#varney the vampire

[alucarddaily]

Castlevania vampires & their historical/literary counterparts

#castlevania #castlevania netflix #castlevania nocturne #dracula #dracula castlevania #vlad dracula tepes #carmilla #carmilla castlevania #erzsebet bathory #varney the vampire

[mayhemchicken-artblog]

VARNEY POSTING PART 1/GOD HELP US ALL: stuff that actually happened in the book. this is the most hinged any of these drawings will ever be

#art #doodles #varney the vampire #varney posting

[see-arcane]

I wish for something Dracula as sort of post-apocalypse. Maybe killing him did not stop the infestation, maybe it emboldened other vampires and you have now 100 Ruthvens in his wake having turf wars, maybe his visit awakened legendary dormant ancient evils, maybe it inspired ambitious lords of the dying british/european aristocracy wanting to copycat him and make devil pacts and training in the mountains. And the survivors who experienced it all first hand dealing with it.

Honestly, it stuns me how little has been done with the 'Dracula technically leaving an open spot at the top of the vampire food chain' possibilities. I think Castlevania kind of touches on it, but overall there's just a whole lot of nothing going on in Dracula-adjacent media about it.

Though I will hand the other public domain vampires a pass because, to be honest, I think Count Dracula was the only vampire in literature who was ever concerned about Taking Over the World. Everyone else in the undead scene is just sort of doing the smart thing and. You know. Chilling.

Lord Ruthven wasn't out to conscript others. Dude went out of his way to kill his victims with knives and drink the red runoff, as if to explicitly avoid making other vampires.

Carmilla was out there romancing and drinking girls like an undead Casanova. The vampire who turned her first when she was Countess Mircalla might have been different! But we never find out who that vampire was; we just know about Millie and the growing list of broken/siphoned hearts left in her wake.

Clarimonde, the dead woman in love~, was so bad at making another vampire. Comically, tragically bad at it. All she could bring herself to do was construct a fantasy dreamscape to live in with her human priest crush while taking literally only a single pinprick's worth of blood from him to keep herself going. This, when the priest in question openly declared SHE COULD HAVE HIS ENTIRE CIRCULATORY SYSTEM if she wanted it!

Varney the Vampire was and remains just...terrible at being a vampire. In general.

Countess Dolingen and her undead village, along with Gorcha and the Vourdalak village, both seem to have the whole 'conscript everyone around me/all those I love' angle handled. Except neither group ever ever expands past the borders of their territory. Maybe it's a rule? Maybe they just ran out of people they felt like drinking? Either way, they stopped caring about collecting others and just tucked themselves in their graves to doze once their respective villages were turned.

In short, for somebody to take over Dracula's ~King of the Vampires~ role, we'd actually need an OC to step in. All the actual classic literary vampires, many of whom were kicking well before Dracula appeared on the scene, just are not interested in the undead tyrant game.

(Probably why Dracula had to go around recruiting in the first place. None of the other vampires returned his letters or carrier pigeons for centuries. No, they don't want to join his pyramid scheme vampiric onslaught campaign, thanks. Too busy minding their business and/or dealing with personal drama. Please lose their address.)

#Drac Attack Pack: 'Oh man oh no what if other vampires start vying for Dracula's spot and try to take over the world too?' #Other vampires: 'Oh shit someone killed Dracula? Send them a fruit basket.' Or: 'Zzzzzzzzz' #dracula #dracula's guest #the vampyre #the family of the vourdalak #clarimonde #carmilla #varney the vampire

[mysterious-secret-garden]

Anonymous - Engraving from 'Varney the Vampire; or the feast of blood', 1845-47.

#Anonymous #Varney the Vampire #vampire #vampirism #dead #death

[cleolinda]

Hello! I think I have some new followers! You may either remember me from Livejournal/Twitter, or it might have been a total impulse follow. Right now I'm 1) hanging out on my dash, reblogging, chiming in on things sometimes; 2) writing about perfume because I got really interested in that over lockdown; 3) reviving a series of recaps I was doing back in 2010.

