Dracula/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.



  • Complete Monster: Guess who?
  • Draco in Leather Pants: The Count, of course, gets this to a truly startling degree.
    • More so in later film adaptations then the original novel, though.
  • Evil Is Sexy: Averted with the Count himself, who is an ugly old man who physically repulses Mina when she first sees him, unaware of his identity, but played straight with Lucy - her vampire self is considerably more sultry and seductive than her original, innocent persona.
    • The Hammer Horror film Dracula series plays it straight, though. Christopher Lee is handsome actor, but this is arguably the most monstrous interpretation of the character to date, with some later sequels reducing him to an non-speaking, near feral (but good looking) beast.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: When he and Seward are alone, Van Helsing bursts into laughter over Arthur absurdly treating blood transfusion as a metaphorical sex act, which, in hindsight, looks like a Take That Leaning on the Fourth Wall.
  • It Was His Sled: Considering "Dracula" is now practically synonymous with "vampire", the big revelation about the Count isn't nearly as shocking as it once was.
  • Mainstream Obscurity: How large percentage of the people who know about Dracula, have actually read the book?
  • Memetic Sex God: Dracula.
  • Nightmare Fuel:
  • Nightmare Retardant: Armadillos in Dracula's castle? Shiver!
  • Nausea Fuel: Renfield's attempt at aping vampirism.
  • Praising Shows You Don't Watch: Some people call Sadly Mythtaken on many things saying that "Dracula never sparkled" or "Dracula never went out into the sunlight". The former is more or less common sense, but the latter pretty much shows how much they read Dracula.
  • Purity Sue: Debatable but Lucy.
  • Seinfeld Is Unfunny: It can be easy to assume Sadly Mythtaken after Nosferatu and other such vampire-themed works gave us a different example of what a vampire is.
  • Values Dissonance: The casual antisemitism displayed by Harker, the sexism, the xenophobia, and such would have been seen as perfectly normal and cultured for the well-to-do British reading this novel when it first was published.
  • The Woobie: Arthur. He loses his dad, his fiancee, and his soon-to-be mother in law in less than a week of each other. And then he has to kill his undead fiancee, who's turned into an unholy abomination against nature.
    • And then his best friend dies.
    • Jonathan as well, to some extent.
    • Mina, to the fullest extent.