mayhemchicken-varneyposting

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developed a real fondness lately for characters who experience a horrific act of violence and come out the other side saying "ah. I don't think I get to be me anymore. they took out the part that was me, killed it, and put something else back in its place, and now I'm whoever the hell that is." love it when someone becomes a corpse and replaces themself <3

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Does Varney sleep in a tomb/grave/ancestral place like vampires traditionally do, or is it never mentioned? I don't know if the The Vampyre adaptation he's inspired from mentions vampire daytime resting habits either.

Varney sleeps wherever the fuck he wants, usually in hotel rooms or the guest rooms of whoever he's crashing with this week. Occasionally he gets his own place for a while, at least until he's chased out of it. One time he squatted in a house that was for sale. At one point he does make a reference to sleeping restfully in a tomb, but I'm not clear whether he was referring to actual sleep or death. Either way, it didn't go very well for him.

Varney the Vampire canon is inconsistent (of course it is) on whether vampires need to sleep in their graves or not. The fact that they apparently have no supernatural means of leaving their graves, requiring other vampires to dig them up, suggests to me that most probably do not go to the trouble of unburying and reburying themselves every night. On the other hand, Clara Crofton did return to her tomb during the daytime; but then, she behaves like no other vampire in the book. Varney does not seem to need to return to a grave of any sort, but he also sure doesn't sleep restfully. He claims at one point to be cursed with restless sleep in the form of nightmares, but it sort of sounds to me like he just has normal PTSD.

Also, apart from hunting excursions, certain crimes, and the Vampire Council, Varney is largely diurnal? He mostly keeps the same hours as the general populace.

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wait are you saying that flora gets a corruption arc and goes crazystupid?

God I fucking wish. No, all I'm saying is she gets a gun. I'm sorry if I got anyone's hopes up. Rymer is not cool enough to give his heroine a corruption arc.

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Would you say that Varney is written consistently throughout? I know that he has contradicting back stories apparently with may indicate that subsequent writers did not read or forgot what was established previously but did they have a stable or also contradicting characterization

Uh, no. I mean, if you're unhinged like me you can bash all the contradictory bits of characterization into a single person, but some parts are much harder to reconcile than others.

Usually, Varney is sort of a Team Rocket figure with depression and trauma. He's always scheming about how to get more money, he acts charming and well-spoken but simultaneously can't resist winding people up, and whenever he ends up playing a role (which is often), he commits to the bit like his very life depends on it. At the same time, he is generally shown to dislike violence and bloodshed. He disdains and avoids duels, brims over with tortured angst about his vampirism, and appears to view the act of drinking blood as disgusting.

...And then also, he murders at least four people in cold blood without apparent remorse. In one such episode, he goes so far as to monologue to himself about the pool of blood forming on the ground under his most recent victim, going on and on about how it doesn't affect him because he's such a hardened criminal/vampire. It's infuriating because usually he actually is fairly consistent, just every once in a while we'll get a chapter where he strangles a priest to death or runs an old lady through with his sword and doesn't appear to give a shit.

The Crofton chapters offer a possible explanation for this, although it's still somewhat unsatisfying. Basically, at the start of the Croftons sequence he resolves, after an unsuccessful suicide attempt, that if he cannot die and end his earthly suffering, then he is going to cast aside all human feeling and remorse and become the monster everyone believes him to be. There is no real indication that he has done this before, let alone that he does it regularly, but there's also no better explanation I can think of for why he randomly goes Murder Mode when he usually seems to hate the very thought of bloodshed and spends a lot of time self-flagellating about his own guilty conscience. Under this explanation, it must be assumed that we simply don't see the aftermath of his random murders where his attempt to become an unfeeling monster breaks down and he spends an entire week lying on the floor of a hotel somewhere feeling sorry for himself. Which is a patch job for a badly written story and deeply unsatisfying, because obviously I want to see the Sad Lump scenes. (shaking Rymer's ghost by the lapels) Give me the Sad Lump scenes!

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give that ingenue a gun. let her have a corruption arc where she goes crazystupid. she's tired of being nice she wants to go apeshit. #giveingenuesagun2k23

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Do you have any favorite human characters in the book?

