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[vickyvicarious]

It’s Wednesday, my dudes.

[vickyvicarious]

[vickyvicarious]

@vickyvicarious aw heck now I want to compare Madness in Dracula and the Woman in White, with the short version being that in WiW Madness = Childhood and in Dracula it very much does not. There's also things to be said about withholding information to avoid triggering the person in recovery.

And I guess the big thing is Dracula is written after the big Asylum reform but the Woman in White is written before.

But yeah they each have a character who is congenitally mad and beyond help and a second, younger character who is driven mad and later able to recover.

I don't have time right now but it's worth chewing on

[vickyvicarious]

Hi I just learnt that grebe the bird existed and I am intrigued do you have any knowledge to drop on the dudes

BOY DO I! grebes are my favorite waterfowl!

they're specialist divers and fish hunters, and they're a pretty wide group with a LOT of species!

and they're all freaks. every single one of them.

they're most closely related to FLAMINGOS, of all things, which is why their feet are so weird! they evolved completely separate from other waterfowl like ducks and geese, so they did the flipper thing totally backwards.

this is going to be a theme, nothing these birds do is normal.

unlike other specialist diving birds (coughcough LOONS coughcough), they aren't totally incompetent on land! just, again. total freaks about it.

aaagh I love them so much I might actually explode

also they swim like frogs, babies can dive pretty much immediately after hatching, and adults can minutely adjust their buoyancy in the water at will like a fucking submarine. you just can't make any of this shit up.

weirdest fucking bird 100/10

[vickyvicarious]

@vickyvicarious aw heck now I want to compare Madness in Dracula and the Woman in White, with the short version being that in WiW Madness = Childhood and in Dracula it very much does not. There's also things to be said about withholding information to avoid triggering the person in recovery.

And I guess the big thing is Dracula is written after the big Asylum reform but the Woman in White is written before.

But yeah they each have a character who is congenitally mad and beyond help and a second, younger character who is driven mad and later able to recover.

I don't have time right now but it's worth chewing on

[vickyvicarious]

These are so fun to make

[vickyvicarious]

Arboreal Salamander (Aneides lugubris) bite a finger!!!, family Plethodontidae, found in California and Baja California

Arboreal, these salamanders have prehensile tails, and will use their limbs to glide or "parachute" from trees, if they need to.

They can deliver a nasty bite.

photographs by Val Johnson

[vickyvicarious]

oh fuck this is a really good hill i gotta die on this

[vickyvicarious]

To further on the horrors (pun not indented) of the anon that talked about the 1992 Dracula movie-

Apparently during the filming of the scene where the crew finds Mina after she drank Dracula's blood, Winona (who played Mina) said that Coppola was shouting "SLUT!" and "WHORE! behind the camera to make her look guilty.

He *even demanded that the other actors do the same*, Anthony Hopkins (Van Helsing) and Keanu Reeves (Jonathan Harker) were apparently the only two that straight up refused to do so.

When I went to look this up, I found this article which kinda walks that back, though certainly not all the way. More whisper than shout, "horrible stuff" in character to make her sad/teary rather than specific sexual insults. And it seems some of it was possibly tied up in tension with Oldman, who Ryder didn't get along with on set. But who knows how much of all that was publicity related (on either side I suppose, shock value or smoothing things over, though I'd definitely defer towards believing the victim). I don't ever really read interviews or follow celebrity news or behind the scenes type stuff, so I am not particularly prepared to play detective about this kind of story, nor is lengthy discussion of these sorts of things my preferred way to spend my time. But honestly, regardless of if it was as bad or worse as what you said, or as mild/milder than the article I pulled up, it's still unpleasant either way.

As a rule I am highly skeptical of the efficacy of any 'method acting' techniques where an actor or director subjects their coworkers to any kind of nastiness in the name of an 'authentic reaction'. Their jobs are to act, you should expect them to act, not try to force them to react genuinely. If they want something more genuine then they can request it - "surprise me at some point so I can get off a really good scream" or whatever. Or you can ask them if it would be okay ("can I jumpscare you for real at some point" or whatever, doesn't have to be specific enough to ruin the genuine react you want). Similarly if you wanna stay in character because it helps you, sure, but don't make that other peoples' problem. It's like that one post going around talking about how you almost never hear of people method acting nice and kind characters, only assholes. Can really feel like grabbing onto justification to be cruel. Even if it 'works', that doesn't make it worth it, nor make it the only way to get that good take.

