[lauralot89]

My personal headcanon is still that Dracula doesn't know what shorthand is, and thinks upon seeing it that English has some secret second alphabet that wasn't in any of his books

[thethirdromana]

I'm thinking about responses to Dracula - both adaptations and critical responses - and how the main thing that they seem to get wrong (at least from my perspective) is their approach to the romantic relationships in the novel. You know the kind of thing: Arthur is boring, Jonathan is boring, Lucy lusts after all three suitors, Mina lusts after Dracula, the suitors must all be suppressing their jealous hatred of one another.

It feels to me like it all comes from the same place, and that place is the idea that romantic relationships, particularly at the start of a story, can't or shouldn't be straightforward.

Instead, Dracula begins, near enough, with two women who have both met and are set to marry men who they love and who love them in return, and where it seems like there is no intrinsic reason why they shouldn't live happily ever after.

And normally we don't expect that. Certainly these are not the narrative rules of a romance (which Dracula isn't, but bear with me). It's a little bit like if Elizabeth Bennet was actually really into Mr Collins and accepted him right away, if Jane Eyre was blissfully happy with St John Rivers, or if Margaret Hale fell for Henry Lennox. Jonathan and Arthur are the safe choices for Mina and Lucy, and we don't normally expect heroines to want the safe choices.

Mina and Lucy do. Arthur is strategically the best husband for Lucy - good family, pots of cash, no weird job, her mum likes him - but he is also the man that Lucy loves. Mina and Jonathan are utterly besotted with one another, and though Jonathan isn't as wealthy as, say, Jack Seward, his career is also on the up. He's a good choice.

I think this works brilliantly in Dracula, because the later threat is so much the greater for the fact that everyone starts out the novel so strong. The fact that they are so happy to begin with means they have more to lose.

So many responses to Dracula want this to be a novel in which love is complicated, but instead it's a novel in which love is both pretty straightforward and always good. And I think it's more interesting for it.

[draculasweedsmokinggirlfriend]

Quincey really said "I know your girl is busy tonight so you're free and you don't have an excuse to not come" lmao

[natalie-waite]

"Cannot read, cannot rest, so diary instead."

- Dr. Jack Seward's Diary, May 25 (Dracula, Bram Stoker)

[lauralot89]

Annotations for May 25:

In the original publication and the abridged text, this entry was dated 25 April. In Stoker's notes, it's dated 24 May.

Phonographs were expensive: In 1898, the Edison home phonograph sold for 15 pounds, equivalent to 1680 pounds in 2025 money. So Seward must have paid a lot for his.

Jack's Omnia Romae venalia sunt line is a misquote from the Bellum Iugurthinum by Sallust. The original line is Romae omnia venali esse: All of Rome is for sale.

verb. sap. is a shortening of verbum sapienti, "a word to the wise."

In the original manuscript, Renfield was 49 years old.

[treesaspen]

"Why isn't Dracula using the door" he ain't opening that door ever again or his cat (Jonathan) will figure out how to slip away

But more seriously, Dracula has ever opened the door once, to let Jonathan in. And Jonathan noted right away that the door sounded like it has been not used in years.

Dracula has been crawling up and down the walls for centuries.

[thethirdromana]

I saw the whole man slowly emerge from the window and begin to crawl down the castle wall over that dreadful abyss, face down with his cloak spreading out around him like great wings.

Why does Dracula's cloak seem to defy gravity?

Too much starch in the washing process

Dracula exudes an anti-gravity field

Dracula has minor telekinetic powers

It's not a cloak at all, it's actual bat wings that Dracula has grown

Loreal advert-style winds are making it billow out behind Dracula

Cloak knows it's in a novel and does whatever looks coolest

Jonathan is hallucinating all of this from sleep deprivation

Some other answer (put it in the tags!)

Voting ended onMay 13, 2025

[lauralot89]

Notable annotations today:

The address for Lucy's letter is given as Chatham Street. Her home, however, is not on Chatham Street, and there's never a letter from this address again. So why is her letter coming from here? There were two Chatham Streets in London, one near the Middlesex County Lunatic Asylum and one near Bedlam. Was Jack at one of these asylums for whatever reason, and Lucy went to see him?

The Pop that Lucy refers to is a Popular Concert, which were held at St. James's Hall on Saturdays and Mondays.

