dragonlady7

like this, what a thing

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sirsparklepants https://sirsparklepants.tumblr.com/post/623097418768138240 :

sirsparklepants https://sirsparklepants.tumblr.com/post/623094477880492032 :

You know you’ve picked your friend group well when a bunch of them will sit and theorize about the horrors of witcher biology with you when you yell about how the fuck Geralt even stands up without passing out with a stupid low heart rate. ladyalisette https://tmblr.co/mlq9we1yh1_kbuTnkLRlXkQ and loquaciousky https://tmblr.co/m7N5ADHFbV9XdSzadx8_yGA are delightful people who came up with most of this.

Anyway! It’s likely that he has an enlarged heart (which I love for both fantasy biology and narrative symbolism reasons), extremely overactive bone marrow, and a super efficient liver. Which means the witcher trials are basically doing an entire magical bone marrow transplant at the same time as hugely altering two major organs! No wonder so many kids die. And probably not all of them die during the trials, unless they take a month or more, because in that case you run the risk of giving the candidates every autoimmune disorder at once or aggressive leukemia, or both! And a legit reason for only men to undergo the witcher trials - testosterone mediates autoimmune functions, which is why more AFAB folks show signs of autoimmune conditions than AMAB ones. If the trials upregulate immune activity as part of supercharging the response to toxins and diseases, testosterone could be a deciding factor in survival.

Bonus fact! With a supercharged immune system, you get things like cytokine storms in response to anything that does get through the body’s defenses… which Geralt shows most of the signs of when he gets that ghoul bite.

ladyalisette https://tmblr.co/mlq9we1yh1_kbuTnkLRlXkQ coming in clutch with some more witcher biology theorizing! If witchers have supercharged blood, they also probably have a longer latency time between “lack of pulse” and “irreversible brain damage”, which is, idk about y'all, excellent whump fuel, in my mind. They also might have larger reserves of myoglobin, a muscle protein that stores oxygen like hemoglobin (sperm whales use it as oxygen reserves while diving, apparently, and iirc human athletes generally have more from training), which would result in very dark/deep red muscle tissue. This would also make witchers more naturally suited for endurance activities, because they’d have longer aerobic respiration periods in the muscle before anaerobic respiration kicked in.

Now, if we wanted witchers to be able to do sprint activity when needed (as they likely do), we can look at beefed up witcher livers again! Glycogen, stored in the cells, can be quickly converted to glucose for anaerobic respiration, but the liver regulates both glycogen storage and glycolyis (glycogen to glucose), so it would need to be beefed up. Naturally, this process gives you about two minutes of extra hard workload, but in a witcher, it could be upped if the storage happened in the body cells as well. At the cost of insane caloric needs, of course! I hear Geralt eats whole sticks of butter in the games and this would be why. Also, Ali says “as a result, if you were to try to eat a witcher, they’d taste weirdly sweet and caramelize like liver.” (Your picture was not posted)