#we're supposed to be enjoying the fact that: Hey. New folks are reading the dusty old stories we love. Enough to be interested in a poll!

[see-arcane]

me, ten innocent minutes ago: Come on, it can’t be that bad. 

me now, fresh from reading the Tag Warzone, aging like a magic portrait in an attic: 

Guys. My friends. My fellows in gothic lit love. This is just a funny little poll on tumblred dotted com. Reserve this rage for the infinity of bastardizing media based on our favorite books that have yet to ever actually do the stories credit. You know, the content that actually goes out of its way to sandblast and strip the characters of their character, often being far more regressive than the books that were written in the 19th century. That deserves our bile. Torches and pitchforks and a plague upon Hollywood, et cetera.

That said, why is it so deeply enraging to you that people might find Jonathan Harker more appealing/sexymanlier than Dorian Gray? Jonathan Harker, who up until recently on this site (and frankly, everywhere else) was practically a ghost in his own story after over a century of being buried by sour Freudian lit critic takes and even worse sidelining and distorting of character from films and TV? 

People barely remember who Jonathan Harker is in pop cultural osmosis because he’s so consistently smothered by warped takes that turn Dracula into a liberating Casanova rather than an enslaving, abusive monster.

His recent popularity can only be blamed on Dracula Daily...

...in that it required people to sit down and actually read the story and meet Jonathan Harker as he was. A loving, vulnerable, passionate, dedicated-to-his-wife-unto-blasphemy protagonist. Oh, and also a husband! Which somehow is also a demerit in sexymanhood.* 

(*I’ll be honest this one legit confused me. Like not even angry-confused, just outright baffled.)

Additionally, voting for Jonathan is an outright attack. One that makes you:**

**Grain of salt here, maybe this is just a hyperbolic joke. Apologies if so. But the general vein of the tag pile makes me wonder. 

Especially considering how often Jonathan is genuinely used as a character-shaped bin to dump random biases in by academics and directors to make him seem like a less worthy love interest to Mina to support their latest Daring Count Fuckula adaptation. Because he’s somehow supposed to represent Othering on top of secretly being afraid of powerful women while also secretly being a cheater.

Jonathan ‘Definitely Extremely Straight’ Harker, who wrote he was charmed by Dracula before the Count got creepy and abusive. Jonathan ‘Mega Dull Standard Man’ Harker who had many a damsel moment over the two month period of gothic heroine imprisonment. 

Which isn’t even getting into the points made about how Bram Stoker used both him and Mina as self-inserts in exploring the idea of a queer certainly not a reaction to Wilde’s trial unconventional romance that could go against God Himself, as seen when Jonathan vows to join Mina in undeath as a demonic vampire if she can’t be cured, even after the Holy Wafer burns her and seems to show God’s abandonment. Certainly no symbolism happening here.

There’s also “Dracula’s Guest,” to consider, featuring a narrator likely intended to also be Jonathan pre-castle. A story in which he is rescued from a mob of vampires by Dracula the Wolf pinning him down and licking his throat (and stealing a nip), before Jonathan is whisked away by some manly traveling soldiers on horseback, one of whom he takes up to his room for a talk and a glass of wine. 

Nothing but wall to wall hetero happenings there, too. You can tell because, in true cinematic fashion, the movie kept entirely to the text and didn’t change a single th--

...

Hm. Well, at least it’s keeping with tradition. Said tradition being erasing or swapping out Jonathan Harker’s canonical role as the damsel preyed on by a powerful older man and given the bulk of his intimate attention while the actual women are given a love bite or two before being ditched. Because Jonathan and his role are just so so straight and heteronormative and homophobic and repressed and sexy vampire lady-horny all at the same time. A multitasker, you know.

But this is all getting off track. 

Let’s turn to the star of the show: the gorgeous, the beguiling, the paint and blood-spattered Dorian Gray. I do mean that literally. He is the star of every show--movie, musicals, et cetera--with him in it. Because his story is all about him. About his innocent beginnings, about his descent into debauchery and half-mad refusal to accept his wrongdoings as truly his, warring with the flickers of conscience that dare to arise as he buries himself in harmful hedonism that results in the piling of tragic and wholly preventable deaths caused by callousness. Sibyl and Basil, Alan and James. Dorian himself.

