#Long sigh

[techutones]

so many morals , so little orel...

[samtastical-shitposts]

hi hi hi

shows u my art and runs away

[see-arcane]

It's been theorized that the reason why the "reincarnated wife" (notice that she's a wife, not a paramour) plot point took off (which for Dracula first appeared in the 1974 movie) was that American producers were uneasy with a married woman being seduced by a vampire in her bedroom. If she’d actually been married to him first, however long ago, then their romance conforms to respectability.

Under this lens, Dracula and Mina don't transgress, they seek to restore the past and the status quo: Dracula doesn't truly steal her from another; he reclaims his property from a usurper. Mina doesn't truly cheat; she's going back to the feudal lord she "rightfully" belongs to and no longer be a modern woman but an eternal 1400s bride. On the surface, it looks like Dracula and Mina are shaking up the mores, but in the end, it's not truly an illicit ribald affair to the masses. The powerful, heteropatriarchical lord is taking back what's his, and she, as a good wife, obeys.

Thank you for uncovering a new layer of nausea to the whole hair-tearingly bad premise I didn't even know was there. It's like misery archaeology.

[starsnstyrofoam]

Your f/o respects and loves you btw.

You're trans? Awesome, cool, sick. It doesn't change much but they take it into consideration and her you on bad days, make sure to use your preferred pronouns (and beat up a bitch if they're an asshole)

You're lgbt in some way? Sick! Your f/o supports it, duh. Human rights. They will very gladly support you and go woth you to pride. (Again, they'll beat up an asshole if need be)

Oh? What's that? The fandom decided your f/o isn't attracted to your gender? Oh well, lemme fix that for you. *crumples that titbit up and throws it away* perfect. Your f/o loves you despite gender, gay or not gay or whatever. I make the rules, I do not apologise.

Your f/o loves you damnit.

They respect you, and love you even on the bad days. Always. They use your chosen name and pronouns. They just love you for who you are

[I'm not projecting. ok maybe a little. I'm just, need f/o hugs. And gender affirmation. Shoutout to all the enbies btw, your f/o is in love with you.]

[another-delta-lover]

HANDS ON HEAD

I'M REALLY HAPPY FOR U MEDIC.................

[freakaziod01]

me seeing those 'bat family' posts but it's just Dick, Jason, Bruce, Damian and Tim.

[newwavesylviaplath]

wish i had the drive to make vlogs i would be such a good niche internet micro celeb

[wisteriagoesvroom]

so piastripilled that i read “oscar nominations” and automatically went: wait did he win something…

[copingchaos]

i miss marc, i miss steven, i miss jake, i'm literally homesick for the moonboys

[cachien]

my stupid dumb laptop has the disk write speed of a computer that hasn't turned off since 1997 and can't run veilguard but i keep seeing posts about davrin x lucanis and about emmrich and my plans to romance davrin are flying out the window every time i see that spindly old man pine after rook in some fashion

[prettyboykatsuki-moved]

me when this silly umemiya piece is no longer silly and has plot and too many words

[see-arcane]

Well. I just read the Robert Eggers Nosferatu (2024) script in its nascent 2016 form. Quick and haunted thanks to @nosferattusx2 for making me aware of its existence. It’s here on the Internet Archive if you want to give it a look yourselves.

I don’t know if it’s legit, but it seems precariously close to the trailers. Even if it is the real thing, it’s also an eight-year-old rendition of the script, so there’s no guarantee of it being an exact mirror of what will hit theaters. That being said?

It’s. A lot.

SPOILERS BELOW

I won’t regurgitate the whole thing here, just the main bits that stood out to me for better or worse:

For a guy who says he's very against the sexy romantic vampire trope, Eggers makes sure to have everyone getting scared and horny over Orlok at every opportunity. I will give him grudging kudos for not confining this strictly to Ellen or otherwise Just the Ladies~. The thing opens on Knock stroking himself to the concept of the guy and Thomas gets his own erotic/assault-flavored attack from Orlok at the castle with future allusions framing it in a distinctly sexual framework. Ellen is set up as the ~darkly tempted Eve to Orlok’s Adam~ but it’s not aggressively mega-hetero about it. Progress?

Thomas arrives in Orlok territory and immediately gets swarmed and pickpocketed by smelly-masculine Romani people (referred to strictly by the g word through the script) bar the one pretty young teenage girl one who we later get to see riding naked on a horse because only naked virgin girls can lead the group to hidden vampires for their destruction. Yeah.

…

Bobby Egg, I can get behind the VVitch using seductive evil weirdness and I see why mermaids would swim around topless, but. What the fuck? And also follow-up what the fuckery to the whole portrayal of these guys, period? On that note.

