Dracula's Biggest Mistake
blog.ayjay.org
blog.ayjay.org
I read _Dracula_ afterwards, and I think this perspective is 100% correct, and perhaps the single largest theme from Bram Stoker's _Dracula_ which has been thrown out by successors.
(For fellow Gene Wolfe fans: I was reading up on this topic earlier because of "Suzanne Delage", where I interpret (https://gwern.net/suzanne-delage) as an inversion of _Dracula_ - in "Suzanne Delage", the protagonist & his allies are defeated by Dracula due to a lack of coordination/technology, in contrast to the successful protagonists of _Dracula_.)
I didn't realize Dracula lore was among your many sidelines :P
I didn't realize either until August last year!
A modern Dracula with detective themes could use a "hacker" to put together the kind of digital trail that a modern police officer would follow, so we understand that checking a person's Facebook page is modern and high tech.
What I recall is that vampires who don't occasionally "go to sleep" never make it long enough to become truly strong. In essence, they burn out. Almost as if the world becomes so boring that they must sleep for centuries so they can wake up and find the new world _invigorating_ rather than overwhelming.
In her books, both the original vampires did this, as did Lestat.
I think the point Rice makes in the books I have read is that the vampires are not equally overwhelmed. The Vampire Lestat is about capital-P Progress even more explicitly than Dracula. The protagonist, Lestat, is influenced by the Age of Reason he is born into. He witnesses the end of the old ways in the French Revolution. All of it prepares him for the future. This is in contrast to the younger Louis and the older Armand, who hang on to the past.
The introduction to that book is memorable for being an over-the-top paean to its time. Lestat is not overwhelmed; he loves the 1980s.
Quote:
> As I roamed the streets of New Orleans in 1984 this is what I beheld:
> The dark dreary industrial world that I'd gone to sleep on had burnt itself out finally, and the old bourgeois prudery and conformity had lost their hold on the American mind.
> People were adventurous and erotic again the way they'd been in the old days, before the great middle-class revolutions of the late 1700s. They even looked the way they had in those times. The men didn't wear the Sam Spade uniform of shirt, tie, gray suit, and gray hat any longer. Once again, they costumed themselves in velvet and silk and brilliant colors if they felt like it. They did not have to clip their hair like Roman soldiers anymore; they wore it any length they desired. And the women-ah, the women were glorious, naked in the spring warmth as they'd been under the Egyptian pharaohs, in skimpy short skirts and tunic like dresses, or wearing men's pants and shirts skintight over their curvaceous bodies if they pleased. They painted, and decked themselves out in gold and silver, even to walk to the grocery store. Or they went fresh scrubbed and without ornament-it didn't matter. They curled their hair like Marie Antoinette or cut it off or let it blow free.
> For the first time in history, perhaps, they were as strong and as interesting as men.
> And these were the common people of America. Not just the rich who've always achieved a certain androgyny, a certain joie de vivre that the middle-class revolutionaries called decadence in the past.
> The old aristocratic sensuality now belonged to everybody. It was wed to the promises of the middle-class revolution, and all people had a right to love and to luxury and to graceful things.
Dracula loves the modern world (particularly with its lack of Catholicism & peasant superstitions about how to fight vampires). He is, in fact, an enthusiast for modernity and England, an anglophile otaku, you might say, with a library stuffed full of English books & periodicals he reads obsessively: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Dracula/Chapter_2
Further, he is a dark counterpart to Van Helsing in that throughout the novel, he is 'waking up', and scientifically experimenting in learning how to use his vampiric powers effectively in the modern context, and Van Helsing tells us that Dracula was only days away from becoming invincible, after discovering that he is allowed to transport his own coffin-soil and hide them away in places that only Dracula's fog or animal forms could ever reach: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Dracula/Chapter_23 (Rather than depending on humans, who keep receipts and addresses, and happily reveal the locations of all of the coffins to the protagonists.)
It is only by the skin of their teeth that they are able to destroy his backups before he has figured out how to move & hide them, and reduce him to a single backup and force him to flee to Transylvania before he finishes his 'hard takeoff vampire Singularity', if you will.
* yes, I know Rice retconned this for her narrative convenience so she could churn out sequel after sequel. Nevertheless.
It's also a sneaky, underhanded way to make a point. The shell game of argument tactics.
I didn't read all of it, but the first two pages of [1] demonstrate how the book is "Catholic" as opposed to Anglican, with the protagonist feeling awkward, as an Anglican, at the icons and crucifixes used as (in the book effective) protection.
