#mina rants (∩ ∩)

[hugsandnoregrets]

actually insane that i wasn't sure if i should read dracula because i had seen so many 'academic' claims of misogyny and then i finally read it and mina murray harker is literally one of my favorite characters in like a decade. like she's got so much personality and agency and like yes she has internalized the expectations of women at the time but they literally can't beat dracula without her, she is essential. she is intelligent and funny and intense and weird and i adore her.

what the fuck is everyone smoking to claim that she's a sad little housewife who is dracula's bride or whatever.

[mushroomates]

thinking about boromir again

how does gondor grieve? it’s a dying country in it of itself, can anyone make the distinction between tragedies? how many men have fallen, and who buries the dead? where are the mass graves, the unmarked tombs, how many bodies lay beneath the eroded soil?

was there ever time, with the end of the world crashing down, to lay a flower on the grave of a loved one. did you mourn the men who fought for their country, or the country that fell along side them. is it easier to grieve the kingdom, or its people?

when aragorn reigns king, arwen is surrounded by death. i wonder what its like to loose an afterlife and be reminded of its contrary every day. she didn’t grow up with death like many of gondor did.

when boromir was a boy, he saw men fall. he grew up too fast, with his brother at his side, even though boromir tried to shield him by standing in front. all he knew was war. all he wanted was to end it.

he left everything behind to go on a journey so far from home with a slim, almost none, chance of success. to fight side by side with your begrudgingly rightful king, with a wizard, with an immortal elf seemingly untouchable. with the hobbit who’s entrusted with a power you perceive to be the solution to your problems.

it’s a wonder he wasn’t more resentful. the fellowship was full with things he was envious of. the hobbits easy life must have come as a shock, and i wonder if that’s why he wanted to protect them. meet people untouched by war, who have never fought nor gone hungry. he did not hate them for what they had, but wanted to protect them from the harsh reality he grew up with.

boromir is so inherently good it hurts. this man deserved to see the world he fought so hard for. his body lies so far yet so close from his homeland, from his brother. his final resting place is unfamiliar. he never got to go back home.

[igotusernamecrisis]

my favourite thing about 'Dracula' is how Mina Harker is the cleverest strongest icon out there: girly can write shorthand, learn train timetables by heart, keep a diary daily (my procrastinating arse could never), retype and organise a ton of written information AND a literal audio diary in like a day (????), and deduct the randomest niche stuff like it's nothing?? QUEEN behaviour period. Which is why, while I definitely love the cinematography and the cast in the 1992 film adaptation, the plot absolutely pissed me off. Of course the og misogyny in the novel was very unnerving and impossible to ignore (for me personally) but I bet even Mr Stoker himself would have had a stroke if he'd seen the way they reduced Mina's character to a mindless girl obsessing over the count. Tbh some ooc fanfiction I've read had more 'in character' figures than whatever the hell happened to Mina. Which is fine as an artistic interpretation of the og material I guess but explicitly calling the film 'Bram Stoker's Dracula'-- the audacity lol. The vibes were on point though very reminiscent of the book

[local-lover-boy]

I feel like class 1-A would call Aizawa babygirl by accident and then see their lives flash before their eyes, however Aizawa doesn't even react, he's too tired

[impossiblyannoyingstarfish]

I think Kit herondale moving to Devon to stay with Jem and Tessa was a very appropriate decision made by Cassie.

Kit was, by no means ready to be in a relationship with Ty at that stage. I definitely do not like the way things ended with them. But what I do know is that Kit needed Jem and Tessa. Kit needed their love and guidance. Here, we are talking about someone whose father showed him such little affection that he felt that he was never loved by him. And he was the only family Kit had ever known while growing up. Kit did not value himself. He hated himself. And until a person learns to love themselves they won't be able to love others properly, no matter how hard they try.

I love the blackthorns. I really do. But tbh they are a bunch of teenagers with too much baggage on them already. They are always busy with their own businesses. They don't have time to help Kit with his mental health when they all clearly need therapy as well. Living at the LA Institute would not help with Kit's mental health in the slightest.

