#put this in the wrong place THIS IS NOT HOLMWOOD CANON

[georgiacooked]

A quick painting I unfortunately don't have time to finish.

Bad ending Jonathan Harker, trapped in Dracula's castle, waiting for the Master to return home.

I have this notion that vampires retain a twisted aspect of their living loves and desires, but wrenched into the same position as their unending hunger. Jonathan will love Mina, regardless of who or what he is, and that love will remain to consume him when all else is gone.

[bluecatwriter]

So I watched a tv movie called Bram Stoker's Van Helsing (2021) that's only about the London Lucy segment of the story and… you know how no one (despite Van Helsing's fear) is seething with jealousy over Lucy? well, it's a love triangle now because they wanted to make it more interesting. Arthur and Jack keep headbutting for dominance and Arthur is so jealous that he's the one who throws the garlic away at night, for Jack to not be the one who becomes the hero in Lucy's eyes.

Putting this on the pile of Dracula stuff that includes Arthur, but completely changes him to "fix how boring he is"... (see also Anno Dracula (allies with Dracula, becomes a serial murderer all because the Newman loathed Arthur in the book), The Athena Club series (allies with a demon to become a fascist ruler), Dracula 2006 (huge rich jerk, invites Dracula to fix his syphilis), Dracula 2020 (loves to publicly humiliate Jack, horrible person)

Every day I learn about a new adaptation in which my boy is massacred... :'( Bless you for watching so I don't have to.

Turning the Suitor Squad into a love triangle (square?) is just lazy writing, period. Ohhh, multiple guys are interested in one girl and they're jealous and fight over her?? HOW ORIGINAL. *eye roll* It's such a cliché that there is NO excuse for using it, and triply so when the source material doesn't have it in the first place! Arthur throwing the garlic away because of some male ego thing makes me want to smash a chair through my dining room window.

It's honestly discouraging how little imagination adapters seem to have. All right, adapter guy, so you think Arthur Holmwood is boring... it's not a completely unreasonable statement. But look— look at the actual source material and see what's buried there! Just off the top of my head...

-Being someone who cries so openly and on so many different people is a huge character trait. Show how he's defying Victorian masculine norms by freely expressing emotion (or how he's conforming to the stereotype of Sighing Lover) and do something with that.

-What kind of person travels literally all the way around the world, having tons of wild and wacky adventures, and yet never tells any stories about it? What is his motivation for not trying to impress his girlfriend with tales of running from wolves or crashing a ship in Polynesia? What does this say about the way he experiences life?

-The story is ripe with little hints about how incredibly close he is to both Quincey and Jack. If adapters weren't so homophobic, they could explore all sorts of possibilities there.

-He likes dogs! That's a whole character trait!

-All right, adapter doesn't want to engage with any of that and is set on making him evil? Okay, then, make him evil in a way that fits the source material. Once again, making him jealous of other men or a philandering spoiled lordling are super-cliché. How about thinking about what could make him actually go off the rails? Is he haunted by how obedient he was in killing Lucy, even when he didn't know exactly what was going on? Does he carry a grudge against Van Helsing for making him into a killer? Do we take the text at face value that when he set his mind to it, he was ruthlessly effective in ending Lucy's undead life— does he get addicted to that feeling, does he get righteously caught up in vampire hunting (or just murder) because he can't bear the thought that he could've been wrong?

People making adaptations don't have to follow canon, of course, but it seems reasonable for the decisions to be rooted in canon, for readers/viewers to be able to draw a line from point A to point B. At the very least, there's no excuse to fall back on tiresome tropes.

Thanks for giving me the chance to rant about this. :D