#and the novel itself which is SATURATED with God Christ and more God

[cry-ptidd]

I'VE SAID IT BEFORE, I'LL SAY IT AGAIN,

Dracula doesn't DESERVE Mina in any way, and he doesn't love her. Not like Jonathan does (nor does Mina love Dracula back).

Jonathan was, on his goddamn soul, ready to throw away his soul and chance in paradise and betray his own comrades for Mina. He, a good Christian Victorian boy™️, was ready for that, to make a full 180.

Was Dracula ready to redeem himself for Mina, though? Was he ready to make that 180 like Jonathan?

No the FUCK he wasn't

Jonathan Harker: The ‘Absolute Love Corrupts Absolutely’ Villain That Almost Was*

*LONG before Francis Ford Coppola’s Cinematic Gary Oldman Fanfiction

Spoilers ahead for the Dracula Daily enjoyers, because I’m whipping out all my literary receipts on this.

I recently finished speed-rereading Dracula because I have no self-control. In doing so, I got a refresher on quite a few incendiary factors of the book that time had dulled in my memory.

1.     There’s a TON of ‘I’m not like other girls!’ and ‘men good, women dainty,’ and ‘What no I’m not projecting, honest, I just really like the words manful, voluptuous, manful, aquiline, manful, God, and manful again. –Bramothy Stoker,’ so brace for that from basically the whole cast. I’m blaming it partly on Bram Flakes’ own prejudices, of which there are plenty, and the fact that he’d clearly never met a thesaurus in his life.

(I appreciate everyone’s mental revamp of Mina as the New Woman to Lucy’s Classic Damsel, but…oof. Everyone’s in for a harsh Period/Stoker Accurate reminder.)

2.     Brammy Pajamas was either hanging around some exceptionally devout Christians to write some of the second/third act scenes with everyone basically thrashing and wailing and falling on their knees and clasping/kissing hands as they pray to/thank God, all while thinking it was perfectly natural behavior for these characters…or he legit had no clue how any kind of ordinary human being, Christian or otherwise, would react to the situations he puts them in.

(Seriously, it’s not even that everyone’s devout, it’s that they’re all written to act like they’re in a soap opera where the only direction they got was to be as hammy and histrionic as physically possible. You’ll know the scenes when you see them.)

3.     Jonathan Harker has not only been done dirty by every adaptation since the book in terms of being a main character, along with being the character to spend the most time with Dracula in close quarters, period, and being the love interest for Mina—his whole character arc by the second half of the book is the most blazing hot, “If my beloved is destined for damnation, I’m heading to Hell with her, fuck all else,” shit I have ever read in classic literature, full stop.

Not Dracula. Not any character based on Dracula.

Jonathan fucking Harker is the OG archetype for Love Corrupts (Violently), and the canon story avoided him going full tragic villain by t h i s much. You want proof? Let’s go.

NOTE: MAIN SPOILERS STRAIGHT FROM THE BOOK, SHIELD YOUR EYES

Here’s the part most Harker fans scream over, myself included:

“To one thing I have made up my mind: if we find out that Mina must be a vampire in the end, then she shall not go into that unknown and terrible land alone. I suppose it is thus that in old times one vampire meant many; just as their hideous bodies could only rest in sacred earth, so the holiest love was the recruiting sergeant for their ghastly ranks.”

Good shit, good shit! Jonathan was already prepared to risk falling to his death from a cliff or being eaten by wolves rather than stay in Castle Dracula for a bloodthirsty eternity with the ladies. But now? Mina is quite literally his, “You are worth Hell,” Beloved. But there’s more. Fast forward to one of Team Fuck-Up-That-Old-Undead-Man’s first head-on encounters with the Count. As they’re waiting, Jonathan gets impatient, declaring:

“I care for nothing now,” he answered hotly, “except to wipe out this brute from the face of creation. I would sell my own soul to do it!”

