Hiroguchi’s Law, in a nutshell, is that things from Andasia can only eat things from Andasia, and things from the Old World can only eat things from the Old World. But I guess Cassandra already talked Kana’s ear off about that a few pages ago, didn’t she?
Reminder: Until I’m done with finals and graduation and such, the comic is only updating on Saturdays.
I speculate randomly that Hiroguchi’s Law might have something to do with the chirality of proteins. Alternately, consider that out of the myriad of amino acids actually described and named, we use only twenty, and may have trouble digesting proteins constructed from any of the others. Finally, who knows — perhaps Andasian life-forms use cyanogen instead of iron in their blood. It might explain the green familiars and the characteristic pallour of a vampire’s complexion. ;-)
It could have just been an Old World vampire that happened to be in Andasia at the time. Yeah Kiyohara, guess you didn’t think of that. ;)
I just realized how positively egyptian kiyohara’s eyes look.
“Something important has come up”
*hang up*
“Damn, now I need to get over there and kill everyone involved”
So, organisms from Andasia use different amino acids than life elsewhere (two different origins of life… interesting…), and that’s called a “law”? Strange.
I’m sure it was originally formulated in a fashion that made sense to call it a law, I.e., “Eating stuff from over here will always kill you! Don’t do that!”
In honesty, the notion of an Andasian vampire would have to be pretty far-stretched, though, so it’s weird Kiyohara didn’t automatically assume it was an old-world one: they’d have to be either shapeshifters or created since first discovery of Andasia in order to look humanoid, after all.
My theory is that its a magical life-form (as all things over there seem to be) which acts as a parasite. I think maybe it gets into the host and takes over the body. In this case biting could be a way to sustain the appearance of a normal life-form, or it could be a method of breeding. Actually, thinking of, this sounds unlikely. But it’s fun to speculate.
The technical version of Hiroguchi’s law is more along the lines of organisms of Old World and Andasian origins will have incompatible protein chirality and amino acids, and it can generally be used to discern scientifically whether or not a given organism is from Andasia or the Old World (instead of ballpark guesses like “oh it glows and it’s weird looking it must be Andasian).
Familiars, even the ones that take on the forms of Old World animals (Lydia’s ibis, Telith’s dragon– although the dragons are extinct they lived in the Old World) are Andasian according to Hiroguchi’s Law. This is known as Seneca’s Corollary. Yes, that Seneca.
As soon as the word “vampire” slipped out of Lydia’s mouth Takako pretty much just stopped listening to her, and heard “blah blah blah vampires andasia andasian blah blah blah i’m an idiot cheater hurf durf i’m stupid”
I originally read that as Hiroguchi’s “lawl”.
Is it me, or does Takako look weird in the first panel? It’s definitely en profil, but she’s as wide as when we see her from the front/back.
That’s what I mean: that’s not a law, it’s a single fact. A law is a sweeping generalization across lots and lots of facts. The law of gravity, for example: it’s not “apples fall downwards”, it’s “all, uh, entities that have mass attract each other according to [insert formula here]“.
That’s the most parsimonious conclusion. It’s a hypothesis, not a law or part of one.
There are very, very few laws in biology in general…
I think what’s going on is that this is where you can see how big her eyes are, and that her eyes are sort of 2-dimensional; they don’t seem to be in sockets, they seem to be part of the skin or something. (Flatly contradicting the right, though not the left, eye in the third panel, which very clearly is in a socket.)