My duty's to the law! I'm a real adult and I'm tired. Sci-fi is good, so is musicals, chocolate and sleeping forever. Things I vibe with include: Barbershop, Gilbert and Sullivan, Babylon 5, gay, Dinosaurs, science, poetry, M*A*S*H, Red Dwarf, Geology, Star Trek, Stargate, Roller Derby, singing, palaeontology, Les Miserables, Terry Pratchett, Horrible Histories, Welcome to Night Vale, Pacific Rim, D & D, Critical Role, The Adventure Zone, Lazytown, Whose Line Is It Anyway? and many more wonderful things. NSFW BLOG (HA!)
Werewolf Regency story where part of courting is a full moon ball to meet the eligible gentlemen as their wolf selves to be certain you are still a fine match.
Instead of a dance card, you have a trotting card. Gentlemen fill in a spot to have you ride on their backs and trot around the grounds, all well within view of all chaperones.
Werewolves don’t talk the same, so particularly well-educated young ladies have training in dialects. Should a young lady be a werewolf herself, she is welcome to attend in her wolf form, though required to carry a fan to signal she is a lady.
If a gentleman and a lady wolf wish to trot, they do so under the same supervision as the wolf and human pairs, but they trot side-by-side.
There is no nuzzling between wolves until an engagement has been secured.
The funniest implication of the reveal of the three vampire women living in Dracula’s castle that at some point Dracula probably had to explain to his roommates that he was going to have a human guest over and he needs to keep up the ruse that he has servants, that he doesn’t live alone here, and all three of them looked him in the eyes and said: “we’re not doing that.”
And all three of them just sat there watching as Dracula uses his superpowers pretending to be the entire wait staff.
The reason Dracula crawled down from the walls of his castle instead of using the doors like a normal person is because he’s concerned that if he goes out the front door Jonathan will slip out between his legs like a cat
Learning that the original idea for Dracula’s name was “Count Wampyre” had me all “Really?? They’re going to be acting mysterious over whether Count Wampyre is a Vampire??”
But then I remember the fully serious show about Hannibal the Cannibal
Dracula: Hm, that human mother is being super annoying
about her dead kid at the gate. How do I fix that? Wolves? I’ll say wolves.
Dracula: What’s that? My good friend Jonathan Harker
wants to leave ahead of schedule? Think I’ll do some wolves about that.
Dracula: Damn, seems that old Dutchman has blocked
off one (1) single window with garlic blossoms and now this one (1)
specific girl in all of England is barred from me. Maybe I should use my title
and/or some invented pretense to cajole the girl’s mother into letting me in.
Or maybe I could just move on to a different victim out of the nigh endless
blood buffet I specifically moved here to enjoy, none of whom have a small
legion of blood donors and vampire-proofing scholars on their side.
Dracula:
Dracula, about to slam dunk a wolf through the window:
Or,
now that i think about it, jonathan harker would’ve been a great character in frankenstein. he’s so completely oblivious to dracula’s red flag parade that he’d probably completely avert the creature’s murderous rampage by accidentally befriending him after spending a page and a half writing about some weirdly tall homeless guy with daddy issues he ran into
Stay tuned to hear the trailer on the Re: Dracula feed in a week, or join our patreon and listen right now! Since we’re funding the miniseries via patreon, there will be lots of perks and early access audio for supporters. Production will take place in 2024, once we’ve fully wrapped Re: Dracula!
We’re so used to the sexual reading of the entire book of Dracula, which takes the sensuality of the early chapters and jams everything that follows it into the same metaphor no matter how poorly it fits, but I feel the segment we’re approaching works much better with a lens of chronic illness and disease.
Vampire legends are inextricably intertwined with disease. Many of them are said to have been birthed by burying victims of disease too soon, who later seem to rise from the dead. But what’s more is that Stoker and his family have deep-seated trauma over disease: his mother had to flee her hometown at the age of 14 because of a horrific cholera epidemic, and Stoker himself was bedridden as a child from an illness that no one could identify.
Found this quote from Irish Historian Mary McGarry:
Bram as an adult asked his mother to write down her memories of the epidemic for him, and he supplemented this using his own historic research of Sligo’s epidemic. Scratching beneath the surface (of this essay), I found parallels with Dracula. [For instance,] Charlotte says cholera enters port towns having traveled by ship, and can travel overland as a mist—just like Dracula, who infects people with his unknown contagion.
I bring this up because a lot of academic analysis insists that Lucy sleepwalking is proof of her being the Slutty Woman archetype that needs to be punished. This suggested symbolism is hilarious when put next to the text saying she inherited it from her father, but I’d like to suggest a different angle from the lens of disease suggested earlier:
Lucy’s sleepwalking is a condition that predates Dracula but makes her an easy target for him to prey on. Through the lens of disease symbolism, she now is someone with chronic illness or disability who is especially vulnerable to infectious disease. This becomes a cross-section of Stoker’s trauma regarding disease: his own mystery illness and his mother fleeing a plague.
To wind down my rambles with a bit of a soapbox, I feel this adds a very poignant layer to the struggle to keep Lucy alive. The COVID pandemic showed a horrifying level of casual ableism vs disabled and immunodeficient individuals, shrugging off their vulnerability and even their deaths with “well COVID only kills them.” There’s something deeply gratifying at seeing the way everyone around Lucy fights to the bitter end to protect her and refuses to just give her up to Dracula, whether it’s Mina physically chasing him away or the suitor squad pouring their blood into her veins or Van Helsing desperately searching for cures. The vulnerable deserve no less than this. They’re not acceptable casualties.