What he truely needs is a loving, caring family that can give him time and attention. Who can teach him to love and to be loved. Kit needed Jem and Tessa. He needed Mina. He needed church. He needed them to know the value of family, love, protection and care. He needed to be a son. He needed to be a brother. He needed to be a tol hooman for his cat.

Before he needed the Blackthorn's companionship, he needed the Carstairs family's love. I just know that by the end of the three year period Kit Herondale would be in a much better place as a much better, understanding and mature person. And most of all, I need people to understand this.

[yallemagne]

I’m thinking. A dangerous pastime, I know, but I’ve been reminded yet again at how fandom “fixes” characters to fit into their own sensibilities, and I realized a parallel. 

DISCLAIMER: this is not an academic paper, I wrote this in one sitting after a day of eating nothing but cookies. Too long to read? The gist is that society is very fucking uncomfortable with accepting people for how they actually are outside of predetermined roles, and so they try to rework people’s images to be more palatable at the expense of authenticity... and this applies to how we treat characters in fandom.

I will never stop being upset at fandom for girlbossifying Mina Harker: for denying her flaws, values, weaknesses, and even some of her strengths because they don’t identify with those, and they have to rework her in order to even halfway tolerate her as a character. AND THEN THEY CLAIM TO LOVE HER. And it just made me think “how can they claim to love her if they hate everything about her?” And I realized that a lot of the people who talk up Mina and build her up as a paragon of girlbossery ignore and/or devalue her words while mythologizing her actions. Like “this is the woman who did this this and this, she’s a girlboss feminist queen” while conveniently leaving out her perspective on the matter. 

So many people like to reframe her tangent about how silly and gauche she views New Women as her being sarcastic or ironic. “It’s just a joke! She actually thinks feminism is great!” they say. But she is not a sarcastic or ironic person. She’s very witty, but she’s not snarky or irreverent. This is a case of people projecting traits onto her that they like while erasing the ones she actually displays. They like their women to be disingenuous and wisecracking because insincerity is a way of taking control, but Mina is earnest and honest about her beliefs and feelings, and they don’t like that because honesty is a form of emotional vulnerability, and a woman being emotionally vulnerable is “playing into the stereotypes”. 

Now, what’s the parallel? 

It made me think of how Seward views Jonathan after reading his journal in the novel. Jonathan was so honest about his fear and uncertainty in his journal that a wide-sweeping interpretation of that part of the novel in academic spaces is that Jonathan was just a yellow-bellied coward. Seward does not have this interpretation at all, in fact, he is shocked to meet Jonathan because he had been picturing a mythic figure of perfect chiselled masculinity like Hercules! And instead he is met with a quiet, mild-mannered solicitor?

Why does Seward make this mistake? We all joke that it’s because he’s not incredibly bright, which he isn’t, and he’s super gay, which he is — but the crux of it is that he is not receptive to the idea of people who don’t fit into his worldview. He is very particular about how he believes men and women behave. Men are rock solid and strong both physically and mentally whereas women are as delicate as cotton candy. He meets Mina and decides that she must be the ideal woman. So, he simply ignores all the ways her husband doesn’t conform with his ideal man. Jonathan being bedridden from mental trauma he faced in the castle? Psh. Might as well have never happened. But we all know that, had he met Jonathan before his recovery, his impression would have been way less charitable. Why? Because we all know that, as Mina gets sick and Seward is primed by an authority figure to distrust her intentions, things he admired about her (like her acts of service) get reframed as potentially nefarious. 

It is so easy to ignore everything that is true about a person and frame your perception of them in a completely dishonest way because that’s just the most comfortable option! 

Seward fails to acknowledge the ways that Jonathan subverts his expectations because the people who don’t fit into his expectations are, to him, the dregs of society: people who belong in his asylum or in the ground. So, he juices up Jonathan. He’s like “he must be the most ripped flawless guy ever” because his brain doesn’t have much room for nuance. He’s uncomfortable with accepting that the men in his life who he idolizes aren’t paragons. He’s stiff and awkward while comforting his dear friend who just suffered the deaths of his father, his would-be mother-in-law, and his fiancée in such a short amount of time, only offering a stiff embrace with a couple back-pats and some words of affirmation thrown in and justifying that with “that’s all the comfort a man needs”. And hey, it’s not like he despises his friend for being able to cry, it’s that men have never really been taught how to reckon with their emotions. They see a woman being emotional, and shrug it off and say “psh typical hysterical woman”, but they see their fellow man struggling, and the only response they have is “hey… stop that. You clearly aren’t having a good time, and I don’t enjoy this either, so you should just… stop feeling and save us the trouble?” 

