#Mina's and Jonathan's child was just described as having a bundle of names one of which was Quincey and that is So Funny to me

[saturnalmoss]

I have completed Dracula. I really enjoyed reading it. I've liked adaptions but i do like the book more, for all it's issues. It's many, many, many issues.

While i was reading, I was thinking about the '92 Dracula movie bc I think I'd seen it the most recently. Like, i did enjoy that movie but gonna be honest i didn't like any of the characters. I was a bit reticent to read dracula bc of that. But it turned out i only dislike Seward! He's a good character but holy moly Seward please place yourself in a coffin and put that coffin in a hole and cover that hole in cement. Ur a fine victorian man i bet you can do it.

I loved Lucy and i it was such a sad part when she died. I loved renfield which i wasnt expecting bc i have understandable issues with the way mental illness is written by very nearly anyone. But like?? I just felt a lot of compassion for a guy who Seward's decided to keep as a fucking pet and then Dracula's decided to fuck with and he was trying SO hard when he couldn't communicate. Poor guy. I loved Jonathan and it was super enjoyable how wife-guy he is and i am not familiar with gender stereotypes of the nineteen hundreds but?? I don't know i feel like he bucked em a bit? Soft boy?? Whatever a soft boy was then?

Mina and Lucy, so sweet and the part where Mina wrote her just after she died, very very sad! Mina and Jonathan, absolutely adorable. Precious. The heteros are ok. Mina is just so good and damn I'm not sure they would have got Dracula without her around. Like, do not mean the psychic powers. They would have had an easier time w dracula if they had a Hale and Healthy Mina. It was truly the worst idea to keep her out of the loop.

Victorian Standards were the real villain in this book. Every time they got too victorian shit starts going down hill. Jonathan too xenophobic and superior feeling at the start to heed warnings? Welp now he's snacula. All the characters at the start refusing or just not considering telling the house hold staff and MOM what needs to be left for Lucy's medical care? TWICE? welp Lucy is snacula. Can't bring yourself to do a damn thing for renfield because he's *~*insane*~*? Mina: snacula. Renfield: dead (snacula status unknown).

Seward, at any point, is too victorian a man. Gosh. Go crawl in a ditch.

Ah i really loved van Helsing. He was just, so genuinely full of love and kindness. I feel like i haven't seen a character like that in a while, much less a mentor character or a character that isn't killed to show how unattainable that world view is. He probably needs to communicate a little earlier with people, but i get it. it's hard to explain there's a dracula on the loose.

I would have enjoyed having some written from Quincey and Arthur, but i get they might not have had anything to add to the story. It just felt like, with Quincey dying at the end, that they wanted a tragic sacrifice to finish the dracula but couldn't bear to use one of the liked main characters?? I d k

My take away is that all the dracula adaptations I've seen, which I'm defining by 'having dracula characters', have done them all dirty. Everyone. Even Dracula? I don't know. Maybe they gave him a cooler end-fight i guess. It feels like, they take a story that already had a serious issue thinking of women as human and made it WORSE TOWARDS THE WOMEN. how??

The other issues, about the same (bad).

Then '92 dracula like, what if dracula was acting exactly the same, but mina was into it? Mina ('92): ah, this man assaulted and murdered by best friend. I will fuck him. It's is true love.

(this is why i didn't like mina in the movie)

But now i see that, some how, they have done injustice to every one of the characters. Fascinating.

Was happy to hear that Seward and Arthur happily married at the end. Good for them.

[d-dormant]

random thoughts about the book

- first of all, I LOVE YOU MINA HARKER. I LOVE YOU MINA HARKER. there was a moment when somebody described her as having a man's mind and a woman's heart, and while yeah it doesn't sound quite as flattering given modern sensibilities, i GET it and i agree. she literally had one of the two braincells that their whole band could count on, she was the one who figured out how to catch the count, she's the one who's into nerdy cool stuff AND she is so compassionate and selfless and kind-hearted just AHH no wonder the whole book just reads as a d&d campaign of a polycule trying to save her life

- right after mina (or mina with a revolver, really) in my list of characters i'm infatuated with is jonathan, whose hair just got naturally white one night, and who just heaves and sighs and weeps and then does his thing. he's just like me fr!

- now that i'm at it — actually, all of the characters were so lovable and it was so nice to read their interactions and all the ways they expressed their warm feelings towards each other. like i'm joking about the polycule but am i?

- like, those scenes where, for example, dr. seward shows mina the phonograph and she says it beats shorthand, or when The Boys are just there for each other... i loved it! mina and jonathan's child having a "a bundle of names" that "links all our little band of men together"?? SHUT UPPP

- i knew nothing about "dracula" prior to reading the book, not a single thing. i have not seen any adaptations, i was not checking out Dracula daily, i wouldn't even let myself read the wikipedia page so that i could have the full experience. now, not to out myself as a dumbass, but the full experience was this: i read the first mention of dr van helsing, and i deadass went, "oh, van helsing is in this?"........... as if van helsing is some sort of a king richard the lionheart's cameo in "ivanhoe"...... anyway.

- those three weed smoking girlfriends actually were much less important than i thought they would be, to be honest. maybe i just saw them mentioned in discussions a lot, maybe their role is made bigger in some adaptations, but in the book they're kinda just there two times and that's it.

- the only things that i'd nitpick is that, i guess, the epistolaric nature of the novel sometimes smoothes away some of the tension, at least for me, because whenever i was reading some scene and there was suspense, i could feel that suspense and yet i could not quite be scared for the lives of the characters because in the back of my mind i knew that, eventually, things must have got well enough for one of them to sit down and write this lengthy ass diary entry. but, like i said, it didn't matter much in the grand scheme of things.

- the other stuff that got me mildly annoyed mostly goes back to me not being a native speaker and therefore having a hard time reading whenever the author went out of his way to show that a character had an accent as opposed to RP or whatever.

- anyway i think that's it! reading this was actually a lot of fun and i'm glad that i could squeeze this book in-between my study sessions and exams and such. maybe i should watch an adaptation, but from some posts i've seen, they tend to lean into dracula/mina which to be honest baffles me as i did not see even a hint of it in the book. but oh well. i loved reading about mina and her boys!

finished reading "dracula".......