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“If he be Mr. Hyde,” he had thought, “I shall be Mr. Seek.”

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Chapter 9: Dr. Lanyon's Narrative

I've had this meme template sitting on my computer for nearly 2 years and suddenly had divine inspiration strike

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Dracula and Hyde are both these characters that just seem rotten. The kind of people who’re just off for whatever reason. People whose vibes are positively sour. Who emanate the type of fucked up fight or flight feeling you get deep down that something about them is off you just don’t know what

But it’s in completely different ways.

Dracula seems almost animal. Harker describes his physical appearance as being not quite human, his hands just a little bit too hairy, his eyes a little too dark, his nails a bit too sharp, almost like claws even. He is unsettling in an inhuman way

While Hyde is unsettling in the most human way. He’s angry and erratic and impulsive, he yells and squirms and spits and screams. He’s this filthy man who breezes through life with a sleazy smile full of rotting teeth. A man that is so very human

One of them is inhuman, while the other is the very worst of humans

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You ever wonder if Utterson went back to the lab after reading Jekyll’s version of the story and just… saw Hyde differently after he knew everything?

The small, fragile body dead on the ground was actually one of his best friends

No? Just me? Ok

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Mr. Edward Hyde is such a good horror monster and it’s a shame his deal is boiled down to Scary Crazy Shapeshifter. He commits the most disgusting over the top violent acts while all dressed up like a Victorian gentleman. He IS all the awful things the Victorian establishment does and yet pretends it doesn’t, made physical, still clad on class signifiers. A living testament to all the blood it takes to maintain the cogs of the Empire well-greased. He is all the things society sweeps under the rug but is ultimately responsible for- drug addiction comes to mind. He is what they label as Other, but actually is Them. But yes he is the Scary Crazy Shapeshifter because he needs to mark himself as Other while being Them. It’s not that any regular Victorian upper class twat could have become Hyde, but rather than Hyde already is THE regular Victorian upper class twat.

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"characters don't know what genre they're in" CORRECT Henry Jekyll thought he was in Hannah Montana

look how well that turned out for him

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was spitballing ideas for a creative essay in my victorian horror class and, mostly as a joke, wrote down "carmilla and dr jekyll get bored at a twelve step meeting for monsters and go out for fast food," have been semi seriously thinking about it for the last little while, and I'm now appalled that this character dynamic exists only in my brain. carmilla, spiritually twenty years old but has been alive for centuries and has been out to herself since she was twelve, dragging mid fifties dr jekyll out of the closet kicking and screaming. carmilla, languid and completely unbothered, asking jekyll why he decided to try and turn his life around, and him mournfully going through the whole story of how he gradually lost control and killed someone. him asking her the same in return with an addition of "you really don't seem that bothered about all the murders you did, so why stop?" and carmilla sinking into her chair and sheepishly saying "...my girlfriend said we had to go on pause until I could stop drinking her blood all the time."

[georgianadarcystanaccount]

I think what a lot of j&h adaptations get wrong, is that ultimately, Jekyll is, at heart. A Cunt. Lots of adaptations like to write him as an innocent scientist, who got more than he bargained for when he drank the potion, and unleashed a monster, but in the novella, the only thing the potion really does, is change Jekyll's appearance. He created Hyde, and I think he had the opportunity to make Hyde into something good, but, because he's a cunt, he chose to use his alter ego as a force for evil and chaos. "Edward Hyde was alone in the ranks of evil"- of course he was, you never allowed him to be anything else. And Jekyll is fully aware of what he does as Hyde, he says it himself in his full statement, and he feels no remorse. He didn't create Hyde accidentally, he made Hyde because he wanted to do bad things and get away with it, without damaging his reputation.

Fuck Dr Jekyll, all my homies hate Dr Jekyll.

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Stylisation is saving my soul

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One of my major pet peeves with Jekyll & Hyde adaptations is that they always give Hyde the Hulk-treatment by turning him into this large, monstrous creature when in the book he actually becomes smaller and younger after his transformation?! No, for real, he SHRINKS. And he's not exactly monstrous or ugly; his vibes are just rotten. People tend to describe an encounter with him as "I cannot put my finger on it but something was just OFF about this guy." Vibe check failed. Imagine this mellow, middle-aged, dad-bod gentleman suddenly turning into a nasty frat boy who just automatically evokes a flight-or-fight response in you. Like, you just take one look and instinctively go "Ew, he looks like a terrifying asshole, I want to deck him in the face." That's Edward Hyde.

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I'd like to see them have a nice discussion.

（Another color）

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A gothic literature hyperfixation has possessed me so I made this

(This took way longer to make than it reasonably should have)

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jekyll jekyll hyde jekyll hyde hyde jekyll

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So when trans people take chemicals that radically change their body in order to live happier and freer lives it’s fine. but when I, Henry Jekyll—

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Apparently when my grandma first came to America she didn’t know what a raccoon was and assumed it was a fucked up cat and adopted it. I just imagine this 13 yr old girl with a heavy Eastern European accent being like “this is my cat, Petr. He is not very friendly”

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The other thing I’m kind of finally getting is. I’ve talked at length on this “blog” about the fact that Pride and Prejudice is unadaptable to the modern day at least in a like, US or British dominant culture context, because the resolution of every plotline hinges on a “rescue” of Lydia and of the family that is completely appalling and is in retrospect a profound condemnation of the social and economic mores of that moment in history and that’s like, kind of the whole point of the book. And I remain correct about this.

But what is disturbingly fully adaptable in a sort of direct cut-and-paste way to a contemporary western story is the way Darcy and Elizabeth and Jane talk about talking about Wickham.

Wickham is a predator who targets teenage girls. He does this with casual impunity. He gets that impunity without even working for it, because there are people who know this fact about him, but those people will work so hard to keep it a secret that he doesn’t have to do any work himself, because if it did get out, nothing that would happen to him would come anywhere close to the damage it would do to the above mentioned teenage girls.

Darcy watches Wickham flirt with every girl in tiny rural Englandville and doesn’t tell anyone what he knows because saying it would hurt Georgiana much more than it would hurt Wickham. Elizabeth keeps the same secret for more or less the same reasons—it would be a horrible betrayal of Darcy and Georgiana to do otherwise—and this secrecy allows Wickham to continue to operate under zero scrutiny or suspicion, and then when he runs away with Lydia, Darcy and Elizabeth are both mortified and guilt-stricken because they believe that their silence made this possible. And they’re right, I guess, so far as that goes. But that agonizing question of “should I speak up or shut up,” the knowledge that speaking up will hurt the guy’s victims more than it hurts him, and then the sickening sensation of complicity once you’ve decided to shut up and then the guy pulls off the same play somewhere else, remains completely applicable. All the conversations in the last third of the book about “should I say something, should I have said something, is this my fault,” feel like they could be taking place last Tuesday.