And the whole of the novella is beautiful for both Wilde’s most perfumed prose and cruelest conjuring, showing the ugliness and evil that can simmer under pretty veneers, and how sadistically the purest love can be spurned--oh Sibyl, oh Basil--when a life becomes ruled only by immediate self-satisfaction. If we’re being honest, beautiful and infinitely capable of seduction as Gray is, his character has more in common with Edward Hyde than any other figure of the era. It’s just that he has the blessing (curse?) of the portrait to preserve his beauty versus showing the increasing deformity of his soul as Jekyll and Hyde wears theirs/his.

He is an entertaining, enthralling, engagingly complicated and groundbreaking character in literature, as is his book. Which is all about him. And even in the most agonizingly straight-washed and, notably, very often brunet-washed to cover up his original Anglo golden tresses and Cupid complexion because only dark features are allowed for characters who descend into wickedness we still get to see the bulk of his character and story arc unfold in a way that delivers the core of the novella.

Dorian Gray is known. Dorian Gray is a shorthand term. People can quip about folks who look perpetually young and lovely as probably having a portrait aging in the attic because the story is so immediately known, just as the character is. 

If you want to argue that, in a legitimate crossover, Dorian Gray would draw more amorous attention than Jonathan Harker? 

I would buy that. 110%. We don’t even have a ton of description for Jonathan to go on beyond his eyelashes, looking reserved and friendly, seeming at once young and ancient/corpse-like following the discovery of Mina’s being assaulted by Dracula, and having a general grave and wraithlike look for the latter third of the book. Very nebulous versus Dorian’s clear-cut description of his features.

In a book where the two worlds meld, Dorian Gray could have rooms upon parties upon whole counties wrapped around his ageless finger. As per canon.

Jonathan Harker would still be the person who had a higher quality of people around him. More of happiness too, despite Gray’s rabid and nigh tragic chasing of that fleeting experience. Jonathan Harker has endeared himself to the cast of his novel. Just as he has, finally, after one colossal, beautiful Internet-wide book club moment, endeared himself to an audience who barely knew he existed as anything but a footnote in misleading essays and mangled movies.

Endearment that is redoubled due to so many new readers recognizing in him what Stoker intended him to be for Mina, even as she wept and declared herself unclean for being attacked by Dracula, for being tainted by vampirism, for being the Other.

Jonathan Harker’s love is unconditional. Period. 

His love is what keeps him from suicide in the castle, what drives him to civilization through the wilderness, what powers him through that strange transformation that culminated in him hunting down the Count and chopping his head off in the bastard’s dirt box. He is the champion we all wish we had as a partner, the person who looks us in the eye and tells us that even if God Himself has declared us filth, has deemed us a monster, he does not care. He will not let anyone harm us, even ourselves. And he is ready to be a monster with and for us.

How is that not objectively sexy?

How is he not objectively someone that people who have the ability to see beyond faces and into actions--like us, the Audience--would leap at the chance to love and be loved by?

I’m not saying he has to be your sexyman, or your type, or your blorbo, or any kind of favorite in literature. He doesn’t even have to be The Gothic Lit Sexyman Supreme (c). But he, and people who like/support him more than Dorian Gray, deserve not to be spat and shat on for having a little lead in a fun nonsense fandom poll like a dozen others circulating right now. 

Last thing, because it was a greatly languished fact in the tags too: 

The Dorian Gray Weekly Substack is right here.

Been going on since January.

It’s one of the many, many, many classic literature Substacks that have taken off thanks to Dracula Daily’s success proving that people are eager and willing to dive into old stories they only previously knew from misleading media and dry-as-dirt classes that sucked all the beauty out of reading them.

Oh, my mistake. We aren’t thanking Dracula Daily for inspiring anything in anyone. 

We’re blaming it.

tl;dr: Long-ass ramble that amounts to wondering how particularly meanspirited fans think ‘WELL IF ONLY PEOPLE HADN’T RECENTLY READ THE BOOK WITH THIS OTHER CONSTANTLY MISREPRESENTED CHARACTER IN IT AND WERE ENCHANTED BY HIM DOING COOL THINGS AND BEING APPEALING, HE DEFINITELY WOULDN’T BE WINNING IN THE SEXYPOLL AGAINST ONE OF THE MOST FAMOUS PRETTY MURDER MEN IN ALL OF MEDIA!’ is a good argument or a reason to be so full of bile 

aaand want you guys to be normal about Jonathan "shafted away from half his own canon's adaptations and spin offs" Harker winning something on a small tunglr dot edu poll. esp since I've seen him lose plenty of polls so far and ones he qualifies for more than sexyman (which I don't think he is but if u do that's valid there ain't no dictionary definition) and no one was nasty on his behalf there. like maybe don't literally call people homophobic and/or illiterates and just be normal abt it maybe ‼️