Dracula Meta - Tumblr Posts

The people have spoken! Here is the total length of the remaining Dracula Daily entries!

scroll if you don’t want to know - I am unsure about tagging this as a spoiler as it only relates to the story in a meta way

Total, the journey takes us 189 days, 111 of those have entries (58.73%)

We have 34 days left until the last entry November 7th, 22 of those days have entries (64.71%)

There are only 3 breaks left, from 10/07 to 10/10, 10/12 to 10/14, and 10/18 to 10/23

Bram’s longest on streak was 19 days - 09/17 to 10/06

Bram’s longest off streak was  11 days - 06/06 to 06/16

The longest remaining day is Sunday 10/30 at 4,983 words (10 to 20 pages ~30% of the longest entry 10/03)

There are 29,117 words left till the end (There has been 131,000 so far)

Google says it takes around 5 minutes to read 1,000 words

October 31st has 420 words (yes really)

Let me know if there’s any more data you want! I love making graphs!

The same is true of an illness, though, especially since they immediately rule out any sort of anemia (why do they do that??). I think, in Jack's shoes, I'm like, totally flummoxed, right? Super upset and worried. Honestly I'd probably suspect the mother or a member of the staff. Someone is exsanguinating Lucy. I'd also be grasping for potential animals. I'd be in the library trying to figure out if rats ever drink blood or something. Actually, (tw animal suffering/death)

.

.

I used to have chickens and found two of them totally exsanguinated one morning. We think it was a weasel. So as Jack I'd be like, "Is a fucking WEASEL getting in here somehow???" And my mind would keep linking the blood loss to anything similar I'd encountered with my patients, so I really do think it's reasonable to want him to start having these ideas, even if he can't make them fit or make sense.

Someone here asked why Jack doesn’t yet suspect that someone is preying on Lucy, and it got me thinking. It’s a great point. The Jack the Ripper murders predate Dracula by a few years. Why wouldn’t Jack, a man who deals with people like Renfield every day, think of the Ripper and begin putting together a theory of some madman (his term) crawling through Lucy’s window at night?

I poked around Google to see if there’s any connection between Stoker and the Ripper. Aside from him meeting two men suspected of being the Ripper (did he know they were suspects? it didn’t say), there doesn’t seem to be much there. One source did mention that he made a comparison between the evil of the Ripper and the evil of Dracula. So we know Stoker was aware of serial killers; hence Seward should be, too.

Anyway as I was reading my findings I was struck by something else. In multiple sources people dismiss the idea that Dracula was based on the Ripper because the Ripper tortured and killed prostitutes while Dracula “romantically” preys on high class ladies.

You guys.

Okay, to be clear, I don’t see much evidence that Stoker based Dracula on the Ripper.

But like. Did any of these people read the book? Romantically? Ffs.

Also (and this is the point I’ve been working towards, believe it or not) the idea that Dracula doesn’t prey on poor sex workers just annoys me. We have no idea. No one would tell us, in this epistolary novel, if sex workers were turning up dead in London gutters. It’s not newsworthy when a sex worker dies looking pale but otherwise unharmed. We’ve seen that Drac has a huge appetite (*cough*Demeter crew*cough*). The fact he *hasn’t* killed Lucy yet implies an almost guarantee that he’s eating other people. Who better than sex workers? Maybe some vagrants here and there, too. The way they die would likely mislead most people who found the bodies into thinking it wasn’t by violence, too.

Dracula likes to slowly torture and draw out his kill when it comes to Lucy. Is she the only one? We have no idea.

Aaand now I want a story about Dracula’s unknown victims.

Okay, so what about the fact that London isn’t becoming overrun with fledgling vampires? Well, idk if Stoker ever gives us an explanation for how Drac makes new vampires, but it’s clearly not an automatic thing, or Transylvania would have a lot more of them (a lot of them babies–yikes).

Will someone pretty please write the story of these missing victims?

Maybe I’ll take a crack at it…

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.

I saw someone call Renfield Dracula's ghoul and it stopped me short for a moment.

Was Renfield Dracula's ghoul?

First of all, big disclaimer, I have only the vaguest notion of the origin of the word ghoul. I think it's Turkish? Middle Eastern? Persian? And very likely the authentic meaning differs significantly from the meaning I associate to it, which comes from... DnD, I think. Maybe some urban fantasy novel I read ten years ago, too.

In my mind a ghoul is a human who is magically linked or in thrall to a vampire and who takes care of the vampire's business during the day. They may also be a (willing?) donor if the vampire gets peckish. In the interests of this meta speculation, I'm going to use the word thrall instead of ghoul bc I suspect ghoul has been appropriated disrespectfully. Maybe I'm wrong, please feel free to comment and tell me so.

Anyway, was Renfield a thrall?

He certainly is portrayed that way in at least some adaptations, but I would argue that he's not a thrall in the book.

Best word that comes to mind for what Renfield is in the novel is fan, followed closely by tool. Tool in the sense that Dracula used him to gain entrance, not in the sense of like, "Chris Pratt is such a tool."

Renfield is fascinated by Dracula until close to the end. He is worshipful of him. So he's certainly primed to become a thrall. But I recall no evidence that Dracula takes the step of turning him into one. Renfield is a wannabe, although no doubt he'd prefer (before he realizes the whole soul consuming thing turns him off) to be a vampire rather than a thrall.

When Dracula does use him there's no exchange. My understanding of a vampire thrall (what I associate to the world "ghoul", however erroneously) is that they get perks. Extended life, certain comforts... Dracula probably offered these in exchange for Renfield opening the door, but by then Renfield had become resistant and Dracula had to force him to cooperate, using him like a tool.

Is my tool versus thrall distinction valid? I'm not sure. If anything, I guess I'm inclined to prescribe more willingness to a thrall. So Renfield of the novel never got to become one when he was willing, and resisted it by the time the opportunity came.

Thoughts?

Train obsessions in Dracula. Hmm.

I think for many of us, Dracula and Mina's interest in trains seems a little odd. Maybe cute. Maybe surprisingly relatable to some who have their own hyper fixations.

I think it's more than that and I would be surprised if I'm the first to come up with this. Trains were world-changing technology in the latter half of the 19th century. In fact, Dracula as a story was only conceivable because of trains. In Jane Austen's time, there was no railway connecting British solicitors to the darkest reaches of the Carpathian mountains. Trains make Dracula's invasion of England possible.

So...why Mina? Was Stoker trying to provide balance somehow? Like, he didn't want to have the message be "trains bad, abolish trains" so he had the beloved Mina be into them and the Crew of Light use them to reach Dracula and defeat him (no spoiler, I'm guessing). Is there more to it?

Trains in Dracula represent the good and the bad of modernity. Civilization makes trains which reach too far into the land of the Other and endanger civilization. But then civilization, personified by the Crew, uses trains to bring civilization to victory.

I'm not sure Stoker knows what he wants to say, given all of this.

Thoughts?