opossum of esoterica

I remember watching an analysis on how well the first seasons incorporated blackness into the narrative. It wasn't just a race-swap; louis' blackness became the key motivation behind his character, his suppressed rage and need to be seen made his turning so much more powerful than the standard 'don't you want to live forever?' shtick. I would even go as far as to say it made iwtv better.

I know the show doesn't have the space to focus on Armand's identity to that extent, so i'm not too bothered, but.

rentboy, nicki's slur, bottom twink, ragdoll for hire, etc, etc. If you're going to mention all this anyways, can there please be a little more to it?

I know this is not South-Asian exclusive. At this point of the show you could make armand white and you could argue it would largely stay the same* save for some insults switched around and, dare i say, have him be portrayed as more desirable like in the books. I almost wish this wasn't the case, I wish it was a race-adaption instead of a race-swap, because there's so much potential.

Everything about armands' story feels riddled with orientalist and colonialist themes. There's the historical association of south asian men as less masculine and feminized compared to their white counterparts, the simultaneous desire (exotic, youthful, novel) and ridicule (gremlin, monkey, dirty). Characters constantly humiliating and talking down to him, backhanded compliments because admitting that he could be desirable feels shameful so they have to take it out on the object instead. Marius' painting where his brown identity was stripped but the art was kept, because it sold better this way (scandinavian scarves, clean girl aesthetics, yoga). His complex view of his master as a rescuer, his relationship to religion, languages, names, ownership, identity, all colonialist themes.

And why not get geo-political with it? there's a wealth of detail that his background provides. Why not talk about Dehli's huge child trafficking problem that continues to this day? Or how his parents selling him could have been influenced by India's caste system? What was it like spending 400 years in a country with anti-Romani sentiment? How did Santiago, who existed during the period where India was under British rule, feel about having to answer to a brown man? Did it influence their dynamic at all? What about living in Dubai, a city built on slave labour?

So much potential. Obviously this can't all be fleshed out but the script definitely had room for a little self-awareness between the many, many, cases where we see armand grapple with these themes.

One area where the series (maybe) highlights Armand's struggle with his race & ethnicity is his accent. His accent this season (3) is probably the closest we've got to something native, which is interesting since Assad Zaman has said that Armand's now regressed into Arun. Given Zaman's abilities, I'm assuming that the imperfections in the accent likely signal how long it's been since Armand's been in the space/identity where he uses it.

In Paris, he had a mostly French accent, but one that announced him as well-travelled. But, in San Francisco & Dubai, he has a pretty posh southern English accent. It's more 'refined' and classic than Assad's natural Geordie accent. In the US, it signals that he's middle-class European, but with English as his first language. And in Dubai, it separates him from the majority South Asian underclass of exploited (effectively, slave) labourers. The same goes for Fareed. They may not be native to Dubai—the child—but they're 'respectable expats,' a great deal of which are middle-class Brits.

That desi blend accent is 100% intentional because Assad referenced saying that we probably hadn't heard his 'real' English accent if he even had one, over a year ago in some interview.

We've also been critiquing things like Fareed's wretched, wretched Hindi pronunciation.

Modern Devils Minion as Posts

Plus an Important Bonus:

INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE 3.04: The Devils Road TVLTwT/IWTVTwT Version.

reason: "we all know why"

This is such a shallow interpretation of Dracula the novel, so shallow that it prevents answering its own rhetorical question. It's especially noticeable since the post goes on to discuss Frankenstein and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde quite a bit better. Dracula is like a blind spot for analysis for this poster.

So let's be blunt here: Dracula is a racist, anti-semitic, anti-immigrant book. It's about an evil count pretending to be a peaceful immigrant but actually he is an evil eastern european jewish rapist who is coming here to rape and corrupt good white englishwomen.

It's a bit offensive to describe this literal bloodsucking jew character as some anti-capitalist metaphor, as the screenshotted post seems to imply.

All this is fairly obvious to me, who has read the book many times, and even more obvious to just about any literary scholar who has read this book. Now it might not be obvious to the general public nowadays, who I think might not fully understand the novel since it's almost 130 years removed from the present-day context. For example, people reading it today might simply not understand what Stoker means by describing Dracula's face as "aquiline." They might not understand the word means in its most basic sense, and just skip over it. And such readers are even less able to understand that Stoker is clearly coding Dracula as jewish.

A lot of it also has to do with how popular Dracula is despite it's age. There is a strong fandom here on tumblr, of the book itself, as the Dracula Daily craze a few years ago proved. So there is the usual fan's reluctance to admit that the work they love is racist. It takes an unusual fan to admit that "I love this book, this book is racist", but I'm that fan.

Anyway, once you understand Dracula is an uncomfortably racist text about the evil foreigner rapist, then you can finally answer question asked in the screenshotted post.

The reason adaptations like the Francis Ford Coppola film change Dracula to a sympathetic, tragic figure who is Mina's lover, despite that being the opposite of the original story, is because that original story is racist.

It's one easy way to subvert the racism of the story, and fairly common in horror media. Turning the monstrous outsider (a trope that is inherently racist and xenophobic) into a sympathetic and misunderstood tragic figure, unfairly persecuted by the forces of normality and turning the rape of the (white) female lead character into a consensual relationship, it's a standard way of subverting an old racist horror story.

See The Shape of Water for a movie that does the same to The Creature from the Black Lagoon. These films are unfaithful, but they are engaging with the themes of the work.

Next in the art style/movement pieces! Claudia in Art Nouveau!!