Keep in mind, for the purposes of the book Catholicism and Orthodoxy can be considered the same as we both believe in icons, consecrated sacraments, apostolic succession, transubstination, etc
FWIW, I like the concept in the book 'I Am Legend' where the vampires are repelled by religious symbols that are meaningful to them, rather than any religion in particular.
Sure, but they sure ain't modern.
> Bram Stoker died in April 1912: wonder what he might have made of the spectacle of Progress known as World War One, the applications of all that beloved industry, the rational pursuit of rational ends with well-engineered (hence, rational) means, the wholesale destruction of quaint rural culture and peoples, the royal connections by blood among the crowned heads of so many of the contending parties, to say little or nothing of the Easter Rebellion of 1916.
This reminds me of Heinrich Böll's At the Bridge (An der Brücke), published 1949. Its protagonist makes his own attempt to efface the legibility to technological modernity of his beloved, but as Böll had briefly worked as a statistician before turning to writing, the author was surely aware of the futility, or at least the limits, of his character's effort!
Fun article though, even with that small "mistake". :)
GP neglects to mention that it might also be necessary to bury the decapitated, garlic-stuffed, staked corpse at a crossroads.
The "Quiet Place" movies make me laugh because if those creatures ever really came to Earth we'd have them under control in about 5 minutes.
Too many monsters? Rig up a battery-powered AM radio with a motion detector and a stick of dynamite. Toss 1000 of these things out in a field somewhere. Monsters go boom.
Every human now wears an electronic fob around their neck that emits a loud sound of the proper pitch to drive the monsters crazy.
We'd have those Quiet Place monsters driving Ubers for us and cleaning our bathrooms.
World War Z, the book that is, is the only instance that tried to explain how the collapse occured. I'd expect it to take a lot more than 5 minutes, a lot of my optimism around pandemic control died during Covid, but the full collapse that always happens as soon as zombies show up just won't happen.
It seems like a far more realistic scenario would be a fortnight of chaos where everyone locks themselves inside, possibly enforced by 24/7 shoot on sight curfews, followed by the death of all the zombies and a partial and limited social collapse. Maybe sporadic continuing outbreaks, radically different border policies, and limitations on movement within countries after that.
Take the living dead for example: From what I understood, it is the Wildfire virus that causes it, with everyone (I assume everyone who contracted it) turning upon death. As soon as people figure that out, every dead person is getting his brain stem severed. And there are not that many people dying, outside of war zones and such, for that to be a world ending problem.
28 days later, 28 weeks later is just bad, does mention that: when the rogue army officer states that the indected to build or tend fields, he rightly concludes that one can just wait until they starve or die of dehydration. Zombies should, unless one assumes some magic virus as in World War Z (the book, again), just rot away. Which posses another problem: how to deal with millions of contagious corpses lying around. Using the Black Death as a basis for how such things did play out in real life, would make for a really grim story. Of course, armed survivors scavanging the world has some more fun angles.
But it's also fun to just roll with it :)
And a human being can survive for weeks without food, days without water.
And zombies are, again ignoring voodoo, well, rotting. That means less tensile strength of muscles and such. And even without all that, a himan cannot use his fingers and teeth to tear another human, well, we know the films. The human body simply lacks the necessary tools: claws and fangs.
As the sibling pointed out, just rolling with all of that is also fun!
To be fair, he hoarded wealth, drank blood, and sought eternal life. If I were in a room with Dracula and his enemies, and you told me to point at the Catholics, I'd be a bit stumped.
Das Kapital was 1867; The Time Machine, 1895. They sure loved their vore in the 19th century!
This also means there was no way for either SG-1 or Atlantis to sensibly continue past the SG-1 finale, when they got Asgard replicators and all the instruction manuals for them… and that Star Trek TNG onwards is best done without thinking too hard about the implications of almost any of the tech they demonstrate.
There was a novel that took place after the movie that depicted Hathor coming back and trying to take over with a simultaneous plot of the US trying to extract resources from Abydos. I though it was really we done and wished that SG-1 used it as the starting point.
when ever you want to send a text, you don't enter the code for that. neither did anyone on an away team that needed to take air samples, or scan someone's health.
seems like you had an idea not fully thought out
You're thinking of tricorders[0], GP is talking about PADDs[1]. Tricorders are mostly read-only sensors that need to be pre-configured (with some ability to switch between configurations during use), while PADDs are basically modern tablets with some physical inputs around the screen.
