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@marghen / marghen.tumblr.com

Margaret | Illustrator/Animator | Character Design and Gothic Horror Art | Current Project: Fortune’s Fools, Vol. 1 🌙 Patreon, Ko-fi and More
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Reblogged lavinaigrette
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Anonymous asked:

this is why it's absurd there are 40000 draculas that give him a backstory and with mina/mina-alike a love saga of Forbidden Heterosexual Romance but all carmillas are either horny elizabeth bathory preying with no depth or lately two girls vaguely looking at each other where the vampirism isn't even there. it deserves just as many adaptations especially when there's so many loose ends to tie, or benefit from the pov of the vampire and her life way more than drac.

immediatebreakfast answered:

I would dare argue that Carmilla is the prototype for the tortured vampire who is disgusted by their nature, and only kills for the sake of feeding. She is so so complicated, and all of these cowardly adaptations reduce my beautiful baby girl to a caricature of the Weird Sisters, or not even give her the honor of being the vampire in the story is infuriating.

The archetype of the lesbian vampire not even being a fucking vampire. A female character that represents both the death and the maiden, framed as an object of desire who dares to desire in a world where her love is met with repulsion. So many things to expand, and the opportunity to focus on the female characters... But no let's make another """"subversive"""" adaptation in which Count Dracula is a ~tortured sad grown ass man who needs to be fixed 🥺~ with a convenient backstory that gives him poor Mina as a prize (while still having the Weird Sisters on the side), oh Carmilla? Yeah she is just some vampire woman who needs to be put in her place I mean, has to be stopped, she is trying to kiss girls 😭😭😭!

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Reblogged crunchygranoladyke
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Lily Rose Depp turning out to be a creepy dykey weirdgirl with a hot female boyfriend is such a win for The Culture

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seriously we needed a hot weird girl who acts publicly insane over beautiful masculine women in the current pop media circuit and it's HER.

Happy birthday my oxygen

#she’s just like me fr
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Was looking for “I, Strahd” at the secondhand bookstore but I found P. N. Elrod’s fix-it fic instead

you may not like it but this is what aura looks like

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Please know that I gave this book an honest chance but I am not even though chapter two and I cannot get though more than a couple pages at a time before a wild desire to throw this book across the room takes me.

#did I say fix it fic? she fixed one thing and smashed the rest of it with a comically large hammer#maybe this book is not for me
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More things that get left out of Dracula adaptations

  • Van Helsing pulls 29 year old Dr Seward's ear like he's still a schoolboy
  • There's a relationship-establishment flashback between Van Helsing and Seward
  • In it, Van Helsing accidentally gets cut with something unclean. His then-student Seward immediately drops everything to start sucking on the wound raw
  • At one point, Seward asks to become his "pet student again."
  • Dracula has a big, permanent scar on his forehead from Jonathan Harker's shovel
  • Arthur Holmwood saying "Tally ho!"
  • Transylvanians conclude that the delirious, amnesiac Jonathan Harker is English due to "his violent demeanour."
  • Despite attempts to keep low profile, Dracula gets into the news twice in two months (in one of them as a missing dog)
  • Dracula getting misreported as a dog because English people have never seen a wolf
  • London newspapers treat Lucy's vampire attacks on children as a meme among kids because they don't believe in vampires
  • Dracula gets sworn at by a British sailor solely because he thinks Dracula is French
  • Van Helsing baffled why British sailors keep talking about blood and bloom (it's swearing)
  • Van Helsing is friends with real-life turkologist traveler Arminius Vámbéry, who is his source on the Dracula family
  • Van Helsing is friends with Hans Christian Andersen and references The Ugly Duckling
  • Van Helsing getting one-upped by MinaHarker every single time he says something sexist about her intelligence
  • Dracula failing to destroy the evidence against him because Mina backs up her files
  • Jonathan getting so mad he hunts Dracula down the walls like a spiderman with a machete
  • Mina and Jonathan kissing on the mouth in front of everybody
  • Quincey Morris spontaneously gifting Mina the Victorian equivalent of a MacBook Air
  • Quincey Harker
#my gf sent me this post and i feel so seen#i wanna reread dracula this year and fall in love with this book all over again#dracula
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Was looking for “I, Strahd” at the secondhand bookstore but I found P. N. Elrod’s fix-it fic instead

you may not like it but this is what aura looks like

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I love P.N. Elrod, especially The Vampire Files

Funny to remember that Elrod was one of the people who helped Anne Rice pioneer anti-fanfiction sentiment on the early internet

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P.N. Elrod, I was unaware of your fanfic beef

#i hadn’t heard much about her besides her vampire writing
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Was looking for “I, Strahd” at the secondhand bookstore but I found P. N. Elrod’s fix-it fic instead

you may not like it but this is what aura looks like

#in true pn elrod fashion quincey is getting the sympathetic vampire treatment#sadly van helsing is probably going to be the main antagonist if the back cover summary is any indication#I’m already behind on reading A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder for a book club but what’s one more#<is what I said when I picked up Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter last week.#marghen#irl lore drop
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reverse gatekeeping. I am on my knees begging people to engage with the source material

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Very late to the party, but that MA thesis on Jonathan and Mina's gender presentation that circulated on Tumblr some time ago (Jonathan, Mina, and the Holiest Love: Intimations of a virtuous queerness in Dracula (1897) by Viktor Karlsen Hessen) really is so, so good. From a deep dive into Jonathan as a Gothic heroine, complete with step-by-step comparisons with an actual Ann Radcliffe's heroine as well as the other female characters he's paralleled with in the text - Scheherazade and Lenore - to an exploration of how Mina's masculine traits are treated as positive throughout the novel and survive into the ending. Also, the author is very careful and rational when talking about Stoker's personal views and sexuality, neither jumping to conclusions based on a few facts nor disregarding those facts at all.

