the new dracula daily entry with the brides manifesting as moonlit dust taking human form to again try to eat jonathan makes me curious if more vampires used to do misty transformations before the dracula ones
then, the scene that follows with dracula summoning animals to do his bidding, which is i think unique to him
and then dracula being "dead" the morning after scene, when the dawn is emphasized as almost sacred and jonathan finds dracula sleeping after imitating his climbing movements. the vampire falling asleep after the dawn is as old as vampire folklore, but i suspect stories of them being revealed in their tombs is not after the protagonist had risked their lives to discover them
As far as I'm aware, Dracula is the first vampire story to feature vampires turning into mist/dust.
I can't recall any other stories where the vampire has command over animals, either, although a few feature dogs or wolves being repelled by vampires. Dogs bark at Carmilla and at Geraldine in Christabel; in The Family of the Vourdalak, one of the family dogs barks at Gorcha and he makes them shoot it. It's implied that the dog barked at Gorcha because it could smell that he was dead. In La Guzla, crows avoid the vampire's corpse, while in the ballad in The Pale Lady which takes inspiration from the former, wolves and vultures flee from him. Wolves also flee from the vampire in The Mysterious Stranger (which, disclaimer, I have not read yet).
While I'm talking about dogs, I think the howling of dogs breaking someone out of a vampiric trance is unique to Stoker; protagonists in other stories tend to be aided by the power of God (Marquis d'Urfe in The Family of the Vourdalak is snapped out of his trance by the cross necklace he wears digging into his flesh, while Hedwig is protected from Kostaki's trance by a blessed palm frond dipped in holy water). Jonathan being helped by the dogs parallels another Stoker work, the short story "The Judge's House", in which the protagonist is aided by the rats living in the titular house, which attempt to ring a bell in the house in order to signal for help. It's an adorable recurring motif.
The passage about the dawn makes me think of this one from Varney the Vampire:
What wonderfully different impressions and feelings, with regard to the same circumstances, come across the mind in the broad, clear, and beautiful light of day to what haunt the imagination, and often render the judgment almost incapable of action, when the heavy shadow of night is upon all things.
There must be a downright physical reason for this effect—it is so remarkable and so universal. It seems that the sun’s rays so completely alter and modify the constitution of the atmosphere, that it produces, as we inhale it, a wonderfully different effect upon the nerves of the human subject.
Rymer being Rymer, he naturally has to insist that this is a physical, scientific phenomenon.
Vampires being discovered asleep in their tombs is actually fairly common, although generally the process of discovery is not quite so perilous as Jonathan's. Sometimes (as with Sigismund, Clarimonde, Clara Crofton, and Har (in "Manor")), the location of the vampire's grave is a known fact. Other times (Carmilla and After Ninety Years), discovering where the vampire is buried is a whole process. Generally, the vampire is defenseless in the daytime; Dracula's hate-filled gaze that (spoilers for Dracula Daily) causes Jonathan to fumble his shovel swing is something of an innovation. The closest we see to this in another vampire story is Kostaki in The Pale Lady, although this instance technically occurs before he rises as a vampire:
The corpse’s eyes opened and stared at me, more alive than I had ever seen them, and, as if the two rays they emitted had been palpable, I felt what seemed like two red-hot irons plunging into my heart.
It's not the only instance of an evil-eye type power in a vampire work prior to Dracula, but it's the only one (that I know of) that occurs while the vampire is dead/asleep.
...No, wait, I tell a lie. It's in Varney, sort of.
"The deed was done; there was sufficient light for us to look upon the features of the dying man. Ghastly and terrific they glared upon us; while the glazed eyes, as they were upturned to the bright sky, seemed appealing to Heaven for vengeance against us, for having done the deed.
"Many a day and many an hour since at all times and all seasons, I have seen those eyes, with the glaze of death upon them, following me, and gloating over the misery they had the power to make. I think I see them now."
"Indeed!"
"Yes; look—look—see how they glare upon me—with what a fixed and frightful stare the bloodshot pupils keep their place—there, there! oh! save me from such a visitation again. It is too horrible. I dare not—I cannot endure it; and yet why do you gaze at me with such an aspect, dread visitant? You know that it was not my hand that did the deed—who laid you low. You know that not to me are you able to lay the heavy charge of your death!"
I say "sort of" because the speaker here is Varney himself, and the dead man he speaks of is never explicitly confirmed to be a vampire; the story seems like it's kind of going that direction, but changes course at the last second, retcons Varney being a vampire altogether (yes, it's that part), and forgets all about this guy. Also, it's not clear this is intended to be a supernatural effect; it may simply be a product of Varney's trauma and guilt.