[0] https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Tricorder
[1] https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Personal_Access_Display...
That also disabled the transporter, which is a convenient way to get into stories, but also makes it easy to get out of stories.
Somebody somewhere must have done a PhD thesis on the way that cell phones have changed storytelling in TV and movies. I'd actually kinda like to read that.
A quick Google turns up:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254345825_Mobile_Ph...
Transporters: Originally designed to save on tedious shuttle launches and landings and, most importantly, footage, these would utterly rewrite medicine, aging, manufacturing, and so on. Notice in many high adventure films, the dinghy, the shuttle's ancestor, is often ignored.
Artificial Gravity/Inertial Dampeners: We want our ship to be under our boots, and occasionally slosh around when we are enduring space weather. Casual mastery of the force of gravity so we can have an ion storm to knock us about.
Faster-Than-Light: Aside from that messy causality business, real FTL would make the concept of territories quite fuzzy. Sure, you could draw lines on your star charts, but given that someone could zip a few dozen light years in and attack your capitol planet, it's just not the same.
I could go on and on about this, but a lot of this space opera harkens back to a time when governments would just have to trust that some captain or governor was a reasonable person to have in charge because messages back and forth would take so very long.
Star Trek avoids this one by just completely ignoring the lightspeed barrier with handwavy "subspace" technobabble. They can communicate, detect, and track objects moving FTL with as much (or more) ease as done with radio tracking slow moving objects today.
They've been really inconsistent about it. For a while, communicating through subspace was not quite as long as travel, but it was still a non-zero amount of time. Now, communication seems to be via ansible, and the less said about the wildly varying rates of travel, the better.
Surely this one was much more about those "reasons of budget and convenience"? Star Trek couldn't afford non-styrofoam rocks, I can't see them stretching to filming all bridge scenes on the Vomit Comet or building a 2001-style rotational set.
I'm more interested in how it would rewrite the rules of war. If you can transport a nuke (or even a strike team) directly into your enemy's headquarters, wars end faster with less widespread destruction.
Until you develop no-transport fields but now you've just created massive dead zones which - in themselves - highlight key points of interest to investigate and/or target.
Then you have to deploy LARGE scale (think city wide or bigger) no-transport fields or lots of smaller fields to obfuscate the high value targets.
But regardless, you still need normal shields because teleporting a nuke just outside the zone and letting it drop in is just as effective.
And all of that still ignores conservation of mass.. the physical material has to come from somewhere.
I thought that was a clever use of transporter tech.
Extended canon Star Trek has references to both (a) feedstock material storage, with big blocks or tanks of elementally pure materials that get shaved off and recombobulated as necessary by the replicators, and (b) synthesis of elements from pure energy on demand, though usually with the preference of the first method over the second because it's far, far less demanding on all the systems involved to just move atoms around.
It doesn't work when they use a transporter to go to a desolate planet.
Large portions of the web comic are involved with how it completely rewrites the rules of politics and war, with and without review techniques designed to create interdiction zones.
Cumals.
You can give everyone as much food as they want (and we already do!), but you can't eliminate scarcity.
A cumal is the unit in which medieval Irish monetary values are denominated. It is also the medieval Irish term for a female slave; the unit is notionally equal to the value of one such.
The point of answering the question in a historical currency is to emphasize that this question is easy to answer by simply thinking "what have been some well-known historical currencies?"
People trade in materials, tools, food, livestock, and women.
More seriously, the basic answer for the Federation in particular would be "amounts of energy". Voyager uses exactly that, with minor but consistent references to 'replicator rations' because they're limiting the total energy usage of the ship.
One was a businessman who was excited to see how much the stock portfolio he had put together as a long term trust had fared. Picard had to gently explain to him wealth and money were no longer a thing.
Of course the Picard series itself then thoroughly destroys that thought by going on and on about money.
And that unlimited energy has led them to a post scarcity, post money utopia, though that scenario seems to have been withdrawn a little in Picard.
Edit: Why would someone, say the Romulans, do that? Well, Starfleet doesn't establish contact, or invite a planet, because of some on going war or a non-unified government or no FTL tech. The Romulans step in, side with one party. They provide technology and weapons, they unite the planet as an "ally" or theirs. And now they have a new planet and systek to exploit, to use a base. Legally, and even better the Federation canot intervene. Rinse and repeat everytime Starfleet side steps a planet in a strategically important position. Do so over a couple of decades. You see were I am going, right?
They really seemed to make every race encountered to be a relatively peaceful semi-utopian culture.
