#re dracula critical

[xserpx]

Catching up on Re:Dracula and yesterday's (18th September) episode was, dare I say it, bad. The latter half was OK (though I have beef with Jon Simm being too monotonous), but the first half with the zookeeper drove me nuts. Audio levels all over the place, the disparity between the reporter's crystalline ennunciation and the zookeeper's barely audible mumbling was jarring, and frankly I just really didn't enjoy listening to the zookeeper's weird delivery, which was like Mary from Ghosts trying to be spooky. It didn't work for me at all.

Idk. I like the concept of Re:Dracula, but I'm just really not a fan of the hammy style. "This is spooky so we have to sound spooky" makes it sound too unnatural when it really shouldn't. I wish there was more attention paid to emotion - especially the joy and humour - rather than atmosphere. I want more camaraderie, which is a highlight of the book, but I don't really feel like there's much connection at all being expressed in the audio.

[meerawrites]

Re: Lucy Westenra & Mina Murray-Harker

It is that time of year again, folks!

[yallemagne]

I feel the thing with Mrs Westenra is that she's that specific brand of entitled old lady that keeps harming those around her with her own beliefs while having her own fragility used as an excuse. Its like someone punching a friend "for their own good" and then going "pwease dwont hurt me im so delicate n frwagile :("

She works well as a character as in she's basically another way societal expectations and lack of communication are a cog in Dracula's machinations, but on my personal opinion she's really frustrating. (Hehe my rambling got a lil long sorry abt that)

Yes, what pains me so much this that Mrs. Westenra is such a real person. I have suffered such real people in my life, some I love dearly, some I love out of obligation, and it is painful to see what Lucy is going through, to see her be punished again and again by her mother's willful neglect, and she cannot even muster the will to be angry with her. Lucy has been stripped of any ability to speak out against her mother, even in her most private of musings, because her mother is so highly prioritized over herself. Lucy's suffering must always be kept out of view, and she never has the self-preservation to just snap and say "no, I am a human being".

Mrs. Westenra's a cog in the machine of the plot. She was written this way purposefully. No matter how much damage she causes, you're meant to feel bad for her, because if you don't, you might demand to know why Bram hasn't just killed her already. The reason is that he never even intended for his readers to feel this resentment. Her behaviour is not meant to be taken seriously because she's a poor old woman who just doesn't know any better. She's allowed and expected to be ignorant, and if not her, there would be some other person, a maid unknowingly throwing out the blooms.

But it hurts so much more for it to be your own mother who hurts you. Your feelings don't matter to her except as an extension of her own. She finds the flowers that you love, and ignoring the clear signs of your contentment with the flowers, she projects her negative feelings onto you and throws them out. Then, self-gratulatory as ever, she brags to your doctors that she knows better than them when she can't even recognize how close you are to death. She has willfully abandoned you because your sickness stresses her, and she would rather leave you without a goodbye than face you like an adult and admit she is dying. And worse than that, she doesn't pull away enough to make room for the people who are actively trying to save you, no, she still intercedes, making their jobs harder and your life worse, and no one dares to correct her in any meaningful way because if she knew she wasn't perfect, it would kill her.

I'm not so naïve as to say that because I have such deep-rooted trauma surrounding personalities like this that I am sooo smart and right to take such issue with this fictional character. It is a bit of an overreaction. But you could say my feelings towards this entire novel are an overreaction. I know other people have probably experienced this behaviour, and their reactions to it aren't mine. There are most definitely people who have suffered this kind of neglect but their impulse is instead to forgive and defend Mrs. Westenra, and I cannot deny someone that.

But I hurt so deeply for Lucy. I recognize Mrs. Westenra's hurting but I cannot place it above Lucy's. I value Lucy so much more, and I don't feel a lick of guilt about it.

[sexiestpodcastcharacter]

Is Re: Dracula separate enough from the novel to count?

I have received a couple submissions from Re: Dracula, and I am wondering if they qualify with the "Must be from an audio-only show" rule. My understanding of Re: Dracula is that it is closer to a time-dispersed audiobook than an adaptation, but I haven't listened to it.

[moonchild-in-blue]

It's me, I'm girls.

