Still Keeping Up With Dracula Daily. I've Never Read It Before.

Still keeping up 😅 with Dracula Daily. I've never read it before.

i know a substantial number of people stopped following dracula daily after johnny harker got out of the castle so lemme just check out a thing. fandom population census, if you will

pls reblog if you are still actively following dracula daily/have read dracula before <3 thank

Why did Dracula force Mina to drink his (her? Lucy's? Other victims? Whose blood runs in Dracula's body??) blood?

This seems like an easy question to answer based on lots of other vampire stories: to make her a vampire. But Van Helsing said that all she needed to do was die after Dracula fed on her, right?

Which has always sat wrong for me. By that logic, every baby the weird sisters killed would become a vampire. The sailors from the crew of the Demeter would wake up underwater and make their way to land (an image I find delightfully creepy, tbh). So Van Helsing must be wrong.

But did Dracula make Lucy drink his blood?

I guess we can't know for sure, but I don't recall anyone ever saying she had blood on her mouth.

So if it's not an action required to make a vampire, why did he make Mina do it? Just to be gross?

I hope this gets cleared up; I hate unanswered questions.

I've been fiddling with a Dracula-adjacent story idea and I won't say much about that just yet bc who knows whether it'll develop. In any case I was pondering the whole "adaptations make Lucy out to be a lascivious and willing victim" thing, and puzzling over where that comes from.

And granted, the obvious answer is that Stoker describes Vamp!Lucy as voluptuous and seductive.

I'm not sure I'm going to be able to put this idea into words that make sense, so please bear with me.

I was thinking about having a character see Lucy at her window not long before the wolf incident, and I was imagining how to describe the look in Lucy's eyes. Grief and fear, but overlaid with profound weariness, much like the eyes of sex workers the character knows in the dark alleys of London, who've been dealing with predators like Jack the Ripper since forever.

This made me contemplate the ways Lucy's life is both very different from a London sex worker (she has the privilege of wealth, for one thing) but also how it is similar (she has very limited agency).

And that's when I thought of how the adaptations (Coppola is my main one) have made her out to be "the devil's whore." And I thought, "Huh, it's funny, it's like they think sex workers enjoy the sex they sell."*

(*I know some sex workers do, however my guess is that that was rarely the case among impoverished sex workers of the time. I'm pro-SW and have no intention of generalizing, however.)

And that's when the idea I had came. That's exactly it. These people are mostly male, I'm assuming, though who knows maybe not always. They think people (women for simplicity's sake since I think male and trans SWs add another dimension I'm not confident in discussing right now) who sell sex must enjoy it, bc they *need* that to be true. Coppola et al. believe Lucy is a whore (their word) who wants sex because all whores must want sex because if they don't that's just too awful to contemplate. They fantasize about these women and if the women aren't into it the fantasy doesn't work anymore.

Of course there are those who like the idea of it being bad for SWs too, but we're not dealing with them here.

I hope I'm making sense. Let me try to sum up.

I think Coppola and people like him want Lucy to be a whore because it's titillating and they believe whores must want sex (and in her case, Dracula) because otherwise their fantasy can't survive the implications. SW must be willing, eager even, for it to be hot. So they throw out pure Lucy not bc she made the shocking comment about wanting to marry three men (they can see just as well as we can that it came from a place of wanting to make everyone happy, not a place of frivolity or lust) but bc she won't fit with the fantasy.

I wonder if that was like, obvious to everyone else? To me it was a realization.

Jonathan Harker: [Slashes at Dracula with a kukri knife]

Dracula: Haker is…alive? Harker is vengeful? Harker is after my blood? I am running away. I am shipping my little dirt box and going back to Transylvania to ask how you escaped. I can no longer thrive in this city.

I do not, I confess, recall much of anything about Renfield in either of the adaptations of Dracula I have encountered. But I'm pretty sure he wasn't beaten to death as he attempted to defend Mina.

I am flabbergasted.

In the school play I was in, he was comic relief and survived. In Coppola's movie... I don't remember. Does anyone know what happens to him? Does he sacrifice himself for Mina??

I'm so totally floored.

I always thought he was an evil character. He wants to eat cats ffs. I did NOT see this coming.

As an aside, when people who had already read Dracula said they liked Arthur because he was a dog person the last thing I pictured was him whistling over a pack of *terriers*.

I was prejudiced against Arthur but I think that officially won me over.