my introductory paragraph insisting upon my sanity and denouncing all those who would insinuate my madness is raising a lot of questions in the reader already answered by my paragraph

@anawkwardblue writes:

Quincey Morris. Well you know what they say, Quincey is All Man. And in Castle Dracula, that is not a survival trait.

Quincey, good boy, brave boy, goes out to meet the wolves. And, to our bitter grief, with a smile and in silence, he dies, a gallant gentleman.

Quincey P. Morris, alas, can not survive Castle Dracula.

he's fine up till that point because vampires don't feed on their own kind

Me after googling something I knew I’d regret

It's not a full week, but...

The 200th anniversary of Lord Byron's death is coming up next month.

April 19, 2024 (your local time), let's take over the Romanticism hashtag. Fic, meta, fanart, memes, forgotten arcane rituals, translations, poetry, research, mood boards, RECOMMENDATIONS for your favorite lesser known Romantic works, etc.

Rules are for classicists, let's have fun!

still reading frankenstein and i completely forgot that theres a part where victors wrapping up doing devious deeds on a sparsely inhabited island off the shore of england and he loads all his mad scientist shit into a rowboat and pushes off into the water and then fucking falls asleep with no navigational tools and when he wakes up hes like, adrift with no land in sight and hes like ‘FUCK my creation!!!!!’ even though the monster had absolutely nothing to do with getting him lost in the middle of the fucking english channel and he starts lamenting about how hes going to die and his family is never going to see him again and hes going to go to davey jones locker or whatever because hes been without potable water in a rowboat for like 4 hours and then he sees land and hes like ‘oh thank god im saved!!!’ and he gets to shore and is met with an angry mob who thinks he murdered someone and hes like ‘but where is english hospitality?????’ and theyre like ‘this is ireland you dumb slut’ and as theyre marching him to the magistrate hes like ‘i was still thirsty but did not want to show my weakness……’ like could you even imagine

finding out there's a frankenstein ballet and that it was in october of last year…DEVASTATING

look at this. look at these. im foaming at the mouth

Could Laios from Dungeon Meshi survive?

This guy seems very popular but I do not know him at all! So I shall let you fight amongst yourselves.

mmmm you know how in the franking stein novel victor dies so thee monster just kills himself. except. thee monster literally had all of vicky’s notes and shit. theoretically, he knew what the ‘’’cure’’’ to death was. wouldn’t it have been so so so sexy conceptually if after victor finally experienced the sweet escape of death, hoping it’ll bring him back to his loved ones, only for thee monster to bring him right back?

Moby Dick

Gskgdkgdlgdg

Okay.

Moby Dick is immortal. Moby Dick cannot be killed. So trivially Moby Dick would not be killed in Castle Dracula.

But is that the same as surviving in Castle Dracula? Moby Dick is a whale - can he ontologically exist in Castle Dracula at all? Ishmael tells us that not only is Moby Dick immortal, he's also ubiquitous. Does that ubiquity extend out of the oceans into the Carpathians? On the one hand, Moby Dick is a whale, and whales are fish, and fish definitionally cannot leave the water - this is what excludes Walruses from the kingdom of the Cetaceans. But on the other hand, Ishmael also gives us examples of whales coming up onto land to attack cities, a la Porphyros, or devour princesses, a la Cetus. Whales and Dragons are one in the same, and St George was a whaleman - and what place is more appropriate for a dragon than a Castle? Particularly Castle Dracula - that is what the name means.

Hang on though - I have forgotten one crucial piece of the equation: Dracula himself. Anyone attempting to survive Castle Dracula is doing so as Dracula's invited guest. Dracula is not going to invite someone out to his Castle without providing adequate accommodation. Maybe he dug a sperm whale worthy swimming pool down in the crypt. Very fast way to full up 50 boxes of dirt.

I don't think it's likely that Moby Dick would accept the divine protection of the crucifix, but then again, he doesn't need to, he's plenty divine in his own right already. Either he's a God himself or he's the instrument of Divine Judgment - or both! Also he doesn't shave and has no neck. Also you apparently have to get through quite a lot of blubber before any blood comes out. From a vampirism perspective, Moby Dick is probably more trouble than he's worth.

All of that said - I honestly don't think Moby Dick would accept an invitation to Castle Dracula. Dracula has nothing he wants. He doesn't need a two bit satanist to be the Living Embodiment of Material Evil. Honestly Dracula wants what Moby Dick has. And besides, he's got a good thing going with Frankenstein's Creature. He's got his own whale stuff to do.