[stupidvampires]

Listened to Re: Dracula's September 13 entry today!Mrs Westenra sounds very much like one of those kind of annoying, scatter-brained older woman: absolutely no clue anything is wrong. I felt a kind of numb horror at her part like it felt inevitable something else would go wrong for poor Lucy! If not this then another thing would happen to derail her progress.Seward's and Van Helsing's performances were very moving. Seward sounded so resigned but his distress showed through in so many places. Van Helsing sounded so distraught but then he bounced back wonderfully & was so very determined to help save Lucy. This entry & the voice-acting made me want to cry for Lucy & everyone struggling against the seemingly unrelenting illness plaguing her. "Devils or no devils, or all the devils at once, it matters not; we fight him all the same." is such a good line & voiced so well. One of many lines in the novel that perfectly sum it up.

[columboposting]

Honestly not even the last fifteen years — try since the 1990s. A lot of the language we use to talk about social issues today comes from academia, and it is language that has been in use in academia for far longer than it’s been in vernacular. “Social constructs” and the ways in which texts produce/subvert/question them have been, broadly speaking, the primary concern of literary scholarship since the ‘80s. The third wave of feminism started in the late ‘80s; Kimberlé Crenshaw coined “intersectionality” in 1989, and very soon after it gets picked up by a lot of literary critics. Edward Said’s Orientalism, which is pretty much the starting point of postcolonial theory, came out in 1978. By the year 2000 Queer Theory and Gender Studies are flourishing. Fuck, I was so busy talking about those guys I almost forgot to mention that Marxist lit theory has been alive and well since the fucking ‘70s!!!! If you go back and read a piece of literary theory from 1998 you will probably be surprised by how much it sounds like it could have been written yesterday. But that’s because many of the ways we now describe gender and race and sexuality were invented by academics — queer and female academics, academics of color, other marginalized academics — thirty-forty years ago. 

Obviously, criticism from the early/mid-20th century is, to generalize a little, going to suck for all the reasons you think it will; back then, most critics had this idea that a text had one objective correct meaning, and the critics deciding on that meaning were overwhelmingly wealthy straight white men (that said, we even owe some things to those nerds — mainly close reading, looking at a paragraph or a sentence of a work and examining its form and content and using it to draw conclusions about the work at large, AKA what’s happening in 90% of tumblr media analysis). But since the 70s literary criticism has been primarily post-structuralist, and since the 90s that post-structuralism has primarily turned its attention to examining how a text understands structures of class, race, gender, sexuality, culture and society at large in very nuanced, intelligent ways. There are a lot of fantastic scholars doing a lot of fantastic work!!! Post-Colonialism, Gender Theory, Queer Theory, Feminist Theory, Critical Race Theory, and New Historicism are all doing quite well at the moment — within the past fifteen years or so you can start throwing Ecocriticism into the hat, if you want to see people talking about how literature treats the natural world. By dismissing “scholars,” you’re ignoring the fact that there are a lot of really cool literary critics you could be learning from RIGHT NOW!!

And this is a little beside the point but I do really want to note that also: you’re neglecting the fact that YOU are doing scholarship, even if you’re not “scholars”!! Like, I hate the people who invented close reading, but holy shit close reading is the foundation of like every piece of tumblr media analysis ever!! Furthermore: Frankly, if you’re talking about the latent meaning hidden within the text you are probably also doing a little bit of psychoanalysis because that’s where we get that idea about reading literature (sorry, fellow Freud haters). If you’re talking about the emotional reaction the text provokes, if you’re interested in how the serialized nature of dracula daily changes the experience vs reading it as it was published — congratulations, that’s Phenomenology, the study of how people experience a text!!!!!! Plus there are (as previously mentioned) all the ways that we get our vocab on gender and race and class and social constructs from theory. Your blorbo analysis post is a form of literary criticism that is deeply, deeply indebted to both modern post-structuralist theory and earlier 20th century ideas of close reading and psychoanalysis, even if you don’t know it. In that respect, and in the fact that modern criticism is going to be working under many of the exact same methodological and ideological influences as you, I promise literary scholarship is worth your time. 

since I'm paying more attention to drac daily stuff this year I'm seeing a lot of posts saying "scholars always get the book wrong" and guys, ya gotta read better scholarship. poke around on jstor and google scholar for publications from the last ~15 years. see if you can find queer / feminist / postcolonial centered journals with online public archives. find a writer you agree with and see who else they cite. I prommy that academics are not your enemy and a lot of them are in their line of work precisely because they're just as not normal about their blorbos as you are. hashtag don't turn this into another "historians will say they're just friends."

