Titled

[starfish-comics]

Happy pride to all the gay blood-drinking 150-year-old countesses out there! You may be excluded from pride events (due to them taking place in the daytime) but I see you and I love you and I want you to choke me.

Check out my webcomic Carmilla if you haven't!!!

Carmilla

Chapter II_ Odd Habits- Page 9

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Carmilla

Laura's lonely existence is upended when a carriage crash brings the mysterious and alluring Carmilla into her life. But Carmilla has her ow

[hamletteprinceofdenmark]

Dracula Daily - May 31

Hi! My name’s Qwerty and I’ll be your Dracula tour guide today 😊

Please find below a summary of each day's events as well as clarifications and explanations for any words, phrases, or customs that may not be super familiar to folks who don’t read 19th Century literature regularly.

My plan is to do this for every update, so I’ll be releasing them concurrently with any correspondences we have from our mutual friend Jonathan -- and anyone else we meet along the way!

Content Warning: None today

Summary

Jonathan wakes up, wanting to take some paper from his bag in case he gets the opportunity to write another letter only to be in for a shocking and sickening surprise.

Every scrap of paper, including his notes and travel paperwork, are gone! Momentarily shocked he goes to check whether anything else is missing.

Searching further he realises that it's not only the paper. His clothes he arrived in and his travelling rug are also gone.

Knowing that Dracula must be behind it, Jonathan fears what new scheme is now afoot, having had everything taken from him that might lend to an easy escape.

The theft is not only a further display of Dracula's coercive control, systematically removing Jonathan's options and independence, but also erases the means by which Jonathan would be perceived in the outside world to be a professional gentleman, removing safeguards that would otherwise protect him.

Clarifications, Explanations, and Footnotes

Letter of Credit – Before modern bank cards and traveller’s cheques, a letter of credit was a financial document. They allowed travellers to access funds through banks and agents abroad. Without it, Jonathan would have little ability to support himself financially even if he escaped. Dracula has essentially stolen his credit card, which also partially acts as a proto-passport (as it would identify him as a gentleman with access to an English bank).

Portmanteau – A large travelling case or suitcase, commonly used by Victorian travellers for extended journeys.

Travelling Suit – Jonathan’s travelling clothes would have served as proof of identity and respectability, as well as protection from the elements. Their disappearance leaves him more dependent upon Dracula and less able to move freely if he manages to escape.

Travelling Rug – A travelling rug was a thick woollen blanket carried by Victorian travellers for warmth and comfort during long train or coach journeys. Its disappearance is another small but telling sign that Jonathan is being deprived of the practical possessions he would need to travel or escape independently.

Railway Memoranda – Jonathan notices that his notes on train routes, schedules, and travel arrangements, which contain the practical knowledge essential for navigating unfamiliar territory and returning home, have all gone missing.

Psychological Erosion – Jonathan's horror comes not only from supernatural threats but from the gradual realisation that every attempt to plan, document, communicate, or prepare has already been anticipated and neutralised. The resulting helplessness is a hallmark of psychological horror and coercive imprisonment.

Colonial Reversal – Jonathan arrives in Transylvania as an educated English professional accustomed to navigating foreign places through maps, documents, and institutions. As these tools are stripped away, he experiences a reversal of the colonial confidence often associated with Victorian travellers, becoming increasingly powerless in a landscape he cannot understand or control.

———————————————————————————————————–

If you would like further clarifications or explanations on anything that people said or did in this chapter please leave a reply on this post or send me a message directly, and be sure to say which chapter it’s in!

Happy reading! - Q.

[mayhemchicken-varneyposting]

their relationship makes me insane actually

this will not be coherent.

okay so helene's character is, to a T, the Idealized Female Archetype of the 19th century. you know the type: the Angel of the House, perfectly content in the domestic sphere. she plays music, she embroiders, she reads Good Christian Novels, she scrupulously attends church, she's perfectly kind and patient and gracious to everyone she meets, a doting wife, a loving mother, all that shit. she's a very likable character because she's designed to be: flawlessly kind, and utterly innocent of the destruction alinska is about to bring upon her household. there's definitely a sort of...Cautionary Tale About The Dangers Of Being Too Nice To Outsiders vibe here, but in this post we are going to be ignoring that. the author is dead and his grave is a gender neutral bathroom, and there's enough cracks in the narrative facade for me to deconstruct helene's character and give her a little more juice.

let's talk about neurodivergence. alinska is crazy ND-coded.