He says as much in front of his Christian+ buddies who, by now, had pretty fair reasons to believe in the legitimacy of Hell and all its demons. Van Helsing is definitely startled and seemingly talks him down from such an oath. Key word being seemingly. Because we jump forward again to a point where Mina, in full saintly forgiveness mode (and apparently selectively forgetting Van Helsing’s history lesson about Dracula’s pre-vampire days being ones of a slaughtering tyrant), saying that if/when they destroy the Count, oh, how happy his soul will be to be free of his torment on Earth, et cetera. Jonathan Harker has a rebuttal to share. Namely:

“May God give him into my hand just for long enough to destroy that earthly life of him which we are aiming at. If beyond that I could send his soul forever and ever to burning hell I would do it!”

God forgives. Jonathan Harker emphatically does not.

Onward again, and he speaks volumes by what he does not say. Chiefly, there’s a point where Mina, now in full martyr preparation should the worst happen, makes the boys swear an oath to destroy her body if/when she succumbs and dies to Dracula’s vampiric poisoning so she cannot rise again as one of his ladies. The boys swear. Mostly. What we get from Jonathan is…

“And must I, too, make such a promise, oh, my wife?”

“You too, my dearest.” (Note: The rest of her paragraph here is full of the most knife-twisting, utterly warped martyr ‘pep talk’ I’ve ever read, and I have no idea how she/Bramarama thought it would remotely convince Jonathan this was all a reasonable and chill thing she was talking about. Anyway.)

It’s important to note that absolutely nowhere in the ensuing text does Jonathan ever speak the promise out loud. He does read the goddamn Burial Service at Mina’s request, which he barely chokes his way through. But he never makes the oath.

Another jump ahead. They are on the hunt for Dracula and, alas, have just missed him at a key point. Most of the gang are shaking their fists at the sky, cursing up and down. And what is Jonathan doing? Well, to quote Jack Seward, just before the epiphany…

“We men were all in a fever of excitement, except Harker, who is calm; his hands are as cold as ice, and an hour ago I found him whetting the edge of the great Ghoorka knife which he now always carries with him. It will be a bad look-out for the Count if the edge of that ‘Kukri’ ever touches his throat, driven by that stern, ice-cold hand!”

And upon discovery of the Count slipping them…

“Harker smiled—actually smiled—the dark bitter smile of one who is without hope; but at the same time his action belied his words, for his hands instinctively sought the hilt of the great Kukri knife and rested there.”

For context, by this point Jonathan had already come at Dracula with said Kukri knife a while back, having nearly landed the blow after charging out of the pack and nearly fucking gutting the Count. For extra context, this is a Kukri knife:

He’s just been walking around with that. For half the book. Plotting.

And, with all of this in mind, we can only assume Jonathan had two plans of action in mind.

Plan A, follow Van Helsing’s lead.

…Not counting the moment he almost bit the Professor’s head off for saying he had to bring Mina along with him to Castle Dracula. Another good scene which includes his very succinct reaction to Van Helsing’s suggestion, even if he does have to agree in the end:

“Not for the world! Not for Heaven or Hell!”

Anyway. If the plan works out, cool. He gets to kill Dracula, Mina is saved. Best case scenario!

But then there’s the unspoken, explicitly unwritten (in case his pages need to be read), but heavily foreshadowed Plan B. They cannot destroy the Count, in time or otherwise. Mina is now either a corpse waiting to awake as a vampire, or a vampire already. The others, true to their vow, mean to destroy her.

Jonathan Harker, true only to Mina, in whatever form she may take, still has that Kukri. And the element of surprise. And a full acknowledgment of the realities of Heaven, Hell, and his holding Mina’s continued existence above them, his friends, his sanity, his humanity, and himself.

In short, all your tragically romantic Draculas can kindly go fuck themselves with a wooden stake. Jonathan Harker is the first and best gothic horror example of a person in love to the point of madness, damnation, and willingness to deceive or destroy anyone who would endanger the one he loves. The only reason we never got to see it in action was because Stoker had to tack on a happy ending. If he hadn’t?

