Latest Posts by airfleck - Page 7

I recently discovered laundry stripping and y’all, no matter how much of a crock of shit you think fast fashion is, you’re underestimating.

eepy little spiders

Adventures in babysitting: a saga

One hour in:

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Bonus:

Usagi the Twitch Streamer!

Hi guys! I bringeth more VA commissions. This time for Sailor Venus' VA Cherami Leigh!

“Awk sure I did feel while bad for the poor wee critter asking her to marry him the wee pet he was while civil :(” –my very Northern Irish mother about Seward proposing to Lucy after my gothic-literature-obsessed dad and I peer pressured her into reading Dracula

Honorable mentions were her calling Dracula’s Brides “those three bitches” and calling Seward “the hospital boy”

AITA for trying to eat my landlord's fancy takeout?

So my [523 F] sisters [498 F/492 F]and I are fully stay-at-home, and our landlord [530 M] brings us most of our groceries. Now things have been tight recently and so we only have grocery runs about once a month, and last night was one of these. Our house has a pretty clearly delineated men's half and women's half, so when we saw the food [21M] in our rooms we assumed it had been left there for us. But then our landlord burst in with our groceries and started screaming and shouting and getting really violent about the idea that we would touch his special treat after he'd forbidden it and just carrying on and told us to get out (this was our room, keep in mind). And I guess I had known that he had ordered fancy takeout, but it wasn't like it was labeled or anything, and it's not like there wasn't plenty to go around. His reaction just seemed really uncalled for. AITA?

It appears that today JHark continues your thesis statement of him having an "I will not let such a small issue stop me" pattern

Let us recap!

May 3rd: *paprika gives incredible thirst*

Jonathan: I won't let a little thing like that stop me! *more paprika*

May 4th: *locals crying, hugging his knees, begging him not to go*

Jonathan: *significantly more unsettled* I won't let a little thing like that stop me

May 5th: *this door has no handle*

Jonathan: I won't let a little thing like that stop me...? Though I admit I am at a loss as to what to do about it

May 8th: *dracula yeets the mirror*

Jonathan: *annoyed* I won't let a little thing like that stop me *does his best with his shaving pot, which is fortunately of metal*

May 8th: *the castle is a veritable prison*

Jonathan: *running madly around like a rat in a trap* I won't let a little thing like that stop me!!! *sitting down quietly* ahhhh fuck

May 12th: *envelopes extremely see-through*

Jonathan: *resolving to write to Mina later in shorthand* I won't let a little thing like that stop me *immediately snoops on Dracula's letters*

May 15th: *the door is locked, the key is gone*

Jonathan: I won't let a little thing like that stop me. It's probably in the Count's room

May 15th: *one door not technically locked just suck*

Jonathan: *putting his back into it* oh I definitely won't let a little thing like that stop me...

And a bonus:

Dracula, May 12th: Don't go to sleep anywhere else in the castle or you will Literally Die. From, uh. Nightmares.

Jonathan, May 15th: I won't *yawn* let a little thing like *yawn* that stop me.... zzzzzzzz

If nendou takes his buddies out for ramen often enough do you think he might classical condition them into associating him w ramen ? like this

I found a soft quietude come over me. Here I am, sitting at a little oak table where in old times possibly some fair lady sat to pen, with much thought and many blushes, her ill-spelt love-letter, and writing in my diary in shorthand all that has happened since I closed it last.

This segment gives me so much joy, but is a great example of what makes Jonathan incredibly unique among similar types of horror victims in Victorian literature.

A lot of academic analysis notes Jonathan’s traditionally feminine role in the early chapters of Dracula, but chalk it up to “the horror of emasculation”—that Dracula imposing femininity on Jonathan expresses the gender role anxiety of the time and is part of how Dracula terrorizes him.

But that’s just straight-up not how the book is written. Jonathan is comforting himself with his connection to the sweet, soft ladies of old, wishing he were writing love letters to his own love far away. He soothes himself with the image as a way to escape the horrors surrounding him. He encourages himself with the comparison to Shezerade and her cleverness earlier.

It’s the difference between “Jonathan is facing horrors traditionally imposed on female characters” and “the horrors INCLUDE the connection to female characters.” That distinction is enforced by how he, on his own, finds comfort and encouragement by thinking of himself among their number.

It’s a distinction that wouldn’t be obvious from just reading a summary of the story, which in all honesty seems to be what some academic analysis is working from.

Artist: Ramunerica

❥Permission to repost this was given by the artist. Please do not repost without the artist’s permission. If you liked this fanwork, do take the time to rate and bookmark the original work.

