Dr. Seward - Tumblr Posts

Thank you, I just want this to be a thing now

Modern Day Dracula Fan Cast

Whether your particular poison is Sherlock, Elementary, or Watson and Holmes (which is a comic that’s worth looking at if you like Sherlock Holmes) you can’t deny that the idea of modern day Sherlock Holmes really works. I think the reason for that, beyond just having strong, archetypal characters, is that the original Sherlock Holmes stories were very modern at the time. It was a scientist applying the latest methods to crime solving in a world where the police ran like that John Mulaney bit about getting away with murder in olden times.

Somewhere along the way we got stuck in the Victorian conception of it, but it’s got the soul of modernity to it. Another novel that has the soul of modernity to it but has been locked to the period, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (not to be confused with the film Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which I do not care for the most part, though I bear no ill will to those who do). The world has sort of latched onto it as a Romantic era story about a brooding vampire and swooning maidens, but it really is more of an enlightenment story. I’d compare it to Pacific Rim or Ghostbusters which are films about regular folk (primarily young folk in the case of the former) who apply science and friendship to defeat old world evil (admittedly among other uncomfortable Victorianisms).

That’s the adaptation I want to see, where a band of young people join together with science and friendship to defeat the avatar of an outmoded, parasitic medieval worldview.

So here’s the cast….

Mina Murray(-Harker): Saoirse Ronan

Stoker was Irish, Murray is an Irish name, and so I think that it’s fitting for the co-star of this movie to be Irish as well. I don’t think anybody can doubt Ronan’s acting chops at this point so I’ll just say that I think she’s got the ability to be kindly and strong, and be the one to take charge of the Crew of Light (which is the badass name the heroes call themselves in the novel).

John Harker: John Boyega

I don’t think I’m the first person to say Boyega would be a great Johnathan. Based on Star Wars alone Boyega can pull off Harker’s mix of “what the F—k is happening” and “touch my friends and I’ll put a Kukri through your neck.” This character has been done wrong throughout decades of film and stage shows and I think Boyega would be perfect to make the character the active, brave, down to earth, kind and loving husband of the novel.

Lucy Westenra: Lily James

Lucy, another character that has been, in my opinion at least, misinterpreted by most adapters. I picture Lucy as Mina’s upper class best friend. A little more deliberately glamorous but a total sweetheart who we believe the Crew of Light would band together to avenge. The idea of an actual Disney Princess in the role of Lucy is a pretty solid way of looking at the character.

Doctor Jackie Seward: Hannah John-Kamen

Yes, I think Seward should be a woman. The cast needs to an overhaul so it’s not all dudes and one Mina once Lucy dies. Kamen has the capability to play a sort of brooding badassery that works for Seward. Seward is a character who is dealing with rejection, being overworked, and probably dealing with some kind of clinical depression but rises to occasion and teams up with the man her ex-girlfriend was going to marry to make sure nobody has to go through it again.

Arthur Holmwood: Tom Felton

As much as I don’t want this to be a total angst-fest, I think Arthur doesn’t really have much of an arc in the novel. Felton can obviously play upper class Englishman and sort of dorky friendly guy (watch his later episodes of the Flash). I think he could also play an Arthur that slowly breaks down at all the loss until he lets the rest of the Crew of Light support him and ends the movie a little more world weary, but ultimately standing upright.

Quincey Morris: Lucas Till

Guy’s actually Texan, which is fun. I’m mostly basing this on his role as Havoc, but I do think he’s got it in him to play Arthur’s supportive, adventurer best friend, who bonds with everyone and sacrifices himself for John and Mina. Just a fun, friendly action hero in the middle of a survival horror thriller.

Abraham Van Helsing: Mark Hamill

I’m sure he can do the accent, and he’s definitely got the look. I imagine him doing a variation on old Luke Skywalker in TLJ. Someone who knows more than the young people around him, who’s hurting from loss and past mistakes (remember book Van Helsing lost a son and has a wife struggling with mental illness) and ultimately gives his charges the tools they need to save the world on their own.

RM Renfield: Bill Skarsgard

I know Renfield should be older, but I have two points. Firstly, I think it’s fun if Dracula ends up enthralling more of an impressionable young person. Second, just look at that picture. That’s Renfield.

Count Dracula: Hugo Weaving

Credit for this one to my friend Ed. Picture him doing Agent Smith crossed with Elrond in Red Skull’s voice. No sexy Dracula (nothing against Mister Weaving), just a dark, menacing, towering figure with a powerful voice looking down on everyone around him.

Hi, if you happen to be taking asks right now, do you have any thoughts on Jack Seward and his place in the story? A lot of people doing Dracula Daily seem to find him creepy and off-putting and expect him to become a villain. Was he maybe intended as a sort of red herring? Especially his odd arc, which flirts with him becoming a full-on mad scientist? Are we intended to be waiting for him to fall into that behavior or was Stoker doing something else with Seward?