The census would be less four unsuspecting heroes and plus two newlywed vampires.

The End.

Suck on it, Francis.

[grandhotelabyss]

Do you think you are the last generation that won't have even it's "intelectuals" be obsessed with juvenile media, aka how now even well read people like Logo Daedalus are obsessed with One Piece and Batman movies with Nirvana soundtracks? I guess you could be humble and say "well I like comics too", but it seems even that is more of a thing you market to get an edge but in reality is just a teenage passion mostly left behind, which itself only proves my thesis that now everyone has to be the eternal child to be able to adult

But my generation of intellectuals, and the two or three before mine, and arguably the two or three before that, are obsessed with juvenile media. It just stops looking juvenile when intellectuals normalize it. The Boomers gave Bob Dylan the Nobel Prize for Literature! Maybe they'll give it to the One Piece guy in 50 years. This started almost as soon as the division between high and mass culture in its modern form was incepted around the turn of the century. Intellectuals wrote with admiration about jazz, movies, and comics as early as the '20s. A lot of modernism, in many ways itself a youth revolt, was about allying high culture with low against the senescent middle. Gramsci argued that the Nietzschean Superman, whence comes the superhero himself, derived from the earlier iteration of the superhero in French adventure novels. Earlier, Dickens's novels are saturated in fairy tales and offer a defense of children's culture as ethical and authentic, in line with the Romantic exaltation of the child. On the other side of modernism, avant-garde novelists like Pynchon breached the high-low barrier and synthesized the art novel with comics, rock music, and movies. The vanguard of modern culture exalts the juvenile and its cultural appurtenances, and it has been doing so since around the French Revolution. Then again, I just did an IC episode on The Oresteia, according to which the Golden Age of Athens originated when new generation of gods put the traditional elite out of commission. And is the Romantic exaltation of the child not anticipated, as Blake would remind us, in Christ's own valuation of the little ones? Western culture has always worshiped youth. The countervailing position, whether conservative or Marxist, has been defeated again and again. I don't believe this cultural logic can be stopped, and it's difficult to know what it would look like if it was.

[mechanicalinertia]

Some thoughts on re-reading Snow Crash

Sorry if you expected me to have a new update on the RPG. I’ve been all over the place mentally lately. Anyway, since I last read Snow Crash like ten years ago, and probably didn’t understand most of what was going on, I’ve been re-reading it, which is something I almost never do. Here’s some thoughts on what the book does, what it gets right, what it doesn’t, etc.

1. You can draw a pretty straight line from the Neal Stephenson who wrote The Diamond Age and the one who wrote the other books of his I’ve read, the Mongoliad, SevenEves, and Fall: Dodge In Hell. It’s something in the way his prose is written, the way it unfolds. His books have gotten progressively longer, progressively more serious, progressively more weird and less weird at the same time. I will say this much: I never finished SevenEves or Fall. They’re just so fucking long, and so dull, so exposition-y. Moreover, they kinda lack the exciting stuff that Snow Crash is saturated with - dudes with katanas, Japanese rap-stars with glowing afros, gatling railguns, Mafia pizza delivery, nuclear motorcycle sidecars. Christ, if it weren’t for the book’s obsession with really interesting Sumerian linguistic shit, I’d almost say that Snow Crash and all Stephenson’s other books were written by different people.

2. While we’re on the topic of linguistic stuff, religion as a virus, etc, it amazes me that when Stephenson was doing his research about Sumerian and Babel and how Snow Crash would spread, he didn’t come across Julian Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. I say this because Jaynes’ work has a similar hypothesis - namely, ancient man was not conscious in the sense we are conscious, and that the Late Bronze Age Collapse triggered a revolution in the invention of the self and the conscious mind - and, of course, that religion is a desire to revert to that more primitive state where something higher, something separate, the literal words of the gods, tells you what to do. It’s not exactly about viruses, or hackers, and it seems to pin the sea change in mind and language much later than Stephenson, but god damn. Both authors’ sets of evidence are based on not neurophysiological evidence (for how could you? You’d need millennia-old brains to compare!) so much as they are based on linguistics, archaeology, all sorts of evidence that may not seem as hard to modern readers but which is still interesting stuff.