I like vampires. Always have. Like to write about them. Here's why I have brought back Varney the Vampire (1845-1847) recaps:

It is not currently being published and there won't be any author/fandom drama (probably; we can't rule out the ghost of James Malcolm Rymer)

It hasn't been discussed as much as... pretty much any other vampire media

Recaps are valuable because even people who try to read it rarely finish it, and I don't blame them

As of May 2023, I’m writing fresh recaps of chapters that are suddenly much longer, which is……. exciting:

Varney the Vampire masterpost

The perfume posts are following some pattern unknown even to me, but I have some interesting stories coming up:

Perfume discussion masterpost

Sometimes I write about songs I really like:

Music discussion

On Sundays I do Weekend Links posts to summarize the most interesting things I posted/reblogged that week, so check those or the archive out.

#odds and ends #varney the vampire

[eggyfigs]

Stakeout

In honor of today's 9tober episode, Varney. Hope you enjoy him, Tumblr murdered the quality.

#9tober #inside no 9 #varney the vampire

[dontcallmetreffy]

Painstakingly made these in a span of 4 days so I can slap them on a little Valentine’s Day card to hand out at the con… that’s this week :’) so if y’all are heading to Katsucon keep your eyes peeled for Varney/Trevor/Arikado handing these out! They’ll be colored by my buddy @thisteaistoosweet!

Also the fact that Varney is easier for me to draw than Trevor makes me clench my fist in rage

#castlevania #castlevania netflix #alucard #trevor belmont #adrian tepes #alucard castlevania #sypha belnades #castlevania greta #dracula #vlad tepes #lisa of lupu #castlevania hector #castlevania isaac #castlevania abel #carmilla castlevania #carmilla of styria #varney castlevania #varney the vampire #varney of lundenwic #castlevania death

[nerves-nebula]

varney "sorry i ate ur daughter twice can i hide from an AWFUL IGNORANT MOB in your house they think im a vampire (he is a vampire) and wanna kill me :( " the vampire

#nnstuff #rambling #hes so shit at everything i love u varney #hes so cool when hes a normal guy #but the moment hes a vampire or doing anything vampire adjacent he just trips over and dies #stupid motherfucker #i love him #varney the vampire

[honest-moth-of-silver-grove]

Hey there, if you're still up for receiving asks, what do you think it would be like caught in a poly relationship with Ratko/Varney? Preferably with a human reader (male or gn please).

Maybe with the reader playing a similar role to Saint Germaine, although more willingly? I love the two disasters.

A/N: Lol, I love the two disasters as well; one of the highlights of the last season for me for sure! I think it’d take a VERY special human to catch their attention. For one, Ratko sees humans as pigs, all beneath him. Varney recognizes humans as important simply because they have souls and therefore are afforded influences on realms he is not. For this set of headcanons, let’s assume our Reader is just THAT gd special that both Ratko and Varney admire them enough to not only let them live but ask them to join in their arrangement. 

TW: Brief Mentions of Death, and Sex (not always in that order)

Gender Neutral Human Reader in a Poly! Relationship with Both Ratko & Varney 

You’re a human of, shall we say, unique talents and persuasions. Perhaps you’re a doctor or mortician, or a mad-scientist combination of the two. Perhaps you, like Saint Germaine, are an alchemist or magician. 

Whatever your occupation is, it deals with biology, sciences, mathematics, and most importantly, death. 

That’s of course how you met your two current partners, through the more morbid facets of your line of work. 

Ratko and Varney were quite the amusing pair to you from the get-go. As complete and utter opposites in personality and outlook, they butted heads more often than not, but that’s one of the reasons the three of you worked out so well! You were always the neutral party coming in with the tiebreaker. 

For whatever reason, you agree with Varney that Dracula must be brought back to life. However, unlike Varney, you don’t see why he must be brought back as a Rebis, fused with his dead wife. You understand this other associate in their plan, one Saint Germaine, is rather knowledgeable himself when it comes to alchemy, but there are several ways to go about raising the dead; surely any one of them is much less complicated than a plan such as this. 