[fandom]

Web Series

You have so much fun on the internet watching other people have fun on the internet.

Hermitcraft +2

Dimension 20 +5

The Amazing Digital Circus +11

The QSMP Minecraft Server -2

Dan and Phil +20

Critical Role -5

Homestuck -3

Fantasy High: Junior Year

The Magnus Archives -1

The Magnus Protocol

Helluva Boss

EPIC: The Musical

Game Changer +10

StarKid Productions +13

RWBY -10

The Welcome Home ARG -10

Watcher Entertainment

Malevolent +10

The Life Series SMP

Nerdy Prudes Must Die +2

Dracula Daily -12

Crow Time +10

Half-Life VR but the AI is Self-Aware +10

Shen Comix -5

Smosh

Alien Stage

Inanimate Insanity

Marble Hornets +8

The Dream SMP Minecraft Server -14

Dungeons and Daddies -13

Lackadaisy -7

Sun and Moon Show

Make Some Noise

Thomas Sanders -4

Pusheen

Desertduo Vigilante AU

Battle for Dream Island

Re: Dracula -12

Parkour Civilization

Animator vs. Animation

Eddsworld +1

The Walten Files

Redacted ASMR -3

Drawfee

Misfits And Magic

Red vs. Blue

Florkofcows

The Adventure Zone

Ghost Files -29

Batman: Wayne Family Adventures -1

The number in italics indicates how many spots a series or group moved up or down from the previous year. Bolded series or groups weren’t on the list last year.

Do you love to yell with other fans on the internet about your favorite series on the internet? Well, here's a bunch of The Amazing Digital Circus Communities to get you started.

[spider-xan]

I'm happy to see all the meta this year, re: the parallels between Jonathan and Dracula at the castle versus Renfield and Seward at the asylum bc last year, it wasn't really a popular topic of analysis from what I remember, and without spoiling anything, I do think doing a read-through of Dracula last year put Renfield in a different light on a re-read, and it's honestly a relief to see Renfield being treated with more respect and sympathy this time around, as opposed to him being a joke character, prop for Seward's storyline, or his mental illness being stigmatized as something that makes him evil, creepy, and undeserving of sympathy and compassion.

Likewise, as someone who does like Seward as a complex and very flawed character, I'm glad to see more discussion about the way he and Dracula are foils to each other instead of such posts being dismissed as character slander - a lot of characters in the novel parallel Dracula in unique ways, so it's a legitimate topic of analysis if approached in good faith! - as well as viewing his treatment of Renfield in a more critical light bc while he isn't actively malicious in terms of intent, it was a little frustrating last year to see some of that critique reduced to how it's unfair to hold him to modern standards when his actions still nevertheless caused harm and some Victorian contemporaries would have seen them as wrong, not to mention that many of our 'modern' standards regarding mental illness are not progressive at all.

[theholmwoodfoundation]

THE HOLMWOOD FOUNDATION SEASON ONE SUPPORTING CAST

BASIL WAITE - THOMAS VAN HELSING

Basil is a puppeteer and puppet builder, who currently lives by the sea in rainy South Wales. He is well-versed in performing without being seen, as he’s usually under a table or behind a desk, so this project will be a lot more comfortable…! When he’s not making creatures from fleece or doing silly voices, he’s usually listening to an audio book or podcast, so he’s thrilled to be involved with this amazing project!”

MICHELLE KELLY - HENRI MARTIN

Michelle Kelly is an actor, voice actor and TTRPG performer based in Yorkshire, UK. You can hear her as Niyathi in The Secret of St Kilda, as Alexandria in Tales From the Fringes of Reality, and as multiple characters in The Silt Verses, Folxlore and Shadows at the Door. Find out more about her work at https://michellekellyperformance.carrd.co

JACKIE CALISTAHHH - ELENA

Jackie Calistahhh is an actress and seductress. She works in SFW and NSFW productions alike: Commercials, videogames, erotica. She loves immersing herself in different characters and worlds.