Which reminds me. I first learned about the bicameral mind theory in context with an essay about the Aztecs in this book. Freshman year of high school and our history teacher gave us that, wherein Kunstler proposes that the Aztecs turned to human sacrifice as a way to traumatize their own society to reverting back to bicameralism. It’s an interesting theory, I’m just not sure it matches up with archaeological evidence - I remember vaguely that it was suggested that the whole delusion that Cortes was God was likely a Spanish invention, likewise the human sacrifice was a fabrication. I gotta look this up. (If you want to really dig a rabbit hole, lemme just say that the historical account of how Cortes and company brought down the Aztec empire would make a truly excellent HBO miniseries.)

(I just realized there’s a plot hole - Civilization arose independently, at several different river valleys - the Sumerians might have been the first, and their descendants might have hacked out all of Abrahamic religion, but the Yangtze, the Indus, the Amazon, the Nile - there’s no reason to assume they were under the same Babelian thrall that the Sumerians were. So the whole idea of Babel being real, of having an impact on every living person, is a little shaky. Whatever.)

3. Stephenson’s cyberpunk isn’t as urbane as Gibson’s or Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. If anything, it describes an un-urban future, balkanized into ‘burbclaves’, sovereign microstates linked by megacorporate franchises. Which is - interesting? If one exaggerated everything about the 90′s, the Post Cold War Capitalism, then yeah, the idea of dissolving state sovereignty itself is pretty sensible. Gibson did the same thing in his Bridge Trilogy, now that I think about it. And Malka Older, much more recently, did a similar thing in Infomocracy (which is a truly excellent book, though it feels weirdly outdated in the wake of Trump’s election). I’m not sure what, exactly, the urban density of the future will look like, especially knowing that a) climate change will fuck up large parts of the world, and b) more sprawl = more human-wild interfaces = more bugs jumping from wild animals to humans and causing economy-wrecking pandemics (see: COVID-19). One would hope we’d try building denser cities, ones with less climate-impacting sprawl, be more sensible about our design choices, but capitalism is probably going to do what capitalism always does, which is make retarded decisions about the direction of humanity. (See: Fossil Fuel Lobbies).

4. Some say that Snow Crash, then, is a reaction to cyberpunk tropes, the ones so engrained in the popular consciousness at that point, that they just had to be taken apart, deconstructed with a satirist’s eye. I mean, c’mon. Hiro Protagonist, master hacker and ninja swordsman? He’s like if Gibson’s Case mixed with Bruce Lee. Corporations so powerful they’re states unto themselves? Rich dudes buying entire aircraft carriers? Guns, sex, drugs, rock n’ roll? You get the idea. 

I’m not so sure, though. The Metaverse feels like a pretty novel take on Gibson’s Matrix, but it’s one that updates the idea of a global information network, not pokes fun at it. I mean, this was the era that cyberpunk entered the mainstream, when it sold out and was eaten alive by Hollywood, culminating in the Wachowski’s The Matrix, which is at once the height and the death of cyberpunk as a legitimate genre (or maybe CP2077 will be, it’s hard to say). This is a book that could have been much nastier towards the Gibson-Sterling conception of cyberpunk, could have marked it all up as nasty people with too many guns in trenchcoats and shades. I say that because that’s a criticism a lot of cyberpunk fiction has had to deal with (and indeed, those critics may be right for the pop-culture image of cyberpunk, the one propagated by Shadowrun and CP2020). But I don’t think it is.

5. This is a fun book to read. It’s right up there in my mind with Hardwired, another cyberpunk ‘classic’ (because the genre is old enough to have classics, now, I guess). You should read it.

