#also sidenote is that people will act like vampires being hot is PURELY a post-Ruthven phenomenon because they've read like.

[margridarnauds]

The most funny thing about people complaining about DracMina is that there are not actually hoards of DracMina shippers running around, creating ship content or highjacking discourse about Dracula, Mina, novel and such. Yet those complainers are acting as if they are personally oppressed by those shippers while it’s not the case, and it wouldn’t be the problem at all if they were not so obsessed with the shippers or the ship itself tbh.

That's always been what's most bizarre about it because ???? Where are all these Dracmina shippers? Do they have a secret discord server where they talk about Victorian gothic villainfucking? And they didn't invite ME? Can I join?

But like. The truth is that even pre-DD, there wasn't a TON of Dracmina fanfiction/general content, whether it was romanticized and fluffy or not. I've been circling around the Dracula fandom since 2011, scoured for fanfic, and...there was maybe ONE really good series that was dark. ADAPTATIONS are overwhelmingly pro-Dracmina, fine, BUT. A lot of the problems that people complain about. Are only really a major Thing. After Bram Stoker's Dracula. Which imo indicates a broader problem of people getting their first taste of Dracula from that film + its subsequent adaptations and then expanding it to cover ALL Dracula adaptations/interpretations of Dracula. I've ALWAYS seen this kind of endless complaining about Dracmina as if that's a way to prove that you're one of the Real Fans who understands that the Vampires are Bad. Like, congratulations, you read the book! You know that Dracmina is not canon in it! Now go and make content for something you actually DO like! Have some useful conversations about the novel and the themes in it! ANYTHING.

And so many posts are framed as like "instead of Dracmina/the reincarnated wife thing, here is what they SHOULD DO" instead of framing it as "I think it would be really cool if...!" Because even when they're talking about THEIR ships, it's almost inevitably about Dracmina. J0nmina shippers are more obsessed with Dracmina than *I* am. (I wouldn't say I aggressively ship it so much as I hold a little bit of fondness for it thanks to that teen girl who loved the sweeping, gothic romance of the idea of it, especially the musical tbh.)

I see posts about one of my favorite musicals and it's inevitably "Dracula the Musical was kind of good...except for the DRACMINA!" Like, literally no one is forcing you to watch a musical that flopped on Broadway in 2004. (I have my OWN complaints about the musical and how it fails and Wildhorn's general problems with writing plots/women, but like.)

And...I do think that there are valid reasons for supporting Dracmina. Just. As a general thing.

For some people, they might genuinely like darker, fucked up ships. Even the reincarnation thing could be interesting IF it was played up for being as horrific as it should be. Having someone else's memories, someone who Is or Isn't you, being the target of that kind of obsession.

For some people, they might like the idea of "let us be monsters." I see that idea being applied MORE to J0ncula, re: queerness, and, for what it's worth, there is some Victorian literature on the vampire that ALREADY leaned into this. Like, you have (subtextually) queer vampires like Carmilla and Ruthven, who are the highest profile non-Dracula 19th century vampires, but you also have (confirmed) queer authors who were clearly using vampires as a way of discussing queerness like, for example, Eric Stenbock's Count Vardalek, which is an example of a tragic, tortured vampire who is doomed to kill what he loves. (There is also a LOT going on in THAT short story, a lot of which makes it highly uncomfortable for a modern audience, but that's another story.) I've written queer Dracula fic with the idea of the vampirism representing that kind of "I am determined to prove a villain, And hate the idle pleasures of these days" acceptance of the Other and of the Otherness that is present in the Self.

BUT. At the same time, it isn't as if there's ever been a golden age in which women have been allowed to just. Love monsters. It has always been radical. Even today. Women cannot read romance novels or lust after villains openly without handwringing over whether it is Moral or Proper or Whether We'll Get Dangerous Ideas from it. It was the case in the early days of the Gothic genre, when there were concerns over them being amoral (and, I mean, in partial defense of the pearl clutchers...a lot of the early Gothic novels make the later novels look tame in their gleeful use of murder, satanism, incest, and decay, thank you to The Monk.) And I can see the appeal of Dracmina on that level.

And all this is complicated by the racism implicit in the novel, of Dracula as the Evil Foreigner, with his ties to the past and his ancient lineage, who is acting as a threat to the Modern Anglo-American world. How do you grapple with that? It isn't easy. For some people, I know they choose to just. Ignore it. Or try to reframe it as Stoker somehow being progressive. And while I can get the appeal of, say, a black or Catholic Irish Mina, or a black or Mexican Quincey...for ME, that approach isn't satisfactory. I'm not saying it isn't satisfactory for ANYONE, or that it's Problematic or Wrong, but that it doesn't vibe for ME. *I* don't like it because I feel like it de-problematizes the novel, makes it about a multiracial queer polyamorous group trying to take down the Evil White Man. (And also still, unknowingly or not, plays into prejudices around people from the region usually defined in the west as "Eastern Europe" that are still present to this day and which are often invisible.) And, again, some people might like that! I'm not going to police how people recontextualize the novel so long as they understand why other people might *not* like that approach.