So in conclusion, obviously Moby Dick can survive Castle Dracula - he's immortal, ubiquitous, and divine. But he chooses not to, because he's got better things to do.

The Creature from Frankenstein at Hamburg State Opera

i feel like this year a lot of dracula takes have focused in an interesting way on the ways that the horror of dracula includes how he makes his victims be or at least feel complicit in their own victimization. some of this is supernatural vampire stuff like the prohibition against entering uninvited or the ways that vampiric hypnotism seems to include as part of its nightmarish quality the experience of a desire that you don’t actually have, which we see the vampire ladies exert on jonathan in the castle and can extrapolate as a drac-power as well. but a lot of it is the straight up weird psychological manipulations and power play dracula does to jonathan in the castle - the emphasis on “enter freely and of your own free will,” all the little moments of dialogue where he makes something jonathan’s fault or purports to presume jonathan’s desires in a way that leaves no room for jonathan to dissent. it’s a kind of horror that still rings as genuinely unsettling today because it remains an unfortunately familiar and very human kind of violation. and actually even the more magical vampire stuff translates pretty easily to a metaphor for familiar human experiences, right? how many people in the midst of a traumatic event have frozen, like jonathan does when the ladies set upon him, and felt the shame afterwards of their inability to fight against what was unfolding? (cw sexual assault) it’s also well attested to that human bodies sometimes react in situations of sexual assault/abuse with physical responses that overlap with those that accompany consensual sexual experiences, something survivors of sexual violence have spoken about as part of what can make it so difficult to emotionally process what happened - and that’s not even getting into situations of coerced consent or other forms of manipulation that result in experiences only recognized as nonconsensual in retrospect and often with much difficulty and doubt.

anyway. it’s a really rich vein in the novel for me on this reread and i’m grateful for all the posts pointing out the count’s language games in particular, which didn’t jump out at me but once my attention was drawn i couldn’t stop seeing them. but while i am on principle neutral about any individual adaptation doing Whatever with the material, tracking this aspect of the novel’s horror has given me a new dimension of But Why for the sheer prevalence of adaptational choices and academic analyses that have looked at a novel that so viscerally captures so many aspects of violation and gone, “but don’t you think she kinda wanted it?” or even that have looked at dracula’s choice of victims and tried to find or place in them some appeal or weakness inherent in their essences rather than their status as victims of opportunity and vulnerability and dracula’s ability to use them to demonstrate his own power and control, which is how he operates in the novel and which is also an extremely strong parallel for how serial predators operate in the actual world. like any individual movie or retelling or whatever can do whatever it wants, but it is hard to look at the ways the contours of the story as “known” through cultural osmosis have morphed across the century-plus of its popularity and not feel like the versions of it that have lingered have done so in ways that ultimately tone down the horror by placing it more in line with many common cultural misapprehensions about abuse & sexual violence.

hi marta :3 have u ever listened to the album "the haunting of mary shelley, or, the vindication of the rights of the departed"? i think youd like it its on both yt and spotify

I haven't but it sounds super interesting O: the past couple days I've been kinda busy and haven't had time to sit down and listen to anything, but I'll try to find time for it soon!!

The back cover of Dracula is an ocean, to represent the oceans of time that Dracula (the book) crossed to find you (the girl reading this)

You had me in the first half...

OK, here's my new and improved back cover of Dracula to go with my very accurate front cover.

“England had been the scene of momentous struggles, during my early boyhood. In the year 2073, the last of its kings, the ancient friend of my father, had abdicated in compliance with the gentle force of the remonstrances of his subjects, and a republic was instituted.”

— The Last Man (1826), Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Only 49 years until British monarchy is abolished…

I'm reading Mary Shelley's The Last Man and the main character has very strong and fond feelings for his friend

Out of curiosity I checked what Wikipedia has to say about this book, and there's a claim made that the main character is based on Mary Shelley, and his friend on her husband Percy

Thought it might be interesting to some

Due to a few choice covers for the longest time I thought that Dracula was about Dracula sexily abducting a girl to his castle.

Yep, the Dracula covers really over-represent the amount of Dracula seductively snacking on a scantily-clad blonde lady in his castle. And really under-represent the amount of typing, trains, document review and recipe blogging.