[floraski]

# JONATHAN HARKER IS A GOOD BOY A LOVELY YOUNG MAN AND HE CAN AND WILL KILL FOR HIS WIFE :) :) :) # SERIOUSLY THERE'S A WHOLE OTHER ESSAY TO GO WITH HOW GLORIOUSLY FUCKED UP-PASSIONATE THIS STANCE IS WITHIN BOTH THE TIME IT WAS WRITTEN # AND THE NOVEL ITSELF WHICH IS SATURATED WITH GOD CHRIST AND MORE GOD # FOR THIS FUCKER TO HAVE GONE THROUGH WHAT HE DID IN THE CASTLE ON TOP OF ALL THE VERY CLEAR PROOFS OF DIVINE VS INFERNAL GOINGS-ON # THIS DUDE IS FLIPPING THE BIRD TO ALL OF IT # THE WHOLE MESS (BE IT OF GOD OR THE DEVIL OR FUCKING DRACULA) # NONE OF IT RANKS HIGHER THAN MINA IN HIS MIND # MY GUY IS FUCKED UP AND I LOVE HIM

Jonathan Harker: The ‘Absolute Love Corrupts Absolutely’ Villain That Almost Was*

*LONG before Francis Ford Coppola’s Cinematic Gary Oldman Fanfiction

Spoilers ahead for the Dracula Daily enjoyers, because I’m whipping out all my literary receipts on this.

I recently finished speed-rereading Dracula because I have no self-control. In doing so, I got a refresher on quite a few incendiary factors of the book that time had dulled in my memory.

1.     There’s a TON of ‘I’m not like other girls!’ and ‘men good, women dainty,’ and ‘What no I’m not projecting, honest, I just really like the words manful, voluptuous, manful, aquiline, manful, God, and manful again. –Bramothy Stoker,’ so brace for that from basically the whole cast. I’m blaming it partly on Bram Flakes’ own prejudices, of which there are plenty, and the fact that he’d clearly never met a thesaurus in his life.

(I appreciate everyone’s mental revamp of Mina as the New Woman to Lucy’s Classic Damsel, but…oof. Everyone’s in for a harsh Period/Stoker Accurate reminder.)

2.     Brammy Pajamas was either hanging around some exceptionally devout Christians to write some of the second/third act scenes with everyone basically thrashing and wailing and falling on their knees and clasping/kissing hands as they pray to/thank God, all while thinking it was perfectly natural behavior for these characters…or he legit had no clue how any kind of ordinary human being, Christian or otherwise, would react to the situations he puts them in.

(Seriously, it’s not even that everyone’s devout, it’s that they’re all written to act like they’re in a soap opera where the only direction they got was to be as hammy and histrionic as physically possible. You’ll know the scenes when you see them.)

3.     Jonathan Harker has not only been done dirty by every adaptation since the book in terms of being a main character, along with being the character to spend the most time with Dracula in close quarters, period, and being the love interest for Mina—his whole character arc by the second half of the book is the most blazing hot, “If my beloved is destined for damnation, I’m heading to Hell with her, fuck all else,” shit I have ever read in classic literature, full stop.

Not Dracula. Not any character based on Dracula.

Jonathan fucking Harker is the OG archetype for Love Corrupts (Violently), and the canon story avoided him going full tragic villain by t h i s much. You want proof? Let’s go.

NOTE: MAIN SPOILERS STRAIGHT FROM THE BOOK, SHIELD YOUR EYES

Here’s the part most Harker fans scream over, myself included:

“To one thing I have made up my mind: if we find out that Mina must be a vampire in the end, then she shall not go into that unknown and terrible land alone. I suppose it is thus that in old times one vampire meant many; just as their hideous bodies could only rest in sacred earth, so the holiest love was the recruiting sergeant for their ghastly ranks.”

Good shit, good shit! Jonathan was already prepared to risk falling to his death from a cliff or being eaten by wolves rather than stay in Castle Dracula for a bloodthirsty eternity with the ladies. But now? Mina is quite literally his, “You are worth Hell,” Beloved. But there’s more. Fast forward to one of Team Fuck-Up-That-Old-Undead-Man’s first head-on encounters with the Count. As they’re waiting, Jonathan gets impatient, declaring:

“I care for nothing now,” he answered hotly, “except to wipe out this brute from the face of creation. I would sell my own soul to do it!”