Likewise, people don’t want to acknowledge Mina’s internalized misogyny and deep self-hatred because they’re not comfortable with women having flaws. And hey, this is a VERY complex issue. It’s uncharitable to say it’s simply woman-hating. For women who have this way of treating female characters, it’s born from their identity as women and how they are expected to navigate the world. They see a woman who is anything less than a pure goddess and get upset because she’s supposedly making a fool of herself and bringing dishonour to them by association. “You’re setting a bad example for the rest of us! There is limited space for women in fiction/the workplace/the public eye, and you’re taking up space and fucking it up! Now everyone will think that women are emotional/stupid/slutty!” And for the men… they’re literally just the Van Helsings and the Sewards of the world. Either a woman is the perfect wife or she’s a voluptuous she-beast, and whichever one she is justifies how they treat her, and that solidifies their place in the world as men. 

My ultimate point is that we all acknowledge how silly it was when Seward got it in his head that Jonathan had to be a jock to have survived the things he did, and yet we let fandom treat Mina the exact same way?

[notasapleasure]

The show really trying to have its cake and eat it with the 'undocumented agricultural labourers are vulnerable and explotable' and the 'mina rau is an agrarian paradise and a great place to go and raise a child' thing. Utterly incoherent from a show that has previously demonstrated it knows how to do so much better.

[yasministration]

guys i'm sorry but can we stop sending the same requests to multiple writers at the same time. i was literally just scrolling and i came across @jijournal's account. she recently posted a fic with a request IDENTICAL to one i received a few days ago, that you can see here. in this situation, i understand if the anon went and sent in the request after i told them i wouldn't write it since i hadn't seen the movie they based the request on. but i'm also assuming that since jiraen actually wrote the fic (and that takes time to do guys believe it or not), the request was probably sent around the same time they sent it to me.

please don't do this, because it really feels like you're pitting writers against each other by sending in the same ask at the same time, and just playing the game to see who'll post the fic first. and the thing is, this ask was so specific too. like at this point, people will be blaming each other for stealing each other's ideas because of this, purely because you've sent in a request to two different writers.

i've seen occasions where some anons have even asked other writers if they can send the same request to them and to other writers, and if you're an anon and were thinking of doing that to my blog and another blog, please don't! speaking for myself, it doesn't make me feel great when people treat my work as just another option. either send me a request because you want to see me write it because you actually like my writing, or don't send in a request at all. i don't want to see people just trying to get me to write a request out of like 5 blogs they've sent the request to.

i don't really know if this rant makes sense, but genuinely, it makes me feel like shit to imagine someone being like 'oh i really want someone to write this idea because i cba to. oh, let me send it to every single writer on tumblr.'

and again, i don't want to assume the intentions the anon had (and OBVIOUSLY, no hate to jiraen who wrote the fic because she's just a writer writing a request). but like for future reference, if you're trying to treat writers like chatgpt (or more specifically, ME), don't request anything. i want you to request something because you like MY WORK and want to see a specific idea written in MY WRITING

[kacchanot-fucking-deal-with-this]

I love it when Bakugou bristles when anyone other than Deku calls him Kacchan and Deku feels a pang of jealousy and sadness that someone else gets to say it and mistakenly thinks the name is what upset Kacchan and not the person saying it

[always-andromeda]

Mina got a certain magical phrase stuck in my brain so I had to commit my mental visual to a shitty edit!!!!

@evolnoomym thank you for giving me a new vocal stim that I’ve had to stop myself from saying aloud in front of my family mwah 🫶🏻☺️

[iolaussharpe-24]

Am I just a delusional shipper or does this feel like it should have been a thing?