Madame Delmont, who would have found herself in absolute seclusion after the departure of her neighbors, was not displeased that Alinska was prolonging her sojourn. It was not, undoubtedly, a very pleasant society; her habitual melancholy, the silence she maintained when she was not asked questions, the brevity of her answers and, even more so, the indefinable air of her physiognomy, were not attractive. She sang, it is true, with style, and accompanied herself on the harp; but it was while she was shut up in her room that she devoted herself to those pastimes. An invincible timidity, she said, did not permit her to play in front of anyone else.

From that moment on, Alinska’s unsociability seemed to increase. She only emerged from her room at meal times; she sat down at the table, where she scarcely took enough nourishment to sustain her existence. She was vainly urged to eat more, obstinately refusing the best dishes, contenting herself with a little meat, which she sucked—for she appeared not to like vegetables at all.

The Hungarian woman rarely put any expression into what she said, or did. One might have thought, most of the time, one examining her actions, that she was not so much a living creature as an animate automaton, solely obedient to the impulse of springs that moved her relentlessly in a uniform manner.

a lot of her character traits read as kind of autistic-coded, although many of them are directly related to her vampirism. she's definitely clinically depressed. the other characters also all interpret her monologues about being dead and damned and forced down the track of vengeance by God and so forth as proof that she is mad. helene herself concludes this shortly upon meeting her, and is a little scared of her, but remains determined to show her compassion:

The latter would have liked to terminate that painful scene, but a sentiment of compassion still controlled her; she feared, in going away, leaving an individual devoid of help whose woeful madness seemed complete. “Aren’t you suffering too much at present to continue your walk?” she said. “Would you permit me to take you back to the place where you’re living?”

the passage that gets me, though, is from much later in the book, when helene is dying, and requests that alinska come visit her and keep her company. alinska, although she seems to be isolating herself in an (unsuccessful) attempt to keep helene safe from her, obliges, resulting in this passage:

A little reflection reminded her of Alinska’s known character; she also recalled the customary strangeness of all her manners, and realized that it was necessary not to take offense at anything she did, for she did not do anything as everyone else did. Hélène had need of company; she was accustomed to hers; ought she complain about finding her with all her eccentricities and unsocial habits?

see, it's not about helene just having sympathy for alinska, or treating her politely; helene accommodates alinska's ways even when they put her at odds with social politeness; she doesn't attempt to make her conform.

As soon as he had gone, Alinska got up and went out, as if to go to her room, without giving any reason for her departure. Madame Delmont knew how the slightest question was capable of displeasing her, so she never asked her any.

it stands out to me starkly because really, this level of compassion for alinska is not expected of an upper-class woman in this time period. alinska is a foreigner, an outsider to the community, a person of low social standing, an antisocial recluse, and to all appearances mad. but helene doesn't just show her charity, she genuinely becomes her friend. she tolerates alinska's deviation from social norms, and adjusts her own behavior to accomodate her friend.

but we can go further. earlier in the story, after learning alinska has left the delmont household, helene tosses off this line:

We’ll need to send on her clothes; doubtless she won’t have taken them, in order to deceive us more effectively.

we know nothing about helene's back story; she only exists in the story as a wife and mother. but she jumps to this idea so immediately that i have to wonder if it comes from personal experience. maybe helene is not as neurotypical as the author would like you to think. maybe she tried to run away as a teenager, or at least thought about running away.

maybe, when helene is transformed by her grief, that is not a new development of her character, but an old one showing itself from behind the mask she's grown accustomed to putting on.

Time had not yet deadened Madame Delmont’s grief, having been unable to gain any purchase on her. She was almost always to be seen in constant immobility, holding a book whose pages she never turned, or inundating an item of embroidery with her tears. A bleak melancholy had taken possession of her; it was only briefly that, recovering the exercise of her consciousness, she testified to her husband that he was still dear to her. She never allowed her daughter to be apart from her. If Juliette, carried away by her natural impetuosity, occasionally forgot her mother’s instruction, the latter, launching herself out of the room in tears, shouted for her loudly, only seeming reassured when the child came back. She examined Juliette’s cheerful face for hours on end; it seemed to her that the little girl was already infected by the deadly malady that had carried off her son; then her despair knew no bounds.

how much of herself does helene see in alinska? how much does she extend to her the treatment she knows she would have wanted at an earlier point in her life? (how much does she still want it?)

there's something so poignant to me about a helene who struggled with mental illness earlier in her life, trying to reassure a young woman she sees herself in. when alinska states matter-of-factly that her lot in life is fixed, that her presence can only bring despair and misfortune, that there is no hope of turning from her course, helene recognizes, or thinks she recognizes, the tunnel vision of depression. she wants to reassure her that it gets better. she doesn't realize that the problem is more than mental illness, that alinska really is trapped in her situation. only in death does she realize the truth of what was happening, what alinska is and why she was there.

and how does she respond? she and her son are dead by alinska's hand. alinska was drawn here by her husband's broken promise, to carry out a destructive revenge against him. what does she feel when, as a spirit, she watches him fall back into love with the woman who murdered her? what does she feel when his obliviousness leads to alinska's death in turn?

can helene forgive her?

