#coming up with all kinds of excuses

[ilovereading5252]

Dp promt

The Fentons finally figure out how to tell different ecto signatures apart…

[finngualart]

im gonna write my thoughts about this in the tags

[genericpuff]

yeah i don't think this is the kind of advertising rachel needs right now-

[prolibytherium]

I feel like Mac & Dennis had to have SOME in-universe rationalization for getting rid of all of their furniture and all I could come up with was

A) sold (or attempted and failed to sell) their preexisting furniture to invest in their awesome new inflatable furniture business

B) to make room for their inflatable furniture business inventory (would be a literal explanation for the 'no room' comment) or

C) they had actually been renting NOT JUST the couch but the beds and chairs and etc, and panicked upon discovering this was a dumb as fuck move

[puppyeared]

i feel shy talking here when i dont have anything worth sharing but i cant help feeling like ive said things in the tags that could be brought up in court

[motoroil-recs]

Did all the requests I could today, hopefully I can get more done over the weekend, I don't like having requests older than a week in my inbox. Once I'm down to single digits again I might try out other request types, but I've been debating what I should try...

[orcelito]

My druid has "fuckboy" written all over her

[bisexualamy]

.

[see-arcane]

The Underappreciated Undead Squad: Clarimonde, Lord Ruthven, and the Family of the Vourdalak

If you’ve been keeping track, you’ll know I’ve been getting sucked into a resurgence of old school bloodsucker literature. Not just with the fun of Dracula Daily—thanks again, Matt Kirkland!—but revisiting some even older vampiric favorites who have been kicking since long before the Count started planning his English holiday. From left to right above, we see Gorcha, patriarch of Aleksey Tolstoy’s, “The Family of the Vourdalak,” (1884), Clarimonde, of Théophile Gautier’s, “La Morte Amoureuse,” (1836), translated into English as ‘Clarimonde’ or, ‘The Dead Woman in Love,’ and Lord Ruthven, of John William Polidori’s, “The Vampyre,” (1819).

I’ve been dropping hefty blurbs about each of them, but I figured a master post was in order. Much as Dracula Daily is/will continue to pick up its pace as autumn ticks along, I know there are folks out there itching for a broader classic vampire fix than just another reread of, “Carmilla.”*

*Who does not get to sit at these guys’ table, considering she has a web series, a movie, and a number of animated cameos (hi, Vampire Hunter D and Castlevania babes), while everyone on this guest list has no mainstream spotlight, period. Sorry, Millie.

 Assorted Synopses and Story Links Below!

1.    Clarimonde—“La Morte Amoureuse” (Post) (Story PDF)

POV: You’re a newly minted priest doing priest stuff in the middle of Le Bumbfuck Village in Nowhere, France. You fell in love with the hottest party girl in Paris. She dies. She resurrects herself and appears in your room looking like this ^^^ saying she came back to life because she’s into you. She asks if you’re down to run away to Venice with her. Wyd?

Oh, Clarimonde. She’s probably the best way to (un)die you’ll ever meet in classic literature. Gautier wrote her story with all kinds of ribald and religiously risqué (if not damn near blasphemous) joy, and managed to sneak a genuinely heartstring-tugging romance in. She’s probably the first vampiric character to ever be written in a truly sympathetic light, while also being one of few early seductive/bawdy female characters to not be given the ye olde ‘EW NO EVIL POWERFUL LILITH CHARACTER BOOO’ treatment.

2.    Lord Ruthven— “The Vampyre” (Post) (Story PDF)

POV: You’re the tenth adulteress tonight to try to get with the sexy stranger who lives to make everyone around him miserable (sexily). All you’ve managed to do is interrupt his game, in which he plans to bankrupt a father of seven, followed by maybe hunting down his innocent daughter to stick a dagger in her for a midnight sip. Oh, you were after a blood sugar daddy? Too bad. Take that thirsty bullshit to Carfax and duke it out with Renfield.

Lord Ruthven is the original undead bastard. His hobby is ruining the lives of good people, driving virtuous girls to madness and/or murdering them for a drink, and collecting fancy bejeweled blades for a little flair with the latter. Our guy is Not Interested in romance as anything other than a performance to get close to a young lady for the purposes of either ruination or slaughter. Nor is he about to churn out any more of his kind willy-nilly. Why bother? Maybe that shit flies for those needy Transylvanian hoarder types, but he prefers to go solo. He seems like a unique polar opposite to most ‘teaching a moral’ monsters—in his story, only the purest of pure mega-good characters suffer. If you’re anything less than saintly—see: horny chicks, folks with personal vices, et cetera—Ruthven either ignores you outright or tosses you some cash to aid your selfish aims. Thanks, man.