For me, I personally choose to aggressively love the Other. And I'm fully aware my approach isn't SUPERIOR, especially when you're dealing with the coded SA in the novel, both against Mina and Jonathan. I understand that some adaptations have slid into rape apologism/denial category. But I also think that some things I've seen come about re: for example, DD is people not really thinking when they say "we want to see Mina be sexually traumatized by an Eastern European monster so that she and her English husband can destroy the Foreigner." Foreigners or people who are not white or not considered to be white, in the Victorian Era and now, are a convenient scapegoat for sexual violence -- at the time that this is being published, lynchings are already happening in the States against black men who are accused of raping white women. Nine years before, while the figure dubbed Jack the Ripper instigated his reign of terror, graffiti appeared that said "The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing" -- while Ripperologists have debated the meaning of the graffiti, I have the very mundane explanation that an antisemitic Victorian decided to blame the Jews (TM) for the killings. One of the chief suspects of the crime was Aaron Kosminski a Polish Jew whose major sin, with Assistant Commissioner Robert Anderson claiming the main reason that he was never caught was that Jews would not testify against one another. People WANTED the Ripper to be an Eastern European Jewish man murdering and killing English Women (even in the case of the thoroughly Irish Catholic Mary Jane Kelley, her Welsh connections were emphasized over her Irish.) (Also in partial defense of white British men at the time, there were several people were like "hold up, this is kind of antisemitic.")

And I know this is dark stuff, but it's IMPORTANT to ground the depiction of Dracula as a sexual predator in the context that he was being written in, as a character, and why I personally...don't like an uncomplicated SA story. I don't want Mina to lie about it, either (I've seen this with Miranda/Caliban, which is another example of a classic of a classic with Problems with race, and I hate that as well). It's a delicate, delicate line, and I don't think a lot of adaptations have done it WELL, but I also don't think it's SIMPLE to just say "Dracula is a rapist, if you ship Dracmina, you're shipping a rape victim and her rapist." I'm not saying people have to like it or be comfortable with, but I'm asking people to understand like. Why people might go the OTHER way into it. Because the imperialist overtones of Dracula really are the elephant in the room.

One alternative would be to dig into Makt Myrkanna (aka Icelandic Dracula, which also has an earlier Swedish version), where Dracula is an active Eugenicist. It would still be uncomfortable, especially if someone kept the vaguely Lovecraftian ape cult under his castle. (...yes. Really.) BUT it would establish that Dracula isn't inherently a monster because he's a foreigner, he's a monster because he sees Vampires as a master race (which could also be interesting if the protagonists have the Victorian-typical attitude that White Westerners are the pinnacle of civilization, seeing those attitudes turned around on THEM.) I'm not opposed to that. But for me, I prefer vampirefucking.

The thing with classics is that...if they truly deserve the term 'classic'...they will touch people in different ways. Particularly the Gothic genre which relies on extremes of emotion and inner torment and family curses and decay. With the novel Rebecca, people often get into fights on whether Maxim or Rebecca was abusive, whether either or both of them were terrible people, whether Maxim was a misogynist or just an abuse victim lashing out, etc. etc. and the thing I quickly realized is that almost everyone who got really invested in it had a deep personal reason for interpreting it the way they did, and I could see the reasons for WHY they interpreted it that way even when I disagreed. (I still think Rebecca was abusive as a fyi.)

For some people, I know that Jonathan as a victim, as a potentially queer man, who is able to fight against his oppressor in whatever ways he can is really powerful. For some people, Renfield is really important as a mentally ill (again, potentially queer) man who is abused by the medical establishment. For some people, Seward is really important. For some people, the Harkers are important as an adorable, stable couple. For me, as a general enemy of the adorable, I'm neutral. I've read one analysis of vampires as a class thing, and I don't LIKE it because I still feel like it falls into the mistake that bad Leftist analysis generally makes of reducing everything wrong in the world to capitalism (in the same way that bad feminist analysis makes everything about misogyny). Etc. etc. etc. I'm invested in the women. In the women being happy, in having agency however they see fit. This can include with Dracula, with Jonathan, with Van Helsing, with each other, with any other number of options. (But I also want vampirefucking.) If something turns Mina into JUST Jonathan's girlfriend/Supportive Wife or JUST Dracula's bloodbag or even JUST makes them into Wholesome GFs, I'm not invested. I'm not invested in J0nmina, as a ship. I like it best when Jonathan says he'd become a vampire for her, when he's getting a little bit fucky with Victorian norms (though then there's the question of what "Victorian norms" are since, even though I don't think "I would give up Christianity for you" would be considered to be SOCIALLY ACCEPTABLE for real people at this time, it's also definitely not out of place in general gothic lit at this time, and clearly those had an audience so...) I don't particularly find "Middle Class English Couple Has Children" is really that enthralling of an ending, when the ending is middle class domesticity. I understand it from a trauma viewpoint, but it isn't really my vibe.

ANYWAY, my point is, at the end of this essay: I agree with you, people should leave Dracmina alone, it's never been the norm in the fandom, I get tired of it being treated as the Root of All Ills in adaptations when there are usually worse things afoot, there are reasons for people to ship it, be careful with how you talk about Drac because it quickly can slide into bigoted territory with baggage that you might not even be aware of. Also most of the adaptations still suck because they don't let the women be people with agency. And if you reduce Mina to Jonathan's GF I hate you because you don't really care about misogyny in the adaptations, you just care that your blorbo has his supportive wife who cries and acts as a madonna figure for the men to huddle around.