Purpleyin's slightly fannish tumblr

My friend drove thru town with her baby and, more importantly, the baby Dracula book I had sent to her and it’s more hilarious than I could have imagined

There’s also a page where Jonathan is like “no wonder he wants to buy a new house!” When he sees the castle

In this house we bite and run

“No biting!” The theme here is that Dracula is a recalcitrant toddler. With a stuffed dragon

“That night, everyone slept very well.”

Perfection. Zero notes. I can’t believe I can send this to a baby and no one can stop me. Sorry, your baby is a new hilarious flavor of Dracula nerd now

I would like everyone to know that my friend texted me, and this book is apparently a huge hit with said baby, now a toddler, this year. They are teaching him not to bite and so every time Dracula bites someone he shakes his head and goes “no no!” Amazing. Dracula bringing the relevance to toddler fandom

WINONA RYDER as Mina Harker BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA dir. Francis Ford Coppola, 1992

My annotated Dracula has informed me that when Harker said his robber steak was “in the style of the London cat’s-meat!” he was referring to “A tradition in London was the “cat’s-meat man,” a vendor who sold little bits of meat on skewers for consumption by cats”

I am overjoyed by this knowledge that there were Victorians just randomly getting lil kebabs for their CATS

I am so happy to learn this was a thing, looks like they were door to door pet food sellers.

I didn’t see any new posts about it but it is VITAL that new readers know this.

Fact: The earliest reliably dated use of the phrase “fucked up” appears in the court records of a US Navy court-martial case from 1863; the way the phrase is used suggests that its meaning was already well known at the time, but this is the first known printed record of it that we can confidently put a date to.

Additional fact: Bram Stoker’s Dracula is set in 1897.

Conclusion: It would not anachronistic for your Dracula fanfic to have a character describe the Count as a fucked up old man.

Btw, either unfortunately or fortunately, I keep picturing Keanu Reeves as Jonathan Harker throughout all this.

(This is the fault of watching Bram Stoker's Dracula long, long ago, I'm guessing. For a movie I don't remember even caring for, it somehow embedded in my brain, apparently.)

But honestly 90s era Keanu was such a good casting for this Tumblr's interpretation of Jonathan Harker. He does spend at least half that movie with that blank, astonished face like

"This woman is insisting I take a rosary but I'm not Catholic"

"Oh I see my new friend the count is reading trains schedules, how quaint"

"This chicken is very good but made me thirsty, I shall endeavor to get the recipe for Mina"

we’re reading Dracula for one of my book clubs, and I completely forgot that the book starts out as quite an enjoyable travelogue—having just passed the bar exam, Jonathan Harker is essentially on his first real business trip, and keeps making little notes to ask for recipes, or that he’ll share such-and-such about the landscape with Mina.

I also forgot that Jonathan Harker has a Kodak camera (he used it to take pictures of the London estate for Dracula) which leads me to assume that the 21st century version of Jonathan Harker’s journal is actually a series of instagram posts that start getting really, really weird.

Tangent: My brain is having trouble digesting the information that a Kodak camera is in this book from 1897.  Is that a name that means anything to younger folks now? Kodak was THE name you thought of when taking pictures for most of my life, until they spectacularly failed to adapt to digital cameras.  It was a name like Apple and Microsoft.  It’s so weird to remember that it was literally around for a hundred years.

(Yes, I know about Nintendo. Yes, that also hurts my brain.)

I really wonder why all takes on the Dracula book are so similar. There are so many interesting things and dynamics besides Dracula going on in the original story.

I’m super fascinated by Lucy and her three suitors, the lord Arthur, the cowboy Quincey, and the doctor/psychiatrist John. Just the fact that all three suitors are friends and remain friends after Lucy picks Arthur is very refreshing. Lucy even complains about it being illegal for women to have three husbands. Not for horny reasons, she just loves them all so much, and you get the sense that the men would have preferred that too considering how much they love her and each other. There’s a lot of hand-touching, hugs and “yours truly” between the guys. A polycule born in the wrong era.

Lucy is sweet and loving, Arthur is pure and sensitive, Quincey is brazen yet gentle, and John is brilliant but awkward and struggles with insomnia and drug addiction.

Also, John’s whole thing with Renfield is ripe for all sorts of weirdness depending on the direction you’d want to take it. John is Renfield’s doctor and is weirded out by his own obsession with the person in his care. He is constantly doing little experiments on Renfield, allowing him more freedom than other people are comfortable with, like opening his cell just to see if he’ll try to escape, while also putting him in straight jackets, and more than once John worries that he might have a sort of kinship with Renfield. Renfield for his part accepts the power John has over him, maybe even likes John and laughs at the idea of hurting John, but doesn’t have any respect for him once his Master (Dracula) is around.