Hello. My name is Count D’racula Dementia Vampyr Way. I have long white teeth (that’s how I got my name) and a long white moustache with white streaks that reaches my mid back and red eyes like limpid blood and a lot of people tell me I look like my predecessor Dracula (if you don’t know who he is get da hell out of here!!) I’m not related to Attila but I wish I was cause he’s a major fucking hottie. I’m a vampire and my teeth are long and white. I have pale white skin. I’m also a Count, and I live in a creepy castle in Transylvania where I’ve been for quite some time (I’m an age.) I’m a Goth (in case you couldn’t tell) and the blood of every conqueror ever flows through my veins. I’m also a goth (in case you couldn’t tell) and I wear mostly black. For example today I was wearing a black shirt, black trousers, a black cape, and black mid-thigh boots. I was wearing no makeup. I was walking around inside my castle. It was nighttime which I was very happy about. An English lawyer stared at me. I threw his shaving mirror out the window.

it's so funny doing Dracula Daily this year but missing it last year because everyone else is frothing at the mouth at the harbingers of what's to come and I'm just like

the whole dashboard crying and shitting their pants over some paprika rn

Artist: roytheart_

❥Permission to repost this was given by the artist. Please do not repost without the artist’s permission. If you liked this fanwork, do take the time to rate and bookmark the original work.

i’m currently reading stoker’s notes from when he was plotting out and researching dracula.

apparently he took 10+ pages of notes on whitby dialect & slang. it greatly amuses me to imagine the reason mr swales talks Like That is because stoker really wanted a chance to use his research notes at least once in the book

I like how Jonathan freely admits how scared he is or how he could be easily crushed by the other man or how he never states that he must stay the course because he's not a coward etc

And then all "academic analyses" of the text say he's hypermasculine as if Dracula didn't just pull a "make sure to break your hand-shaking partner's fingers to assert dominance".

Impending rant aside, Jonathan is a perfect example of fear meaning bravery. Unlike other protagonists of his time, he doesn't scoff and turn his nose up at the danger he's in. He's not a prideful Englishman self-assured of his main character status giving him plot armour. He doesn't callously dismiss the warnings or try to assert his British-ness over the Count.

He's humble and not afraid to tell his fiancée how unnerved he is by how much stronger the Count is than him. He can't even hide his distress from the Count out of politeness– he's very expressive: a contradiction to the British stereotype of an unmoved prig with a stiff upper lip. He also just doesn't get defensive about his bravery. He's not worried about being seen as a coward, and that is precisely what prevents him from being one. He goes forth with his work not to prove himself a man but to prove himself a dependable employee. And to get that bread.

Like, I can't help but compare him to Hippy Rowan from A Kiss of Judas. Hippy attacks a man who was merely minding his business out of irrational fear but presents his fear as disgust instead, and later on, he brags about never having ever felt terror, to which the men he is staying with respond with a bet that they can show him true terror beyond his imagination. They were just planning to put on masks and jumpscare him when he was not expecting, but just the anticipation of being proven a coward leaves him bedridden with dread. Now that is stupidity and cowardice.

Jonathan's a brave man. He's not stupid, he's not arrogant, he is aware of his helplessness but still determined to pull through for the sake of his loved ones.

Other people have commented on all the funny jokes last year about Jonathan not realizing that he was in the novel Dracula whereas this year we’re very aware of him being uneasy and already saying goodbye to Mina in the second email. Well, personally, I think it was me, the reader, taking everything as a delightful joke. It wasn’t Jonathan ‘not realizing he was in Dracula’ it was me, not realizing that I was reading Dracula. I only had a vague idea of pop culture and a Sesame Street Count to go off of. It was me, a modern thinker, thinking how bad can vampires really be? Aren’t they rather funny? Or sexy? Or weird guys with the personality of mayonnaise and the skin of a disco ball? Not sure what my point is exactly but I feel very confident that Jonathan is taking this situation Much More Seriously than I would if I was on a business trip. And reading it the second time is more nerve wracking then the first, because I know now what to expect, and can’t do anything about it.

Once you know that Marissa Meyer based The Lunar Chronicles (and specifically Cinder, the first book) on an old Sailor Moon fanfic she wrote, the inspiration can be fairly obvious (most obvious being the missing princess from the moon and the threat of war between Earth and the Moon). That being said, there’s enough of Meyer’s own inspiration/ideas in there to help make it stand out (the futuristic setting, for one thing).