ROBYN HOLDAWAY - CAM

Robyn is a non-binary actor best known for their work as Layla in Netflix's 'Sex Education'. Their credits also include: AMC's 'Moonhaven', BBC's 'Strike: Lethal White', and various other stage and screen roles. Their audiobook work includes the award winning 'Our Wives Under the Sea', as well as critically acclaimed 'Sistersong', 'How To Understand Your Gender', and 'Skin'. Robyn can be heard in the audiodrama 'Camlann' and in the upcoming video game 'Eternal Strands'. They are an active member of the LGBTQ community, and they are passionate about bringing this diversity into the mainstream both as an artist and as an activist

DAVID AULT - DR TIMOTHY LAKE

David has played major roles for many productions, including his 'Best Actor' award-winning portrayal of Byron in The Byron Chronicles. He can also be heard at the No Sleep Podcast, Shadows at the Door and Colonial Radio Theatre, amongst others.

KARIM KRONFLI - DAVE

Karim has been a professional performer for over 30 years originally working as a juggler and firebreather. Trained as a Director and Voice Actor at City Lit in London he started doing voice work in 2010. Specialising in audio drama he has appeared in over 100 productions including Re: Dracula, The Magnus Archives, London After Midnight, SCP Archives, Dr Who: Redacted and many more.

CANDACE MCAFEE - MAGDALENA SWIFT

Candace the Magnificent (they/she) is an actor, TTRPG performer, and writer based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. They love bringing their unique voice to a wide variety of projects, from commercials and animation to improv and audiodramas. You can hear more of their work in the upcoming video game Monaco 2, the cosmic horror audio drama Partial Veil, the actual play podcasts 3 Black Halflings and Frequencies, and many more. Learn more about her here: https://candacemcafee.carrd.co.

ANDREW BISS - JONATHAN HARKER 3RD

Andrew is an actor, voice actor and playwright, with an extensive background in theatre and film. Recent credits include the audio dramas ‘Station 151,’ ‘Vampire: The Masquerade Port Saga’ and the newly released ‘Clawmoor Heights’ as well as narrating the documentary series ‘Building Icons’ for Warner Bros. Discovery. He is the author of the best-selling book ‘Monologues They’ll Remember You By’ and is a graduate of the University of the Arts London and a member of the Dramatists Guild of America, Inc. More at: andrewbiss.com and adbvoiceover.com.

As always, you can listen to our pilot episode now for free at the link below. And please donate to our Kickstarter for Season One, if you're able!

[another-chaotic-bisexual-vampire]

just read that one of the first reviews of Bela Lugosi in the Broadway premiere of "Dracula" had this exact quote from The New Yorker's drama critic:

Ye who have fits, prepare to throw them now.

and I'm fully obsessed with this quote and so upset we haven't been using it to discuss Dracula Daily / Re: Dracula this whole time

[familyabolisher]

re: this post, would you perhaps be able to reword it? i understand the words you're using individually, and i think i might kind of get what you're trying to say, but it's just one very long sentence and so i'm having trouble parsing it! (wait--i just reread it. initial question canceled, mostly--now: what alternatives might we have available to us?) and what does this section: "it feels all too easy to jump from that to then just stymieing our ability to actually describe the textual violences necessary to the discursive construction of that normativity in the first place" mean, exactly? thank you as always for running this blog. :-)

What I’m describing is a critical phenomenon wherein people will approach (usually canonical) horror texts which reify hegemony by ‘identifying’ with the monster who is generally figured in terms of alterity in some capacity; by extricating, for example, a queer narrative out of what is in fact a homophobic one, and treating this as something of a ‘reclamatory’ practice in which one ‘relates’ to that which the text figures as monstrous. The most common instance of this which I see is people’s discussion of Carmilla as an erotic lesbian romance; other examples include Dracula, or Frankenstein, or the socially currency invested in the idea of a ‘madwoman in the attic’ (ie. Jane Eyre).  