[vickyvicarious]

Yeah, the difference in treatment once they are in the recovery stage was particularly striking to me. But I think it's also tied up in gender a lot, not only the treatment after the fact but during their madness. Dracula's mad characters are both men, Woman in White's are both women. Walter is really considerate of Anne's distress but he also never felt threatened by her at all. Seward's madness is all along primarily characterized as at least potentially dangerous to others. Jonathan's isn't, of course, but he also never winds up in an asylum, which could be a major difference. And Jonathan vs. Laura being trusted with information in their recovery - it's admittedly fuzzier because of the added complications of her nightmare scenario of everyone insisting she was mistaken about her own identity vs. Jonathan's experience with the supernatural being real and validating, but I still feel like the way difference in information feels distinctly gendered in Collins' book. Madness = childhood being at least easier to reach because they're women and getting somewhat infantilized anyway.

So yeah, timeframe, gender, and the difference in the idea/treatment of madness, as well as whatever differences we can see in the asylums specifically (or infer), not to mention that comparison between the congenital mad one/driven mad one and their respective fates... Lots of interesting stuff.

@vickyvicarious aw heck now I want to compare Madness in Dracula and the Woman in White, with the short version being that in WiW Madness = Childhood and in Dracula it very much does not. There's also things to be said about withholding information to avoid triggering the person in recovery.

And I guess the big thing is Dracula is written after the big Asylum reform but the Woman in White is written before.

But yeah they each have a character who is congenitally mad and beyond help and a second, younger character who is driven mad and later able to recover.

I don't have time right now but it's worth chewing on

[vickyvicarious]

If you wanted to read a comparative literature meta between Dracula and another novel, which one would you choose?

Ooh... This is a really interesting ask. First of all, it's not if - I definitely would want to read that! The only difficulty is in narrowing down the candidates. It's hard to choose, honestly. Ideally it would be nice to compare a novel that explores some of the same themes but in a different way.

The Beetle is also a horror novel that has the fear of foreigners/the other as typified by a supernatural entity arriving in London. It also has multiple narrators as well, who all have to hunt down their fleeing foe on a train in order to save the main woman in the cast. But it doesn't really delve much into old vs. new for example, and it is just... so bad. Every character is worse, the writing is worse, comparing these two books is all the way through just a case of ragging on Marsh's work for being worse, honestly. Ideally for me, both books in such a meta would be good.

Varney the Vampire, Carmilla, and The Vampyre are all classic vampire stories, and it's interesting to compare them to Dracula when you think about what kinds of influences Stoker may have taken from them. But they don't share the same themes as much outside of that. Varney is a penny dreadful and outside of superficial aspects of some scenes/character roles I don't see tons of resemblance to Stoker's work; it's written as a sprawling dramatic tale designed to keep entertaining casual readers over time, unlike the still large yet self-contained and more intense in tone novel by Stoker. (Admittedly, I'm less than halfway through Varney so that's what my opinion is based on. I do find the treatment of Flora as a victim of a vampire to be an interesting point of comparison to the way Mina and Lucy were treated.) And the other two are both much shorter and more constrained to their horror story. They don't have as big of a cast and they don't have as prolonged fights against their vampires, either.