He says as much in front of his Christian+ buddies who, by now, had pretty fair reasons to believe in the legitimacy of Hell and all its demons. Van Helsing is definitely startled and seemingly talks him down from such an oath. Key word being seemingly. Because we jump forward again to a point where Mina, in full saintly forgiveness mode (and apparently selectively forgetting Van Helsing’s history lesson about Dracula’s pre-vampire days being ones of a slaughtering tyrant), saying that if/when they destroy the Count, oh, how happy his soul will be to be free of his torment on Earth, et cetera. Jonathan Harker has a rebuttal to share. Namely:

“May God give him into my hand just for long enough to destroy that earthly life of him which we are aiming at. If beyond that I could send his soul forever and ever to burning hell I would do it!”

God forgives. Jonathan Harker emphatically does not.

Onward again, and he speaks volumes by what he does not say. Chiefly, there’s a point where Mina, now in full martyr preparation should the worst happen, makes the boys swear an oath to destroy her body if/when she succumbs and dies to Dracula’s vampiric poisoning so she cannot rise again as one of his ladies. The boys swear. Mostly. What we get from Jonathan is…

“And must I, too, make such a promise, oh, my wife?”

“You too, my dearest.” (Note: The rest of her paragraph here is full of the most knife-twisting, utterly warped martyr ‘pep talk’ I’ve ever read, and I have no idea how she/Bramarama thought it would remotely convince Jonathan this was all a reasonable and chill thing she was talking about. Anyway.)

It’s important to note that absolutely nowhere in the ensuing text does Jonathan ever speak the promise out loud. He does read the goddamn Burial Service at Mina’s request, which he barely chokes his way through. But he never makes the oath.

Another jump ahead. They are on the hunt for Dracula and, alas, have just missed him at a key point. Most of the gang are shaking their fists at the sky, cursing up and down. And what is Jonathan doing? Well, to quote Jack Seward, just before the epiphany…

“We men were all in a fever of excitement, except Harker, who is calm; his hands are as cold as ice, and an hour ago I found him whetting the edge of the great Ghoorka knife which he now always carries with him. It will be a bad look-out for the Count if the edge of that ‘Kukri’ ever touches his throat, driven by that stern, ice-cold hand!”

And upon discovery of the Count slipping them…

“Harker smiled—actually smiled—the dark bitter smile of one who is without hope; but at the same time his action belied his words, for his hands instinctively sought the hilt of the great Kukri knife and rested there.”

For context, by this point Jonathan had already come at Dracula with said Kukri knife a while back, having nearly landed the blow after charging out of the pack and nearly fucking gutting the Count. For extra context, this is a Kukri knife:

He’s just been walking around with that. For half the book. Plotting.

And, with all of this in mind, we can only assume Jonathan had two plans of action in mind.

Plan A, follow Van Helsing’s lead.

…Not counting the moment he almost bit the Professor’s head off for saying he had to bring Mina along with him to Castle Dracula. Another good scene which includes his very succinct reaction to Van Helsing’s suggestion, even if he does have to agree in the end:

“Not for the world! Not for Heaven or Hell!”

Anyway. If the plan works out, cool. He gets to kill Dracula, Mina is saved. Best case scenario!

But then there’s the unspoken, explicitly unwritten (in case his pages need to be read), but heavily foreshadowed Plan B. They cannot destroy the Count, in time or otherwise. Mina is now either a corpse waiting to awake as a vampire, or a vampire already. The others, true to their vow, mean to destroy her.

Jonathan Harker, true only to Mina, in whatever form she may take, still has that Kukri. And the element of surprise. And a full acknowledgment of the realities of Heaven, Hell, and his holding Mina’s continued existence above them, his friends, his sanity, his humanity, and himself.