Edit: For some reason, every non-FTL civization Star Trek just seems to be ignored by everyone. Heck, even the Dominion ignored them in their empire building...
That's authors so: In the Star Wars Legends EU there are the Ssi'ruuk. A species from the edge of the universe harvesting other lifeforms, litterally, for power generation. Throughout the books about them, the fact they could go on a spree of exterminating each and every primitive species they encounter is never mentioned or even hinted at. Nor is the fact, that with a bare 6 systems under their control, and inferior ships and tech, they should be one punitive expedition away from extinction themselves.
Are they all some starfleet officers toiling for decades on off-chance that one day they might get job on a vessel? The ages of people on show don't present that...
The whole post-scarity kinda really breaks down when you start to look at edges. As society would not be effectively be able to keep up the production at least not as shown in shows...
Now, if you want an Enterprise like personal spaceship, you probably are much better of being part of the Q continuum than the human race, scarcity wise.
IIRC, in Star Trek, the replicator does not convert energy into needed material: it simply reorganizes existing molecules into a new form.
So, for instance, you can't use it to make yourself a bunch of gold: you could use it to convert a bunch of gold jewelry into gold bars, or vice-versa, but you would need some actual gold. It won't convert lead into gold. I think I heard or read somewhere in the lore (maybe non-canon) that the food replicators needed supplies of biochemical ingredients to use for making food. They could get that from various places, including breaking down the waste of the crewmembers, but they couldn't just conjure food out of nothing using pure energy.
Also, the holodeck: Not only can the ship computers run multiple, basically self-aware General AI characters in parallel, it can also extent space beyond the confines of the decks physical dimensions. Pretty amazing tech, no idea why they don't use it to build the interior of all their ships, after all it also has superior environmental controls.
Prime example would be the X-Files. IIRC in the first season they had no cell phones yet.
- Do computers exist? Does everyone have a computer? Is the idea of searching the web a novel thing? - Do they have cell phones? Are they smartphones? - And now the new one, are they mentioning LLMs in some way?
Like one thing that really dates The Expanse imo is the complete lack of AI technology in the books/movies. It was probably an artistic choice, but it's completely unbelievable now in a way that wasn't a problem 4 years ago.
Edit: added NOT
The gag is it takes seemingly forever for it to print all the data about the employee to paper, while Columbia fidgets and waits awkwardly to finish, repeatedly asking if there’s a faster way to get the information.
New tech at the time was often a plot point of the show, like using call recordings to fake the murderers location at the time of the murder, editing video surveillance, etc.
Edit: Another great example of how computers are used is Perry Rhodan (a German SciFi series going since the 60s, and a rather good one). There, in books written up tobthe 70s, they have positronic computers (and other tech that beats everything Star Trek, Star Wars or any other sci fi universe I know has), and computers are still used with punch cards and stripe print outs. Even the ones salvaged from civilisation being millenias ahead tech-wise compared to humans. Pretty funny detail.
Can writers plot a story in any given milieu? Yes. Sometimes they do seem lazy.
Buffy is more vulnerable to gunfire than the vampires are, but she's not vulnerable in the way that a human would be. She is a supernatural force just like the vampires are.
This is only called out in a few episodes; it seems that the writers would mostly prefer that you forget. But compare e.g. her meeting with Glory in season 5, where the two of them get into a fistfight, and after trading a few punches Glory realizes that a human would have been dead by now.
plot armor
noun
used to refer to the phenomenon in fiction whereby the main character is allowed to survive dangerous situations because they are needed for the plot to continue.
"I do think that he can't die since the inevitable plot armor is far too thick"
> But compare e.g. her meeting with Glory in season 5, where the two of them get into a fistfight, and after trading a few punches Glory realizes that a human would have been dead by now.
That being said, you were a bit uncharitable near the end:
> Do you just wander around the internet posting random links in random places?
I think this was a bit of an unfair characterization of my original comment, and veers close to being against HN guidelines by assuming bad faith, and if you look at my comment and submission history I think you’ll find that I don’t in fact do this.
>> But compare e.g. her meeting with Glory in season 5, where the two of them get into a fistfight, and after trading a few punches Glory realizes that a human would have been dead by now.
You have yet to describe what the connection is between your comment and mine. Plot armor describes people doing things they can't do, and not suffering the consequences because that would be a boring story.
What's the connection to people doing things that require the supernatural powers they are explicitly characterized as having?
