• Ledericas@lemm.eeEnglish
    3·
    4 hours ago

    Vampires also have ultra instance senses, so they don’t need to look.behind them

  • ceenote@lemmy.world
    121·
    19 hours ago

    As I recall, the “Vampires have no reflection” stemmed from mirrors of the time usually being polished silver. So, I guess the vampire can do this if they’re okay with having silver pressed up against their face.

    • thefartographer@lemm.ee
      71·
      19 hours ago

      How does that guy with smoke coming out of his eye patch always know when I’m sneaking up on him?? At night. While he’s screaming.

      • Grabthar@lemmy.world
        51·
        9 hours ago

        Pretty sure they just poured silver nitrate over glass. You can still buy kits to do that to re-silver old mirrors for the original look. From what I can find, the layered ones were older, and they used tin and mercury which made breaking a mirror a rather unlucky event.

      • TheLowestStone@lemmy.world
        12·
        15 hours ago

        Can confirm. I’m not a vampire but I sold my soul for a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos back im 6th grade. Since then I haven’t seen my reflection or been able to use an automatic door.

    • redjard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      41·
      14 hours ago

      Mirrors now are chemically deposited silver to my knowledge.
      Deposited on the back of the glass, then a protective layer applied on top. The amount of silver in that assembly is very low, and none is exposed, but the reflective component is the silver.

        • redjard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          1·
          3 hours ago

          I’m not certain, can’t find any reliable info on this.
          Shops don’t seem to specify the reflective material. In addition, aluminium is commonly used to describe the frame, and silver as a color for the frame or other parts, making it hard to get any info on the sales side.

          On the production-tech side, I see some pages talk only about silver, others mention both silver and aluminium. Silver commonly has a description of the chemical process at times (silver nitrate silvering), haven’t seen one for aluminium yet.

          Price wise, metal should be fully opaque around 10nm. Assuming a generous 100nm thickness, that makes 0.1€/m² worth of silver. I doubt material cost is a factor.

          Performance wise, silver seems better than aluminium in its reflectance. Honestly I don’t get why anyone would be making aluminium mirrors.

          Does anyone have more info on this?

  • SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    6·
    12 hours ago

    I thought all of their clothes disappear in mirrors, too. Or what about water that they’re drinking…

        • Dasus@lemmy.world
          1·
          34 minutes ago

          Actually when irl blood feeders (such as vampire bats) feed, they need to constantly keep pissing while sucking blood, so as not to burst from the volume of liquid they’re feeding off of.

          Because blood is relatively nutrition poor. Just mostly water with an irony taste. (Uh… I wouldn’t know personally ofc. Uhm, a friend told me. A human friend, as all we humans have.)

  • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 @pawb.socialEnglish
    12·
    14 hours ago

    Do vampires cast a shadow? Because if they cast a shadow, would they actually be able to see through themselves in a mirror, or would they just see a big void in the shape of their body as the light from behind them hits their body but not the mirror? 🤔

    • stebo@sopuli.xyz
      9·
      7 hours ago

      Idk about vampire lore but if they are invisible in mirror it means light passes through them undisturbed and therefore they shouldn’t cast a shadow. But with the same logic they would be invisible altogether so it being exclusive to mirrors is a wild thing…

      • Simulation6@sopuli.xyz
        1·
        4 hours ago

        I always thought the lore was that they could not see themselves in a mirror and that was misinterpreted as they did not have a reflection. First one could just be a mental block or they just don’t recognize their reflections as themselves.

    • Capt. Wolf@lemmy.world
      2·
      10 hours ago

      Ummm… Because shadows aren’t a solid mass. They’re just where light isn’t. So even in a case where a vampire casts a shadow, it wouldn’t matter, mirrors still work in the dark.

      • stebo@sopuli.xyz
        4·
        7 hours ago

        mirrors still work in the dark.

        I mean, do they? Mirrors reflect light. If there’s no light then there’s nothing for the mirror to do.

        This is like saying a water wheel works without water. No it doesn’t, it just sits there.

      • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 @pawb.socialEnglish
        8·
        10 hours ago

        Mirrors work by reflecting light. If the light isn’t passing through the vampire from behind to hit the mirror, it cannot reflect it. If a vampire casts a shadow, this implies that light does not pass through them. For them to not reflect in a mirror, but still be able to see what is behind them, light would need to pass through their body, which would mean they also would not cast a shadow.

        • Capt. Wolf@lemmy.world
          6·
          9 hours ago

          Right, I get what you’re saying. So I guess you’d have to fall back on the lore… There’s some that says they don’t cast shadows, some that do, and if you consider Bram Stoker’s Dracula, he’s able to control his shadow. Then I guess also the lore for why they don’t have reflections comes into play? Either because the mirror is coated in silver, which destroys their reflection, or because the mirror reflects the soul, and vampires don’t have souls.