I'm not up to returning the gift. But, it seems to me as if Dracula's powers aren't meant to be vampiric. Not in this case, and maybe not even often. The powers of the vampire to reject death, feed on living blood, travel immaterially into their tomb, which are folkloric (reference needed) balance with the weaknesses peculiar to vampirism (anything related to Xtian resurrection, must consume blood of the living, must rest in tomb) and belong to all vampires.
His unique powers of storm summoning, mesmerism, lycanthropy, all the weird shit, comes down to his tendency to nerd out over any and all sorcerous study. He's been in this field of poppies for a long time. It's gotten pretty freaky in there. Even among ancient undead monstrosities the guy is built different.
Some of his powers are for sure products of his Scholomance education. However, quite a few of them aren't unique to him! Alinska in The Virgin Vampire shares his ability to control storms. Carmilla can shapeshift, as can Heira from The Vampire of Vourla (the latter turns into a bat, even). As for mesmerism, many if not most literary vampires possess the ability in some form or another, even the spectacularly unsupernatural Varney.
If Dracula were to go up against the rest of the literary vampire pack in a wizard duel, he might also find he has some competition. In addition to storm summoning, Alinska can also astral project (at least, that's my best interpretation for how she's able to remotely punch and slap people and destroy letters contained in locked boxes). Liatoukine from Captain Vampire can be in two places at once and kill with a stare. The Black Vampyre is an accomplished necromancer, and also has a potion that will cure vampirism—although he's a satire character, and thus playing in a different ballpark. Carmilla and her mother are forces to be reckoned with; the former can teleport like a ghost girl in a horror movie and inflict a person with permanent numbness with a touch, while the latter is capable of not only reading but modifying peoples' memories. Countess Karnstein can also oathbind (force a person to keep a promise/secret), a power she shares with Geraldine and Lord Ruthven. The vampires in The Family of the Vourdalak can completely hide their corpselike appearance and smell from humans, possibly through some sort of mesmeric trance. Clarimonde has immense power over dreams, creating entire fully-staffed palaces which she spirits people away to in their sleep and holds wild dream-parties. Sava Savanovič and Kostaki can both pass through locked and barred doors without obstacle, a power I'm sure the threshold-locked Dracula is burningly envious of. Kostaki is also fatal to fight, regardless of whether he wins: his brother, wielding a holy sword and backed by the power of God Himself, collapsed and died without a scratch on him less than a minute after killing Kostaki.
So, overall, I wouldn't say Dracula is built terribly different from his vampire peers. His Scholomance education gives him an edge, true, but they're a diverse supernatural group packing all sorts of strange powers.
This is such a shallow interpretation of Dracula the novel, so shallow that it prevents answering its own rhetorical question. It's especially noticeable since the post goes on to discuss Frankenstein and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde quite a bit better. Dracula is like a blind spot for analysis for this poster.
So let's be blunt here: Dracula is a racist, anti-semitic, anti-immigrant book. It's about an evil count pretending to be a peaceful immigrant but actually he is an evil eastern european jewish rapist who is coming here to rape and corrupt good white englishwomen.
It's a bit offensive to describe this literal bloodsucking jew character as some anti-capitalist metaphor, as the screenshotted post seems to imply.
All this is fairly obvious to me, who has read the book many times, and even more obvious to just about any literary scholar who has read this book. Now it might not be obvious to the general public nowadays, who I think might not fully understand the novel since it's almost 130 years removed from the present-day context. For example, people reading it today might simply not understand what Stoker means by describing Dracula's face as "aquiline." They might not understand the word means in its most basic sense, and just skip over it. And such readers are even less able to understand that Stoker is clearly coding Dracula as jewish.
A lot of it also has to do with how popular Dracula is despite it's age. There is a strong fandom here on tumblr, of the book itself, as the Dracula Daily craze a few years ago proved. So there is the usual fan's reluctance to admit that the work they love is racist. It takes an unusual fan to admit that "I love this book, this book is racist", but I'm that fan.
Anyway, once you understand Dracula is an uncomfortably racist text about the evil foreigner rapist, then you can finally answer question asked in the screenshotted post.
The reason adaptations like the Francis Ford Coppola film change Dracula to a sympathetic, tragic figure who is Mina's lover, despite that being the opposite of the original story, is because that original story is racist.