E.g. a superhero whose power is having impenetrable skin surviving a hail of bullets isn’t plot armour - it’s an explained part of the story. A character survived because of their nature as a character.
Plot armour would be a hero who does not have any particular resistance to bullets running through a hail of gunfire and surviving. It’s an extremely improbable outcome which ruins suspension of disbelief. The only reasonable explanation is that the character survived because the writers wanted to keep them alive. That’s plot armour.
noun
used to refer to the phenomenon in fiction whereby the main character is allowed to survive dangerous situations because they are needed for the plot to continue.
> A character’s explained powers saving them isn’t plot armour, it’s just armour.
> because they are needed for the plot to continue.
ie. A character should die in this situation but survives because their death would be inconvenient for the writer.
A character surviving because of a predefined power is consistent with the fiction. They didn’t survive out of the writer’s necessity but because they had already been written as someone who can survive such a situation. That’s competent writing.
You’re trying to define plot armour as just… any character surviving a dangerous situation? That makes the term completely meaningless. It’s meant to denote bad, lazy writing whereby an important character improbably survives despite it not being justified by the rest of the fiction.
Additionally, from the very TVTropes article you linked:
> “Plot Armor is when a main character's life and health are safeguarded by the fact that he's the one person (or one of several) who can't be removed from the story. Therefore, whenever Bob is in a situation where he could be killed (or at the least very seriously injured), he comes out unharmed with no logical, In-Universe explanation.”
A character’s survival being well justified in-universe makes it not plot armour.
The original post we’re both replying to referred to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, who is literally the main character of the series. I’m not sure if you’re speaking generally, but I’d say that her powers are not well justified in-universe, to the degree that even supernatural beings in her narrative setting are flabbergasted at her hardiness. I stand by my statement that she definitely has plot armor, as the show is literally named after her.
Buffy having a high survivability is pretty consistent with her defined powers (general resistance to harm, fighting abilities, accelerated healing). It’s not enough to just say she survives fighting monsters.
A good example of clear plot armour in Buffy is the named vampire characters. The random baddies disintegrate the second they’re touched by sunlight whereas Spike survives stretches of sunlight multiple times. This violates the established rules of the fiction for the sake of protecting an important character.
Another example is the rest of the gang of kids managing to survive fighting vampires on their own without Buffy. Early on they have no established powers and while the various monsters are demonstrated to be tough to take down even by someone with superpowers.
So we agree that main characters have plot armor?
I never said that main characters necessarily have plot armor, just that when MCs survive events that beggars belief for the viewer, they do. The perception of the existence of plot armor for any particular character in a work broadly or in a given context in a larger work is a subjective distinction, and varies by viewer, their perspective, interpretation of the setting, the character’s powers, how compelling the writing is, and suspension of disbelief or lack thereof.
Your argument feels like you’re gaslighting me for disagreeing with you about differing perceptions about such subjective distinctions, then using that disagreement to find fault with what is actually a difference of opinion, while characterizing it as me supposedly misunderstanding how the subjective concept of plot armor works, when in actuality we agree on how plot armor works, we just disagree with whether or not a specific character has it or not. But that’s the very nature of the subjectivity of plot armor.
Of course you’re free to disagree, I never said you couldn’t, and that’s part of the fun of fandom. Just because I think Buffy has plot armor, and you don’t, doesn’t mean that one of us necessarily misunderstands the concept of plot armor, Buffy as a character, or the show and its narrative setting, in my view.
None of those were particularly modern?
"Our heroes’ long pursuit of Dracula is largely a matter of tracing the written records of everything Dracula does in England. Note also that the enemies of Dracula coordinate their plan of action with reference to the sequence of events that they have recorded using typewriters and phonographs. (Dracula is the first novel featuring voice memos.) […]
"[And modernity reigns not just in England: even in eastern Europe the pursuers are greatly aided by Mina’s knowledge of when the trains run — and by telegraphs they receive from London. Railway timetables, telegraphs, phonographs, typewriters, invoices, bills of lading, double-entry bookkeeping: these are the instruments by which Dracula’s pursuers draw their net around him."
This might make more sense if you remember that the purpose of HN threads is curious conversation. When you have an interesting conversation with friends or colleagues, the idea is not to repeat things that have already been said, but to add your own thoughts, reflections, experiences.
If you look at the other top-level comments that have been posted to this thread so far, they all have the flavor of what I'm talking about:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39529274
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39529003
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39528984
For example, they all contain some unexpected or unpredictable element—something we can be surprised by and learn from.