Jack Seward - Tumblr Posts
I’ve decided that my contribution to the Dracula fandom in this site will consist of me telling Hollywood and everyone else who adapts Dracula to back the fuck away from the Harker’s because if you wanted to write an angsty vampire love triangle you already have one with Seward, Lucy, and Arthur. Seward literally spends the whole book mourning the fact that he can’t be with Lucy because she is either with Arthur, dead, or a vampire. Meanwhile, Arthur almost caves to vampire Lucy twice and this would be a great way to give him some characterization outside of ‘rich boy’. There is seriously so much potential, you cowards!
I’m broke but I will rob five banks to fund you if that counts for anything
BBC dracula pissed me off so much that I'm considering writing my own adaption to give us those wholesome found family tropes and healthy gay relationships that we all deserve
These are all incredibly accurate and I love them
dracula characters as inspirobot quotes
dracula:
jonathan harker:
van helsing:
renfield:
jack seward:
mina murray:
arthur holmwood:
quincey morris:
lucy westenra:
I have to watch the first 30 minutes of Bram Stoker’s Dracula for a film class and JIMINY CHRISTMAS THIS IS SO PAINFUL ALREADY
ITS NOT EVEN PRETENDING, IS IT? WHAT IS THIS? WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS? I haven’t even seen the title what is this
why is Lucy a slut
WHY IS LUCY A SLUT
Why is Lucy a slut
Why is Lucy a slut
Why is Lucy a slut
I have to watch the first 30 minutes of Bram Stoker’s Dracula for a film class and JIMINY CHRISTMAS THIS IS SO PAINFUL ALREADY
ITS NOT EVEN PRETENDING, IS IT? WHAT IS THIS? WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS? I haven’t even seen the title what is this
Hey wtf??
Has anyone read the Manga Classics Dracula?!?! Because it’s the best fucking adaptation of the book I’ve seen and NO ONE is talking about it???????
WHEN I TELL YOU I FUCKING C H O K E D-
@animate-mush Your kissing question got me curious and I made an ms paint chart hopefully involving everything recorded. Kisses that are not having blood drinking intent (unless you count the Count's June 29 blown kiss to Jonathan as a promise for later tonight).
It seems like the real craven seductress is Van Helsing Van Helsing gets his hand kissed by the most people. In one scene he gets both hands kissed by the Harkers at the same time. Jack is the only one who gives nor receives any, even the journal gets kissed. I put the one Mina gives to the exhausted Jonathan at the hospital as unspecified location, but I personally assume it was on the lips, since they are engaged. Lucy and Mina kiss Quincey at an unspecified location on their first written interactions, but given the etiquette, it is likely on the cheek. Other fun fact, whenever the Harkers kiss mutually Jonathan takes Mina in his arms.
for my next trick I will now become the biggest jack seward apologist on this entire godforsaken website
You know, thinking about it more, I'm actually most surprised with how Van Helsing handled the Renfield situation. The love and respect he has for Jack are actually the only reasons I am willing to accept his actions in his entry, because without that, it would seem kind of OOC.
Because Renfield basically just said "I can't tell you why right now, I would if I could, but I'm begging you, please believe me that my intentions are good and I am only asking this for the sake of others." And that's exactly what Van Helsing said to Jack, Arthur, and Quincy for the duration of the "we need to kill undead Lucy" arc. And I think Van Helsing realized that parallel, I think that's why he was addressing him "as an equal," as Jack put it.
But ultimately, he did not take the leap of faith he asked others to. To be fair, the circumstances were a bit different, but all the same...it's quite unforunate.
On the flip side, I'm not surprised with Jack's response at all, even if I am frustrated by it. Dr. Seward is The Observer of the group, he's extremely good at absorbing nearly every detail and compiling it. But when it comes to synthesizing that data, he sticks to finding patterns in previous observations and using them as a predictive model. And that's exactly what he did here with Renfield—he saw parallels between how Renfield was acting here and how he acted when he wanted a cat, and responded accordingly. The internal logic there was completely sound.