[Spoilers: Extended discussion of Jack Seward, his patient, and later portions of the book under the cut; also CW for mention of medical abuse]

I have many many many thoughts about Jack Seward, his arc, and his multitude of personal and professional failures. He was the topic of my Master's Thesis, and I feel that if I keep up with Dracula Daily through September I will be revisiting a lot of old posts about him and writing a lot of new ones.

I do think Seward's poor medical ethics and his temptation toward even worse medical ethics are incredibly significant to what I see as being as the major themes of the novel, and I think the reader should be apprehensive about his potential for villainy. The basic argument of my own work as regards him is that both he and Renfield are both committed to fundamentally materialist views of reality at the opening of the novel and are dehumanizing one another within those paradigms. Both of them treat the other, at some point, as experimental animals, with Seward explicitly discussing Renfield in terms of vivisectionist research and Renfield attempting to include Seward in his vitalist project by literally consuming him. I hold that Dracula asserts the reality of spiritual existence by allowing each man to have a transformative moment as regards the human soul. Jack, in being confronted by a Lucy who is not Lucy, can see a physical body in which a soul is absent--which affirms the soul’s existence as something beyond the physical contours of the brain. Renfield, in being confronted by Mina’s overabundant empathy, is made to confront the horror of his own vitalist project to the extent that he abandons his attempts to extend his own life in a profound moment of self sacrifice. I also believe that Seward and Lucy (who were a couple in the original outlines of the novel) can be read as a failed version of Jonathan and Mina, with Jack’s skepticism and Lucy’s passivity making them vulnerable in ways that the Harkers are not. I feel that poor Jonathan--for all the flak people give him right now--is a character who adapts to the reality of the supernatural with a grace that Jack cannot.

So that’s the very very brief rundown as to what I think is going on with Seward. I will hopefully be revisiting a lot of this in the future.

seward day one: it’s interesting the little bug farm renfield’s got going on. gonna let him just do his thing basically bc i wanna see where this is going. i wonder what kind of animal he’s going to get into next?

seward day ten: if i give renfield a kittycat he will almost certainly eat it 

Nothing but sleek kittens and smooth seas from here on out!

Drácula, Bram Stoker

Drácula é um romance estruturalmente epistolar, ou seja, o livro é composto por cartas, diários, notícias de jornais e correspondências. Durante a narrativa, acompanhamos a história de Jonathan, Mina, Lucy, Arthur, Quincey, Dr. John Seward, Van Helsing e, é claro, do enigmático Conde Drácula. Cada uma das personagens tem seu respectivo ponto de vista e é por meio deles que acompanhamos a trajetória desse grupo tentando derrotar o vampiro.

No início do livro, vemos Jonathan a caminho do castelo de Drácula, na Transilvânia. Essa trajetória é sombria e misteriosa, e não fazemos ideia do que pode acontecer. Pouco depois de chegar ao seu destino e ser acomodado no castelo, Jonathan começa a perceber que é na verdade mais um prisioneiro do que um hóspede, e que o educado Conde Drácula não é o que parece ser.

O suspense deixa o livro instigante e as descrições são tão realistas que pude imaginar as cenas com perfeição. O clima sombrio, as paisagens obscuras, o castelo rodeado por neblina e as tempestades dão ao livro uma verdadeira atmosfera de terror.

As personagens tem, cada uma, suas próprias características e é fácil nos apegarmos a elas. Em minha opinião, Van Helsing e Mina são as melhores, e eu não gostei muito de Lucy. Conde Drácula é um personagem muito bem construído, sendo inspirado em Vlad Tepes III, príncipe da Valáquia conhecido como o Empalador.

He definitely was tempted but what matters is that in the end he said no !!

Gold star to Dr Seward being like “fuck I could get so much cool information from this but it’s also deeply unethical and I refuse to find a justification for it in case I develop a slippery slope into other unethical experimentation!”

like hell yeah man! correct response! my scientific ethics professors would be proud of you, fictional man from the 1890s!

Bram Stoker is experiencing Writer Hell: over a century later people are still reading and discussing your work but they're making jokes about your one (1) timeline oopsie

People in Hollywood are cowards because you could totally do a book accurate Dracula movie and it really wouldn’t be that hard.

Johnathan is just vloging his trip to Draculas castle but the castle doesn’t have any service or wifi so he can’t post anything or send it.

Lucy and Mina’s letters are now text messages or voice memos that are super long.

Dr. Steward voice dairy is wouldn’t have to be changed or it could be changed to him filming himself talking. Or even recorded sessions of him and Renfield

The newspaper clippings could become morning news stories.