Other classic 'gothic fiction' such as The Phantom of the Opera, The Picture of Dorian Gray or The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde have their own merits as well. Phantom has a similar path in adaptations making the main antagonist into a troubled romantic hero. But that's more about adaptations than the novels themselves, which don't have as much in common as others on this list. Dorian Gray could be a good comparison as far as homosexual subtext (or really, just text in DG) and if one wanted to discuss the idea of nonaging beings. But while Dracula doesn't age and doesn't really grow/change and there are some potentially interesting discussions to be had there, that's more a case of those two characters rather than the two novels as a whole. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is presented as more of a detective story, which is both true to, and an aspect of Dracula that doesn't usually get as much attention as it should. So that could be fun. There's also an interesting thread with Jekyll's experimentation as a 'new manmade' horror vs. Dracula's 'old supernatural' horror, and potential contrast between that very homegrown versus foreign danger, and even the idea of an alternate self being released. But the Bloofer Lady and Mr. Hyde, for example, are very different cases in many ways. And there's again a much smaller cast and scale to the story, so there are a lot more pieces of Dracula that don't have as much of an equivalent to compare. (That too could of course be interesting to contrast, but it's a different sort of meta more focused on the novel's role in the genre for example, than the closer comparison your ask makes me envision.) Honestly, with its themes of culpability/respectability, I see it comparing more easily to Dorian Gray than Dracula.

The Woman In White would actually be quite an interesting comparison, even though it's not really in the same genre. It's not a supernatural horror, however much it flirts with dramatic gothic imagery especially at the beginning. But it does have a bunch of other stuff in common. The villainous foreign Count is an obvious one, but specifically Dracula and Fosco's attraction to certain individuals and like of breaking them is another link. Both have intelligent heroes who are quite methodical about their approaches. Jonathan and Laura's experiences have quite interesting similarities (as well as, to an extent, Lucy and Anne, not just to one another but to the aforementioned characters as well), especially in the contrasting ways they are treated later in the novels. The use of female characters in general has some really discussable similarities and differences (Mina vs. Marian as well as in general). Mr. Fairlie and Mrs. Westenra fill a similar role. Both books are epistolary, with a heavy focus on the characters themselves gathering documents with different perspectives of events to help them figure things out (that detective aspect). Trains and timetables are important in both in a way, and though Dracula is more intentional about the contrast of modern/ancient there is a potential thread to be discussed there. In general, they both get weird about foreigners in ways that could also be talked about at length, specifically in regard to the villains vs. the heroes and how nationality and perceived nationality/stereotypes play into their respective roles. The idea of madness vs. sanity is also a theme in both, and both have characters with differing degrees of memory loss and inability to talk about their experiences. If we're looking for an overall comparison of both novels as a whole, as well as multiple different points of connection/comparison, I think this may be the best one so far.

Of course, this is all just thinking of more contemporary works to Dracula. It's also a list influenced by what I've been reading and thinking about more for the past year, so there are probably other books I'll think of later. But for now, that's my long and rambly answer!

[vickyvicarious]

THE GOBLIN

A short comic about a mysterious creature living with the monks of a secluded abbey.

I made this comic five years ago, and it's still probably one of the most personal things I've written.

If you'd like to support more of my comics, consider preordering my new graphic novel, THE PALE QUEEN, wherever you get books.

[vickyvicarious]

No yeah you're on the right track, in Coppola, Dracula, young-looking and well-fed, stalks Lucy, gives her horny sleepwalking disease, then has nonconsensual sex with her on a tomb while he's in werewolf form, and Mina sees that. Very focused on his goal to find his one true love through the oceans of time. (later we get the immortal lines "You killed Lucy. I love you.")

Wow. Such romance. I'm so overwhelmed by the beauty of it all.

*shudders*

Honestly, I was thinking the Lucy stuff was horrible to her in a "he spied/fed on her and she found it super hot and cheated on Arthur with him" kind of way, which is more than bad enough. Little did I fuckin' know apparently, yikes. What even is this movie. Softcore porn parody version of Dracula? Why.

[vickyvicarious]

Once again Dracula Daily and Re Dracula are about to start. So if anyone needs an overview of when they can expect an email or a podcast episode they can find it under the readmore

Do not click readmore if you want it to be a surprise when you’ll get an update!

[vickyvicarious]

I had some time to kill so

Happy Almost-Dracula-Daily

Special thanks to @akasanata for providing the internet with Dracula Manga images 🙏

[vickyvicarious]

maya’s in game outfit literally looks like an american drew it (and i say this as an american) so…

email me capcom

[vickyvicarious]

A slowly collapsing prairie home.