(no subject)
You know how people always complain about how it's vastly improbably that Lucy could have gone through those four blood transfusions without any sort of checking for blood types? And everyone brings up the fact that this book was written in the Victorian Era, and thus those sorts of things are excusable (though wasn't blood typing invented before 1897? Does anyone know this?), but I think they're all missing one pertinent fact. Or pertinent inference, I should.
Maybe, with vampires, it doesn't matter.
All right, so let's venture for a second into Rachel's Personal Vampire Canon, which I totally made up because I needed something to work off of in my writing. Obviously, vampirism is transmitted through the blood. (Yes, for the most part, unless they have a really convincing argument otherwise, I mocked people who present other ways of dealing with this, especially the person who wrote that short story in which vampirism is transmitted through anal or vaginal sex. Yes, that was a weird one.) In Dracula canon, after much soul searching, I've decided that, in order to become a vampire, you have to ingest a vampire's blood, and then physically die. Being bitten by the vampire is actually...rather optional, I think, though I imagine that it's often the method vampires use to kill their victims/potential Fledglings.
So, vampiric blood has the capacity to reanimate someone who has died, making them into a vampire. Got that?
But, in order for a vampire to be able to create Fledglings themselves, the blood that they ingest from the vampire who changes them into what they are has to go into their bloodstream somehow. And I'll fully admit that I have no idea how that happens.
But, if vampiric blood enters into the bloodstream after being ingested, then it seems logical (at least to me, though it's probably just my strange thought process) that the blood of the mortals they feed from also goes into their veins, since they obviously don't digest it. And, thus, vampiric blood must somehow...neutralize blood types.
Now, we don't know when Lucy (first) drank the Count's blood. I personally normally place it on the night of Mrs. Westerna's death. But it's not at all unreasonable for it to have happened far earlier than that, or for Van Helsing to make such a connection (he does jump to conclusions rather often), making him completely unhesitating in organizing blood transfusions for her.
This still leaves the question, if blood typing was already existent by that point, of why Jack didn't question Van Helsing about something so potentially risky, but Jack doesn't question as Van Helsing all that often, considering.
Maybe, with vampires, it doesn't matter.
All right, so let's venture for a second into Rachel's Personal Vampire Canon, which I totally made up because I needed something to work off of in my writing. Obviously, vampirism is transmitted through the blood. (Yes, for the most part, unless they have a really convincing argument otherwise, I mocked people who present other ways of dealing with this, especially the person who wrote that short story in which vampirism is transmitted through anal or vaginal sex. Yes, that was a weird one.) In Dracula canon, after much soul searching, I've decided that, in order to become a vampire, you have to ingest a vampire's blood, and then physically die. Being bitten by the vampire is actually...rather optional, I think, though I imagine that it's often the method vampires use to kill their victims/potential Fledglings.
So, vampiric blood has the capacity to reanimate someone who has died, making them into a vampire. Got that?
But, in order for a vampire to be able to create Fledglings themselves, the blood that they ingest from the vampire who changes them into what they are has to go into their bloodstream somehow. And I'll fully admit that I have no idea how that happens.
But, if vampiric blood enters into the bloodstream after being ingested, then it seems logical (at least to me, though it's probably just my strange thought process) that the blood of the mortals they feed from also goes into their veins, since they obviously don't digest it. And, thus, vampiric blood must somehow...neutralize blood types.
Now, we don't know when Lucy (first) drank the Count's blood. I personally normally place it on the night of Mrs. Westerna's death. But it's not at all unreasonable for it to have happened far earlier than that, or for Van Helsing to make such a connection (he does jump to conclusions rather often), making him completely unhesitating in organizing blood transfusions for her.
This still leaves the question, if blood typing was already existent by that point, of why Jack didn't question Van Helsing about something so potentially risky, but Jack doesn't question as Van Helsing all that often, considering.