Where Dr. Seward so often falls short is making conclusions that require you to step outside of that set framework of data, and that's something Van Helsing has repeatedly called him out on throughout the "we need to kill undead Lucy" arc. Unforunately, that kind of reasoning was the only hope Renfield had here, because he could not provide Seward the data he needed to make the correct conclusion his usual way.
Dr. Seward we love ur pussy
Gasp, is Dracula a big thing on tumblr, I fucking love Dracula
Guy who mostly interacts with asylum inmates, interacting with his mentor: Getting a lot of 'asylum inmate' vibes from this...
¾ of the Dracula cast, including side characters: -takes 10 pages of yammering to get around to making a single point-
Quincey Morris, King of Brevity, reading the situation for 0.5 seconds: Uh huh, cool. So where’s the blood going?
Jack Seward, in tears, both from the Lucy issue and gratitude at not sitting through another corn metaphor for half an hour: I don’t fucking KNOW–
Godalming and Seward married to each other so true
Made this with much consideration (worked off vibes)
I wonder if we did? Is it a plant for something later?
Jack is sooo pretentious. My brother in christ, we did not need the whole chemical formula of your sleeping pill
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…
Of wolves* and bats...
*A response to DD September 18 in two parts; I talked about wolves in another post.
Bats. VAMPIRE BATS, specifically.
Today our beloved cowboy, Quincey, relates the story of the overnight exsanguination of a horse, *relating the incident overtly to Lucy's illness." He describes damage to the "gorge" aka throat.
I have to conclude this was Stoker slapping the reader upside the head just in case due to their inexperience with vampire fiction they might not yet have figured out what was going on with Lucy. What with Victorian Lady Dying Disease being a thing, or whatever it's called.
But come on, Seward. COME ON. Did you not JUST NOTICE that Lucy's throat puncture marks look mangled? Have you not been racking your brain to think of how she could possibly be losing blood? Have you not SPOTTED BATS flying around in the sky?
I'm certainly not suggesting Jack should realize it's a vampire monster. But when Quincey told his story how could Jack not respond "HOLD UP. A bat drained your horse of blood overnight, you say? And Van Helsing insists we keep the windows shut in Lucy's room? DEATH TO BATS!!!"
"Yes but Cherry, vampire bats aren't native to England."
Of course not, but ships are docking in London from all over the world, friend. You really want to argue that ONE vampire bat couldn't have stowed away?
I get that up until now it was reasonable for no one but VH to have a clue about what the illness afflicting Lucy could be. But Quincey dropped *that* story and Jack didn't pick it up I'm dtvgdggdhhgjj
Here it is! The exact conclusion I've been gnashing my teeth and tearing my hair out over.
"We asked [Doctor] Vincent to what he attributed [the puncture marks on the throat of the hospitalized child], and he replied that it must have been a bite of some animal, perhaps a rat; but, for his own part, he was inclined to think that it was one of the bats which are so numerous on the northern heights of London. "Out of so many harmless ones," he said, "there may be some wild specimen from the South of a more malignant species. Some sailor may have brought one home, and it managed to escape; or even from the Zoölogical Gardens a young one may have got loose, or one be bred there from a vampire."
WHY IS SOME RANDOM HOSPITAL DOCTOR FIGURING THIS OUT AND NOT SEWARD?
*grumbles*
It's actually a flaw in the novel, as far as I'm concerned. I really don't believe that Seward would be able to bob along empty-headed for this long wrt to Lucy's illness. And he's like, thunderstruck when VH describes vampire bats and meanwhile (*eye twitch*) Quincey said the same thing.
It makes Seward seem stupid and he's not supposed to be stupid. This should have come up chapters ago. The only reason it didn't is bc Stoker would have had to find a way to keep Seward from moving the plot forward too quickly. Well, Stokes, that's writing. You don't just hand wave the only logical thing your character would do because it's inconvenient. You have to let them do it and then deal with it.
Seward should have built a theory around some sort of animal attack. Bat, rat, weasel. He should have tried to verify it. And Dracula, because he is, in fact, Dracula, and not a simple animal, should have found a way to discredit the theory.
So. I am amending my fervent wish for a meticulously faithful adaptation of the novel. I want it to be a faithful adaptation except Seward has a clue.
Out of respect for my fellow students attending Tumblr University I will not say what I think of Jack Seward today.