Spoilers for Gargoyles (1972) ahead.

"Go on, your voice pleases me."

"'The sin was not my own, but forced upon me by the incubus; who overnight did slip into my bedchamber and taunt and seduce me with demon's promises until I was as if on fire. He was of uncommon height and finely built. A devil's face of frightful beauty that did put me in a spell. I had no will of my own, but did let the incubus do his will until I was driven mad.'"

Those are actual lines out of the movie. I didn't paraphrase. At all. I played the scene where she was reading out of the book, and typed every word she said. This is a movie about demons who "sometimes take human women" who are trying to conquer the world. Also, in this movie, the gargoyles with wings are the breeders. This one says as much. He was basically the leader. His reaction to being told that he's lost is literally, "Not as long as there are two winged breeders."

Also, the way the gargoyle acts when he first sees Diana just SCREAMS "shipping fuel". If this were written in the modern day, they would have done it. You can't convince me otherwise. You know why I say that?

BECAUSE THE 90s DID IT!!!

I don't care that these two stories have nothing to do with one another. This is a really good comparison. And, even if it wasn't, I have plenty of fuel for this fire. (I don't even need my usual go-to of vampire movies to prove this point.)

Diana and The Gargoyle fit into two categories that I love and frequently ship. Hero/Villain (though I guess this is more damsel/villain) and Human/Monster. I'm going to give examples from both categories that I will die shipping. (They overlap quite a bit, actually.)

Jareth the Goblin King x Sarah Williams

Katara x Prince Zuko

Rey x Kylo Ren/Ben Solo

Vlad Dracula x Mina Murray/Mina Harker

Erik x Christine Daaé

Batman/Bruce Wayne x Catwoman/Selina Kyle

Elisa Esposito x The Amphibian Man

Catherine Chandler x Vincent

So, with all that context in mind,

DOES THIS REALLY LOOK LIKE THAT MUCH OF A STRETCH?!?!

[lemonavocado]

i have many many thoughts about the portrayal of elizabeth (and henry) in adaptations of frankenstein and they need to be broadcasted immediately. feverish incoherent raving about this subject under the cut. tw for very brief mention of SA

so. elizabeth lavenza. by the time of the wedding, elizabeth is rather obviously portrayed to be just as morose and brooding as victor is, she just isn't as susceptible to episodes of mania and psychosis so it doesn't seem nearly as dramatic compared to victor's trauma. she's been through the gutter herself, being an orphan for starters, then being adopted into a family and having to assume the role of caregiver in the frankenstein family because of the coercion of her dead mother to not only take her place as the maternal figure in the family but also marry her surrogate brother (or literal cousin, depending on which version you read). then her surrogate younger brother william dies, and the within weeks she has to watch her closest heterosexual life partner justine be unjustly hung by a corrupt justice system. and she vocalizes, actively, her pessimism and hopelessness in light of these many tragedies. tldr she's fucked up and rightfully so, and while she's a little less crippled by depression than victor, she still has the distinct appearance of being rather ill, listless, and tired, especially towards the end of the novel. anyways my point is in the novel, the most important thing about elizabeth is not that she's a woman and victor's bride. yes, that's obviously the purpose she was created for, but shelley went out of her way to give elizabeth an extremely definite and unique character. she's gentle and maternal like most woman in early 19th century literature, but she's also introspective, intelligent, and perceptive. she displays agency and self-awareness repeatedly (her guilt over the locket, going to the execution of justine even when alphonse tells her not to, waxing poetic on the failures of the justice system, asking repeatedly and rather pointedly if victor actually wants to go through with the marriage, obvious anxiety and solemnity concerning the wedding) we also have to take into account that elizabeth's personality is being relayed to us BY VICTOR, and he wants to see elizabeth as docile and femininely passive, even if a lot of her actions themselves in the novel actually seem to contradict that. also, i am peppering in that many people can (and have) made a genuine and convincing argument that victor and elizabeth are not in love and were groomed to accept their union by their weirdo parents - that they care for each other, but the text includes important nuances that make it evident that victor doesn't feel anything for elizabeth like that. it is a legitimate interpretation of the book - dare i say it's the correct interpretation of the relationship between victor and elizabeth. but that's another essay for another day and it's not SUPER integral to my rant here today. it just highlights the complexity of elizabeth as a character.

