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#I could make a whole fanfic au where Steve has weird ass dreams
derpcakes · 4 years
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So we watched (nay, Experienced) the BBC/Netflix Dracula series
Brought to us by everyone’s favourite team, Steve Moff and Mark Gatiss, promising to be an innovative and exciting new vision of the classic novel
Boy it was definitely something!!!
First I will say: obviously Moff is not my favourite TV writer and my fam and I did go into this with a bias. I’m happy to report, though, that it’s going to be one of these shows that haunts me forever, because if it had just been bad I could have said “bleh” and deleted it from my brain. But because parts of this were genuinely cool, interesting, and fun, and parts of it genuinely had potential, all the bits that were bad stand out as so much worse and the whole thing feels as cursed as a 500 year old undead count. 
Things that were enjoyable and well put-together:
Van Helsing has been gender-swapped into a vampire-hunting nun and her cat-and-mouse game with Dracula is rife with belligerent sexual tension. I was ready to hate this, and ready for like, Sherlock and Irene Adler 2.0, but their dynamic was actually pretty fun to watch! Their power balance is kept even throughout most of the show, and Helsing is never struck down because of ~womanly failings~ or infantilised. She’s consistently really clever and, even if there are some cringey one-liners, I found her and Draccy’s playful quest to murder each other one of the most fun parts of the show. It could’ve been better, but it was enjoyable! (I also like how Helsing isn’t Young and Hot, but is a capable older lady, and her actor and Draccy’s even seem about the same age. Amazing)
The second episode is a spooky murder mystery/horror mini-movie on a ship, with a cast full of interesting characters who all had different things going on and different relationship dynamics that were compelling to watch. There’s even an interracial gay couple! And they’re like, written pretty sympathetically and to be layered and flawed in ways that didn’t feel too stereotypical! And they don’t die first!! Wack! I understand the bar is on the ground, but it’s still worth a mention
Some fun with vampire lore: Draccy absorbs knowledge and traits from people he drinks blood from (which is how he learns languages. Get Duolingo, dude, stop eating people), leading to the intriguing suggestion that myths like “vampires will die in sunlight” and “vampires are afraid of holy symbols” have kinda become real to him even if they don’t literally work, because he’s swallowed so many people to whom these superstitions and beliefs were law. I’m sure this isn’t the first time this has been done, but groundbreaking or no it was kinda neat
Things that were not enjoyable and well put-together:
EVERYTHING ELSE
Episode 1: a weird speedrun of most of the original novel, feat. weaponised nuns and a weird fixation on whether or not Jonathan Harker and Draccy boned. They did not. Dracula pops out of the body of a wolf and he’s Whole Ass Naked. Him and Van Helsing have a power play where she stands just on the threshold of a convent and calls him a little bitch, knowing he can’t come and get her. A knife is licked. 
Episode 2: aforementioned cool ship horror story. Definitely the best ep. It really makes me think about hbomb’s critique that Moff is pretty good at doing standalone stories (and pilots), but when things are tied into a bigger narrative things get zonkers. 
Episode 3: Things Get Zonkers!!
Let me just. Okay. I have the most to say about this one because this is where things really got batshit. And yet, also really boring? How does that figure? Anyway:
Dracula emerges from under the sea and finds that 123 years have passed and he’s now the star of a Modern AU. Upon setting foot on British sand he is immediately accosted by what appears to be an anti-vampire task force. There’s a helicopter. It is later explained how they knew to pounce on him at this exact moment, but holy god it was wild to watch the entire British Secret Service descend on this one wet bastard in a suit
The editing shifts aggressively in the direction of Sherlock. Mark Gattis is there playing an amazingly annoying character. There’s a fuckign.... Underground Secret Society devoted to studying vampires and they put Drac in a Designated Glass Prison for Smug Geniuses (also as seen in Sherlock). Van Helsing is dead but her great-great-grand-niece is played by the same actress and. Okay. Van Helsing, vampire hunting nun, possesses her descendent and rises through the ether to roast Drac one last time, and he’s DELIGHTED TO SEE HER AGAIN. 