In the original manuscript, the line "Some one has evidently been telling tales" was followed with "I shall have my eye on that young lynx for the future so tell her to be very discreet and give her a kiss for me." This is a second reference to Kate Reed, who was cut from the narrative.

Another cut line from the original manuscript: After Lucy mentions that Arthur and her mother have many things to talk about in common, she continued, "I almost envy mother sometimes for her knowledge when she can talk to people whilst I have to sit by like a dumb animal and smile a stereotyped smile till I find myself blushing at being an incarnate lie. And it is so silly and childish to blush and without reason too."

A third cut line: After Lucy states that she affords Seward psychology study, the manuscript reads "I enclose a circular for Madame as you wish." Madame likely refers to the mistress of the school where Mina works. This line served as a transition from Lucy's talk about Seward to her talk of fashion.

Fourth cut line: After Lucy said "I would try to tell you what I feel," she continued "That is not love at all—no, nor the least like it. Love is a holy thing. We used to be ashamed of those things then—as we well might be. I glory in my love now."

The final bit of Lucy's letter, from "I do not know how I am writing..." to "...tell me all that you think about it" has been revised from the original manuscript. It read as follows: "I wish you knew the tall straight-haired man—he is so noble and brave and good and tender and true—How the girls would laugh in school if they saw this letter. I must stop. I feel so happy that I could go on writing for ever—telling you my secret is just like telling Arthur that I love him—only of course not quite the same. Mina, if a time should come when—after he had told me that he loved me, of course—I should be able to whisper to him 'Arthur, I love you!'"

So is Arthur's hair curly, as Mina said, or straight, as Lucy said?

[fandorahsbox]

Jonathan Harper slowly realizing he’s the protagonist of a horror novel

[lauralot89]

Fun with Dracula annotations:

According to Stoker's original notes, if Dracula is photographed then he'll either be absent from the image entirely or else appear as a spooky scary skeleton. This is incredible and I need skeleton Dracula photos in every single adaptation moving forward.

Apparently there's a book by Fred Saberhagen called The Dracula Tape which is narrated by Dracula in the vein of The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs! in which, among other things, he explains that he does have servants, but Dracula wanted to be a good host and care for Harker himself (Also the servants were untrained because he had to take whoever was willing to work for him, and he thought that Harker would not be impressed with them).

And while on the subject of servants, according to Stoker's notes, Dracula employs a deaf-mute woman and a "silent man" in London.

When Dracula speaks of "one of my own race who...crossed the Danube and beat the Turk on his own ground" he is likely referencing the Hungarian Jánis Hunyadi, who did exactly that, and by calling him a "Dracula" is not claiming literal relation, but calling Hunyadi a dragon/devil/courageous/etc. However, the next sentence clearly refers to Radu Țepeș, who was not Hunyadi's brother, so this whole section is kind of a hodgepodge of regional history that Jonathan may have written down incorrectly.

The "other of his race" who was inspired in a later age is presumably Dracula himself, as Mina and Van Helsing later conclude, so it seems Count Dracula lived after Vlad Dracula/Vlad III/Vlad Țepeș/Vlad the Impaler/whatever other names this guy has, there are so many.

I like to imagine Vampire Dracula as a descendant of Vlad Dracula, and I also like to imagine all his ancestral spirits looking down on his bullshit, Mulan-style, and turning to Vlad all "He gets it from your side of the family." This has nothing to do with the annotations, it's just how my brain functions.

The annotations then conclude that Dracula's story here is too contradictory and vague to point to any one figure in Romanian history as the real Count Dracula.

[kindlythevoid]

Guys, guys, look, guys, I know that Dracula is terrible. But I unironically want to start greeting people with his "Welcome to my house. Come freely. Go safely; and leave something of the happiness you bring!". I want to find a sign that says this and hang it on my front door. I need to incorporate this in my every day speech. I'm 65% of the way to making it my lock screen on my phone. I am actively adding it to my blog as we speak. This is by far my favorite line of the whole book. I just.

[woundworship]

dracula putting the horses in their stalls, lighting both fireplaces and setting the table while jonathan stands outside the castle in the cold:

[stawbebbiess]

finding out that the count is covered in hair werwolf style after only ever seeing adaptations of him smooth as a baby was shocking to me tbh

[i-was-today-years-old-when]

i learned that actor Danny Trejo has the most on-screen deaths of anyone in Hollywood history, with 65. Followed by Christopher Lee (60), Lance Henriksen (51), Vincent Price (41), Dennis Hopper (41), Boris Karloff (41), and John Hurt (39). (x)

[splend-42]

Yet poor Sean Bean is stuck with the reputation for dying in every movie. Unfair.

