Cool Drag Transformation (im On Episode 115 So Please No Spoilers)

fantasy costco is a front for garfield's true passion: illegal cloning

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

I'm in a new fandom. You know what time it is- in-universe tma memes. Pov: you work at at the magnus institute

Next/ 3/

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.

Micheal is my favourite character in the whole magnus archives saga- he is just so delightfully unsettling! drew a redraw of an old work on my relisten to celebrate TMPs announcement stuff and my best distorted boy

The gals!! I can't wait to start drawing them for dracula daily

Spider-Jon, Spider-Jon

Climbs a wall cuz he’s so done

With Drac‘s shit, all of it

Almost there, just a bit

Don’t look! You’re high up, Jonathan!

Is he strong? Listen, bud

Vamps are out to drink his blood

Can he climb despite the dread?

Take a look overhead

Hey there! There climbs our Jonathan!

In the chill of night, a castle filled with undead

Ignoring the height

He arrives, just ahead!

Jonathan, Jonathan

How the heck did Jonathan-

Laws of physics? He’s ignored

A dusty room is his reward

Look 'round! A path‘s there Jonathan!

To him, falling is not a big deal

Drac’ cosplaying Jon makes him reel

So there goes our Jonathan!

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.

Things that Adaptions have robbed us from #5829:

Van Helsing having red hair! He doesn't have gray hair yet, which should tell you he's on the younger side of being "old"!

Hi PLEASE go off about how the districts in The Hunger Games work. Thank you. 😘

ahaha OKAY!!

so I think the big issue with other YA dystopia that tried to emulate the hunger games was that it didn't grasp why the districts actually existed, and how the enforcement of their division actually served to benefit the capitol and weaken any resistance. tbh I didn't really think too deeply about this aspect of it until recently when i was watching someone on youtube's deep-dive into the divergent series and was struck by how stupid that series's idea of factions were. they're based primarily on personality traits, and not only that but they have a system where everyone has to be manually sorted into those factions? which is just way too much effort for a system so arbitrary that doesn't actually serve a logical purpose in maintaining a totalitarian regime.

meanwhile the hunger games's districts make complete sense; the capitol never had to corral people or even do much of anything other than draw some borders and then enforce said borders, and they did so logically based on preexisting socio-economic systems. district 12 is a mining district because it's located in appalachia, which is already an industrial mining area. by dividing panem based on available resources, the capitol can very easily maintain its control by forcing each individual district to be dependent on the capitol's allocation of said resources. no other districts can independently trade goods with one another, so if any district wants to receive everything it needs to survive, it has to stay in the capitol's good graces. if district four pisses them off, the capitol can just say "okay, good luck heating your homes this winter" and there's nothing district four can do about it. naturally this leads to certain districts receiving special treatment; district one supplies luxury goods for the capitol and as a result is allowed a level of wealth and comfort not afforded to other districts, which 1) motivates them to maintain the status quo to continue benefiting from it, 2) gives them a sense of pride and superiority to other districts that alienates them from others, and 3) breeds resentment for certain districts among the poorer ones, creating further division with minimal effort on the capitol's part. even if it's in everyone's best interests to unite and fight together, why would district 12 give a shit that district 1 is also suffering under the same regime? their families don't have to worry about putting food on the table.

and then the failed rebellion happens, district 13 is seemingly wiped off the map, and the capitol comes up with the hunger games, which is a pretty genius idea for a punishment that also serves to strengthen its power. "we destroyed district 13 and we have the power to destroy you, too, but all we're demanding of you is two of your children per year, and we're gracious enough to provide them a chance at survival." (i've seen shitty YA dystopias that have similar selection processes for whatever arbitrary system they establish where NO ONE who is selected comes back, which is insane and doesn't work because without that sliver of hope, no one who's being subjugated has anything to lose.)

and while every district is forced to sacrifice at least one child, some districts have a better chance of bringing a child home alive than others, which gives them the "privilege" of seeing selection for the games as something honorable. "yes, you might die, but you've had the resources to train for this your whole life, and if you win you'll bring more glory to our district, just like all the ones who came before you who now live in the victors' village" (and of course the more tributes who win in a certain district, the more aspirational being a tribute becomes, because you have plenty of examples of winners who now live in even more luxury than before; meanwhile district 12's victors' village is technically 'luxurious' but its only occupant is miserable and lonely and his life is hardly any better than the rest of them). and with this sense of competition comes even more division, because why would i see district 2 as my ally when their tribute, who i was forced to watch cave in my child's head with a rock, is now here on their mandatory victory tour celebrating the fact that they did so? sure, they still lost one kid, but they could have lost two like the rest of us.

so tl;dr the districts are a very logical, surprisingly simple aspect of the capitol's totalitarian rule: there's no arbitrary sorting system they have to create, it's based on the control of basic resources humans require to survive, it's relatively easy to enforce both through physical borders and a systemic "divide-and-conquer" approach appealing to human emotion. it's very believable as it merely takes real socio-economic disparity and class conflict to its most extreme.

(also this isn't related to the districts but other YA dystopia tends to portray their protagonists as "special" or "different" and that's why they're capable of taking down the system, but katniss is very explicitly Not Special. she's skilled in a way that makes perfect sense given her upbringing, but she's not overpowered; she wins because the pieces just so happen to fall into place in just the right way that allows her to win. the spark of rebellion she ignites by forcing the capitol to allow both her and peeta to win happens because she's intelligent, sure, but also because these poison berries happen to be available. it's a mundane victory made significant through circumstances where she happens to be the Right Person at the Right Time.)

obligatory "idk if this made any fucking sense lmao" bookend