the intersecting needs of christian childrens cartoons to make all biblical figures both painfully average looking white people and as un-sexualized as possible creates a hellish world where all of humanity is descended from 2 Jon Arbuckles
I’m gonna need a sketch concept of Garfield as the Snake on my desk by 5.
I may have to cleanse my computer after this act of sacrilege.
I like how teens are too young to figure out their sexuality unless its heterosexual
Idk how people find this old post like once a week but I will say as a closeted 15 year old nothing can describe how much confidence it gave me that everyone agreed with me. That it’s all bullshit. I was so angry and frustrated at the world not taking me seriously, and the thousands and thousands of people reblogging showed me that I wasn’t alone. I wasn’t crazy and heteronormativity is all bullshit. Being queer is as natural as breathing air.
the decrease in costuming quality over the last 20 years has been soooo precipitous & nauseating. i’m not even talking abt marvel’s cg supersuits or anything this time, look at the fabric quality, structure, layering, character, and craftsmanship of older costumes in 102 dalmations (2000) vs cruella (2021)
ever after (1998) vs cinderella (2021)
lord of the rings (2001-2003) vs the rings of power (2022)
this trend should upset you not just because it looks cheap, but because it suggests a strong anti-art and anti-labor movement in film and tv making. don’t forget costumers are unionized
As fun as it is to dunk on Dracula academia, I think I am starting to see where some of these 1977 sexual liberation/repressed fantasy takes are coming from. Like, while I think it is a complete misread of the text to claim that Lucy is being punished for sexuality, it may be fair to say that she is being punished with sexuality.
(Punished is the wrong word but parallel structure yada yada)
The big caveat is that academic analysis is not the same beast as fandom analysis; for one thing it is significantly more Doylist. And often the project is “if we apply this lens, what do we get,” which is a wholly different exercise than the one we are engaged in. So if we try to walk away from seeing the characters as people and instead looking at them as symbols and devices -
I think the main problem is that so many of these Bad Academic Takes try to twist the narrative, the characters, even the actual doylist themes of Dracula so it can fit whatever topic, or theory that they have about the book. Without caring how at some point they lose sight of what the text says in favor of what they want to see.
Your analysis of Dracula, and consequently the Brides as symbols of unacceptable desires at the eyes of Victorian Society, then said symbols using those desires to hurt the characters is really plausible. More if we take into account how religion plays in the book. You could even make something about how the victims of the suffering, and the fear coming from those Unacceptable Desires aren’t made to repent, or shamed by outside characters. But their struggle after dealing with Dracula is purely internal because not once the narrative implies that they purposely sinned so it means they deserve the “punishment”. The shame that comes after the fear of confronting the vampire, aka: the Bad Thing is brought through cultural context, and internal struggles of morality.
MY SPECIFIC PROBLEM with all of those “it’s all about sexual something something” takes is how they grab all of the doylist material about sexuality, about shame, about power, and turn around and say with their whole chest is the characters fault for being attacked. To the point that some of them sound like purposely malicious interpretations done because they expected a different book.
Like how so many of the gran Lucy’s quote about wanting to marry three men, point at it with a shame finger and go “See?!??! This character is a WHORE™” while ignoring the rest of the quote, and the meaning of how Lucy doesn’t want to cause any bad feelings with the suitors because her education taught her that she must think about the feelings of everyone else around before her own.
But yeah I really like this one better.
Yeah absolutely the victim blaming can be SOMETHING ELSE. And as some other people have been saying it really does feel like projection - well CLEARLY Victorians were sexually repressed therefore obviously the text is doing [whatever] when it’s just… not.
And yeah the thing about Lucy’s three proposals is just repeated over and over and like. Okay this is another place where reading the Beetle was eye-opening. Because I’d heard for ages “oh yeah, Lucy being simultaneously courted by three whole men would have been super risqué back in the day.” And then it turns out No! The leading lady having three suitors was a recurring trope stemming from the immense genre-defining popularity of Trilby! Everyone was doing it, we just remember Lucy because the other books that this trope turns up in are really bad. But if you don’t know that it’s so easy to be like “oh, yeah, that sounds believable.”
But yeah it striking how little Stoker blames his victims. Culminating in October 3rd where MULTIPLE CHARACTERS look straight into the camera and day as plainly as the language of the day allows: “This Is Not Your Fault.”
Punished for transgressions seems to just not be a trope Stoker is using. If anything it’s the opposite - I see a lot of characters being given the opportunity for redemptive suffering. Which I guess is a subtle difference. But like, with the Captain of the Demeter. He’s in some sense complicit by helping Dracula move to England - he is not blamed or punished for this but he does get to atone for it all the same - and in so doing he saves both his soul and his honor as captain, and is treated by both the narrative and the character in the book as a Hero and a martyr.
But Lucy… poor Lucy. Her suffering isn’t redemptive either because she’s done nothing wrong, even as obliquely as “accepting money for moving dirt around”. She’s the spotless victim. That’s the point.
I can only think of one point in the text where a character or characters seem to be being punished by the narrative for a transgression, and said character immediately takes the hint: “may God judge me by my desserts and punish me with more bitter suffering than even this moment” if I even BEGIN to think about victim blaming.
Hollywood is so inexplicably desperate to make Mina and Dracula love interests, but they always ignore the fact that the one thing these two characters might actually have bonded over is transit schedules.
Love the contrast between the Americans’ “Apollo” and the Soviets’ “Sputnik.” You got the Americans naming their rocket after a Greek god trying to communicate the grandness and importance of this rocket. And you got the Soviets naming their rocket “fellow traveler.” Like a friend you go on an adventure with together. This rocket is our little friend lol
Serious literary critics: [Thumbing through a volume of Sigmund Freud]We interpret Lucy’s dream to mean that she purposely sought out Dracula for sex. She needs to be recognized as a sexual creature.
Tumblr, the horniest website out there: [Googling ‘symptoms of cardiac arrest/near death experiences/extreme blood loss’] We interpret Lucy’s dream to be terrifying. She needs a doctor and a therapist right now.
“A certain critic—for such men, I regret to say, do exist—made the nasty remark about my last novel that it contained ‘all the old Wodehouse characters under different names.’ He has probably now been eaten by bears, like the children who made mock of the prophet Elisha: but if he still survives he will not be able to make a similar charge against Summer Lightning. With my superior intelligence, I have outgeneralled this man by putting in all the old Wodehouse characters under the same names. Pretty silly it will make him feel, I rather fancy.”
(P. G. Wodehouse, via Wodehouse Tweets (@inimitablepgw) at Twitter)