Here we see the first example of Thomas being Assigned Twink at Comparison to All the Other Men. Eggers frames him as insecure beside the masculine Romani and has a future character refer to him as a ‘dandy’ (despite that being a term reserved for men who were well-off, not just effeminate/less than manfully manful). To Bobby Egg’s slight credit, Thomas is not portrayed negatively or milksop-shaped because of this; it’s just. Kind of there. All the time.

Count Orlok’s description isn’t bad. Very ominous, very classic gothic-supernatural. I do appreciate that he’s explicitly given more corpse-like attributes, making him seem like a mobile cadaver more than anything else. And Eggers does keep him creepy—no stealthy Count Fuckula spit-shining on him.

Shovel scene sort of happens as an original Dracula nod, but with no payoff. An attempt was made and thrown away.

Ellen. Oh, Ellen. Such a double-edged piece of work here. On the one hand, this version of the script implies that she isn’t doing the classic bastardized Mina thing of deciding her lame lameo human husband isn’t good enough for her and she needs herself a REAL MAN. There’s a lot of the original Thomas and Ellen’s genuine love and regard shown in the couple…

…up to a point. Eggers writes them a very very ugly and basically wholly OOC argument to do with Thomas claiming he wed her out of pity and saying she ought to have been sent to a madhouse when she was young, which itself was a follow-up to Ellen yelling that Orlok’s work is all his fault in a weirdly victim-blamey way and a scene that felt less like a badly done seduction and more like she was trying to actually assault him. They seemingly both reconcile after this, but like…what the entire hell?

Okay, to get this out of the way—I think Eggers is trying to lean hard into the ‘well in the actual time and place of the story things would be so grimdark and depressing, so it has to be nasty even between the loving main couple, and it adds to the horror-misery of it all, and it makes Ellen’s dark temptation~ more reasonable!’ thing. We can see a lot of that in how he sets Ellen up to have a history of dark thoughts, a lot of stigma surrounding her sanity/insanity, and there’s some very cruel medical ‘treatment’ she gets subjected to during her fits while waiting for Thomas and/or Orlok to arrive. Naturally those fits are all sexual/orgasmically twitchy because of course. Eggers is very much trying to set Ellen up as sympathetic in her situation and as a kind of next evolution to the Francisified Mina character who wants to fuck Dracula/Orlok/Death so so bad~

And then we get to the Van Helsing stand-in, Von Franz, and he is…oh man. 90% of his bits are fun. Interesting. The last 10% would make Abraham van Helsing in every iteration punch through the fourth wall and beat him to death with their library books. Surprise, Von Franz and Ellen both secretly colluded to set up the sunrise trap that will inevitably kill Ellen via Orlok feeding on her into the dawn. Von Franz purposefully leads the vampire hunter crew astray, including Thomas. When Thomas discovers this—from Knock who he mistakenly staked in Orlok’s place due to a mix-up with the coffin—Von Franz laughs as Thomas and Dr. Sievers the pseudo-Jack Seward make a run back to the house to try and save her.

The climax comes with Ellen and Orlok playing out the original Nosferatu ending. She dies happily cradling Orlok’s carcass. Thomas reaches her bedside and collapses in despair. The script closes on Von Franz showing up with a lilac bouquet and putting his hand on Thomas’ shoulder as he grieves, still unmoved from the bedside. Close on Ellen’s dead face ‘at peace.’

Somehow the scene doesn’t end with Thomas wringing Von Franz’ neck.   

There’s a lot more to read in there, obviously, but those were just all the big lumps sticking out of it to me.

I will grudgingly say it is not the absolute worst-case scenario I was afraid of. It’s not what I was hoping for—but that is keeping in line with Dracula and Nosferatu-adjacent media, per tradition. I do still want to see the film, I do want to like the finished product, even with the worrisome second trailer and sundry interviews throwing up red flags. Like The Last Voyage of the Demeter, it is at least an earnest attempt at taking this vein of classic gothic vampire horror seriously as a horror story.

But also.

I would really like directors to stop turning the Mina-Ellen figure into the vampire-pining gothic blowup doll for the latest ‘Bold and Subversive’ take #1654237 of GIRL AND THE DRACULA DO KISSY SEXY ROMANCE TIMES. An impossible dream, I guess.   

[small-spanish-face]

I got tired of the misha pfp. Which is why i decided to spice it up a bit.

[sheep-turtles-and-pizza]

Life of a multishipper is hard. So many shipping ideas for all my different ships and only 2 hands and 1 uncooperative brain.

My list gets bigger and my time not

[buffburlymactavishkissing]

I love Nitara so much…I just wish Megan fox did a better job at voice acting her..maybe more people would like her :(. I hate this.

[damnbtway]

as happy as i am 2 be getting my doc & hush designs out on paper

remind me 2 never try to draw from a 3/4 back view ever again