seeing ppl go "lol jonathan why are you admitting you found them hot what will mina think of you when she reads it!!!" has me go "*shakes you* you are going against the thesis of the book!!!"
I know some of why is dependent on knowledge of future events, and so people new to Dracula Daily won’t be aware of it. But to be honest, Jonathan admitting his attraction to the vampire ladies is so, so important to me. On several different character levels, even outside of the entire book proving over and over again that sharing knowledge is absolutely vital (and is also an expression of deep love/trust/support).
Let’s just stick the quote in here for reference:
There was something about them that made me uneasy, some longing and at the same time some deadly fear. I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips. It is not good to note this down, lest some day it should meet Mina’s eyes and cause her pain; but it is the truth.
Firstly - he needs to keep an accurate record. This is his only place to speak freely, his only opportunity to be precise about what he is going through. It is vitally important for him to keep his sanity intact that he be clear and try to remain logical in this diary. We see him fact-checking again and again. We can extrapolate from other statements that he doesn’t always mention everything he suspects unless he feels it relevant or possible to prove. For example, repeatedly noting Dracula himself doing things before ever getting around to voicing the theory that the Count has no servants (he collected evidence first, didn’t speak his suspicions until they were proven). Or putting the crucifix above his bed and taking the opportunity to sleep elsewhere, thus pointing to feeling unsafe and possibly experiencing bad dreams in his own room (he mentioned what he does about it, but not the feeling on its own or whatever nightmares he may be having). Jonathan works very hard to keep his diary focused on a few things above all: what the Count/ladies are, what everyone does, what Jonathan observes or learns, his actionable plans. He of course expresses his fears and emotions at times in his diary, more than he can out loud, but never going all the way down the rabbithole of fear, hopelessness, etc. He tries to calm himself by sticking to facts (all the harder when something strange is happening), which is in itself a soothing process for him so that’s helpful too. His goal is to make this diary useful to himself and to others, if he ever gets the chance to share it. There is a goal here.
And what that means, is that the things Jonathan writes in great detail are things that feel relevant to him. The entire encounter with the vampire ladies was extremely important. It revealed a ton of new information to him, as well as being a truly horrifying and traumatic thing to go through. Jonathan’s feelings are as relevant as his observations/actions here, because both are directly affected by the presence of the vampire women. Jonathan can’t move. He feels dreamy. He feels attracted to them. He cannot resist and in the moment a large part of him didn’t even want to. These are all effects they are causing, at least to some extent. I know mileage can vary a lot on how much of Jonathan’s attraction is just coming from him, but honestly, I can’t agree with any version that doesn’t have a natural attraction at the very least being exacerbated by supernatural vampire abilities somehow. If not caused or called forth by them in the first place. The way he narrates, with so much obvious fear and revulsion mixed in with the desire, makes that clear to me. He sounds like he doesn’t fully understand his own feelings at the time, at least where they all came from or why they were so strong. It goes along with all the other symptoms he is experiencing, and the other abilities they demonstrate. And so, to keep his record accurate - it has to go in. He cannot leave it out. It might become very relevant later.
Secondly - Jonathan is honest with Mina, specifically. I love this about their relationship. I don’t think it’s so much ‘I noticed they were attractive’ that he fears might hurt her, because Mina isn’t particularly shy herself about noticing both women and men as good-looking, and even admiring their looks while on a date with Jonathan (poor Pretty Girl in Piccadilly). He also called local women pretty in his first entry as well (though he did say “except when you got near them” so it felt a bit backhanded to me), so again it’s not the noticing that’s an issue either way. It’s more that he felt actual desire to act on an attraction, or rather for them to act. This is unusual, this is a separate matter from noticing people are hot, this is something that comes much closer to cheating or at least wanting to, and he feels very guilty about it. There’s no real sense that he is worried Mina will be angry at him, and there’s no sense that he will ever outside of that one moment ever want to act on any attraction he feels for someone other than Mina (or someone Mina also approves of, varying depending on your polycula headcanons). I personally do kind of tend to view Jonathan as some form of demisexual so how much he even tends to feel attraction to other people is often a little wibbly to me, but that’s kind of irrelevant for the point of this. We can also set aside the shared language of “kiss” between Jonathan and the vampire ladies, and how this may point to a desire to become available for being drunk from, rather than necessarily sexual desire specifically, even if that’s the type of language used. With regards to Mina: he’s not worried about being caught, because he is choosing not to hide. He feels bad talking about the attraction because it might hurt her feelings, but he’ll admit to it regardless because it’s more important to him to be honest with her. Jonathan hates hiding things from Mina. This actually becomes plot-relevant later on. Even when she herself expressly forbids him from telling her stuff, he feels anguished about it and is certain to ensure that records are kept which she can read later. He trusts her completely. Embarrassment, shame, bad behavior, or whatever else - he will still share that with her. The only times he doesn’t confide in Mina are when he’s trying to repress everything because he thinks he was crazy (and possibly may even have some PTSD-related memory loss as well), or when he and the other men are trying to make sure she isn’t exposed to danger (which is wrong in several ways but this post isn’t about that so I won’t get into it), and of course when she tells him not to. Every single time he feels upset about it. So yeah, he’s going to regret that she may feel hurt, but deliberately hiding things from her would be worse.