In short, all your tragically romantic Draculas can kindly go fuck themselves with a wooden stake. Jonathan Harker is the first and best gothic horror example of a person in love to the point of madness, damnation, and willingness to deceive or destroy anyone who would endanger the one he loves. The only reason we never got to see it in action was because Stoker had to tack on a happy ending. If he hadn’t?

The census would be less four unsuspecting heroes and plus two newlywed vampires.

The End.

Suck on it, Francis.

[see-arcane]

Jonathan Harker: The ‘Absolute Love Corrupts Absolutely’ Villain That Almost Was*

*LONG before Francis Ford Coppola’s Cinematic Gary Oldman Fanfiction

Spoilers ahead for the Dracula Daily enjoyers, because I’m whipping out all my literary receipts on this.

I recently finished speed-rereading Dracula because I have no self-control. In doing so, I got a refresher on quite a few incendiary factors of the book that time had dulled in my memory.

1.     There’s a TON of ‘I’m not like other girls!’ and ‘men good, women dainty,’ and ‘What no I’m not projecting, honest, I just really like the words manful, voluptuous, manful, aquiline, manful, God, and manful again. –Bramothy Stoker,’ so brace for that from basically the whole cast. I’m blaming it partly on Bram Flakes’ own prejudices, of which there are plenty, and the fact that he’d clearly never met a thesaurus in his life.

(I appreciate everyone’s mental revamp of Mina as the New Woman to Lucy’s Classic Damsel, but…oof. Everyone’s in for a harsh Period/Stoker Accurate reminder.)

2.     Brammy Pajamas was either hanging around some exceptionally devout Christians to write some of the second/third act scenes with everyone basically thrashing and wailing and falling on their knees and clasping/kissing hands as they pray to/thank God, all while thinking it was perfectly natural behavior for these characters…or he legit had no clue how any kind of ordinary human being, Christian or otherwise, would react to the situations he puts them in.

(Seriously, it’s not even that everyone’s devout, it’s that they’re all written to act like they’re in a soap opera where the only direction they got was to be as hammy and histrionic as physically possible. You’ll know the scenes when you see them.)

3.     Jonathan Harker has not only been done dirty by every adaptation since the book in terms of being a main character, along with being the character to spend the most time with Dracula in close quarters, period, and being the love interest for Mina—his whole character arc by the second half of the book is the most blazing hot, “If my beloved is destined for damnation, I’m heading to Hell with her, fuck all else,” shit I have ever read in classic literature, full stop.

Not Dracula. Not any character based on Dracula.

Jonathan fucking Harker is the OG archetype for Love Corrupts (Violently), and the canon story avoided him going full tragic villain by t h i s much. You want proof? Let’s go.

NOTE: MAIN SPOILERS STRAIGHT FROM THE BOOK, SHIELD YOUR EYES

Here’s the part most Harker fans scream over, myself included:

“To one thing I have made up my mind: if we find out that Mina must be a vampire in the end, then she shall not go into that unknown and terrible land alone. I suppose it is thus that in old times one vampire meant many; just as their hideous bodies could only rest in sacred earth, so the holiest love was the recruiting sergeant for their ghastly ranks.”

Good shit, good shit! Jonathan was already prepared to risk falling to his death from a cliff or being eaten by wolves rather than stay in Castle Dracula for a bloodthirsty eternity with the ladies. But now? Mina is quite literally his, “You are worth Hell,” Beloved. But there’s more. Fast forward to one of Team Fuck-Up-That-Old-Undead-Man’s first head-on encounters with the Count. As they’re waiting, Jonathan gets impatient, declaring:

“I care for nothing now,” he answered hotly, “except to wipe out this brute from the face of creation. I would sell my own soul to do it!”