Your back-and-forth arguments act as entertainment for Ratko, who just sits back and watches as his two lovers squabble in a language that might as well be in a foreign language to him. Rebis this, necromancy that. “The two of you squawk like chicken whose head has been cut off.” Ratko frequently says to the two of you. 

That of course always gets a rise out of both you and Varney: “How can a chicken squawk if it’s already dead?” Varney asks, falling for the bait every time. “You would need necromancy to reanimate said chicken!” You exclaim, equally none-the-wiser. 

This undead vs dead squawking chicken debate goes on in circles for a while until one of you, usually Varney, starts listing off your credentials. “Don’t you know who I am? I’m VANREY!” Which is hilarious, given there’s not a single soul amongst the three of you who doesn’t know the entire backstory of the other nor is there one of you who hasn’t seen the other two naked. Speaking of naked….

You were probably the first to initiate sex, not because Ratko or Varney weren’t attracted to you, or interested in sleeping with you. But because the two morons didn’t even realize that was an option! Well, I mean sure, they had each envisioned what it’d be like to sleep with you, but their imagination made it all seem theoretical. 

So one early morning you decide to take matters into your own hands. You strip down to nothing and wait for them to come back home before the sun fully rises. You lay there, splayed out on the bed, bare as a newborn babe, casually reading a book akin to the Kamasutra, complete with very detailed illustrations, of course!  

Varney is the first to notice. He sort of freezes before smirking. Ratko sees you second, his usual indifferent demeanor giving way to shock before an expression of reverence crosses his face. “Well, fellas?” You roll over, toss the book aside, and sit with your legs spread far apart, giving them a good show of everything you have to offer before pointing to a particular illustration on the left side of the book. “I’ve always wanted to try this one.”

It’s not a surprise their bickering crosses over into sex. They argue over who gets to do what first, so more often than not, you have to pick one of them to shove back down and get started, much to the chagrin of the one left standing. (Don’t worry about them too much though, they always join in themselves soon enough lol.) 

You work well together, even if there’s a total of like, seven brain cells between the three of you, and you have five of them on any given day. 

#varney the vampire #varney castlevania #ratko castlevania #castlevania x reader #castlevania imagines #castlevania imagine #varney x reader #ratko x reader #castlevania #hc #hot!

[mistressofthemacabresworld]

#penny dreadfuls #victorian #horror #gothic #goth #art #skeleton horseman #haunted forest #sweeney todd #the vampires of paris #spring heeled jack #varney the vampire #vampire

[dross-the-fish]

WHAT HAPPENED TO HOLMES⁉️⁉️⁉️⁉️⁉️⁉️⁉️🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️🗣️🧎‍♀️🧎‍♀️🧎‍♀️🧎‍♀️

He's stuck with Varney and not at all happy about it.

#sherlock holmes #varney the vampire #crossover au #doodles from the breakroom

[kingbuffy]

I'm actually reading Varney the Vampire for the first time, because I'm determined to become an expert in foundational vampire history, and it's really fascinating how much it has influenced modern vampire lore. Varney, by my estimation, may have been the first vampire portrayed with fangs. More importantly, Varney seems to be the first sympathetic vampire.

The way he acts actually reminds me a lot of Barnabas Collins, another extremely influential vampire that made his debut in the soap opera Dark Shadows over a century later. Barnabas begins his story being merely a charismatic and conniving villain, but as he goes on the layers are peeled back and we see the man that longs to love and be human again. If you've read Varney, you'll recognize the comparison. Varney the Vampire and Dark Shadows actually have many striking similarities. Varney the Vampire was an extremely popular Penny Dreadful, which were basically soap operas at the time. Even the meandering plots and repetitive dialogue are the same, but it's always Varney and Barnabas that keeps the audience entertained.

