#bastardization

[see-arcane]

Today’s entry is one of many that really drives home why I can never quite bring myself to get into softer ‘uwu he’s just misunderstood and sexy-liberating’ versions of Dracula. Just. I can’t. I really really can’t.

Up to this point, he’s already had a monstrous moment in bringing the ladies their first on-screen kids meal crying and squirming in its sack. He’s had outright predatory back-to-back moments in imprisoning, coercing, robbing, and getting increasingly threatening and handsy with Jonathan. This, capped with the fact that he plans to kill/drink/gift him to the Undead Girl Gang by the end of June.

‘But what about his, “I too can love,” huh? He’s just loving as best a monster can! He could be tearing everyone around him to ribbons for annoying him, Brides and Jonathan included! Instead he goes out of his way to feed the ladies, albeit gruesomely, and has no retort when they laugh at and insult the lonely old bat. And he isn’t planning to kill Jonathan. He wants to keep him! Sure, it’s a sick version of it, but to him conscripting and collecting Jonathan rather than executing him outright is the height of affection! Surely that’s grounds for some of the more ~romantic~ takes in warped gothic flavor?’

To an extent, yeah. 

But he also just dressed up in Jonathan’s stolen clothes to cover up for the man’s own abduction, imprisonment, and undeadifying, while also increasing the odds of Jonathan already getting mistaken for a vampire, bringing home another child for the ladies to devour, and then ordered a pack of wolves to eat a grieving mother alive for making noise at his gate.

And this? This is just the tip of the iceberg for how downright hellish he gets as the novel progresses. 

Dracula can absolutely be a nuanced character within canon, offshoots, retellings, re-imaginings, and so on. And he should be! He’s a very interesting bastard who’s got so much more going on than a few one-liners and a taste for good cloaks and yummy company. But his actual actions in the book--even the smallest ones--just automatically torpedo 90% of my audience enjoyment when I run into yet another ‘Oh, but he did it all because he was in love!/misunderstood!/depressed!/unfairly maligned by the eeevil human Victorian characters in their journals and newsprint and body count records!’ version of the Count. 

Even sillier takes that try to heroify him for kids like Hotel Transylvania just kind of make my brain trip and fall into a pit of ??? 

‘Look kids, Dracula is really a nice guy and a sweet dad who runs a fun little hotel for his misunderstood Universal Horror monster buddies! Isn’t he neat?’

It leaves me biting my tongue and holding this mental grimace as I think about the sacks full of weeping children, the slaughtered mother, a young man imprisoned for making the mistake of endearing himself so much to a sadistic monster that the latter has decided to keep him as a tortured toy and undead pseudo-slave for eternity, with an entire blood buffet of human cattle still waiting to fill out the rest of the novel with trauma, horror, and death. 

‘Ohhh, but look at Francis’ tragique sweetheart version who stole all his redeeming qualities from Jonathan Harker! Ohhh, but look at the funny silly Adam Sandler cartoon and his new everyman-settling daughter! Ohhh, but look at how #cool and modern-sexyedgy an antihero/villain he is when penned by every projecting director and their grandmother! Lighten up, it’s just a different interpretation!*’

*Of the character whose whole deal is psychological torture, being a predatory creep, casual murder, and worse-than-murder of innocents.

I know it skews me towards being a whiny purist. I know. Let folks have fun. I know. But still, it feels so wrong every time I see someone try to ‘awww, he’s not so bad!’-ify him in new media when. No. He is exactly that bad and probably worse. If he’s not, then that’s not fucking Dracula.

tl;dr: Can people just make some new fun/sexy/antihero vampires instead of stapling Dracula’s name on all of them? Can Dracula just be an interesting villainous monster again?? Please??? (Please save me Renfield 2023 and The Last Voyage of the Demeter, you’re my only ho--)

[pcktknife]

gordon but hes all fucked up now :/

[millenniumcamcorder]

the first joke was

low-hanging fruit

[xmagnet-o]

It will put way less stress on people if they just accepted Black people birthed country music.

For the record it wasn’t spread, it was stolen by white youth who went into rural segregated parts of the American south, etc and recorded locals playing music.

[nickkahler]

He was not one of these old people who fight improvement, who object to everything new and cringe at every change. He wanted to see a paved highway in front of his house with plenty of new-model cars on it, he wanted to see a supermarket store across the road from him, he wanted to see a gas station, a motel, a drive-in picture-show within easy distance. Progress had suddenly set all this in motion.

Flannery O’Connor, “A View of the Woods,” 1956

[see-arcane]

Van Helsing only became that cool vampire hunter in mass culture because they were constantly robbing other characters of their important traits and giving it to him. They gave him personal face offs with Dracula and gave him killing Dracula in various movies and TV series, they repeatedly gave him idea to hypnotise Mina and use her link to Dracula in various movies and TV series,they gave him descendants who are often cool vampire hunters as well and also encounter Dracula and vampires[1/2]

Dracula and Van Helsing as characters have turned into every director and writer's sponge to leech up the character traits and cool canon reality of the entire rest of the cast so that they can be the Only Two Specialboys of the Entire Story, no matter what

All with Jonathan and Mina, the actual co-protagonists of the book, getting eternally shafted to make it happen

[see-arcane]

After reading and watching several adaptations, I have come to the conclusion that Quincey gets much more respect than Jonathan. Yes he appears much less, but he gets his heroic sacrifice when he does instead of getting bastardised. Three times I have seen him be the one who kills Dracula without Jonathan. In two of those he has the kukri.

Also idk if vampire Quincey is underappreciated, there is a novel all about him.

And in this one Jonathan is revealed to have been a cowardly cheater all along.

You know. Sometimes I think I might be going too overindulgent with my Harker Horrors and lavishing of attention on my favorite special little haunted gothic heroine lad.

And then I get lovely reminders like these that not only am I not being indulgent, I have to actively burn every daydream of an inhibition I have as a writer to unfuck 126 years' worth of doing the whole cast dirty, but Jonathan Harker the absolute worst.