Dracula Daily: Lizards
May. 12th, 2022 10:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
writerkitBook-Dracula can turn into a bat. He has no reason to go down the wall like a lizard except to be creepy. One wonders if he knew that Jonathan was watching. One of the unintentional comedy bits of this is just how bad Dracula is at pretending to be a human. Like, he is so, so bad at it! To the point where some of it has to be on purpose!
Something I have not thus far seen much discussed, probably because it's not great meme fodder, is that the sequence where Dracula is telling Jonathan to stay another month reminds me of nothing so much as the vaguely-pressure-y rapes where women go along with it because they think the man is going to get violent if they don't and they'd rather have the veneer of consent if not the actuality. Especially given all the incredibly homoerotic overtones that everyone is running about actively discussing. Dracula tells him he's staying for a month and does gaslighty "don't you want to do the thing" comments, and Jonathan remembers he's a prisoner and is aware that it will go from the veneer of being a guest to actually being locked up if he tries to insist.
I mean, I know it gets much more rapey later (fairly soon, I think?), but this reads like where that starts to hit the subtext.
Certainly one grasps why Jonathan keeps going off on tangents about finer points of law. It's the one thing he feels in control about at this point.
There are a lot of people on the internet who are like "Oh, this is normal law associate behavior; sure, the client can mind control wolves and has actually threatened to kill me, but the boss will be mad if I blow this deal, so." Which... what is wrong with the law profession?
This is the first time we see him do something that's genuinely an unforced error, though: do not take off the crucifix, Jonathan! Wear the thing so he will have at least a somewhat harder time killing you!
(Also why is he so sure the Count can't read shorthand?)
Incidentally, I did in fact start writing "Statement of Jonathan Harker Concerning a Business Trip to Transylvania," which will be finished and posted once we've had the entire trip to Transylvania, so not for a bit. I am a highly distractable writer.
Something I have not thus far seen much discussed, probably because it's not great meme fodder, is that the sequence where Dracula is telling Jonathan to stay another month reminds me of nothing so much as the vaguely-pressure-y rapes where women go along with it because they think the man is going to get violent if they don't and they'd rather have the veneer of consent if not the actuality. Especially given all the incredibly homoerotic overtones that everyone is running about actively discussing. Dracula tells him he's staying for a month and does gaslighty "don't you want to do the thing" comments, and Jonathan remembers he's a prisoner and is aware that it will go from the veneer of being a guest to actually being locked up if he tries to insist.
I mean, I know it gets much more rapey later (fairly soon, I think?), but this reads like where that starts to hit the subtext.
Certainly one grasps why Jonathan keeps going off on tangents about finer points of law. It's the one thing he feels in control about at this point.
There are a lot of people on the internet who are like "Oh, this is normal law associate behavior; sure, the client can mind control wolves and has actually threatened to kill me, but the boss will be mad if I blow this deal, so." Which... what is wrong with the law profession?
This is the first time we see him do something that's genuinely an unforced error, though: do not take off the crucifix, Jonathan! Wear the thing so he will have at least a somewhat harder time killing you!
(Also why is he so sure the Count can't read shorthand?)
Incidentally, I did in fact start writing "Statement of Jonathan Harker Concerning a Business Trip to Transylvania," which will be finished and posted once we've had the entire trip to Transylvania, so not for a bit. I am a highly distractable writer.