Thirdly - Jonathan admitting his attraction here is a huge comfort to Mina later on. I truly believe this. I’ve talked about it before actually, but let me try to rephrase a bit to keep it on the same post. By being open about his own attraction and experience with nearly being drunk from, he provides precedent for Mina’s October 3rd trauma. It makes it easier (though obviously still not easy) for her to admit to the same kind of desire:
“I was bewildered, and, strangely enough, I did not want to hinder him. I suppose it is a part of the horrible curse that such is, when his touch is on his victim.”
Mina never blamed Jonathan for expressing such thoughts. She wasn’t concerned about the issue being another woman when she came to him in the hospital, and when she read his diary she never mentioned any hesitations or misgivings about this scene at all. But even if she had secretly felt upset before (I personally don’t see her thinking that way at all, but for the sake of argument), I think that experiencing something similar would make her grateful for Jonathan’s candor. In a moment when she’s already feeling deeply unclean and complicit, Jonathan’s earlier honesty here relieves her from a little bit of the guilt she is feeling. It lets her recognize her own lack of desire to stop Dracula as something he did to her, just like Jonathan experienced with the vampire ladies when he couldn’t/didn’t want to move away. It’s possible even that Mina felt more explicit desire for Dracula’s 'red lips to kiss her’ but didn’t feel comfortable saying quite that much - even if so, again Jonathan’s account would be a comfort.
And having that account written down long ago means she has already internalized this. If Jonathan had kept it hidden only to try and ease her mind later, well… first off, Mina too might have kept her reaction hidden out of guilt. And even if she didn’t or he told her then, a confession at that time wouldn’t mean nearly as much or carry the same kind of weight, I don’t think. It would feel like he’s making excuses for her, like he didn’t trust her enough to tell her earlier, just… bad stuff mixed in, which are all avoided by having Jonathan be truthful from the start.
normal dude. just loitering around the city. kinda funky, interesting colorway, but feral pigeons have plenty of variety. not really of any particular note, all things considered
u know, that one’s a bit of an oddity right there. in the realm of weird, yeah, but i can still connect point A to point Z
what the fuck. no, seriously, what the fuck is this. how did you get to this morphology via selective breeding. what led you to choose to continue this at each and every step. what.
in junior year of highschool my art teacher would let our ceramics class play music of our choice off of her desktop. we usually used spotify or youtube but she did have one album downloaded on her computer. it was a halloween sound effects/ambience collection. i dont remember why she had it. there was a track on there called “burning screams” which was exactly what it sounds like. just a cacophony of screams alongside crackling fire. she only let us play it on very special occasions, and we would cheer and jump with joy every time. it was like a pizza party to us
please imagine 6 teenagers with giant sad puppy eyes looking at a dear sweet 50 something year old art teacher and asking “may we please hear burning screams”
i dont know where burning screams came from. ive looked. its lost media to me. burning screams is my white whale
Track 3 “Burning Screams” on “Scary Sounds of Halloween”
And speaking of scurvy, I am eternally amused by the thing where some ancient form of healing that was born in a time where people didn’t know exactly how the human body works, or what causes it to stop working sometimes, that still somehow worked. Like how so many old folk medicinal plants were listed as a cure for various ailments that - from a modern view - are clearly just symptoms of scurvy, and the plant itself is rich in vitamin C.
I recall reading some story, no recollection of the exact time or place, where the king of a large empire suffered from constant horrible headaches and was incapable of falling asleep unless drugged or blackout drunk. Sick of taking temporary fixes to dull the pain and having to be sedated every night, he called up some old sage healer who was said to know how to fix things nobody else could explain, and the healer heard his symptoms and went
“Hmm. You spend too much time being a king. Your skull is packed so full of kingly thoughts that they don’t all fit in there and that’s why your head is in pain. You need to spend time not being a king.” And prescribed him to schedule three days every month where he must go to a peasant village where nobody knows he’s the king, live with a family there under a fake name and identity, work in the rice fields with them, eating the same food and sleeping on the same mats. Absolutely nobody is allowed to address him as the king, speak to him of any royal or political matters, and he himself is not allowed to think any kingly thoughts or think of himself as the king.
And naturally, this worked. Taking a regular scheduled break from a highly stressful office desk job to completely decompress, paired with physical exercise in the form of hard but simple physical labour, plain and simple food and Just Not Thinking About Your Fucking Job All The Time does help chronic stress, which here was worded as “spending too much time being a king clogs your brain.”
Sometimes you do have ghosts in your blood, though I’m not entirely sure whether you should do cocaine about it.
[ID: a screenshot of a comment from reddit, with no username visible. The commend reads: This doesn’t make a ton of sense to me either. Setting aside the question of whether gender/sex is assigned or observed at birth, the gender I was assigned at birth was ‘boy.’ The gender I have now is ‘man’. Boys and men have different gender roles, and few adults identify as boys anymore. From this standpoint, every adult has a different gender than the one they had at birth. End ID]
Framing “girl” and “boy” as separate genders from “woman” and “man” is such an amazing take. it’s a framework that accommodates and explains so many trans experiences. Some trans people never were their AGAB. Some feel like they were their AGAB, but that that changed (usually when puberty hits, which is when you start “becoming a man/woman”. The accepted societal path is that girls grow up to into women, and boys grow up into men. But some girls grow up into men, and some boys grow up into women. This guy was a boy who grew up into a man, which generally works out pretty well for people. Some boys and girls grow up into people who aren’t men or women, even! It’s like this random cis guy skipped right over transgender 101, 102, 201, etc. and stumbled directly into Transgender Nirvana.