All the diary entries are now them just filming themselves talking about what happened in like a video diary format.

It would be so easy! Can you see the vision?

OKAY TUMBLR I'M GOING TO NEED YOU TO TRANSLATE DR. SEWARD TO ME BECAUSE I GOT NOTHING

OKAY TUMBLR I'M GOING TO NEED YOU TO TRANSLATE DR. SEWARD TO ME BECAUSE I GOT NOTHING

Okay you guys the lapse in Dracula communiqués is really starting to put a strain on the Tumblr community. People are snapping at each other left and right in the comments of various unrelated posts. We. Need. Jonathan.

Seward watching Renfield use his food to attract more flies because he's feeding his flies to his spiders because Seward said to get rid of the flies

I really find Seward hard to understand. Like, not globally, but individual phrases just totally baffle me. "oh, unconscious cerebration! you will have to give the wall to your conscious brother." Wtaf are you talking about my dude

oh god he's gonna eat the bird isn't he

I'm curious, people who are reading Dracula Daily, but haven't read it before and have managed to avoid spoilers, what are your predictions?

I am convinced that Dracula has long distance telepathy, though some aspects of my theory don't really work. I've never read the book so please don't comment either way if you know the story. Here's my thinking. It stands to reason that Jonathan told Dracula all about Mina and absolutely convinced Drac that Mina is the best woman in England (and the world as far as Jon's concerned). Dracula is not immune to such advertising and send his telepathic mind tentacles out to find her. Here's where my theory gets shaky. Why did he start playing with (his food) Lucy first? Was she sitting near Mina and his mind-tentacle bumped into her first? And then there's Renfield. I suspect Renfield was always ND. But the eat-living-creatures thing must be a Drac influence. Drac setting up a little helper for when he arrives. Or just playing with his food again, who knows. But I doubt Jon has ever heard of Renfield? Unless he mentioned Seward and the mental hospital and that intrigued Drac. Maybe he was looking for Seward and his tentacle bumped Ren instead. Imagine Dracula having, like, imprecise aim! Seward would be a much more useful helper, after all, as a respectable medical man. Think of the access to helpless food Seward could provide. Come to think of it, if Drac has long distance telepathy he'd have close proximity telepathy too. Maybe he plucked Lucy out of Jon's brain. Maybe out of his dreams. Maybe Drac just liked her looks; everyone seems to. But that still doesn't explain him going after Renfield. Unless Jon met Renfield once, somehow? Could have been in passing, before Ren went to Seward's hospital. Maybe Ren acted memorably enough for Jon to have dreamt of him, and put him on Dracula's radar? Anyone new to this novel have thoughts about it?

This fits nicely with what I've been pondering. Dracula consumes and destroys lives.

This update makes me also sad for Renfield in a way that's just like. Ok. He's not doing great before Dracula comes in. Seward is not running an establishment that is treating Renfield's issues, and there is no end in sight for the man where he is going to be able to live normally outside of the asylum. But for all that... his life was not a misery. Seward himself comments that Renfield seemed more content doing his thing in his cell than Seward was living his life on the outside.

Now he's in a straight jacket and chained to a wall and his life IS a fucking misery and it's just like. This is what Dracula does to people. Any little life that Renfield might have eked out for himself is gone now. Dracula has his hooks in him and I'm sure one way or another will lead him to his death. It was his powerlessness and his madness which drew Dracula to Renfield and that's all she wrote. Dracula doesn't stop until he's utterly decimated everything a person could be. Like I can't get over how little Renfield had. No power, no sanity, no friends. Just his contentment. That's it. And he can't even have that.

I wonder if we did? Is it a plant for something later?

Jack is sooo pretentious. My brother in christ, we did not need the whole chemical formula of your sleeping pill

Van Helsing's letter both entertains and frustrates me. My LD is such that when I don't understand something I read my eyes just skip over it until I get back to a part that makes sense. In VH's case I enjoyed the way it was written to convey a Germanic flavor of ESL. But then several turns of phrase threw me off. Am I understanding correctly that Jack sucked gangrene out of VH's wound...with a knife? I'm having trouble picturing that. And the wound was caused by... someone. A colleague of VH's? A peer of Jack's? When his knife slipped? Why are these people brandishing knives at each other? And how did gangrene instantly set in and then get sucked out? That's not how gangrene works, is it?

Ship-wise, I didn't much like Seward included in the polycule, tbh. I like morally ambiguous characters a lot, but Lucy doesn't need Jack's brand of dysfunction. She already feels way too responsible for others' happiness. Seward + Van Helsing, though? I love it. I'm not always a fan of the teacher-student transgression romance but these two seem perfect for each other. Jack is already morally gray and prone to boundary stomping. And VH strikes me as a *really* out there guy.