I don’t think this is like, a practice that we need to do away with entirely, lol – but I do think that a) there are marginalised writers + filmmakers who are making horror with actual teeth, with actual radical edge, and we don’t need to keep pretending like this approach of reclamation-through-identification with a monster in a v normative work is all we have available to us when politically subversive horror does very much exist, and b) this critical practice is often vvv limited in its discursive scope, and tends to lack the kind of materialist analysis that I would consider necessary in talking about literatures of alterity/marginality/violence.

When I talked about stymieing our ability to describe the textual violences necessary to the discursive constructions of that normativity in the first place, I meant that overfocusing on these texts as “reclaimed” articulations of an essentially queer (or otherwise ‘othered’) imaginary can inhibit our ability, as critics, to describe how those texts in fact do not think of their monstrous figures as worthy of a sympathetic or appreciative narrative. I mentioned Carmilla above – we can talk about Carmilla as erotically lesbian, sure, but how far down the line in talking about it as a Queer Narrative do we lose track of the fact that the text itself asserts the sexual norms of white Christian hegemony to necessarily succeed over the perversion of the corruptive, predatory lesbian, or as an Anglo-Irish work positing Carmilla as an Irish woman (and thus a contaminant threat to Anglo-Irish society)? At what point in adulating Dracula as articulating a particular form of queer, effeminate Jewishness destabilising and threatening Jonathan and Mina’s persistent heterosexuality do we lose track of Dracula as having grown out of the fear that the new waves of Jewish immigration in London’s East End were vampiric sources of contagion, or its possible relationship to the antisemitic smears that grew out of the Jack the Ripper murders? Or like, taking Bertha Mason (or ‘the madwoman in the attic,’ because truly, v few people using this phrase are actually thinking about Bertha Mason lol) as a kind of feminist paragon – at what point do we begin to overlook the fact that Jane Eyre is a v racist text?

These aren’t necessarily contradictory approaches – like, for example, you can talk about ‘identifying’ with Dracula as emblematic of British Jewish assimilation and the discontents thereof whilst also talking about Dracula as an antisemitic text, even if the analysis in the former isn’t especially coherent – but the focus of the ‘identification’ treatment is often incredibly limited in its scope, and those limitations can often be detrimental to one’s ability to talk frankly and honestly about what a text actually says and does. A very good example such limitations is that of Frankenstein; an identification with Frankenstein’s monster as an entrypoint for textual analysis obfuscates the way in which Frankenstein constructed a discursive template by which the ameliorationist argument against the immediate abolition of slavery could be argued for. (The linked post lays this out v clearly, but the cited source is Mary Mulvey’ Roberts’ ‘Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, and Slavery,’ in Dangerous Bodies: Historicising the Gothic Corporeal). What I basically mean is, when we talk about relating to, identifying with, ‘reclaiming’ the monster, we have to have a real grasp on what it is we’re trying to impose such a practice on, and what the actual substance of the source text has to say for itself. I’m not one for assuming a text as a body with a set of metaphysical properties that we as critics are tasked to find – I think the relationship between text and reader ought to be dialectical – but part of that dialectical process means situating the text in its material social context and responding appropriately.

[queenoffloweryhell]

Once again, Ben Galpin and Karim Kronfli ooze pure skill in and absolute control over their performances in today's ep of re: Dracula

Good Friend Jonathan's nervous undertone throughout the entirety of the episode, because when you find yourself trapped alone and helpless that maddening fear pervades everything you do, every thought you have

Dracula's first person narrative of long gone history lazily explained away as familial pride while his voice hikes up and up in excitement as his explanations get more and more personal, not a teaching of history, but a retelling of experience

And the sound design?? Absolute perfection. I maintain that sound design is something that requires a difficult balance of being ignoreable vs memorable. Background noise and music to enhance the voice acting in the foreground vs stretches of silence or big sounds to catch your attention. The entirety of re: Dracula so far has been an impeccable example of this, but (imo) especially May 8. That shattering mirror is still echoing in my ears, because it was a big sound at a critical moment that legit made me jump after focusing entirely on Good Friend Jonathan and Count Dracula's voices.