If someone made a game and wanted to be more creative than the usual “fighting Dracula and his brides” they could have vampire Lucy turn her suitors and you’d have to fight them one by one to get to her. They have such distinctive personalities I’m sure you’d get some great bosses. Part of John’s fights could be Renfield. He keeps this man who has been driven mad by Dracula in bondage and it’s an ever present danger that he might let Renfield loose, mostly because he doesn’t actually control Renfield so once the straightjacket comes off anything could happen.

Also, John used to study under Van Helsing and refers to him as his old Master which comes of as reminiscent of the way Renfield talks about Dracula.

There’s so much good stuff to focus on and every film director and game creator keeps going with the same old, boring Dracula.

THE LIST OF THINGS NINTENDO PREDATES INCLUDES, BUT IS NOT LIMITED TO:

THE SHERLOCK HOLMES FRANCHISE

UNITED STATES PRESIDENT DWIGHT D. EISHENHOWER’S BIRTH

THE NOVEL “DRACULA”

THE NOVELS “THE TIME MACHINE” AND “WAR OF THE WORLDS” BY H.G. WELLS

THE FIRST MODERN OLYMPIC GAMES

THE DISCOVERY OF HELIUM ON EARTH

… Okay. I believe you. But like… how?

NINTENDO WAS FOUNDED IN 1889 AS A CARD GAME MANUFACTURER AND ALL THOSE OTHER THINGS HAPPENED IN 1890 OR LATER

WHAT THE FUCK I THOUGHT DRACULA WAS EARLIER WHAT THE FUCK

YOU COULD WRITE A DRACULA FANFIC WHERE DRACULA TRAVELS TO JAPAN AND BUYS A PACK OF NINTENDO BRAND PLAYING CARDS AND IT WOULD BE HISTORICALLY ACCURATE. SAME DEAL FOR SHERLOCK HOLMES.

No no no no no!

Don’t write fanfic!

Those things are in the public domain!

You can legally write, publish, and sell a Dracula book where Dracula travels to Japan and buys a pack of Nintendo brand playing cards!

Same deal for Sherlock Holmes!

what if you write a book where dracula and sherlock holmes travel to japan at the same time and reach for the last pack of nintendo brand playing cards that they both wanted

Here’s where the romance happens

Even better, you could have Sherlock Holmes chugging coca cola while playing Nintendo with Dracula.

One of the funniest things about Bram Stoker’s Dracula is that it’s mentioned in passing that most of Dracula’s powers don’t even have anything to do with the fact that he’s a vampire; he can do all that stuff because – and I swear I’m not making this up – in his youth he attended a magic school whose headmaster was the actual Devil. This is never followed up on.

Basically, what I mean to say is that you can picture a scenario where any fictional devil you care to name is a teacher at a magic school where one of the students is kid Dracula, and this would be a totally canon-compliant crossover.

Was… he a student at the Scholomance? Is this why the Western world is familiar with solomonari even though in Romania it’s such an obscure mythological reference??

That’s pretty much exactly what happened. Bram Stoker read one (1) book on Eastern European folklore that had a bit on the Scholomance in it, threw a passing reference to it into Dracula’s backstory, and English-speaking audiences have been going “hey, what the fuck?” ever since!

(Incidentally, this means that if you’re doing one of those classic crossovers where Victor Frankenstein ends up fighting and/or working for Dracula, Dracula absolutely gets to talk shit, because at least he finished his degree!)

Does Dracula have a PhD equivalent in dark magic? Does “Count” override “Doctor” in forms of address (I feel like this one does have a real answer)?

I’m not aware that there’s any universally accepted rule for the situation.

Outside of formal, your-name-is-your-biography introductions, the general rule is that you can have both a prenomial and a postnomial, but not two prenomials or two postnomials. There’s no postnomial for being a Count, so – assuming for the sake of argument that being instructed in blasphemous sorcery by Satan himself is a doctorate of philosophy rather than of law or medicine – that leaves “Count Dracula, PhD” as the only obvious form that would incorporate both titles.

However, academic postnomials are not used in everyday speech, so in practice he’d probably have to choose between being addressed as “Count Dracula” or “Dr. Dracula”. The rule there is to use whichever title is most immediately pertinent – e.g., “Dr.” when serving on a university’s board of directors – and otherwise to go with the individual’s stated preference, if any.

So the real question is: would Dracula prefer to be addressed as “Count Dracula” or “Dr. Dracula” in contexts where no other rule of precedence applies?

Actually, German does permit the doubling of Doktor (as in a doctorate, not necessarily a physician) and combining it with other honorifics. So in formal situations, you might introduce someone as Frau Doktor Doktor [Name] and in conversation refer to them as Herr Doktor. 

Apocryphally this can go on for as many honorifics as you want to include, but there’s no reason Dracula in Berlin couldn’t be Graf Doktor Dracula