And she has cancer, right, so her blood is poisonous when Draccy tries to bite her, but in the end, right, the end of the episode, right, the final shots of the show, he comes to a place where he’s willing to die, and she’s already dying, and so he drinks her blood and they die together on a table while cinematic metaphor vision shows them having sex in the middle of the sun
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There was a badly CGI-ed vampire baby. Jonathan Harker falls from a tower and a scene later they flash back to this event by reversing the footage of him falling down, meaning we just see him go VWOOP up through the air, bouncing off the wall on the way. Van Helsing says the words “come boy, suckle” when she’s goading Drac into drinking her blood. The show sits in a weird middle ground where the characters talk about sex a lot (”dID yOu HaVe sExUaL iNterCOURSE with COUNT DRACULA?”) and Drac is clearly meant to be super magnetic and sexy but the characterisation and cinematography is not horny at all. People have these sexy-type dreams of their lover of choice when Drac is drinking their blood but even those are very boring and weirdly chaste, except of course for the final one where, if I  can take the chance to remind you, Van Helsing and Dracula have symbolic Mind Palace sex inside the centre of the solar system
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I can’t speak too much on its quality as an adaptation since I actually haven’t read the book, but splitting the story so that some characters (the Harkers, Van Helsing) existed in the time the story is set, and some (Lucy, Dr Seward) exist in The Modern AU felt very strange. Was there any reason to set the third episode in modern times, apart from the fact that I guess they wanted to do their Sherlock thing again? Or, perhaps, because they wanted to do their Jekyll thing again?? Oh my god, that’s what the editing reminds me of - the small clips of Jekyll I’ve seen. The zooming. The slow-mo. The emphasis on The Monster Man’s weird goddamn teeth
(Also, I don’t really feel qualified to dig too deep into it, but I will say there felt something a bit uncomfortable about Lucy being black in this version, while also being written to be very promiscuous and vain. idk. Also, since it happened in an ep of Sherlock as well, “weedy white Nice Boy rescues the Very Cool woman of colour he has a tragically unrequited crush on” is now an official Moffattis trope)
Count Moffatula is an experience. Its pacing is buck wild. The speeding through the original plot and the mish-mashing of elements in the Modern AU section feels like another expression of contempt for the source material on Moff’s part. Someone says “reality is overrated” in a show set in the 1890s. Draccy quotes a Beatles song. He also makes quippy allusions to having eaten various famous figures and basically winks at the camera every time. Granted, this wasn’t as obnoxious as I was maybe expecting, but there are still too many lines of dialogue where you think “oh, the writers high-fived each other after they wrote that one, huh”. The fact that Moff has such vitriol against fan fic writers is more and more grating every day because this is so, so clearly a zany-ass fanfic that he happens to be getting paid for. The costumes are nowhere near as nice as they could have been, and Dracula’s cape looks like his mum made it for him for the school play in which he is playing Dracula. 
This show is So Much. Watch it to share in this fever dream. Or don’t, and save approximately 5 hours of your life. God. 5 hours. Who was I before Count Maffatula. Who am I now. Why was his cape so bloody ugly. Why did they bone in the centre of the sun
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wetookanoath · 6 years
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ooh what are your headcanons for the coco au?? 👀
Well, right now I have…
TW: Racism, implied homophobia and transphobia, sexism, way too many languages in one tiny family, necessary Major Character(s) Death(s), this is not a fanfic but a way too elavorated AU lol, Trans Male Character, trans pregnancy.
S/O to @faequill and @impossiblevvings for educating my ass by sharing his experiences as a trans parents. And also S/O to @from-one-fandom-to-the-other for making THIS and THIS wonderful art and talking about this AU with me. And also S/O to this anon for asking.
Set in the 30s, I’m thinking in maybe Baja California or Guadalajara. During this time, Mexico is still getting together after the Mexican Revolution left tons of deads and shattered states. In this time, the Golden Age of cinema flourishes and singers like Pedro Infante and Jorge Negrete become famous. Enter the music theme of the story.
That said, Mexico has a long history of having good relations with european countries such as Germany, Ireland, Austria and Poland. During the Colony, tons of people came to Latinamerica because there was work, commerce and land (I mean, stolen land– you know how that goes), so entire families would come with the hopes of a better life. 
During this time, chinese people build a China Town in what will be Mexico City later (still stands and is a wonderful place), japanese people will came in their own commercial ships to either work or be with their families, since samurai getting jobs as big names spaniard’s bodyguards, and soon other business people came with their families.