Also, there's a section comparing Mina to other female characters in Gothic literature who do not act in accordance with the Victorian gender norms but are punished for that - Helen Vaughan from The Great God Pan and Marjorie Lindon from The Beetle, and I personally am 1) always there for some The Great God Pan talk, 2) always there for dragging The Beetle.

#dracula
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#GO READ THIS IMMEDIATELY YOU WILL NOT REGRET IT#dracula's guest#dracula#art by op
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Reblogged starstrider-productions
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Anonymous asked:

I'm reading a dissertation on gender-fluidity in Dracula and how the Harkers especially display androgyny in an atypical non-villainious way (they take a comparative literature approach) and it's very good so far. It's going to talk about their love and challenge the notion that it's heteronormative, according to the abstract, but here's just a few bits from what I've read so far

When Jonathan becomes sick in Budapest, Mina travels across Europe on her own to bring him back. Whereas Jonathan’s journal briefly mimicked the form and content of a Radcliffean heroine’s travel narrative, her narrative never does. As far as narrative decisions go, it is appropriate that her narrative does not take on such a format here, because if anything she is playing the Radcliffean hero to his heroine. As discussed in 3.5, he is, if anything, the party being given away to a spouse by a father. Hawkins suggests to Mina, not to Jonathan, that they may as well marry in Budapest. [...] Jonathan, meanwhile, becomes very emotional, a state associated with Victorian femininity. His anger has him shouting in most conversations with the group, and failing to kill the Count in Carfax Abbey leaves him in a “sublime misery” that had “no place for words” (Stoker 268). [...] Today anger and rage are perhaps the most acceptable emotions for a man to openly display, but by Victorian standards, emotional excess was inherently feminine. A manly response to his situation would have been “[d]isinterested and controlled compassion” (Demirhan 96). The volatility of Jonathan’s mood here speaks to a lack of self-control, which—as discussed—was one of the core tenets of Victorian masculinity. On the other hand, Mina is obviously shaken and upset, but she consistently makes a great effort not to be overwhelmed by her feelings (Stoker 269). [...] When it becomes evident that he cannot leave, he instead wishes he had “a gun or some lethal weapon” (Stoker 51). When he realizes that Mina cannot stay, he pre-emptively grants the wish that was never granted to him. [...] Finally, it is worth noting that he seems more than comfortable with her wielding a deadly—and undeniably somewhat phallic—weapon. Whereas the phallicized women of The Great God Pan and The Beetle, and the vampire women elsewhere in the novel, inspire fear, Jonathan is entirely comfortable with Mina armed.
see-arcane answered:

Ohhhh this is fantastic! Who is the writer? Is there a link where folks can go read the dissertation?

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I will never not be thinking about the way this book explores gender and gender nonconformity. It’s such a major theme in the story, though easy to miss for modern readers because from our modern perspective some of the things don't seem like such a big deal anymore, or simply don't have the same significance now that they would then.

I mean, consider the bit where Jonathan holds Mina's arm. That's a complete reversal of the gender norm of the time - where the woman would walk holding the man's arm - but today it doesn't really register because it's not something we pay that much attention to anymore as a society.

It's really notable that this is initiated by Jonathan and it's not a one-time thing, but rather something that they regularly did "in the old days." So it's not at all connected to any infirmness post mental breakdown. They were doing this long before Dracula ever came into their lives. Mina is more aware now that it is considered transgressive and improper, but she ultimately decides that she doesn't care. She says not only that they are somewhere where no one knows them, but that they decide that even if someone who knew them DID see they don't care. This is how they want to live. They are consciously making the decision despite being aware of how they will be viewed.

Nor is this an isolated incident of them taking on reversed or nonconforming gender roles. And these two make it through everything. For all critics try to say this book is about people being punished for expression, Jon and Mina are portrayed as having a good and pure love that conquers evil, and they are rewarded by the narrative. They both survive and achieve happiness. And indeed, what the narrative actually punishes are the instances where characters try to force them into a more conformist dynamic - for example by shutting Mina out of things because she is a woman, a decision that has catastrophic consequences for everyone.

#the feeling of academic validation here is unparalleled#jonmina#mina harker#jonathan harker#dracula
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Plans for March: Wouldn't you like to know

Plans for April: Drawing Quincey in bootcut jeans for Dracula 2004

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[jolts up from my desk] JONATHAN WITH A CRUCIFIX FLIP PHONE CHARM

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