Y'all over at @re-dracula didn't have to go this hard, but you did, and I see you, and I appreciate you

[ashes-in-a-jar]

In my head, you’re a Magnus Archives blog. I mean, I know you obviously listen to other things, but In my mind it’s things like Welcome to Nightvale, Malevolent, Hello from the Hallowoods, The Sheridan Tapes, things like that, horror and supernatural.

So I had to do a double-take when I saw a Dungeons and Daddies post from you, I really didn’t know you listened to it. Then I see you reblog a Fawx and Stallion post, and now I’m just wondering how many podcasts you’ve listened to that I’ve also listened to.

Hahaha yes this blog has been mainly for tma stuff for years now, I still feel like I'm new to the fandom but honestly I've been here through a lot of it since the beginning of season 5

Buuuuut in the past few months I've stopped going into the tma tag regularly and been feeling a little detached from it, at least as opposed to before. My listen to tmagp has been way less interactive and I hardly reblog content anymore (which is something I like doing but because of various bad experiences on the internet recently I have yet to recover from I feel safer posting my own original posts rather than reblogging)

And that freed up a space in my mind to realize I've actually been listening to a lot of podcasts besides tma and it's honestly a shame not to talk about them more with others

I do listen to a lot of horror fantasy supernatural and science fiction podcasts! I also love a lot of dnd and ttrpg podcasts, I also love everything dropout and wish I could get into critical role but it's so big I don't think I'll manage it

I put under the cut a (quite long) list of the podcasts I have listened to and/or have notifications turned on

Anyone following me, you're welcome to send me an ask about one of them if you like them as well or want to hear about them!

I also put a list of podcasts on my to listen to list. Feel free to drop a recommendation for which them to listen to first!

-------------

Podcasts I'm caught up on (the lists are long so it's alphabetical without "the")

Ongoing podcasts

The Amelia project

Ask your father

A voice from darkness

Black box

Brimstone valley mall

Camlann

The cellar letters

Death by dying

Derelict

Eeler's choice

Ethics town

Fawx and stallion

Hello from the Hallowoods

The hundred handed

Levian

Lost terminal

The Magnus protocol

Malevolent

Midnight burger

The mistholme museum of mystery morbidity and mortality

Neon inkwell

New years day

Not quite dead

Old gods of Appalachia

The penumbra podcast

The program

Red valley

The Sheridan Tapes

The silt verses

The sound museum

Super suits

Tell no tales

Tiny terrors

Traveling light

Unseen

The vesta clinic

Victoriocity

The white vault

Completed podcasts

Absolutely no adventures

Archive 81

Borrasca

The bright sessions

Camp here and there

Descendants

Give me away

I am in eskew

Monstrous agonies

Parkdale haunt

The Magnus archives

Re: dracula

The secret of st kilda

Spirit box radio

Steal the stars

Time:bombs

We know none

Wolf 359

Wooden overcoats

Ttrpgs

The adventure zone

Campaign skyjacks

Chapter and multiverse

Dark dice

Dice shame

Dimension 20 (not a podcast but I listen to it like one)

Dungeons and daddies

Not another d&d podcast

Rusty Quill gaming

Worlds beyond number

Podcast on my listen next list:

The Alexandria archives

Alice isn't dead

Ars paradoxica

Believer

The Black tapes

Blackwood

The box

The bridge

Carrier

Counterbalance

The cryptid keeper

Darkest night

The darkroom

The dark tome

The deca tapes

The deep vault

Dreamboy (this one is nsfw so it makes me nervous lol)

Duggan Hill

The earth collective

Either

The far meridian

The fountain road files

The glass canon

Jar of rebuke

Kings fall am (I started but heard not great things about it)

Knifepoint horror

Kollok 1991

Less is morgue

The leviathan chronicles

Liberty

Limetown

The lost cat

Mabel

Maeltopia

Marscorp

Mirrors

Mockery manor

Next stop

The no sleep podcast

The orphans

The Orpheus protocol

Out of place

Paired

Palimpsest

The phone booth

Point mystic

Pseudopod

Rabbits

The right left game

Shadows at the door

Spines

Stellar firma

The storage papers

Stories from among the stars

Super ordinary

Superstition

Tanis

Tides

Unwell

Vast horizon

Victoria's lift

Video palace

Welcome to night Vale (I listen to this one very sporadically lol)