But it did make me think: Bill Ellis (who I mentioned on here before) wrote an essay about Princess Tutu where he said that Cinderella–the fairy tale Cinder retells–is an archetypal precedent to magical girl transformations. Cinderella and Sailor Moon have premises unique to themselves, but then I thought about the basics of both stories: both Cinderella and Usagi start out as girls who are at a low point of their life (Cinderella is mistreated by her stepfamily, while Usagi is chronically late for school and failing tests–one is arguably worse than the other, sure, but the point is, neither of them is doing great in their own way). Then both of them encounter magic (fairy godmother, talking space cat, etc.) that gives them, as Ellis puts it, the skills they need to accomplish whatever they need to do (go to the ball, fight evil). For an added bonus, no one at the ball ever recognizes Cinderella, similar to how no one ever puts it together that Usagi is Sailor Moon, despite her never covering her face (though she did have a mask in the early chapters of the manga). Also, there’s a prince in both stories.

With that in mind, it’s not hard to see how it was easy for Meyer to take inspiration from Sailor Moon in her Cinderella retelling. (Interestingly enough, the original fanfic was a Puss in Boots AU, because as Meyer pointed out, both Puss in Boots and Sailor Moon have talking cats.)

Some people have been making the joke about the characters of Dracula being stuck in a time loop but honestly it got me thinking about how epistolary novels feel like a potent manifestation of the concept of being doomed by the narrative

Because when I read a non-epistolary book, I’m not left with this sense that it’s all going to reset because the events of the book aren’t happening according to a very specific timeline. Like, sure, maybe specific dates get mentioned in the book, but it’s not as rigid as having a diary or letters with exact dates laid out over the course of six months.

Because Dracula has a definitive start date and end date, the characters are fixed in time and being (sometimes literally) railroaded. Your sense of the passage time is very concrete and there’s not a ton of wiggle room. Like, a book such as…idk, The Great Gatsby that doesn’t have any dates in it (IIRC) feels timeless. Sure, maybe it takes place in spring and summer, but you can kind of lose track of that because there isn’t a calendar keeping you aware of the date. Gatsby has to die within a certain window of time in the year but you’re free to imagine that as being whenever you want.

Not so in Dracula. Jonathan HAS to be on his way to Castle Dracula on May 3 and 4, he HAS to be there until at least late June. He cannot be already at the castle on May 2, and he can’t leave until after a particular date has come and gone. Every event in the book has to happen on or about the date it’s written about, there’s no room for deviation. We are free to imagine what might happen between specific dates (especially in the long stretches with no updates) but ultimately it all has to conclude in a specific event happening on a specific date.

That really lends the book the sense of being a time loop because we can pin down a pretty much exact timeline of the book. We know that these characters are locked in, and on the dates of the novel they cannot meaningfully deviate from the text. And because of that, they’re doomed to live those events out on the same exact date every single year for all time.

It adds the same layer of dread/grief/futility that you might feel when playing a game and reading in-universe diaries/news stories/etc from the early days of the game’s apocalypse. You can’t change the events of the past no matter how much hindsight you have, and none of us can change the canon events of Dracula no matter how much foresight we have. Jonathan is always going to be on his way to Dracula on May 3, and he’s always going to be completely unaware of what’s waiting for him.

I am obsessed with this idea

the year is 2056. Critical role is on it’s 11th campaign. Samuel Reigel drinks out of an 8 foot tall marble martini glass. He sets it down and unzips his jacket. His t shirt has a photo of Matthew Mercer’s birth certificate and social security card printed onto it. Matthew Mercer can only respond with a creepily realistic bottle sound of distress.

So I rewatched the entire dinner scene instead of sleeping, and here’s my hot take: I don’t care about Trent. He’s an asshole abuser, so I will eat up others’ probably far more insightful meta on THAT topic.

No, I want to talk about Astrid, Eodwulf, and Caleb.

That scene didn’t go at all like I expected it to. I think I, and everyone else, were expecting the mind games, the subtle threats, the manipulation…

But I wasn’t expecting half of it to be directed towards Astrid and Eodwulf.

In those previous encounters, we kind of got what we thought the two of them would be – confident, duty bound, convicted, a certain sense that they were where they wanted to be, that they knew their environment and had some control. Astrid came from a place of slightly patronising pity for Caleb. Eodwulf didn’t bother talking to the Nein overly.

So we all sat here and made jokes about Caleb’s evil ex-friends, donning their scariest wizard robes and staring stonily down the table for the evening. That’s what we expected. People who didn’t hesitate. People who, though abused and brainwashed, were committed to the cause, were perpetuating the cycle.

That is not what we got.

They start that way. Annoyed at the Nein’s antics. Stern. Supposedly full of conviction. But there was no righteousness, and they got more and more nervous as the night went on.

Astrid and Eodwulf were afraid. Astrid was not one step away from coldly offing Trent and taking his place. She was leaning away from him, begging Caleb to stop provoking Trent, stop calling attention to her. Eodwulf was reluctant to talk, was worried about how Caleb would react, froze up as soon as things started getting confrontational.

Every moment of their interactions at that table screamed ABUSE. 