          I dunno, I guess it all depends which mythos you want to follow and just how much you’re willing to ignore basic physics.

        • Snazz@lemmy.world
          1·
          7 hours ago

          We could say that vampires don’t have a material body and they just alter the wavelength of light that passes through them to project a living form towards the eyes of living observers. That way they could be visible without having a reflection.

          Then they could give themselves a shadow by shifting the visible light from bright light sources into infrared or ultraviolet instead of blocking it as material objects do.

  • Sibshops@lemmy.myserv.one
    451·
    19 hours ago

    Would this work? I think the light stops at the mirror because it’s silver.

    Normally

    1. Light hits the vampire.
    2. It bounces off their body.
    3. It hits the mirror
    4. It reflects from the mirror into your eyes.

    Silver mirror

    1. Light hits the vampire.
    2. It bounces off their body (now unholy light)
    3. It hits the mirror and gets absorbed
    4. Light doesn’t make it to your eyes

    So, technically, there really should be a vampire-shaped hole in the mirror where the vampire was.

    • thefartographer@lemm.ee
      37·
      18 hours ago

      Not enough research to support this claim.

      Studies seem to show that onlookers see a reflection of everyone and everything BUT the vampire without any vampire-shaped losses of light showing up on the objects behind the vampire; as evidenced in Brooks’s 1995 documentary. Also important to note is that the vampire’s shadow is also missing from the mirror’s reflection, but it’s visible when viewing the vampire directly.

      From the same documentary, we learn that vampires do have shadows, but it raises doubts as to if the vampire casts a shadow of their own; this could instead be evidence that a vampire’s shadow is an entirely sentient entity somehow tied to the vampire’s corporeal form.

      Based on this, I believe that we’d need more research into the existence and form of a vampire’s shadow and the possibility that the silver of a mirror wholly negates or even rejects unholy light. Before making such baseless and reckless claims, you consider how your own xenophobic and, frankly, teraphobic or demonophobic biases are likely hurting members of the inmortua community.

    • Troy@lemmy.ca
      26·
      19 hours ago

      The idea that light has a binary property of holy versus unholy is pretty funny. You could probably exploit this to do computing.

      • Sibshops@lemmy.myserv.one
        15·
        19 hours ago

        You have added The Unholy Spectroscope to your inventory.

        The concept of unholy light seems to imply vampires can be detected through unholy spectroscopy.

    • deranger@sh.itjust.works
      12·
      19 hours ago

      If I’m standing next to a vampire and give them the shirt off my back, does my shirt turn invisible in the mirror when they put it on?

      If a vampire gives me their shirt, at what point does it become visible in the mirror?

      What if the vampire is wearing a rope- can they spool out a hundred feet of mirror-invisible rope as long as some is on their body?

      I feel there’s a ton of applications for vampires- optics use mirrors a lot, can they wear a vehicle/tank/ship/etc and make it invisible to optics that utilize mirrors?

      • Sibshops@lemmy.myserv.one
        8·
        18 hours ago

        Well, if we treat incoming light as a quantum superposition:

        |light⟩ = α|holy⟩ + β|unholy⟩

        …and assume that vampires reflect only unholy light and absorb holy light, then anything directly part of the vampire’s “system” filters light this way.

        So I guess the question becomes, “How does the filtering happen?” Is it by physical surface, or is there some kind of quantum holiness field that absorbs holy light nearby?

        • CodexArcanum@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          4·
          14 hours ago

          So if sunlight hurts vampires, but moonlight doesn’t (but moonlight is reflected sunlight) then does that mean the moon absorbs all holy light, and only reflects unholy light? Sunlight, we must assume, is composed of a random mix of all wavelengths and divinities of light. Therefore, can a vampire’s reflection be seen if the vampire is illuminated by moonlight? Only if using a non-silver mirror? What about office fluorescent light, the most evil light of all?

    • squaresinger@lemmy.world
      12·
      7 hours ago

      Try it out. Take a mirror, put it very close to your eye but angled sideways, since you can obviously not look through your head.

      You will have no issues at all focussing on what you are looking at, since you aren’t looking at the mirror at all.

      You can also try that while looking at yourself through a dirty mirror. You can either focus on the dirt on the mirror or on your face. You can’t see both the dirt and your face in focus at the same time.

      • stebo@sopuli.xyz
        2·
        8 hours ago

        i think it should be a concave mirror with a focal point on your retina for it to work

        • squaresinger@lemmy.world
          5·
          7 hours ago

          Nah, doesn’t have to be. Just try putting a mirror very close to your eye, but angled sideways. You will be able to focus onto anything you want without issue. Because you aren’t focussing at the mirror, but at the thing you look at.