The hardest part about Dracula to believe isn’t the vampires.
It’s the fact that three men proposed to the same woman and, upon being rejected, two of the men not only immediately accepted the woman’s refusal with grace but they also vowed to be loyal friends to her anyway and then they actually were.
In real life, you’re usually friends with a man first and after a while you get the “I need to tell you something” text but Dracula completely reverses the order of events. Lucy gets the text, politely declines and then gets to have a genuinely fulfilling friendship with the men who were interested in her.
Bonus: all three men, including the man whose proposal was accepted, are also friends and there was no toxic masculinity or fighting or trying to one up each other. There was no competition. They just respected Lucy’s wishes and each other.
I think people irl wonder why I’m so insane about this book, both regarding how well it holds up over time (generally speaking, because there is obviously still room for criticism) and what a complete failure every single adaption has been. This is why.
To this day, we struggle with how female and male characters are written, and here’s a guy from the 19th century who, despite still holding beliefs from his era, has been able to do what so many modern writers, both male and female, have completely failed to do. The men in Dracula aren’t just better than a lot of real men. They’re also better than a most fictional men too.