He says as much in front of his Christian+ buddies who, by now, had pretty fair reasons to believe in the legitimacy of Hell and all its demons. Van Helsing is definitely startled and seemingly talks him down from such an oath. Key word being seemingly. Because we jump forward again to a point where Mina, in full saintly forgiveness mode (and apparently selectively forgetting Van Helsing’s history lesson about Dracula’s pre-vampire days being ones of a slaughtering tyrant), saying that if/when they destroy the Count, oh, how happy his soul will be to be free of his torment on Earth, et cetera. Jonathan Harker has a rebuttal to share. Namely:

“May God give him into my hand just for long enough to destroy that earthly life of him which we are aiming at. If beyond that I could send his soul forever and ever to burning hell I would do it!”

God forgives. Jonathan Harker emphatically does not.

Onward again, and he speaks volumes by what he does not say. Chiefly, there’s a point where Mina, now in full martyr preparation should the worst happen, makes the boys swear an oath to destroy her body if/when she succumbs and dies to Dracula’s vampiric poisoning so she cannot rise again as one of his ladies. The boys swear. Mostly. What we get from Jonathan is…

“And must I, too, make such a promise, oh, my wife?”

“You too, my dearest.” (Note: The rest of her paragraph here is full of the most knife-twisting, utterly warped martyr ‘pep talk’ I’ve ever read, and I have no idea how she/Bramarama thought it would remotely convince Jonathan this was all a reasonable and chill thing she was talking about. Anyway.)

It’s important to note that absolutely nowhere in the ensuing text does Jonathan ever speak the promise out loud. He does read the goddamn Burial Service at Mina’s request, which he barely chokes his way through. But he never makes the oath.

Another jump ahead. They are on the hunt for Dracula and, alas, have just missed him at a key point. Most of the gang are shaking their fists at the sky, cursing up and down. And what is Jonathan doing? Well, to quote Jack Seward, just before the epiphany…

“We men were all in a fever of excitement, except Harker, who is calm; his hands are as cold as ice, and an hour ago I found him whetting the edge of the great Ghoorka knife which he now always carries with him. It will be a bad look-out for the Count if the edge of that ‘Kukri’ ever touches his throat, driven by that stern, ice-cold hand!”

And upon discovery of the Count slipping them…

“Harker smiled—actually smiled—the dark bitter smile of one who is without hope; but at the same time his action belied his words, for his hands instinctively sought the hilt of the great Kukri knife and rested there.”

For context, by this point Jonathan had already come at Dracula with said Kukri knife a while back, having nearly landed the blow after charging out of the pack and nearly fucking gutting the Count. For extra context, this is a Kukri knife:

He’s just been walking around with that. For half the book. Plotting.

And, with all of this in mind, we can only assume Jonathan had two plans of action in mind.

Plan A, follow Van Helsing’s lead.

…Not counting the moment he almost bit the Professor’s head off for saying he had to bring Mina along with him to Castle Dracula. Another good scene which includes his very succinct reaction to Van Helsing’s suggestion, even if he does have to agree in the end:

“Not for the world! Not for Heaven or Hell!”

Anyway. If the plan works out, cool. He gets to kill Dracula, Mina is saved. Best case scenario!

But then there’s the unspoken, explicitly unwritten (in case his pages need to be read), but heavily foreshadowed Plan B. They cannot destroy the Count, in time or otherwise. Mina is now either a corpse waiting to awake as a vampire, or a vampire already. The others, true to their vow, mean to destroy her.

Jonathan Harker, true only to Mina, in whatever form she may take, still has that Kukri. And the element of surprise. And a full acknowledgment of the realities of Heaven, Hell, and his holding Mina’s continued existence above them, his friends, his sanity, his humanity, and himself.

In short, all your tragically romantic Draculas can kindly go fuck themselves with a wooden stake. Jonathan Harker is the first and best gothic horror example of a person in love to the point of madness, damnation, and willingness to deceive or destroy anyone who would endanger the one he loves. The only reason we never got to see it in action was because Stoker had to tack on a happy ending. If he hadn’t?

The census would be less four unsuspecting heroes and plus two newlywed vampires.

The End.

Suck on it, Francis.