I need sleep to do battle again tomorrow

The kid was picked up by an ambulance 30 minutes later.

Now as an adult working in security I get SO MANY folks- upper-middle aged mostly- coming to me to 'rat out' people they think are faking it.

I was once sent into a bathroom because a client demanded that the "fucker won't get out, so good drag them out"- I was NEVER going to do that, so I did a wellness check instead. You know who it was? A person recently released from the hospital after a car accident. They had a hole in their skull and major hearing loss. They couldn't answer the owner because they couldn't HEAR the owner.

Another time about a homeless man who got around town by kicking the ground from his wheelchair. "You know he doesn't actually need that thing, his legs work fine, it's just for pity points"- Oh, so he's not paralyzed, his wheelchair is performative? Funny story Dale, I actually know that guy, he was backed over by a truck and has chronic pain from his shattered pelvis. But sure, let's make him stand up and walk everywhere so nobody feels too bad for him and tries to help him or something.

"She doesn't need that scooter, I've seen her get out of it."

"Look how fat he is, because he just rides around and refuses to get up."

"She doesn't really need that cane- she comes here without it all the time"

Lucy lived happily with her loving mother, had her pick of three lovely suitors, was given full freedom to choose whom she would spend her life with and has that decision respected by all the men involved, who all admire and care for her so much that they remain devoted friends to her (and I mean REALLY genuine friends) up to and past the point of her death where they risk their lives to avenge her and put her soul to rest.

Mina is in an unusually healthy, loving, devoted marriage to a man she completely adores, again with a bright future ahead of them both. Jonathan constantly thinks of Mina, compares almost all women against her, and is absolutely utterly in love with her. Mina and Jonathan regularly subvert Victorian expectations of a married couple in that they deeply love and respect one another to the point of flouting “proper” Victorian customs by being affectionate out in public. In fact, the one time Jonathan decides to play the traditional man and ignores Mina’s wishes to leave her at home while he goes hunting vampires w the other men, he is IMMEDIATELY punished by the narrative! Draculas predation of Mina starts that night because she was left behind, and in response Jonathan affirms and reaffirms his total devotion to Mina above the other men for the rest of the story. In the third act of the novel while the team is trying to stop Mina’s slow turn to vampirism, Jonathan not only explicitly tells us the reader through his private journal entires that he will LITERALLY go against god if Mina is turned and damn himself to be by her side in hell rather than kill her if she becomes a vampire, he is unsubtle enough about it that the other men genuinely worry about where Jonathan’s loyalties will lie if they fail in killing Dracula and saving Mina.

So when adaptations pose that either of these women were just your typical trapped, bored, sexually frustrated poor Victorian traditional ladies looking for an out until bad boy Dracula comes to sexually liberate them…. Motherfucker they were ALREADY about as liberated as female characters written by a man in the 1800s could get. Lucy is introduced to us as a young woman flush with bright and happy futures and her pick of the litter for the life she wants to lead until Dracula kills her and takes that from her. Mina marries her childhood sweetheart who literally prioritizes her over God and is building a business with him before Dracula nearly ruins her life permanently.

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