so. for some fucking reason, writers do not understand this when they are adapting the novel, and do not want to apply more than eight seconds of critical thinking and the absolute shallowest 3rd grader levels of reading comprehension to this character, so they simplify her from what she was in the original novel, freshly complex, opinionated, and introspective to boring useless incest lady. victor is never portrayed with the same amount of nuance he deserves in any adaptation (also another essay for another day), because adaptations also have a very surface level reading of him as "guy who was ambitious and played god which immediately cements him as an irredeemable self-aggrandizing asshole and/or a raging insufferable narcissist who's a dick to everyone around him EXCEPT for elizabeth" but at least SOME adaptations are able to kiiinnnddaaaa capture the sympathy meant to be felt for the character in the novel. not so for elizabeth. her character in basically every adaptation can be boiled down to this: "omg victor my brother let me hammer in that you are my brother. im just going to stand here and look clueless and annoyingly naive for the entire time im on screen/stage. im just a little girl and idk what's going on victor but im gonna stay blindly devoted to you and ask numerous but completely useless questions 🥺 let me stare at you with tender worry in my eyes and treat you like a child even though we have absolutely no romantic chemistry and you're an objectifying dick towards me and we have nothing in common and the audience is actively dry heaving as we sensually make out for no other reason than to have characters in this movie sensually make out. im basically a carbon copy of original-novel-henry expect super boring and super useless because im a woman which means the doylist explanation for why im here HAS TO BE ONLY for the main character to fuck me and to hold the attention of the male viewership. now time for me to get SA'd by the creechur for basically no reason" we can observe something approximating this in basically every frankenstein adaptation i've ever seen: kenneth branagh's (my enemy) 1994 film, the 2004 hallmark miniseries, the musical, and the ballet. also in the 1931 film, but that one isn't really trying to be book-accurate so it doesn't really count for this rant.

with this understanding of elizabeth, writers then attempt to artificially generate more romance between these characters, mostly by, yes, replacing a lot of henry's role in the novel with elizabeth, hence why we see so many adaptations (1994, 2004, ballet) make elizabeth nurse victor back to health in ingolstadt instead of henry, which generates... so many problems. one problem with this is that it just sorta ruins henry's original role in the novel in one go. writers recognize that henry is supposed to be victor's character foil, but now they don't have much for him to do so he can demonstrate that role in the story since they gave all of the romantic tension moments to elizabeth. meaning that in adaptations you can tell the writers didn't really know what to do with henry because he's reduced to a comic relief bumbling idiot (1994, ballet, 2004 to an extent) with his only personality traits being "random xd" and "morals good playing god wrong!!!! 😠" (2004, musical, several independent stage adaptations). they keep him as a character foil, but just replace all of his compassion, tenderness, and devotion with elizabeth, while effectively draining henry of all of his original appeal and charm and stamping those traits onto their already stripped-of-all-nuance elizabeth. so now both henry and elizabeth are not only extremely different from their original roles in the novel but extremely, woefully less charming and complex. this especially pisses me off because it's explicitly stated in the book that henry was victor's only friend precisely because he was victor's intellectual equal, so seeing henry reduced to a smiley idiot and/or stupid generic male side character with Morals fills me with a visceral rage. writers will also sometimes make victor and henry meet in college (ballet, 1994) and try to strengthen the bond between victor and elizabeth by making it appear as though she was victor's ONLY childhood friend and companion. other times, victor and henry will be friends pre-ingolstadt (2004, musical) but most of the relationship development will be between elizabeth and victor. those two have all of the tender bonding moments while henry is just kinda inexplicably there sometimes. but i digress. this post is supposed to be about elizabeth. but IF YOU NEED A CHARACTER TO BE A SUNSHINE SOFT OPTIMISTIC LOVER FOR VICTOR IN A FRANKENSTEIN ADAPTATION, HENRY IS ABLE AND WILLING ARE YOU STEPPING ON MY BALLS