[loulooser]

Can’t wait to not sleep at all on September 11th

[spinostarz]

i know ur from the uk(?) but reading this as an american is really really funny

[loulooser]

why 😭 it’s about twenty one pilots???? Their new album is out sep 12th????

[jarsjam]

THERE'S TWENTY ONE THIS TIME???

[ofools]

not gonna say it again!!!!

a BOG is a wetland that is acidic

a FEN is a wetland that is alkaline

[vampireapologist-archive-deacti]

FINALLY someone said it!!!!!!!

[quasi-normalcy]

a SWAMP is a wetland whose vegetation consists of trees or other woody plants

a MARSH is a wetland with other forms of vegetation

[dracula1992soundtrack]

laura’s companion

[edwire]

What if you were BISEXUAL and your wife was BISEXUAL and there were hot vampires and they were also BISEXUAL

🦇commissions are open!🦇

[redscharlach]

The Casa Batlló (1904–1906) in Barcelona, designed by Antoni Gaudí, is a swirly undersea kingdom covered in glorious tiles and stained glass. Photos by me, February 2026.

[sleepnoises]

i want to do a painting of a tiger taking a bath to put in a bathroom (bathroom-themed bathroom) and to this end i made a little maquette out of clay and i suspect this will scope creep into having both a painting and sculpture of a tiger or perhaps only a sculpture of a tiger. if i do both should they be displayed together or separately

[sleepnoises]

Tiger maquette by the way 🐅

[sleepnoises]

Working on cutting out a large piece of wood to do the painting on, which is a constraint that will either be really fun or really annoying. Maybe both

[sleepnoises]

Wood primed and underpainted and sketch transferred mostly by cutting it out in different chunks and tracing around them. Stripes to be determined. Nobody let me work on this again for at least two weeks

[sleepnoises]

The finished Ms. Tigers

[natnormalatall]

roald dahl was antisemitic. george orwell was openly homophobic. edgar allan poe married his 13 year old cousin. dr seuss cheated on his wife. hp lovecraft was racist as fuck. anyways they’re fucking dead it’s not like you’re enabling their behaviors in the afterlife or something. then again I think orwell’s homophobia bleeds into one of his books so uh keep an eye out for that

the difference between these old white guys and jk rowling is that the former group is all dead. jk rowling is alive and using your money to oppress trans people

[ketchuplaser]

[miamaimania]

Night Rush ~ Saigon Streets by Paul Chesley ⌘ Motorbikes blur past red lanterns

[goryhorroor]

130 favorite horror movies: (51/130)

"if I were gonna haunt somebody, this would certainly be the house I'd do it in."

-house on haunted hill (1959) dir. william castle

[lauralot89]

Having now read about all these fascinating Not Dracula 19th century vampires, I would like to institute a new law for Dracula adaptations moving forward:

If you're not making an accurate adaptation then you have to use Dracula as a Trojan horse to introduce a bunch of other vampires instead

Dracula: My good friend Jonathan Harker, allow me to introduce you to the members of my annual hunting party. This is the Countess Mircalla Karnstein, and before you ask, no, she's not into men. The tall gentleman lurking by the drapes is Sir Francis Varney, and yes, he knows his face looks like that.

Jonathan: Why is he sobbing?

Dracula: Oh, he does that. Ignore it. And here is my dear friend Kostaki Brankovan, another proud noble of the Carpathian Mountains. We have so much in common.

Kostaki: We're not friends and we have nothing in common. I'm just here for the food.

[aceinthetrap]

Dynasty Flowchart (Extended) – Nüwa Hanfu

An ultra extended flowchart for identifying dynasties! Even identifying sub-periods of each dynasty. As always, this is a general guide ther

does the makeup look sad or happy? >>> goth & sad >>> middle tang dynasty [lmao]

[mayhemchicken-varneyposting]

a little more of this crossover

[greymvs]