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Dracula's Biggest Mistake

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Re: Dracula's Biggest Mistake

#81

Post by bryanrasmussen »

sigzero wrote: post #64
runeofdoom wrote: post #8

The author thinks that Helsing & company killed Dracula... and that is certainly the narrator's desperate belief. But as Fred Saberhagen pointed out in his more modern telling of the tale, Van Helsing himself maintains Dracula must be staked, decapitated and have his mouth stuffed with garlic to perish. And yet, despite this and despite knowing that Dracula can turn himself to mist, the heroes are content with victor…

Dust and mist are two very different things though.

different things sure, but very different? Plants and molten lava are very different things, dust and mist have similarities to the human eye. I mean if the dust were blown away by a wind that might have been Drac turning into mist and just happening to have a little bit of dust on him he scattered. Maybe I'm just overly cautious but I've always been taught you can't be too careful with the undead.

Re: Dracula's Biggest Mistake

#82

Post by joosters »

thsksbd wrote: post #69
jackjeff wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s really Dracula vs Modernity. There’s nothing in the blog post that justifies the usage of the “Catholic” epithet. London is the seat of Anglican faith after all and using type writers and records are secular endeavors.

But the sacramentals used against him are Catholic (and in Romania Orthodox). 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 a…

But Dracula was defeated by being decapitated and stabbed in the heart. I do hope religion isn't claiming those as their own!

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.

Re: Dracula's Biggest Mistake

#83

Post by crooked-v »

at_a_remove wrote: post #32
jfengel wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Star Trek was well aware of that problem. They often encountered "ion storms", or landing parties got conked on the head and their communicators taken, or other ways of disabling communications. 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 storytel…

I've counted at least three civilization-shattering technologies in Star Trek which were simply thrown in, without consideration for the long-term, for reasons of budget and convenience, but largely to maintain the Sailing Ship, Days of Yore set of metaphors. Transporters: Originally designed to save on tedious shuttle launches and landings and, most importantly, footage, these would utterly rewrite medicine, aging,…

I think that last part about FTL is taken more into account in the stories than you've considered. 'A Borg ship moving super fast suddenly showed up Federation core territory' is the driving conceit behind "Best of Both Worlds" and Star Trek: First Contact, FTL travel is the main technobabble allowing for surprise appearances of Romulan/Klingon/Ferengi ships in unexpected places in a number of episodes, and there are whole arcs in DS9 about the impact of the Gamma Quadrant wormhole and how it's abruptly connected two politically opposed parts of the galaxy.

Re: Dracula's Biggest Mistake

#84

Post by crooked-v »

coryrc wrote: post #68
aquova wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a fourth, which in my opinion is even more world shattering than the others -- the replicator. It often was shown as a novelty device to make food or warm beverages, but the ability to convert energy into any needed material would instantly transform the world into a post-scarcity, post-economic future. What would you even use as currency when everyone has personal money making machines? I've seen som…

Gold-pressed latinum, obviously, as it can't be replicated.

Also hand-woven traditional scarves, to reference a certain podcast. Sure, you can replicate them, but then it's not genuine anymore.

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.

Re: Dracula's Biggest Mistake

#85

Post by twic »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #77

Slightly OT but Dracula is not the only monster that has no chance in the modern world. 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 wear…

Reminds me of the bit at the end of Shaun of the Dead, where zombies are seen doing minimum-wage jobs and being used in a wacky gameshow:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIG36gncSxs&t=33s

Re: Dracula's Biggest Mistake

#86

Post by crooked-v »

caseysoftware wrote: post #45
at_a_remove wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've counted at least three civilization-shattering technologies in Star Trek which were simply thrown in, without consideration for the long-term, for reasons of budget and convenience, but largely to maintain the Sailing Ship, Days of Yore set of metaphors. Transporters: Originally designed to save on tedious shuttle launches and landings and, most importantly, footage, these would utterly rewrite medicine, aging,…

> 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. 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-transp…

> the physical material has to come from somewhere

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.

Re: Dracula's Biggest Mistake

#87

Post by crooked-v »

ben_w wrote: post #34
themaninthedark wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really didn't like the direction that SG-1 and Atlantis took. 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_literature

I can sympathise with that; while I enjoyed both, they were a radical departure from the source material and non-trivial departure from the SG-1 pilot (which I only learned recently was initially a made-for-TV film).

A made-for-TV film for Showtime, at that, which is why the pilot has nudity and an R rating and the rest of the series pivots into more family-friendly territory.

Re: Dracula's Biggest Mistake

#88

Post by geon »

joosters wrote: post #82
thsksbd wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the sacramentals used against him are Catholic (and in Romania Orthodox). 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 a…

But Dracula was defeated by being decapitated and stabbed in the heart. I do hope religion isn't claiming those as their own! 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.

In Blindsight, vampires have epilepsy triggered by right angles. That explains both the aversion to crosses and the inability to go through a door uninvited.

Re: Dracula's Biggest Mistake

#89

Post by thaumasiotes »

aspenmayer wrote: post #66
thaumasiotes wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What about shows set in USA with heroes who are vulnerable to gunfire? 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…

Definitions from Oxford Languages 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" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plot_armor https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PlotArmor

...was this supposed to be related to my comment in some way? Do you just wander around the internet posting random links in random places?

Re: Dracula's Biggest Mistake

#90

Post by aspenmayer »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #89
aspenmayer wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitions from Oxford Languages 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" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plot_armor https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PlotArmor

...was this supposed to be related to my comment in some way? Do you just wander around the internet posting random links in random places?

Yes, if it wasn’t obvious I apologize. Many main characters have plot armor in a way that makes for lazy writing, bad characterization, lowers stakes in the plot in favor of protagonists, and breaks immersion, which is what I was alluding to in response to this part of your comment, and the thread broadly:

> 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.

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