3.    Gorcha and Kin— “The Family of the Vourdalak” (Post) (Story PDF)

POV: You are a traveler meeting the dead and knowing eyes of Gorcha and his family. This ends one of two ways. Version 1: Gorcha and his family decide they hate you. There is only room for murderous hate or consuming love in their still hearts, as is the condition of the Vourdalak. They will nail your head over the door. Version 2: Gorcha and his family have decided they love you. So much so that they must empty your veins and welcome you into the family. Forever. What’s that, traveler? You’d like to leave before they decide either way? Who said that was an option?

Vampirism and love have always managed to overlap throughout the genre. But the condition of the Vourdalak flavor is especially fixated on it. The gist is that where ordinary vampires will target whoever, whenever, Vourdalaks are driven specifically to drink from their loved ones. Family, friends, lovers. It’s how whole villages have gone underground, with kin and neighbors preying on each other in a warped display of grim thirst and affectionate preservation. On the flip side, those not loved get put down. Messily. It would almost be sweet if things like ‘consent’ or ‘neutrality’ could come into it, but no. You are loved and kept or unloved and slaughtered. The only third option is to run—if they let you.

 I really recommend giving all these guys a read. Right now, we’re enjoying a bit of a vampiric/Dracula renaissance. Silly stuff like the What We Do in the Shadows series is going full blast, Castlevania is entering another run, and the Count has a whole slew of movies lined up. While I very much did not care for this year’s, The Invitation, 2023 is due to dish out a fun dark comedic romp called Renfield centered on our favorite inventor of the Victorian small-scale turducken (with Nicholas Cage as Dracula!), and a genuine horror movie offering with, Last Voyage of the Demeter, directed by the same man behind The Autopsy of Jane Doe. Promising stuff!

My fingers are crossed that between all that and the clear popularity of Dracula Daily, we can dust off some other coffins and, maybe, give these older undead characters some overdue love. (At a safe distance.)

[dolokhoded]

"judas and peter both denied christ but judas couldn't face it while peter repented" shut the fuck upppp peter wasn't in a similar vulnerable psychological state should we throw a party should we invite god what did he even do after christ anyways he teamed up with paul. one would argue that's worse than betraying jesus

[mintharan]

i'm gonna be honest a lot of the people who are super vocal about the emperor's manipulation being the reason why they hate him scream of that post that goes 'no one is gaslighting you, that's just lying, you're not worth all the effort of gaslighting'

[vashti-lives]

After vague blogging about fanfic and YA I will say that the issue of media for teens mixing poorly with all ages and adult media is not a problem exclusive to fanfic writers. 90% of the conflict in the star wars fandom stems from the fact that star wars’ YA and children’s media is to some degree canonically and philosophically incompatible with the mainline movies. In the movies the Jedi are unequivocally the heroes and we’re supposed to respect them even as they get backed into a terrible corner. They’re wise heroes doing their best.

In the media made for kids by necessity the adults of the Jedi order have to make absolutely wild and absurd decisions in order for the kid protagonists to get chances to do heroic stuff actual kids would find fun and exciting. This naturally puts their behavior at odds with the goals of the movies.

Add in that the movies don’t hold up to close reads because they’re intended to be fun summer blockbusters, and the fact that the Jedi are based on a fairly shallow understanding of a non-western collectivist lifestyle without nuclear families which is extremely foreign to western audiences and what do you get? Decades worth of discourse over whether the Jedi are actually good guys which can never be resolved because they're based on completely different ways of analyzing media. Worse, nobody can agree on what parts of star wars should be counted in the first place so even if you're analyzing things in the same style you might still be doomed.

[pyrriax]

HI TUMBLR late footnote posting before i go to bed (i took a nap today........ ate up most of my time)

not a lot to talk about with footnotes today since i was Busy and my brain wasnt working pfndkmlfd i blame seven hours of modded oneblock

[convoloutedinjoke]

"is ADHD real or have we made another category to encompass freaks and sick people who don't fit neatly into any personality disorder diagnoses and make too much eye contact for autism?" longest thread on the DSM fandom boards, closed down after 1817168179 comments when one user got doxxed for calling another the r word. (answers yes btw)

[designernishiki]

sometimes i kinda wish mirei wasn't killed off because boy the divorced exes dynamic with majima could've been so god damn funny

[cheesey-rice]

I feel like with the Internet and all our society is kind of entering this new phase in terms of nationality of like, people who kind of think Nationalist-ly or Globally/human-ly? Like a lot of our communities and important social spaces are not as restricted by like relative global position anymore and it's like very easy to get news about shit happening halfway across the world.