Truthfully one of the most insane things to me that tumblr users have ever done is transform Dracula from a book about the Victorian scooby gang trying to defeat a vampire into a tragic time loop (which in turn makes the story even more of a gothic horror in my opinion) via the existence of Dracula Daily
Like what do you mean every single year the Harkers, the suitor squad and Van Helsing are forced to relive the worst year of their life
Sure they win in the end but over and over they are forced to loose the people they love, be striped of their personhood and fight what must have seemed like an impossible battle.
And nobody is even aware of this time loop except us and we just feed into this narrative. “Oh my friend Jonathan has just sent me another letter let’s hope this goes better than last year ;)”
And from a literary analysis standpoint this whole change is inane because it frames the book in an entirely new light. There is a meta layer of horror being applied to the book that was never possible before.
How many years will they suffer like this before someone realizes something is wrong? Before someone gets déjà vu just a few too many times?Before Jonathan and Mina realize they don’t know what their son looks like all grown up? How many years before they are free?
Grace: (Has been alone in space for all of five minutes) Oh wow, an alien! Neat! I hope we can share science notes and be buddies!
Rocky: (Has been in crushing, absolute isolation for half a century; immediately forms an attachment so intense it defies the laws of physics) If you exit my line of sight for more than two seconds, I will dismantle this ship and then myself. We are a hive mind now, Question?
whats that kink called that you get from reading too much fantasy lit as a child that makes you want to be tortured in front of someone who loves you so you can see the pleading desperation in their eyes and hear how much they love you in between the cracks of their voice and really truly believe they would do anything to save you. also you get to look so cool and brave and covered in blood and soooo able to withstand pain haha no just me? ok
I am so utterly fascinated by “Saki”, the 18-year-running mahjong manga in which you, the reader, become gradually, frog-boilingly aware (over the course of nearly two decades’ worth of mahjong tournaments) that none of these girls are wearing underwear and most of their boobs are slowly expanding.
I need you to understand that I have, like, an anthropological level fascination with this comic. From the perspective of someone who is also a comic artist and writer, two things delight me about it:
the fact that I understand completely how an artist gets from “the fans can have a little hint of skirted asscheek” to “the pussy is completely out on center page” over the course of 18 years; and
the way in which the pussy being out is treated by the characters and diegesis as being utterly unremarkable.
Okay. Point 1. The frog-boiling.
Let me put this in perspective for you. There was already a meme about how the characters in “Saki” don’t wear underwear when I was in middle school. I am thirty now. Okay? And it’s still going.
In the time since, this has stopped being a joke. It is now indisputable canon. This is not because anyone outright says it at any point. It’s because the underwear ran out of places to hide. I’m obsessed with this thought: somewhere in the over 20 volumes of “Saki”, there is a panel in which underwear was objectively deconfirmed. And it would be so hard to figure out where that panel actually is. Maybe the artist didn’t even realize it when she drew it! The frog? Boiling!!
And of course there is also the breast expansion. I don’t know how to put a spin on this. They are just expanding. Like, this happens a lot with artists: you define a character as being, in your mind, “the one with the big boobs”, and over the years you emphasize that trait further and further so that the signal doesn’t get lost in the noise. It’s just that normally—in like a wildly popular manga series about mahjong published by literally Square Enix, for example—normally there would be a point at which the boobs stopped getting bigger. Like, an editor would step in or something. Or you would get to the point where you cannot draw the character in the same panel as her mahjong tiles without her breasts spilling over the tiles, and you’d go, “Well, this is now untenable.”
That did not happen. There is no ceiling. The frog is soup.
Point 2. The complete and utter mundanity of all of this.
It’s like this, okay: there’s no shortage of trashy ecchi manga out there. There’s a million other comics doing wildly bawdier things with wildly more improbable bishoujos.
The vibe with “Saki” is different.
It’s hard to explain this, but it feels like the world of the comic is fundamentally uninterested in the fanservice happening on the page. I cannot describe it as “leering”, because I cannot conceive of a person in the story from whose point of view one would leer. I think the artist is probably into it—I can’t imagine anyone is making her do this—but “Saki” the comic has no opinion on the matter.
There are essentially no male characters in “Saki”. Like, there was one guy? Kind of? At the very beginning? But he is gone now. They put him back in the toybox. He does not exist. It appears to be some level of canonical that in the world of “Saki”, almost all humans are women. Those women are sometimes romantically into each other. According to comments the artist has made on Twitter (which I cannot source), they have lesbian baby technology, so it’s no problem. It’s so much not a problem that the story is about mahjong, instead of any of that.
So, like, the fiction here appears to be this: this is the, like, meta-narrative of the fanservice of “Saki”, right: it’s just normal that they don’t wear underwear and their boobs are arbitrarily big. It’s been normal. It was normal before the story of the manga began. It’s just how things are. Nobody bats an eye about it, and if they do, it’s in sort of a lesbian kind of way so like what’s the problem, we love lesbians here. This is literally normal for girls.
The fanservice simply diffuses into this all-encompassing aura of disembodied, ambient sluttiness. The framing of the panels demands you acknowledge it, and the story demands you already be over it, because it’s mahjong time now, and we’re playing mahjong.
Do you get??? why I’m so fascinated??? Are you not a little enraptured???
Anyway, I have no idea how to end this weird post. I guess the conclusion is that women stay winning????
I have so many questions... How does one SUSPECT a manga character isn't wearing underwear? Like, sure, boobs are front and center amd you can see them get bigger panel by panel but how does this work for panties? Are there just that many upskirt shots?
Also how do you keep a manga about Mahjong going for 18 years, what??
In all seriousness, Dracula is just as terrifying in his calm rage as he is when he's flying off the handle.