I'm not sure though if I would recommend Varney the Vampire to the average person, if only because it's really long. The writers were paid by the line, so you can understand the dragged out story, but that doesn't make for very palatable reading. If you're a total nerd dedicated to the niche of vampire history like me though, you'll probably get something out of it. I don't know when or if I'll finish it, but it'd be cool to talk about with someone.

#varney the vampire #vampires #barnabas collins #dark shadows #vampire lore #penny dreadfuls

[mayhemchicken-artblog]

more varney posting. it's time to d-d-d-duel

#art #doodles #varney the vampire #flora about to send varney's ass to the shadow realm #i'm procrastinating on lxgf panels to post this lmao #it's uhhhhh it's a warmup let's go with that

[see-arcane]

I started reading Varney the Vampire, and I'm pretty sure that if the Dracula crew ever met him, they would instantly adopt him because he's such a sad wet cat of a man.

110% agree. @mayhemchicken-artblog has actually drawn a scene or two on the subject I believe 👀

#varney the vampire #is legitimately awful at vampireing #the Drac Attack Pack wouldn't be able to raise a stake to him without feeling bad about it #(especially when he spends a solid page's worth of detail trying and failing to get over a wall) #((by the time he gets up there Jonathan is already sitting at the top--no longer sharpening his kukri; just playing tic tac toe)) #dracula

[loki1987]

But we don't value our personal safety

#varney the vampire #vampire story #vampire books #vampire #victorian literature #penny dreadful #bookaddict #books and reading #booklover #book recommendations

[cleolinda]

Varney the Vampire: A Preface

I want you to think back to what it’s like to reread your old work from years ago—your old stories or poetry, your old school papers, or even your old tumblr posts. Sometimes you’re actually kind of pleased, sure, but I want you to really go back and locate yourself in the heady cringe of that feeling.

In related news, I'm going to pick back up with the Varney the Vampire recaps I started in late 2010 CE. I got about nine chapters in, and then something, who knows what, derailed my life, as things tend to. Like, I'm used to this, it happens with the regularity of a lunar cycle. But I like writing about vampires (clearly), and since I feel like Dracula has been tread pretty thoroughly in recent times, I figured I might go back to something different; we had some lively discussions about Varney back then.

But 2010 was a time before A Lot of Things happened. I was in my early 30s at that point, so I won't say, "Oh, I was so young," but I had a very different energy as a blogger 12-13 years ago. So I've decided to rewrite the recaps a little—some more than others, some not much at all. I just feel like I have a really different perspective on the first chapter in particular, in 2023.

As before, I'm using the full, unabridged text. It is hideously long, something like 230+ chapters, but go big or go home, I figure. The thing is, I was using the files hosted at the University of Virginia, and now you can only get those through the Wayback Machine, but they are still usable for now. I have various backups saved, but I do want you to be able to see that I am, as ever, Not Making It Up.

I'm also not going to quibble anymore as to whether James Malcolm Rymer or Thomas Peckett Prest wrote this behemoth. Per Wikipedia sources, scholars seem to agree that it was all or mostly Rymer. When it's mentioned that they figured this out based on his dialogue style, I went... yeah, that checks out. Because it sure is A Style, and I'll be honest, the repetitive filler dialogue in chapter 10 was such a speedbump for me that I just threw up my hands and said, "I don't know how to recap this. Something I can't remember now is going on in my life and I Cannot. I no longer Can."

Well, it's the 2020s and we're gonna. Like I can't tell you how much stress I do not have about this. I've had covid three times and also spinal surgery. Varney the Vampire can no longer hurt me.

To start, this ordeal has a preface—apparently written upon the occasion of collecting the serial into book form—wherein The Author expresses his gratitude for "unprecedented success of the romance of Varney the Vampyre." First off, Rymer uses "vampire" and "vampyre" interchangeably, because fuck me for caring about consistency, I guess. Second, as Wikipedia notes,

It first appeared in 1845–1847 as a series of weekly cheap pamphlets of the kind then known as "penny dreadfuls." The author was paid by the typeset line [YEAH, I NOTICED], so when the story was published in book form in 1847, it was of epic length: the original edition ran to 876 double-columned pages and 232 chapters. Altogether it totals nearly 667,000 words.