[deliriumcrow]

Give him time, he still has many years of dying yet to come.

[cipheramnesia]

Also there’s the question of density vs quantity. If you make a hundred movies and die in 50, and someone else makes 30 movies and dies in 30, the first one has died more, but the second one has died more often per movie.

[patrickat]

It’s the DPM ratio that really counts, IMO.

[avron]

65/402 16% Danny Trejo 60/282 21% Christopher Lee 51/259 20% Lance Henriksen 41/211 19% Vincent Price 41/205 20% Dennis Hopper 41/204 20% Boris Karloff 39/209 19% John Hurt 33/117 28% Sean Bean

[digitaldiscipline]

I’m so proud of the statistical side of tumblr for coming through on this.

[alexanderwales]

Here's a legal PSA:

If you've committed a crime and a detective gathers everyone involved in the room, especially if he's not actually a detective and is instead a novelist, puzzle-setter, psychic, fake psychic, dog, chess grandmaster, etc. ...

YOU SHOULD NOT CONFESS.

Every year, hundreds of people are put away by non-traditional "detectives" who have either inserted themselves into the case or are working with the police in a dubiously legal capacity as advisor. In 99% of these cases, the murderer gives a full confession even though the evidence against them is circumstantial at best and often requires a long just-so story which can only guess at motive.

If this happens to you, stay quiet, do not attempt to defend yourself or talk your way out of it, only say "I want a lawyer".

Now if you find yourself being investigated by a boy genius, magician's assistant, anthropologist, classics scholar, or philosopher, it's likely that refusing to talk to the police (or investigator with no legal authority) is merely the end of the second act, and by the end of the third act they will have you dead to rights.

YOU SHOULD STILL NOT CONFESS.

Make them take it to court. Force the eccentric detective and his straight-laced police partner to take the stand and explain their methods to a jury of your peers. Have your lawyer look at the chain of custody on the evidence, especially if you believe it to have been handled by someone who has only bumbled into detective work through their natural charm and/or unique set of skills and outsider perspective that come in handy more often than they should.

Know your rights. Don't let eccentric detectives put you away.

[tiger-in-the-flightdeck]

There are, of course, exceptions to this rule, but only under certain circumstances. If the eccentric is there with a much put upon biographer who is gazing with open awe and adoration at his dear friend and constant companion, you are safe to make known your involvement IF one or more of the following applies to you:

Your victim was planning something nefarious for your daughter

You were getting vengeance for the murder of your true love, who society would not let you be with

You were protecting your true love from abuse at the hands of a spouse, because despite society not allowing you to be together, you are still utterly devoted

You were being blackmailed with the threat of a secret relationship being revealed to the public which would result in your absolute ruin

You are a snake and thus beyond prosecution

[logorrhea5mip]

Sorry for the bad photo quality, Tumblr doesn't like posts this long.

[waffled0g]

Everyone gets “The 90s” look wrong and I hate it

Couple years ago I saw these two board games at the store back to back. Well, not saw them per se, but ya know. Spied them out of the corner of my eye. And for a moment without reading the text, I couldn’t tell you which was which decade at first. Funny. Either they were in a rush to get these out the door or they wanted their throwback trivia game boxes to look uniform. I didn’t think too much of it.

Only, from then on I started seeing it MORE. Every time someone markets a 90s or 80s throwback…

Goddammit they’re identical! What??! How did we let this happen? As a 90s survivor and a designer, this drives me up a wall.

Look, I know I’m late to the party to complain about “the 90s look” when we’re just starting to get sick of the Y2K nostalgia train. But c’mon, the 90s were not The 80s: Part Two™ 

Trust me when I say that we weren’t all wearing neon trapezoids up until the year 2000. The 90s look being peddled is so specific to the tail end of the 80s and an early early part of the 90s - a part of the 90s when it wouldn’t stop being the 80s. This is Memphis design being conflated with the wrong decade.

Keep reading for a long ass graphic design history lesson and pictures of old soda and fast food.

Keep reading