The way he just held the letter against the candle while smiling at Jonathan like "we both know exactly what this letter is and exactly why I'm destroying it."
A loud and beastly monster is terrifying for sure but in a scene like this, where both captor and captive know how powerless the latter is...
Yeah that's chilling, that's actually horrifying and I love this book so freaking much.
I literally cannot stress enough how this is the type of horror I EAT UP. I don't like gore or graphic murder or assault etc. That makes me really uncomfortable and upset.
It's this type of horror that I just LOVE. It's not the "I am actively being killed/hurt/traumatised," that gets me, it's the "I am trapped in a prison of terror and the person who's power I am under could at any moment kill/hurt/otherwise harm me and there's nothing I can do about it."
"I'm in a room with one exit and Dracula is between myself and the door. I know he's incredibly fast, incredibly strong and if he decided to hurt me there's nothing I could do about it. He also knows that I know this."
Part of the reason I so desperately want a full-length TV adaptation of Dracula is so the viewers/Jonathan can really marinate in this dynamic. Adaptations always abridge the Transylvania sections and it’s such a shame not to let the true horror of Jonathan’s captivity (and how aware of & powerless over his captivity he is) sink in.
This is Dracula-as-Bluebeard, the monster inherent in the man. He doesn’t need to flash his fangs to exert his power over Jonathan; he is master of the house, and the house itself is the physical embodiment of his dominion. Jonathan has nowhere to go, they both know it, and Dracula wants to relish his unspoken dominance for as long as he can.
I'm just saying, if you're going to worldbuild magic being a "raw, primal force, akin to and interweaving with nature itself" you gotta explain to me why animals don't use it
I know the normal answer is "they just aren't smart enough for it" but idk I've seen enough media where a character uses a spell in a moment of brain-off panic ilI feel like animals could probably stumble into a spell or two like, accidentally
group of wizards who ask this in-universe, and after extensive study learn to their surprise that animals are casting spells all the time, just that their magic is so fundamental as to be unrecognizable to humans. turns out the only reason acorns grow on trees is because squirrels keep wishing for them.
I love the dont-go-crazy room in phm because the lab I work for has received NASA-funded grants specifically about this. we've done VR experiments in isolated and confined environments (such as Antarctic stations) to see what type of scenes (nature, urban) people find the most calming. nice to know that Stratt read our papers.
fyi to those of you who still haven't read the phm book, you're missing out on some pretty hardcore Yearning after grace & rocky part ways. there's whole chapters of grace like, staring sadly after rocky's departing ship in the petrovascope every single day while thinking mournfully about how great his best friend is and how much he wishes rocky was there, before doing an insane amount of complicated relativistic math to calculate the exact moment when he'll no longer be able to see the blip-a's light in the distance bc he already misses rocky so much. it's great stuff
I do think it would be kind of funny if Eridian media, like Earth media, sort of tends to go through phases. Like you know how sometimes 100% evil vampires are all the rage, and then sometimes they're sympathetic tortured antiheroes, and sometimes it's all vampire romances, and etc?
So like, with the stars dying, I'm thinking Eridian media might have gone on a whole "aliens are bad bad bad out there killing stars and wanting to eat Erid" and etc trend for their sci-fi. Long ballads about what are essentially evil Eridians with the equivalent of prosthetics doing terrible things to the galaxy and brave heroes like Rocky going off to stop them. Because y'know that's probably how you'd conceptualize a huge scary conflict like total cosmic annihilation in a way that makes it seem beatable: designate a bad guy you can just defeat in order to stop it.
But then Grace and Rocky get to Erid and that trend gets immediately flipped. Turns out that there were kind of bad aliens, the astrophage and all, but that's more like a natural disaster, and hero Rocky has returned with the weirdest, nicest alien ever. Erid media suddenly rockets back to a prior era of optimistic sci-fi previously considered intolerably twee and cringe after the solar disaster kicked off, where the aliens are always nice nice nice, incredibly weird and sometimes goofy as fuck but friendly and not the bad guys.
Of course you never get full consensus on these things, so there are also creative Eridians who are like. But what if evil humans question? Evil humans posing as saviors infiltrate Erid and replace Eridians with pods that hatch into creepy non-Erid rock monsters question? Evil human comes to Erid under guise of niceness and KILLS Eridians question???
Which is broadly considered like. Holy shit dude stop being gauche the nice alien saved the planet stop fucking writing stories where his skeleton cracks open like a nest of evil eggs and turns into a bunch of monsters! Rude, statement! Aliens very nice statement!
And like at first all the Eridian scientists are very sure to keep this sort of stuff away from Grace, they don't want to insult him or imply that he's being slandered in their media or anything. And again overall the popular trend turns a lot more to aliens-as-friendly, especially if they're expressly humans, and the sci-fi writers of Erid are having a total BLAST speculating about Earth and writing stories about it and etc, Grace seems to very much enjoy answering questions for the ones who want to keep things accurate and chuckling and enthusing over the creativity of the ones who don't. He's like, oh yeah they are definitely also doing this back on Earth, don't worry.
Researchers laughing and nervously just being like, yes of course, this is the full extent of it, not to worry! Normal thing which humans are also doing!
Until one day Rocky just brings Grace a recording of a full-blown Eridian horror sci-fi where Grace HIMSELF is EXPLICITLY a horrible monster that goes on a killing spree and tries to destroy Erid.
The other researchers are losing their shit. RoCKY?!?! WHY QUESTION??? Oh fuck Grace is going to be so upset! He's such a sensitive soul he doesn't even like it when one of his students gets distressed!
Anyway Grace thinks it's hilarious and Rocky gets to be smug about it for months.
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