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As I mentioned yesterday, immortals typically don’t pay much attention to the passage of time.  In fact, many stories tend to show this off by having the immortal be confused about time periods or flat out say it.  They’re designed to be creatures outside of time who have, quite often, ascended to a psychological point where they no longer care about the limited concerns of mortals.  It’s kind of sad and makes for a difficult character if you’re going for a connection.

Thankfully, the Dawn Fangs aren’t usually like this, which comes out pretty clearly in War of Nytefall: Anarchy.

To be fair, there’s been a sense of this from the beginning and much of that was because of how this series works.  It isn’t a vampire story where you have one or a band of mortals facing off against blood-sucking monsters.  You don’t have mortals as the central characters at all here, which has caused some issues.  People see vampire and they focus entirely on the fangs, violence, blood, and powers.  The personalities don’t always get noticed by readers, which is where you would see their gradually changing thoughts on immortality.

The Dawn Fangs are really hard to kill even compared to other vampires, but they have this sense of things being finite.  Sure, they fight with little care for their bodies due to regeneration, but they still avoid taking fatal blows.  You don’t see these characters standing before an enemy and acting like they’re never going to die.  Even Clyde, who destroys people with ease, dodges and acts like he could be taken out.  Honestly, I think more mortals have done the ‘I will not die’ shtick than vampires in this series, which is strange.

You may also note that the Dawn Fangs are starting to make families, dreams, and long-term plans that are similar to what a mortal would make.  Best examples here are Chastity Sullivan and Desirae Duvall.  Both women have created businesses and are continually trying to expand.  They’ve talked about branching out and where they want to go, but it’s spoken of in stages.  While they have eternity, they know that time is a factor and they need to pay attention to it.  Letting the years shoot by as they build slowly means the world will change faster than their businesses, which could fail due to lack of adaptation.

All of this may seem minor and easily missed in the series, which always focus more on the action adventure side.  It really gets overlooked when it comes in discussion, which is what you will see in War of Nytefall: Anarchy.  Dawn Fangs are starting to want the war to end because they wish to live in the light.  They are tired of hiding in plain sight, which is normally a favorite hobby of immortals.  You can tell that their mentality on living forever has changed because they’re developing connections.  This would usually be an issue because a person will have to disappear after a certain amount of years to avoid suspicion and then government probing.  Clearly, it’s not the case here since the Dawn Fangs are pushing to become known to mortals, so they won’t have to rebuild their lives after a few decades.

I always found it strange how immortals who have been around for hundreds of years are still sane or willing to be near humans.  Not to mention how they’ve never been found out, especially when populations were smaller.  The toll on the mind has to be immense and immortals show enough emotion to make you believe they could have mental illnesses and trauma too.  So, how can they keep disappearing and rebuilding their life throughout history without snapping?  Technology changing makes the feat more difficult, so greater actions need to be taken to pull it off.  That’s more stress, which should drive an immortal to just go away from civilization.

My hope is that War of Nytefall: Anarchy really pushes the idea that the Dawn Fangs have a sense of time and belonging.  This way, it makes more sense for them to want to be known and accepted by their neighbors.