Assuming we get a Dracula second series (I’m not sure how likely that actually is, but it appears to at least be a possibility) I desperately want a flashback/origins episode. Or if not a full episode then at least a good chunk of time. I want to to know the circumstances under which Dracula became a vampire. Since the root of his weaknesses all end up falling under him being afraid to die and being ashamed of that fear... did our Count Dumbass choose to become a vampire, or was it thrust upon him unwillingly?
(I don’t remember us getting confirmation one way or the other on this but if we did just ignore this entire post I guess)
Because on the one hand, we could have a man who watched family and friends die in battle-- an honorable death, the type of worthy/interesting/good death he still references 400 years later --and who lost the chance to follow them when he was turned. His sense of worth would be directly tied to his ability to die a good death, and the shame and perceived dishonor in not being able to do so would have compounded over time into self-loathing and genuine fear of the thing he can’t attain. Fear of it creates more shame, and you know the rest.
Or! (and this next one is my preference)
We could have a man who watched family and friends die in battle, spent his entire life being taught This Is The Way, but was utterly terrified to die. He might have sought out and willingly chosen to take on the vampirism as a way to cheat/escape death, convincing himself that it was out of a quest for power rather than out of fear.
Having been in that warlord-type culture, he would have needed to put on the charade of believing in it. Not in the sense of “secretly hating violence and wanting to write peace treaties instead” because that doesn’t track and I don’t think he was a particularly good guy pre-vampirism either, but rather in the sense of “I better make damn sure no one figures out how truly frightened I am of death.” It’s interesting how boastful he is about being a warlord when he does mention it (at least one time, maybe more?) when to be honest his reign of terror as a vampire is... relatively tame? He’s monstrous no doubt, but it isn’t like he’s tearing through the countryside and eating entire villages every night.
I dig the idea of his whole shame/fear spiral going all the way back to his human life. His very human, very understandable fear of "I don’t want to die/die young/die violently” would end up being the thing that drags him furthest away from actually being human. It becomes this vicious cycle of “I’m afraid to die, so I found a way to not die, but I’m ashamed of that choice, and the only way out of my shame is to actually die, which I can’t do anymore.” [Interesting note here: He knows suicide doesn’t work. That could have been discovered via his turned victims, but... food for thought.]
Dracula doesn’t fully become a monster out of blanket desire to do monstrous things, he becomes a monster by first choosing to ignore his own humanity (fear), and the rest follows.
The thing that frees him is acknowledgment of his own fear (thanks, Agatha!). It isn’t that in the end he’s not afraid of death anymore- I honestly think he still is afraid. But he’s able to recognize and admit that he’s afraid. He doesn’t do say it in words, but if he didn’t believe in what Agatha was saying about him, he wouldn’t have stepped back into the sunlight to test/confirm it.
If a fear/avoidance of death is what made him choose to become a vampire in the first place, it seems like a fantastic (if hilariously delayed) growth of character that the admittance of that fear would be the thing to make him regain a sliver of humanity in the end. The strength ends up coming not from the actual act of dying, but from the preceding act of accepting, “Yeah, I am afraid.”