clervalstein is true. anyway

elizabeth is somehow more complex and powerful as a female character than the literal adaptations produced almost 200 years later. in adaptations, the most important thing about her is somebody else. the development of all of her character traits (which usually never go beyond standing around and looking helpless) are solely dependant on victor. she feels more like an appendage of the protagonist than an individual with thoughts and experiences separate from victor, and her character is loosely defined and flimsy so the writers can have her conform to her actions in the book whenever it's convenient and then change things up entirely that completely contradict her characterization in the book whenever it's convenient. i have no idea why the fuck this keeps happening with frankenstein adaptations (it's misogyny) and because it isn't looking like guillermo del toro's film (from what ive heard) is going to be super book accurate, i dont foresee too much of a shift in frankenstein adaptations.

look i get it. it's a movie/play/ballet which lasts like 2 hours and you have a lot to do and not a lot of time to do it. i understand you have to make sacrifices for brevity and these characters are, frankly, a lot less interesting and exciting than victor and creechur. people didn't come to see john hughes levels of charm and complexity in the side characters, they came to watch the creechur do scary shit and for victor to say IT'S ALIVE 😱 and be an evil mad scientist you love to hate. they came for their values of "it's wrong to play god!!!" and "too much ambition bad!!!" to be re-cemented even though that's not even the original point of the novel. which is why imo if you're going to adapt frankenstein in a manner that does justice to the beautiful and sublime subtlety of the original novel, it needs to be either a miniseries or a REALLY LONG film. it's a short book, but it's very eventful, and imo for an adaptation to work you have to let the audience sit with it. which is why you all need to donate to my gofundme so i can produce an honest to god frankenstein adaptation. in fact, im running for president in this year's primaries :3

just a disclaimer: im not an academic or a scholar or anything. i just like the book. i probably have no idea what the fuck im talking about. but im a very very passionate little guy and this has been my rant

[terminallydiseased]

im alive. been busy with school (uni) and other irl stuff. but imagine you're rody's bf that broke up with him because it was the 70s + the way he loved you was the way he loved manon so it was pretty much overwhelming. you start hanging out with vincent and vincent was planning to kill you but he ends up getting interested in you so shit goes down

[a-traveling-void-human]

I don't like the name Bakusquad and Dekusquad (Personal Opinion)

It is just a Fanon name for the two funny ahh groups, but Bakusquad and Dekusquad just sounds... Not, good in my brain.

since I'm not a fan of the name Bakusquad and Dekusquad- but still want to have a specific thing to call them each by, what should I name them? Dekusquad is the nerdsquad in my brain. Or the "Be gay do crime" gang. While Bakusquad.. Hm. The "Hazzard squad" cuz ya know:

Bomb, Acid, Electricity, Rock and Warning tape!

And also, personal reason why I don't like the name of Baku and Deku squads is because of the association of "They're only Baku's or Deku's friend." I know it's not like that but it is to me.. Like- Imagine me this.

Bomb, Acid, Electricity, Rock, Warning tape AND eldrich HORROR!! (Plus, Anti-Gravity, Sonic, Hot Cold and Fucking FROG.)

Katsuki is also a nerd. And gay. And have killed a baby- so- perfect right?

Right???

Nerdsquad and The Hazzard Squad- or THS for short-

I'm losing braincells.

Give me your own names for the groups! I really want to know more options to call them by

[disregardcanon]

i hate lazy listicles. like maybe i shouldn't be using a listicle for something but oh BOY do i expect better than "hey so uh.... villainous girls' names.... here have mary because of MARY MAGDALENE and mina because of MINA HARKER" you absolute morons

[maycat-19-142]

Multiple character headcannon

A/n: I'm very bored ATM

⚠️: let me know if I missed anything

Walking was your favorite thing to do together. Walking in the woods near your home or were you lived was relaxing. It was even better when you had your s/o. They love it to just Walking in silence in each other's presence

Todoroki | iida | momo | mina | kite | illumi | legolas | sam |

Have a good day and night 🌙

Pixie out 🧚‍♀️