I’m sure our previous assumptions are true. I’m sure they kill, torture, and do worse for the Empire. I’m sure they defend it at every point, have parroted lines they refuse to let go of. It’s possible that they mean it.

But those weren’t powerful mages who’d grown up to shoulder the horrors of their youth as just and right without another thought. Those were beaten dogs.

On top of that, those were beaten dogs who know they’re not allowed to think for themselves. Every time Caleb asked Astrid a difficult question – every single time – she would look over at Ikithon nervously, steel herself, and then mimic him almost exactly.

I didn’t realise until rewatching the scene, but her speech pattern varies GREATLY between speaking in a manner I believe to be honest, and speaking about dicey topics like the Empire, her duty, their actions, and so on. When addressing more vulnerable topics, Astrid spoke softly and looked like this:

Whenever she had to speak about something that she clearly felt she was on thin ice with? She lowered her voice, evened it out, and changed her cadence to match Ikithon’s perfectly, the only difference being that her voice is slightly higher pitched. It’s so close I sometimes had trouble telling if Caleb was talking to Ikithon or to her.

Astrid straight up told Caleb that whoever is her superior is right, and she and Eodwulf will do as that superior says. Nothing more. No moral judgements of her own. Eodwulf, for his part, never directly defended his actions or their jobs. Whenever he was pressed, he looked to Astrid. Who, in turn, would look to Trent.

That’s a pretty obvious sign of what’s going on, here.

The only times Eodwulf is startled into genuine reactions are when Trent drops the first real bombshell on Caleb, at which point he makes these faces:

And afterwards, when Caduceus parted with a scathing last word to Trent, wherein both he and Astrid looked like this:

Astrid tried to share her hair techniques with Jester. She smiled when the Nein joked about kidnapping her. Eodwulf liked the moniker they gave him. Eodwulf decided he liked Caduceus right after he’d told Trent no one would mourn him.

As soon as that dinner was over, Eodwulf pulled out alcohol, took a swig, passed it to Caleb, who took a swig, and then to Astrid, who took a swig. That quick and unhesitating exchange speaks of long experience. Long experience leaving Trent’s presence and immediately trying to get drunk.

It said a lot about the three of them, I think. That little moment, the ease of it, how normal it seemed, displays a genuine (at least at one point, and maybe still) camaraderie between them, and also a genuine unease in Trent’s presence, even after a decade and a half.

And that leads to the other thing I wasn’t expecting, but maybe should have. Caleb.

He’d hesitated from condemning Trent. This was the man he had spent most of the campaign running from, the man who had groomed him into killing his family, and yet he was reluctant to speak about violence, even though his friends half begged him to give the okay on it.

I think we were expecting Caleb to hunch his shoulders, to look away, to be eaten up by anxiety. And maybe he would have been shrinkingly cautious through the whole affair. Y’know, if Trent hadn’t said Caleb’s parents would have been okay with him burning them alive. If Astrid and Eodwulf hadn’t desperately tried to blend in with the furniture at every opportunity.

Caleb starts the dinner making these kind of faces:

But slowly, that changes. He stops doing his usual habit of avoiding eye contact and rubbing at his arms. He starts glowering when Trent tries to insist that Caleb’s parents’ deaths were a good thing, were what they wanted, would bring honour to the family he had eradicated, somehow. He likes it less when Trent claims credit for his escape. He really looks pissed when Astrid tries unconvincingly to argue that what they did was okay, obviously signalling her discomfort with the situation.

By the end of the night, Caleb looked Trent in the eye and said he dreamed of murdering him, brutally, with his bare hands. By the end of the night, Caleb had THIS look on his face as he stared at the man who’s haunted his every moment for as long as he’s been a lucid adult:

This Caleb? This is the Caleb who isn’t paralysed by his own guilt and fear. This is a Caleb who is very, very angry.

So regarding the dynamic between Astrid, Eodwulf, and Caleb? The script was, in the end, rather flipped. We went in expecting three wizards trying to manipulate an overwhelmed Caleb. Instead, we got one wizard crushing the souls of two others under his heel, with the only one currently outside his direct influence growing more and more furiously bold as the situation became evident.

The fact that Trent was his abuser was never going to bring Caleb to violence on its own. But Caleb called Astrid and Eodwulf “friends,” present tense, the day before he watched them sit, afraid of saying the wrong thing, through a dinner with their abuser. I don’t think he’s going to be so hesitant about violence towards Trent in the future.

They may have learned very little about Trent and his true intentions. It’s even possible that everything we saw of Eodwulf and Astrid is some elaborate fiction, though I don’t think so. But whatever else, it did one thing I’m not sure Trent wanted; it solidified a path forward for Caleb that he wouldn’t commit to before, and I don’t think it involves Trent surviving.