What Age Are The Characters (Dracula Aside)? I Think I Remember One Of Your Old Posts Talking About This,

What age are the characters (Dracula aside)? I think I remember one of your old posts talking about this, maybe.

[Spoilers: The linked post contains a whole rundown of major characters and is rife with spoilers. The rundown below has allusions to later events/context but is friendlier to people who only want to know the particulars of the characters Dracula Daily readers have already encountered.]

The post where I addressed the whole cast is here. To address just the people we've met thus far, here’s my read on them (keep in mind, these are headcanons informed by some geeky research; only a few characters have established canon ages):

Jonathan Harker: Jonathan’s age isn’t given, but in the 1890s, he would have had to apprentice to a trained solicitor for five years in order to qualify for the exam he just passed. Given some information we learn about his circumstances later on, I find it reasonable to believe he started training reasonably early, and I place him around 21.

Mina Murray: We’ll eventually get an exact age for Lucy, and there is a very recurring theory among critics, adapters, and writers that Mina is a little older than her and that she stayed on at the school they attended together as a teacher. I have wholeheartedly adopted this headcanon, and I like the idea that she’s a little older than Jonathan. I place her around 21-23.

Dracula: If you think he’s Vlad III, he’s a silver fox in his 460s. If you don’t think he’s Vlad III (and I don’t; check out this Notes & Queries article), he’s a little bit younger. I like to imagine he’s a descendant of Vlad III from somewhere in the 1500s, placing him in the middle of his third century.

It’s worth noting that while Stoker definitely drew upon sources purporting to describe vampire folklore in establishing rules for his own vampires, some of the vampire “lore” you see in play in Dracula is original to him. The mirror thing doesn’t seem to have been around before Stoker. While there are regional superstitions one can track down about needing to cover mirrors in the home of the recently dead to prevent their corpse from turning vampiric, the idea that vampires cast no reflection appears to really have had its start with this novel. What’s more, it was only part of what was planned in Stoker’s notes on vampiric irreproducibility. While it never made it into the final text, Stoker wrote down vampires also wouldn’t show up in photographs (which is might be related to Jonathan conveniently mentioning his kodak camera) and that even attempting to paint a vampire would fail. Apparently painting a vampire was just supposed to end up looking like somebody else. Photographs would either come out black or show a skeleton or corpse.

jonmina headcanons time!!!

fair warning - even though i've read the book multiple times i am prone to just forgetting important things so these may be like entirely against canon but w/e

- jonathan and mina are childhood sweethearts

- i think it's canon that they both lost their parents when they were young so they definitely bonded over that

- jonathan went to an all-boys boarding school and mina went to its all-girls equivalent (along with lucy) and that's how they met

- they spent summers together, catching toads and causing trouble and such

- lady westenra allowed them to stay with her during this time as they didn't have anywhere else to go

- jonathan started learning from mr. hawkins in his mid-teens, and so he decided to spend summers at his home from then on. mina spent her time divided between the westenras and jonathan. this was also when they started to take their studies more seriously - up until now they'd spent most of their time goofing off

- they tutored each other - mina helped with the sciences and jonathan helped her with languages and humanities

- they're both bisexual. one day when they were dating, jonathan approached mina, shaking like a leaf and deathly pale, and told her that she was free to leave him if she wanted, but he had to tell her something, and then he said that he'd loved men in the past. mina just started sobbing and hugged him and said that she was so relieved because she didn't know how to tell him but she was the exact same way

- when it came time for them to ask for each other's hand in marriage, mina asked hawkins' permission to marry jonathan and jonathan asked lady westenra's permission to marry mina

i'll save some other headcanons for the end i just love them with all my heart

Dracula’s Lineage Speech

If anyone for any reason would appreciate a blow by blow breakdown of everything that is going on in the Count’s lineage speech, matching all of Dracula’s dialogue to Stoker’s research sources and describing the historical events being alluded to, I made one of those many many years ago and I’ve copy/pasted it under the cut:

Keep reading

"Do you ever try to read your own face? I do"

I'm on the Dracula train

Broke: Mina shares so many of Jonathan's intense academic interests (law, journaling, timetables, etc.) because she's the dutiful love interest who sets her own passions aside to accommodate him.

Woke: Jonathan and Mina are both huge nerds and that's how they fell madly in love in the first place.