I’m saying all this to then say that,
Ryan’s family has always had it bad because they are mixed. His father’s grandpa decided to move to a small community where most people is mixed near the principal city of their state, yet not so close. This is so they can all live in peace.
Ryan’s grandfather gets out the country, builds a life in the States where he meets Ryan’s grandma, an also mexican woman who went to live in the States. Years later, Steve, Ryan’s dad, meets Linda, daughter of immigrants too, and they build their own family.
When Ryan is a teenager, his parents understand he is trans and caliming economic problems, Steve decides to take his family back to the family’s ranch in Mexico, where they can protect their kid, so no one knows he is trans and they know him only as Ryan. They grow up learning from all their cultures and speaking very accented english and spanish. Ryan and Jake also talk a broken japanese their mom is always cheering. They cook strange stuff that convines all three cultures and people think they are weird, but it works.
To their little town comes a group of immigrants from Poland, men are there to work in the energy plant near the Bergara’s ranch.
Ryan and Jake met Shane then, he’s older than them and Ryan gets irritated at his funny spanish, but finds himself talking to him daily until Shane starts to work, too.
So, every day, Shane and his brother walk in front of the Bergara ranch and he can always see Ryan at the window with a guitar or just asleep. He always waves at him and soon, Ryan finds himself waiting for the boy to pass by his window.
There’s a lot of Ryan insulting Shane in either spanish or japanese, to what Shane always answers with polish and both look at each other like ¬¬
They fall in love eventually.
Both families get along well, it’s then when Linda and Sherry start to notice something between their kids. It’s unspoken and like a known secret, and only once did they tried to talk about it but, like it happens so often in remote places of Mexico, no one said a word.
Ryan’s family is well known, names move sea, dirt and sky in Mexican societies, and so life goes on– of course, leaving the santity of their small town means dead and treats, and so none go.
Scott and Jake both leave eventually, it is known then that Ryan will take the ranch. When he’s already an adult, Shane and his mom move to the ranch after his father dies and Scott leaves.
Later in life, Scott gets married in the ranch, and they are all such a funny and curious mix of a family.
They have a few happy years where Ryan and Shane are together, dream of music and suddenly, something changes.
When Ryan realizes he’s pregnant, he’s worried shit will go down. Shane is actually pretty happy and excited, and after the initial shock, both feel good about it. With his mother’s support, he is able to tell his father, and to his freakin’ surprise, he’s happy. 
Ryan has to stay in the ranch to protect himself and the baby, seeing the struggle, fear starts flourishing in Shane and instead of saying something, he keeps it all in him. He needs an actual job, not just his music delucions, and he needs to do better and make sure nothing ever happens to Ryan and their baby.
They have a girl, they name her Alejandra, and she grews up listening to her parents sing together and even with economic struggles, they were happy.
Then Shane leaves.
When Alejandra was little, Shane met bitch ass Ernesto who used to listen to him at the local bar where he sang with Ryan and other pals they had. Shane originally didn’t want to become a singer, but he wanted to keep writing songs, Ernesto made him believe they could be both singers.
Note: Mexico has a big time problem with colorism and favoritism of whites™, but when it comes to music and so, especially at that time, the mexican public wanted to the men who sang to be the stereotype of a Strong Mexican Man™, like Jorge Negrete and Pedro Infante (this doesn’t mean they weren’t talented and amazing at their art, because they sure as hell were). A man like Shane would had never find fame and acceptance at that time, so this bitch ass Ernesto fooled him deeply.
Ryan doesn’t like Ernesto one bit, and feels him fake as shit with his “support” of their family when Shane is idiot enough to tell him the truth. This causes their first big fight, since Ryan didn’t want a man like this bitch to know about him and that Ale is their biological daughter.
Fights start to become terrible, and finally Shane tells Ryan he wants to try this and if it doesn’t work, he’s coming back right away. If in six months he hasn’t done shit, he is coming back. 
Ultimately, Ryan believes in Shane’s talent and lets him go. At first, they write to each other constantly and Ryan always reads part of Shane’s laters to Ale.
