Come on. Admit it. You’ve wondered how a werebananaslug, werekangaroo, or werepossum would work. Scientists Mohamed Noor, Emily A. Finke, and Leighann Lord along with comedian Lali DeRosier talked about the science of making werecreatures Sunday in Hilton 209–211 at 4PM.
Wanna be a werebug? There’s a science-y thing to remember. If you made a fruit fly human-size, it’d collapse in on itself and wouldn’t have the strength to keep itself upright. This is due to the square-cube law that states something along the lines of as the fruit fly doubles in size, it becomes 4 times the volume squared, which is 8 times heavier, but it only becomes 4 times stronger. Meaning, it will outweigh its strengths. (However, please refer to the Google for a more accurate and useful answer. We do the words, not the maths.) Even if the whole collapsing from your own weight doesn’t deter you, fruit flies can’t process caffeine, so that’d be a rather awful were to turn into.
Going to the opposite end of the spectrum, the panelists talked which weres would be the most vicious. Often, werelions are depicted as fierce and violent. In reality, werelions would likely be the laziest shifters. You’d see them stretched out napping in a recliner in front of the tv with a snack fridge. Lions in the wild most often go for the easy kill and aren’t above stealing their dinner.
While some of us would be content with being lazy, if you are really determined to be a violent shifter, you have a few choices. Noor went with a classic: weredragon. Finke thinks the ultimate were would be a werehippopotamus. When you’re an angry herbivore with huge teeth and are the size of a Mazada, you do what you want. If killing things with your butt is your jam, then weremurderhonets might be for you. The audience also suggested wereshrews, werehoneybadgers, and werehousecats as other strong, violent types.
One of the most intriguing shifter ideas from the panel has to be a werewombat as the wombat itself is stranger than fiction. Wombats poop cubes. Wombats then use their poop cubes as communication towers. Would the wombat’s oddities cross over into the human? If yes, then theoretically the human could construct heaping poop cube communication towers. Imagine sending poop cube signals up the communication tower to find your friends at Dragon Con.
For obvious reasons, the panel couldn’t shy away from werelephant in the room: werewolves. While there was no consensus on the validity or usefulness of werewolves, it wouldn’t be all sunshine and milkbones. Dogs don’t do well with painkillers, and werewolves may have the same limitations. In fact, a lot of werewolf fiction does note that shifters aren’t tolerant of medicines in the same way that full humans are.
While strange, this panel doesn’t even scratch the surface of things the Daily Dragon has done in the name of news or that Dragon Con has done in the name of science. In honor of that, we’ll leave you with this pressing question posed by a young panel attendee: If you’re a weremosquito, are you a vampire?
