mina: professor, may i speak to you, as one ten to another?

van helsing: you are an eleven, my dear, but please continue

mina: hey babe there may be a time where i need you to kill me so i don’t become a vampire

jonathan harker, who was already planning out where they’d live their vampire lives and figuring out matching outfits for that possibility: what

I've seen people in the Dracula fandom say they want a Dracula adaptation that's in Dracula's perspective, but keeps him as the villain, shows his struggles to pass as a human and the many mishaps he goes through when subduing his goal for world conquest, all while also putting up with the humans trying to stop him, put into an equally humorous and terrifying fashion.

But guys, that show already exists. It's called Invader Zim.

I have written this in the train.

Can you imagine being a fellow passenger on that train, watching Jonathan scribble away? Let me remind you, this is the entry which contains the famous "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" passage. He is sitting in the train actively writing away how he plans to become a vampire as well if necessary, all while vibrating with the desire to get there already so he can murder Dracula with his big knife.

Just imagine the energy radiating off of this man. I would perhaps hesitate to sit near him.

Jonathan’s vibes while writing in the train

the passenger next to him

Okay, I have a beef to pick with vampire media after reading Dracula with all y'all. We've seen vampire hunters bedecked with garlic cloves, potential victim's rooms filled with strings of garlic, Lucy being depicted with a garland straight out of Strega Nona's pantry. Basically garlic cloves EVERYWHERE. And yet, something odd struck me when reading Dracula

They specifically say "garlic flowers"

It tickled my brain a bit when the phrase first appeared, but I paid it no mind. Then Lucy's mother died, and she used the only flowers available in the room to lay on her chest. The garlic. Why would Lucy lay cloves of garlic on her mother's chest out of grief?

When Lucy died, my suspicions were confirmed. There's no way that cloves of garlic would go unnoticed in her funereal bouquet. So they really mean garlic FLOWERS

Anyone who has gone foraging for wild garlic or deadheaded ornamental alliums will tell you that garlic flowers STINK. They are perhaps more pungent than the cloves themselves. They're also quite pretty, white or pink little starbursts of stinky, stinky garlic flowers

Basically, through the years we've transformed this image of a frail, beautiful woman surrounded by pure white flowers that drive away the evil that wants to eat her life force, her literal blood that would stain her perfect whiteness red, into this actually pretty silly concept of stink grenades and a room filled with more garlic cloves than a grocery store

and it cracks me the hell up

reading today's Dracula daily like ??? of blood? and of bloom? you're losing me again Can Helsing... only to get a little further and realize it's supposed to be "bloody" and "blooming". That's so funny.

I'm wondering, would "bloody" be printed in this kind of book at the time it was published? I know I've seen some older works where it's censored, or at least a word I assume was that was censored, but I'm not sure what books or when they were written.

A lot of nineteenth century books had different versions printed in different languages for local censorship laws. For instance, in Britain, the word blood would be banned (and so would other words like "thunders"), but thirst wouldn't be banned, and "death" would be fine but with an asterisk or two. This is what you see in some nineteenth century British books:

ALT

That said, I have only looked at British-published copies (the British had, if anything, more censorship than American English-published books), so I have no idea if it was really the norm.

(In the US, by contrast, you'd get banned words, but only when they were followed by another word. For instance, the word "bloom" would get banned, but only when it was inside the word "blood"; if it was in its own phrase, it would just be censored.)

It looks like an AI generated ransom demand.

Jonathan: if my wife is damned to be an unholy creature of the night I would simply not kill her and instead join her in damnation so she wouldn't be alone. Rip to Lord Goddalming but I'm different.

Count Dracula sees his former plaything crawling down a wall with a giant knife in his teeth and is like “Actually Transylvania is lovely this time of year”