Most Certainly Uncertain

our blorbo of the month Jonathan Harker for the character bingo!

I’ve taken a highlighter to my copy of the book and half the sections I’ve highlighted are just like. Jonathan and/or Mina making me 🥺🥺🥺 And when I say “the fans” what I mean is “apparently most adaptations.”

I say wasted potential because SIR WHAT HAPPENED DURING THOSE LONG STRETCHES YOU’RE NOT WRITING? Dracula Daily ratchets up the tension with these long stretches of silence from him, but it is SO jarring reading the book and seeing his journal jump from May 31 straight to June 17. That’s almost 3 weeks!!! And clearly he had his journal and clearly things were still happening, so…what could’ve happened that kept him from writing?

Personally I think stuff went down that he straight up could not write about because it was too traumatizing to try to commit to paper. I think it’s a type of memory suppression. He writes stuff down to remember it, and to try to make sense of things that shouldn’t make sense; when he can no longer deny that something is seriously wrong, that impossible things are happening, his entries become a lot shorter. Up to this point, writing events down has served to make those events real for him, and I think he doesn’t want whatever happened in those 2.5 weeks to have been real. I have my ideas about what happened—I think he absolutely got bitten and fed on by Dracula, multiple times. I think there was a lot more overt and intense psychological torture than the cat-playing-with-its-food we see in the May 19 entry (and I think gaslighting played a big part in it). I think there was probably also physical stuff, but that’s something I can discuss another time, under a cut. The point is, while I know why we didn’t get any of this, I’m so mad about it.

I can’t, in good conscience, say he’s never done anything wrong because he is canonically xenophobic and interested in phrenology, but he was also written by a white dude in the British Empire at a time when most white British people were like that. You could remove those two elements from the story and his character remains the same, so I view them as a problem with the author and not the character. So if, for the sake of this meme, we set aside the problematic traits….his literal only crime is being a brand new baby lawyer who got a big break that turned into a fucking nightmare.