elaby | The vampire-to-immortal transition

So, today I wanted to ask a question in class, but I was less inclined to, because I knew it was a question that would be obvious to some of the students who are more experienced in this particular subject area. I knew that whatever the answer, if I was aware of the historical context, I would be satisfied and accept it. But I didn't want to ask it in class, because grad school has put The Great Fear Of Looking Intellectually Inferior into me where it really hasn't been for years (boo, I say) and so I went and asked the professor beforehand, which I had no embarrassment doing. And it was nicely cleared up for me.

And then I was validated by having it brought up in class and an Interesting Conversation ensuing.

Randomly, I've begun wondering just WHAT my criteria for locking posts was. I thought it was real-lifey identifying stuff, but apparently not, because then I'd lock anything that talked about my classes. I also wonder how paranoid I ought to be.

Anyway, now I'm going to talk about why I decided to keep some of my characters vampires and why I decided to make some of them merely (merely?) immortal, as

caitirin mentioned we did.

First of all, I'm making Mei into a just-immortal rather than a vampire. I created her at the end of our age of doing vampire things, and already when I was writing her I kept forgetting things like needing to feed and stay out of the sunlight. She was originally a daywalker, but would get easily sunburnt, etc., and wore completely covering clothes during the day. But I never remembered that unless I had a specific image of her doing vampirely things. However, her being a vampire seriously messed up the whole living-in-France thing, because who in their right mind would have a page that could only work at night? I could pass off the fact that she obviously isn't European by the whole vampire-mind-trick thing, but going so far as to say that she could trick them into not caring that she wasn't around during the day... not so much. So Mei's going to just be an immortal now, because that's a hell of a lot easier for me. Also, what

caitirin said about wounds being not nearly as dramatic stands for Mei as well; her samurai stuff is kind of contingent on the fact that she's not so fantastic at kenjutsu (at least, not as good as she is with a foil), and if her duels weren't going to be deadly, that would muck everything up.

Simon, on the other hand, is going to stay a vampire. Stay tuned for why when I next get a chance to post! I promise it won't be next month ¬_¬