Are all Immortals foundlings?

[Saber Dog]

He is. He just graduated as an electrical engineer and had a job lined up before he did so.

[dubiousbystander]

Well, yes and no. I mean, there are people all over the world who look like they might be twins, or even siblings. However, for the storyline we know that, to Duncan, these Immortals don't resemble each other enough to trigger flashbacks. I sometimes say, "Two arms, two legs, one head. They all look alike." (Not about Highlander characters, more people in general.) There is also the variation that someone out there is having/creating baby Immortals and dropping them randomly here and there, and there, and here. They're not fertile because they are immortal. The males don't produce sperm. The females can't get pregnant.

Any time I think of it as someone is there, knows exactly where the baby came from, and there's a corpse of a mother left behind, I can't bring myself to suspend disbelief in the area of "no one knows where the babies come from."

[Wilusa]

A further thought: The idea of all Immortals' being descended from a common ancestor, with males occasionally fathering offspring, can be used to "explain" the resemblance between the two Immortals played by Anthony De Longis...and the two (one in "Raven") played by Valentine Pelka.

[Tootsie Bee]

And there's another problem with the idea of their being fertile. Take, for example, Amanda. She's 1200 years old. Can anyone imagine a woman enduring monthly periods for 1200 years? As recently as a century ago, they were much harder to deal with than they are now!

Should we assume that immortal semen is pure fructose*, then? I mean, if women can't produce eggs, then men shouldn't produce sperm.

*"The snozzberries taste like snozzberries!"

[Wilusa]

I was trying, of course, to come up with plausible ways Immortals could reproduce, that would be consistent with there being a tradition that all of them are foundlings (even if that isn't always, exactly, true). I certainly don't think mortal mothers' dying is desirable. But with that being the case (and if the father was Immortal, his no longer being around), the woman's family could plausibly have bad feelings about the infant, and choose to give it away. Or worse.

I really can't see Immortal females bearing children.

Assuming we're not going into the realm of fantasy (or science inconsistent with what we know about Immortals in this era): men can procreate without knowing it; women can't. If Immortal women were bearing children - all of them knowing it, and being as visibly pregnant as other women - it couldn't possibly have been kept secret.

And there's another problem with the idea of their being fertile. Take, for example, Amanda. She's 1200 years old. Can anyone imagine a woman enduring monthly periods for 1200 years? As recently as a century ago, they were much harder to deal with than they are now!

[dubiousbystander]

Smart child, your nephew. I like that idea, too.

[Saber Dog]

I assumed that they are all foundlings whether they were told that or not. To my mind, using a Gnostic concept, is that all immortals carry a spark of a non-corporeal entity which has split itself apart and is experiencing our world via the immortals and the game is this entity's way of reassembling itself with the knowledge they have gathered. "I know everything. I am everything." The prize is the completion of its task.

Of course, being foundlings, we're still left with where did they come from.

When he was very much younger, my nephew patiently explained to me where babies come from. It seems that storks bring them...and then stuff them into their mothers. Oh the horror.

[dubiousbystander]

I tend to have a gut reaction of outraged anger to assertions that only male Immortals can be fertile. I am aware that it is more scientific. Another writer had a Stargate crossover, where the male Immortals over 2,000 beget, essentially, zygotes who take on a phenotype from the surrogate mothers. Fault: There is no reason whatsoever for there to be female Immortals, or for those to be sterile. I suggested to the author that perhaps a late discovery that the females are the same as the males. They produce an egg that can be implanted in a surrogate mother. The complication of course being that the delivery system will take more work as they don't have the same genitals.

I also have a pained objection to the idea that all of the women die at the birth of the child, who is then nearly always abandoned by the woman's family/husband/the sire, so that hardly anyone knows they actually do have parents. In the modern world particularly you'd have to come up with some pretty fancy footwork to explain why no one's caught on!

Gardner and Sylvia's idea is pretty good, and I recall that you also have the variation that male Immortals periodically leave behind pregnant women who wither away with the birth of their child. And that female Immortals of age can cross with a mortal, but that same process will kill the father. That was a neat touch, and balanced.

Then there was Eng's Chaos Chronicles. Oh, that was a fun one.

[mathpiglet]

They come from Zeist, carried to earth by lightning. The lightning reappears later in the form of quickenings.

[Gardner]

[QUOTE=Wilusa;n4974]I

I've used another possibility. I'm not going to give too many "spoilers" for my fiction! But here's the basic idea. Male Immortals (only males) are fertile...but on such rare occasions that most of them never realize it. (They don't feel any unnatural "compulsion" to mate at those times.) Often, they're so sure they're sterile that they'll walk out on a woman who tries to convince them she's carrying their child. The infants are always pre-Immortal; and the mothers always die after giving birth. So many of those infants are, understandably, given away. In cases where the fathers are still in the picture, they usually won't risk keeping the infants with them.

QUOTE]

Developped by author Sylvia Volk in some of her stories. And that long-lived males, at least 500 years old who are intense players of the Game. Female Immortals can carry children if they come of age, i.e have taken enough heads in thousands of years to breed children of their own. They call it the secret Game. Only ancient Immortals know of it.

[Nicholas Ward]

I'm unsure but I thought either Methos or Ramírez was known to have brothers? So although most are foundlings it's not true for all?

[Wilusa]

I can't resist posting some thoughts (because I had a new one today).

First, some of the theories used in fan fiction...

I have notes about theories by two other authors, though I've never read their fics, and don't recall even the authors' names.

One was extreme fantasy: Every so often, a female Immortal feels a "compulsion" to mate with a male Immortal. From his point of view, they've just had great sex. But wthin a few hours, the female Immortal bears a pre-Immortal infant...acts on a new "compulsion" to abandon it...and then forgets the whole thing.

The second was less fantastic...quite interesting, IMHO! A fetus becomes pre-Immortal if the already pregnant woman has sex with a male Immortal during her first trimester. (But unless there was more to it than I heard, it doesn't explain the infants' becoming foundlings.)

I've used another possibility. I'm not going to give too many "spoilers" for my fiction! But here's the basic idea. Male Immortals (only males) are fertile...but on such rare occasions that most of them never realize it. (They don't feel any unnatural "compulsion" to mate at those times.) Often, they're so sure they're sterile that they'll walk out on a woman who tries to convince them she's carrying their child. The infants are always pre-Immortal; and the mothers always die after giving birth. So many of those infants are, understandably, given away. In cases where the fathers are still in the picture, they usually won't risk keeping the infants with them. In our era, the few Immortals who understand this believe they're all descended from a long-ago ancestor who was the product of a mutation. (Not possibly Methos: in this fan-fiction universe, he's recovered some fragmentary memories, and knows there once were Immortals older than he.)

Here's the idea I just thought of.

I recently learned from a scholar I admire that thousands of years ago, unwanted infants were routinely abandoned - just left exposed to the elements, with the expectation they'd die. The scholar believes even early Christians did that. So perhaps we can say every pre-Immortal was the result of a mutation - the same type of mutation taking place again and again, with both parents being "normal." Giving birth to the "mutant" would always cause the mothers to die, with the infants - somewhat understandably - being abandoned. But they'd be more hardy than other "exposed" infants, and would survive until someone found them alive and took pity on them.

That certainly couldn't happen in our day, but it could account for there being a widely-accepted myth that all Immortals were foundlings. (While present-day pre-Immortal infants probably would be given up for adoption, because their mothers had died.)

Others' thoughts?