Eventually, the letters stop and a year later, Ernesto is in everyone’s TV and Ryan tries his best to find out what happened to Shane. When he finds out he was murdered, Ernesto tells him some story about being mugged and what not, and in his pain he believes it.
In the back of his head, there’s always the tiny voice that says this is not true, but the pain and his pride are stronger, and so he decides to keep going.
He makes the ranch prosper with his bare hands and the whole family helps, as years goes by, they can mantain themselves with the ranch’s production of meat and leather.
Note: totally not based on my own ranch, lol.
Ryan dies later in life, having his daughter carry his name when he decided to change her name to take away Shane’s (because we mexicans are petty and this was super common. Your husband left you? Change your kids’ name to yours– my name should be Rivera, guys, but my great grandma said fuck you to his father, and changed her name to León -her mom’s name- and here we are…) and the ranch.
~ The After Life ~
Shane is there before anyone else. He could be send to his polish family, he could find the other Bergaras, but he is not sure of what to do. His situation as someone his family has decided to forget mantains him in the streets with the ones without a family, which is bullshit because he knows his family must be somwhere.
His first years, he forgets about the Día de los Muertos tradition, among other traditions, and is only worried to find a way to know if Ryan and Ale are okay, and soon he’s hit with a newspaper from a maxican lady that has hear his story of having his family in Mexico, she reminds him of the bridge that opens on November 2.
That’s when he starts trying and when he’s told his family doesn’t put a picture of him, that breaks his heart and spirit more than he cares to admit. He gives up after.
Years later, re-animated by the fact that he needs to let Ale know he loves her more than anything in the world, he keeps trying. This is when he recognizes Ryan for the first time.
He is an emotional mess, trying to reach him and when he sees he is with their entire family, he is a rying mess. But then, Ryan looks at him and there’s complete silence– it’s unspoken that Ryan is kind of the family’s head, so the others wave at him but don’t do much when Ryan finallly turns around to cross the bridge without saying a word to Shane.
His heart is shattered to not repair that night and on.
Shane concentrates then into getting to the Human World to see Ale. His parents and other family members would talk to him from time to time, and at least he gets to know his daughter grow well, but also gets to know Ryan had it bad for a while and will take him time to accept him back.
He tries to tell Ryan about Ernesto more than once. He courts him, and sings, and does all he can until Ryan is tired of him and finally tells him he doesn’t want excuses, he doesn’t want to see him and he should go right now.
Shane is not sure anymore if there’s more heart to break, but it hurts all the same.
Ryan, when in the After Life, woke to his family and only accepted to himself to be disappointed of not seeing Shane there. He finds out later about his situation, and for a while decided to not search. It’s better this way.
When he hears Ernesto has died and it’s there among them, he tries to find Shane, and maybe clear things once and for all. But he finally drops the idea and lets it go.
His no-life goes on, and when he sees Shane for the first time before the bridge, all he wants is to slap the idiot and kiss him, but his pride is stronger and so he turns around and leaves.
He cried all the way to the Human World.
When he realized their great-great grandson was a lot like Shane, a lot like both of them, he couldn’t help but smile.
After Ryan finds out the truth, Shane’s picture is put on the Altar of their family and he goes to no-live with them in the Land of the Death, they have a long talk about their lives and cry together for having found their way to each other again, no matter what.
Both feel guilty for a while, though. Shane for leaving and never finding a way to let Ryan know what happened. And Ryan for closing himself and not believing in Shane’s love for him and Ale, and for their family forgetting him for such a long time.
Eventually, they can heal together. They have all the time in the world now.
At some point, Ryan looks up at Shane with a smirk and goes, “See? Ghosts are real” and Shane wants to die again.
When Ale dies and she reuinites with her parents, there’s a crying fest. 
It hurts Shane that he didn’t get to see his Alejandrita grow up, and that she thought for a long time that he decided to leave them and was selfish enough to never look back to his family.
But seeing Ale’s happiness to see him again and all the love of his family, helps him slowly heal. Now they can all be together.
Shane’s first Día de los Muertos is so funny to everyone, because he doesn’t know what to do and still gets all ?? with some tradition, but he enjoys it all the same.
Life goes on in the Human World, their great-great grandson grows up, he gets married and has his own children than still put their picture in their Altar, and like that, things are okay.
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