We're alive

Within the wires

Woe begone (I started but got stuck on episode 20ish but want to continue)

Wrong station

Ttrpgs

BomBARDded

Critical role (it's sooo long tho)

Dames and dragons

Dragon friends

Join the party

The lucky die

Queens of adventure

Realms of pearl and glory

Rude tales of magic

Skyjacks courier call

Three black halflings

[sexyleon]

I felt that post of yours about the Dracula fandom and the way it talks about adaptations tbh, like, I'm someone who was very involved in DD last year and I've written critique myself about Dracula adaptations bc I love comparative analysis and really thinking about the choices adaptations make, for good or for ill, but from my personal experience, a lot of fandom commentary on adaptations isn't really thoughtful analysis, and don't get me wrong, I'm a hater sometimes too and enjoying venting, but I noticed that this year, there were so many posts that started out as thoughtful commentary on the book, then launched into bitching about the evils of adaptations out of nowhere, and people can write what they want, but it got tiring after awhile to be in a fandom with so much angry energy, not to mention the divergence in canon vs fanon that was much starker this year that made me feel like I had read a different book.

Also, every time I see people point at re: Dracula to be like, see, it's so easy to do a perfect 1:1 adaptation of the novel, why can't other adaptations do it?, it's like, it's an audiobook, a movie can't be that long, even a television mini-series would have to make cuts. And I might dislike a lot of choices adaptations make, but creatives absolutely have the right to take a public domain work and put their own spin on things beyond book accuracy as the number one goal - and like, do we truly want a 100% accurate adaptation when the novel is still ultimately a xenophobic reverse invasion story? Like, I would hope modern directors would seriously grapple with those aspects of the original story instead of reproducing Victorian bigotry unquestioned.

Hi, thank you for your response! I'm glad that my post resonated with a few people!

I definitely also felt a shift in energy with this season of Dracula Daily, and I'm pretty sure it is a direct result of the phenomena that is Re: Dracula. Don't get me wrong, I am a HUGE supporter of RE: Dracula, and I found it to be absolutely delightful specifically because it was a 1:1 adaptation of the book, but I also think that it has skewed the way people engage with all the other adaptations of Dracula. You are so right when you say that Re: Dracula's media as audiobook is what allowed it to be so authentic. Even if it was a long-form series, there would have to be creative liberties taken to account for visualising certain aspects of the text. I am 100% sure someone would be able to do it, but it would undoubtedly be a labour of love and expense.

I think the biggest thing that got lost in translation in my post is that I was speaking specifically on the rhetoric of "bad adaptation = bad media." I don't even like to use the term "bad adaptation" because it feels inaccurate and gives the connotation of being holistically terrible; "failed adaptation" or "inauthentic adaptation" seems more apt when discussing how close an adaptation relates to the source material. I think it is unfair for any adaptation to be written off solely on the fact that it does not strictly adhere to the original text. This can be in way of narrative, characterization, theme, etc. I don't think it's fair to say "x adaptation is bad because it ignores x from the text" because that fundamentally dismisses all the other attributes that contribute to whether or not a piece of media is subjectively good (because honestly that's all it is-- subjectivity). Media, especially film and stage, has so many dynamic and moving parts. There are so many attributes that contribute to the success of any one given thing, especially adaptations (which can claim the title with even the loosest references to the source material). I feel like the black and white thinking when it comes to this doesn't really allow for a dialogue to exist between people who enjoy Dracula adaptations for what they are and, forgive me for saying this, book purists.

Understandably, there is criticism against some adaptations that have claimed to follow the source text closely, but very distinctly did not (Ahum, Cappola). However, I think it does everyone a disservice to deny the impact of a lot of these (mostly) films. Someone in the reblogs of my original post did a good breakdown of the origins of the Dracula genre itself, and I think it goes to show that the story of Dracula has a life of its own outside of the pages of Bram Stoker's book.

The most annoying thing about the responses to my initial post was the refusal to believe that anyone was making these comparisons. I really would not have gone out on a limb to rant about this if I hadn't been consistently seeing vent posts in the main tag with mostly negative responses to a lot of different adaptations of Dracula based on the authenticity of them to the text. I admit I was frustrated when I wrote it, but it really was meant to just address the black and white thinking re: failed adaptations making bad media. This is not to say that criticism of adaptations isn't valid, but I think there should be more nuance to this conversation and that's what I wasn't seeing. It's not fun to dive into the broad Dracula tag and find post after post shitting on your favourite media because it isn't like the book.

