Dracula Daily: Texans and also RENFIELD

Lucy is proto-poly. So now here's another AU which lots of Tumblr seems to want (and that I would love), in which the main cast is entirely a polycule.

Also Lucy is super sweet and kind and adorable; it is a crime the way she gets portrayed in adaptations. She's got three suitors and they're all perfect gentlemen with her. So far this book actually portrays its women really well, between Lucy and Mina being best friends despite having such very different lives, and Lucy being a little flighty but still portrayed as very kind and good, and the suitors all taking their rejection quite gracefully and affirming their desire to stay friends... the relationships in this book are so sweet! (Also people were pointing out that even when writing about her three proposals in the same day to Mina, she still manages to be low-key sapphic with Mina, which is also true. I want the everyone-is-in-a-polycule version of this story where you have Lucy's husband and her two boyfriends and her girlfriend and then her girlfriend's husband.)

Anyway, Quincey P. Morris is very Texan.

Very, very Texan. Bram Stoker wants to be absolutely sure you know he is TEXAN. I know of no Americans who would be fooled. (I'm not even certain I believe the possibly-apocryphal story of someone getting stuck translating, at Pennsic, between the Texan gate volunteer and the English-from-England-received-pronunciation new arrival because their accents were so different as to be nigh-incomprehensible to each other, and that allegedly really happened.) One wonders if Bram Stoker had ever actually met any Texans, and if so whether they were messing with him.

(My own interaction with accents consists of the common neurodivergent thing colloquially known as "parrot ear." After I spend a certain length of time interacting with a specific regional accent or dialect-- particularly dialect-- I will just start adopting bits of it unconsciously when interacting with people who use it, which is fine right up until I run into someone who uses a dialect that's historically looked down on, and then they assume I'm making fun of them and the Extremely Woke crowd gets mad about cultural appropriation.)

And we finally meet Renfield, although very briefly and with no indication that he's relevant beyond the fact that he's the one Seward is talking about and this diary entry was considered relevant. Seward manages to actually be fairly profound about selfish versus selfless and how that alters the danger for the people around you. Usually it's observed heroically-- "Hero is driven by a GREAT CAUSE and thus can ignore physical privations!"-- but here we see it presented as a potential negative, in that Renfield's alleged delusions (which, as we shall see, are not delusions) will make him dangerous to people around him if he doesn't have any sense of caution borne of concern for his own safety.

By the by, how exactly does one keep a diary in phonograph?

Also I love that all the suitors are apparently good friends and Fought In The War together and are doing nothing so silly as fighting over a girl who has a perfect right to make her own opinions. (But also the poly energy continues. Like seriously, so much poly energy here.)

The number of people who have posted something to the effect of getting Jonathan Harker and Jonathan Sims confused is hilarious to me. And yes, I am probably going to write several versions of Jonathan Sims and Jonathan Harker overlapping.

I do grow concerned about our good friend Jonathan Harker, though. It has been some time since we've had a message from him, and his last messages were rather ominous.