Most of them are not fleshed out real well, so in practice this is sort of like picking my favorite slices of stale white bread out of a lineup, but there are definitely some I like more than others.

Going strictly by what's in the text, and not any of the piles of headcanons and fanfiction I've stacked on top of it, I think Henry and Flora come out at the top of the pile, though Henry a little more so. I relate to Henry. Flora has a number of good individual moments but I feel her character on the whole is a little weak. Charles has a similar problem, which is why he's not ranked higher.

Admiral Bell actually ranks very high initially, because in the beginning he's very funny, but as the story goes on he gets more annoying and less likable. Mr. Bevan you would think would be high ranked but in all honestly I found him a little bit annoying. He has potential, but he's too busy being Rymer's self-insert priestsona for his character to really shine.

Of course, there's about 8 million side characters who show up for maybe a couple chapters max and then never again, and of these my favorites are Tom Eccles, who is a tender-hearted soul who doesn't want to hurt anyone, even a vampire, and The Honorable Dick Lake's Booby Son, who does not have a name. I like him because he's an idiot and a coward and in his case it actually comes across as funny.

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Chapters 5 and 6 are complete, and it's still not quite done. Varney and Clarimonde finally make their appearance in chapter 6!

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Forgot to comment on the chapter when I read it, but I enjoyed the vampire literature ("Fragment Of A Novel" spotted) and vampire folkoric references. Too bad Clara did not ask for any of this. And no vampire there is helpful because they have no fledglings, and are used to vampires being risen through non-biting means (so a maiden among them is outlier; those are most likely to become vampires through suicide or vampire-drained). And they're also too content being lethal predators to entertain her moral bargaining.

Points for spotting the Fragment reference!

Poor Clara is really going through it. She finally meets some more vampires and they're all garbage.

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people being Wrong About Frankenstein has reached fascinating new levels in Instagram advertising.

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Varney travelling to Italy and throwing himself into the volcano reminds me of Lestat going to the Gobi desert and flying himself into the sun in order to burn himself to ashes, but he only ended up with severe burns and after a few days he healed and left (because he had drunk ancient vampire blood and that gave him sun/fire resistance)

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Learning that Charles disappears from the narrative for over 25 chapters since his kidnapping and remembering that penny dreadfuls were published weekly I'm trying to imagine what it was like to have Charles as your favorite character. Perhaps you have grown to love his his Grand confessions of undying love to his ailing fiancée and his Reckless "I will lie that I am a scoundrel so no one will get harmed by the vampire but me as I go to fight the supernatural creature all by myself" heroism. And then he gets hurt and disappears. Months pass with no signs of him. Perhaps we shall see of him this Friday, Gertrude? Nope. Mob City again.

genuinely i cannot imagine what it would have been like to experience this in its original serial form. i would have burst a blood vessel from frustration.

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One day someone will want to learn about Varney the Vampire or desperately want to read reactions and commentary to Varney after having read it, and find your recaps. I can imagine the euphoria. I have read an obscure book before and sought the same thing but the only thing I found was on a website I think livejournal which did this for several chapters but they ended up abandoning it in 2014.

I hope to God I have the stamina to recap the entire book. As a service to the community and also a way to get more people to read my fanfic

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drawing the little freak from chapter 25 again

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Chapter 4 is up! It's, um, nearly as long as the first 3 chapters put together. The vampire council wouldn't shut up.

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nine days in the vampire dungeon with a concussion and no ibuprofen

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Wait is 20 chapters a hyperbole or does Charles Holland is still to be imprisoned for that long without appearing at all? And I thought Jonathan Harker disappearing completely during the Demeter incident and Mina's and Lucy's hell vacation was long.

It's not hyperbole, I counted. The next appearance of Charles will be in chapter 65.

Incidentally, the amount of time that passes in-story over the course of those 20 chapters is four days.

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Meanwhile all this and in the background there's a guy in practically motionless imprisonment in a cold wet basement of some ruins with a head injury from a bonk on his head. Is anyone feeding him.

Presumably, but it will be another 20 chapters or so from where we're currently at in the summaries before we get another update from poor Charles. Rymer just forgets about him.