It's one easy way to subvert the racism of the story, and fairly common in horror media. Turning the monstrous outsider (a trope that is inherently racist and xenophobic) into a sympathetic and misunderstood tragic figure, unfairly persecuted by the forces of normality and turning the rape of the (white) female lead character into a consensual relationship, it's a standard way of subverting an old racist horror story.
See The Shape of Water for a movie that does the same to The Creature from the Black Lagoon. These films are unfaithful, but they are engaging with the themes of the work.
And it's probably for the best that a Dracula adaptation is unfaithful. A faithful adaptation can't help but reproduce the racism inherent to the story. See Robert Eggers's Nosferatu (2024) for an uncomfortable example (it deserves its own post).
Dracula in Coppola rapes Lucy. Multiple times. On-screen, very graphically, he rapes her as a werewolf.
His (extremely orientalist) brides rape Jonathan.
Among other things that he does in the movie in which he has "a consensual relationship with Mina", is feed on his own people (who all fear and hate his guts), kill babies of his own people, kill an entire ship full of Russians, and (and I cannot emphasize this enough) rape Lucy.
Saying that the movies like Coppola's make Dracula have a consensual (doubtful, since he keeps hypnotizing Mina) relationship specifically to battle xenophobia is frankly ridiculous. Dracula does the exact same things, and even worse ones, the only difference is that he also has a love interest now.
I mean feel free to misinterpret the reincarnated wife movies all you like, but they are very much not made To Own Xenophobia. Be so for real.
Game companies hate emulation, but none of them seem to understand that a lot of us would just buy ROMs from them directly if we could. I don't want a fifth remake of Final Fantasy IV, I want to pay five bucks for the 3MB file you already made bank with thirty years ago. Nobody who wants to play something for the purpose of retro gaming is going to consider a $40 remake as the alternative option, and we're certainly not going to let the original dissappear. They're crying about opportunity cost for a product they're not even selling.
op i know you're probably talking about like, video games, etc, but this is also critical for research science - my lab has so much abandonware, either because the company's out of business, or the company decided to not maintain it, and it's a fucking nightmare. we have two windows 95 computers that are CRITICAL for performing experiments/data analysis because the software needed is abandonware. one of the main roles for a guy in my lab is to maintain these little dinosaurs because if they go out, we lose access to ~20 years of raw data for research. part of why is that these companies also make their own file types, and make it difficult-to-impossible to convert those file types without their specific software. by habit, i convert all research files to more generic versions (txt, pdf, tif, etc) so that i minimize risk of losing my shit, but some stuff can't be converted.
for example, we have a microscope that is perfectly functional, good microscope, but its software is abandonware because the company refused to maintain it. the company is still in business, still makes essentially the exact same software, but they made all of the old tech incompatible with new software to force people to buy the new microscope tech. it would cost a quarter million dollars to replace this microscope. this perfectly good microscope.
so like, i know a lot of people look at the original post here and go "well op just wants old video games to play" (which is valid! games companies should not be able to push shit to abandonware and then close it off) but also this is critical for like. biomedical research. if y'all had any idea how much basic infrastructure built on science relies on shit that is technically abandonware, you would probably be horrified.
I just took my computer in for a repair I'm not skilled enough to do on my own.
As I was chatting with the tech, I mentioned offhandedly to her that my first computer games were on 5 3/4" floppies, and said "you're so young, you've probably never even seen one of those."
Her response: "oh, I have. We do maintenance for a company that still uses them."
For those of you too young to know what any of that means: my school moved to computers with 3 1/2" floppies in 1992. I only used the bigger ones for one year. Three years after that we got converters to also use CD-ROM. I got my first thumb drive in college, in 2007. And the storage on 5 3/4" floppies was minuscule. This post would fit on one. I think. This technology was outdated 34 years ago, which is like 500 in computer years. This is roughly equivalent to someone telling you they're self-publishing their werewolf romantasy on Ben Franklin's printing press.
Now I don't know why this company is still using technology so obsolete it makes thumb drives look like sci-fi. But given that it's functionally useless in the modern day, I'd bet a nickel it's because of abandonware.
I also don't know what this company does.
But does it give you a little shiver to know I live near both the Mayo Clinic and Honeywell Aerospace?
say what you will about their relationship in the rest of the film but ellen (mina) going "im so worried about thomas i really hope hes okay :((((" and immediately cutting to thomas (jonathan) passed out on the floor of castle orlok (dracula) in nosferatu (2024) perfectly captures the spirit of jonathan and mina in the first chapters of the novel. like yep. can't even deny it. thats my harkers. #myharkers
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