Sorry this was a bit long! I am just really passionate about Dracula okay!! And I really really really like all the shitty little shows and movies and plays and comics and all other media that comes out of his name (because YES, a lot of adaptations really make vampire synonymous with Dracula and ROLL WITH IT). Vampires are really neat and the Dracula genre of film has been a huge influence on horror media. I think there is a lot to be said when analysing adaptations, but none of it can come from blanket statements against them.

@spider-xan

[hinasho]

This is the last thing I'll say in regards to the criticism.

James O'Barr is fine with new adaptations of his graphic novel.

He had joined on board the production process when there was going to be a 2014 adaptation of Eric's storyline with Luke Evans as the lead.

"[We're] not remaking the [1994] movie. We're re-adapting the book. My metaphor is that there is a Bela Lugosi Dracula (1931) and there's a Francis Ford Coppola Dracula (1992). They use the same material, but you still got two entirely different films. This one's going to be closer to Taxi Driver (1976) or a John Woo film, and I think there's room for both of them. Part of the appeal of The Crow comics, after all, is that they can tell very different stories."

James is not only fine with new adaptations, he's tired of how many he's wanted to see happen that unfortunately never got released.

Earlier this year on April 18, 2024, he sat down for an interview with The Legacy Of Nerd youtube channel.

(@ about 9 minutes & 38 seconds)

INTERVIEWER: "What do you think has been the most frustrating thing of seeing these projects lag, lag, and lag?" JAMES: "[...] A couple of them, ya know, I've met the directors and worked with them on the script. I've put a lot of effort and time into drawing things and re-writing scripts. And then at the last minute it falls apart and I have nothing to show for that." JAMES: "So it became frustrating to where, I just... If you're going to make a movie, go make it! I don't want to have anything to do with it. Go make the best movie you can, but I can't invest anymore time and effort into this thing. When nothing is going to happen."

And he's found it frustrating how many times he has to explain to skeptics and complainers that different adaptations do not harm the original story in any way.

(@ about 10 minutes & 30 seconds)

INTERVIEWER: "The '94 Brandon Lee movie is really hard to re-do—" JAMES: "Yeah, people love that character. But they understand though. Even the people that love the first film and don't want a new one, they understand. They're gonna go see it, just so they can have something to bitch about."

(@ about 11 minutes & 14 seconds)

INTERVIEWER: "...The Brandon Lee version has a very important feel to a lot of people and that's how a lot of people discovered The Crow. To go on and to read the books and read the comics and stuff like that. I can see why it's been so difficult to re-do over the years and I can see from a creator standpoint that—" JAMES: "When I was working on them, like the Jason Momoa one, having to explain to people that it's not... how many film versions of Dracula are there? There's like 60 of them. Everybody has their favorite. [...] It's the same source material but it's a different way to tell it. I spent a lot of time explaining to people that it's not going to take anything away from Brandon's movie. This is just a different way to look at it."

The only thing James does NOT want are people trying to remake the story in the same exact way.

"The Crow [1994] still holds up remarkably well. For a 10 million dollar film, it looks astonishing… it seems kind of pointless if you’re just going to be repetitious." - James in an interview with Supanova.

---

"If you read the comic, Eric and Shelley never have their last names revealed," he said. "Hopefully, this is one area the new movie being more faithful to the comic will come into play, and Eric won't be going by Eric Draven in the new film. "Luke Evans may play Eric, but Brandon Lee will forever be Eric Draven... No-one understands that fear more than me. Brandon Lee was a friend and I'd never do anything to hurt his legacy." - James in 2014 when he was working on the Luke Evans version.

As long as the re-imagining has it's own spin and doesn't try to copy beat for beat the same exact story as it's already been told, James is more than okay with it. He actively supports re-adaptations of his graphic novel as long as they're unique and refreshing in some way.

So if you truly care about the original creator's own thoughts on his own work... please get a grip.