For comparison, all of Lord of the Rings plus The Hobbit is 576,459 words. I sure do blanch every time I see those numbers! It's fine. We're gonna be fine. Back to the preface:

The following romance is collected from seemingly the most authentic sources, and the Author must leave the question of credibility entirely to his readers, not even thinking that he is peculiarly called upon to express his own opinion upon the subject.

"Seemingly" is doing a lot of work here.

Nothing has been omitted [for real, nothing down to the tiniest fly-swat has been omitted] in the life of the unhappy Varney, which could tend to throw a light upon his most extraordinary career, and the fact of his death just as it is here related, made a great noise at the time through Europe, and is to be found in the public prints for the year 1713.

I've seen more than one Dracula multimedia art project where people recreated the letters and diaries and recordings in the book (have you heard my whole thing about how Dracula actually was a cutting-edge techno-thriller back in 1897?), but I've never heard of anyone creating ARG-style media for the Totally for Actual-Fact Real tale of Sir Francis Varney the Vampire, and I think it would be hilarious if someone did.

I won't belabor the entire preface, but what I do want to touch on is Rymer's mention of "unprecedented success." Varney is actually standing on the shoulders of a vampire giant, and it's not the one we would think of. Nowadays, our big touchstone—the influence so great that most works either evoke it or take the trouble to say "Our vampires are different"—is Dracula, obviously. Which was published exactly 50 years after Varney, in 1897. But Varney's touchstone is Polidori's short story "The Vampyre" (1819). And for most of the 1800s, this was everyone's touchstone. Per Wikipedia (which I'm going to lean on for how concise it is, but I concur with this from my own research as well):

An adaptation appeared in 1820 with Cyprien Bérard's novel Lord Ruthwen ou les Vampires, falsely attributed to Charles Nodier, who himself then wrote his own dramatic version, Le Vampire, a play which had enormous success and sparked a "vampire craze" across Europe. This includes operatic adaptations by Heinrich Marschner (see Der Vampyr) and Peter Josef von Lindpaintner (see Der Vampyr), both published in the same year. Nikolai Gogol, Alexandre Dumas [note: I have the Ruthven play he wrote around here somewhere] and Aleksey Tolstoy all produced vampire tales, and themes in Polidori's tale would continue to influence Bram Stoker's Dracula and eventually the whole vampire genre. Dumas makes explicit reference to Lord Ruthven in The Count of Monte Cristo, going so far as to state that his character "The Comtesse G..." had been personally acquainted with Lord Ruthven. [...]

In England, James Planché's play The Vampire, or The Bride of the Isles was first performed in London in 1820 at the Lyceum Theatre based on Charles Nodier's Le Vampire, which in turn was based on Polidori. Such melodramas were satirised in Ruddigore, by Gilbert and Sullivan (1887); a character called Sir Ruthven must abduct a maiden, or he will die.

Back when no one gave a shit about copyright, Polidori's work was spun out into a cottage industry of knock-off stories and plays, an entire horror zeitgeist. Lord Ruthven was, for 78 years, who you copied, who you riffed on, who you parodied, what Count Dracula is to us now: the archetypal vampire. The Big Guy. And Varney is clearly cut from his cloth—the ostensible gentleman who worms his way into the lives of respectable, unwitting people. Unlike Dracula, there's no foreigner Othering, no "historical basis," no undercurrents of contagion and infection, no ambition to make the world his wine-press, none of that; Ruthven is a simpler figure, but the dominant one of this time no less. He is a stranger who shows up in the middle of London high society, icy and distant, his eyes “dead grey”—stern, yet somehow compelling when he cares to be. And when he cares to be, you're in trouble.

And this is the cultural consciousness when Francis Varney shows up.

[Chapter one will go up sometime this week, March 8-10 or so.]

#varney the vampire #vampires #vampire studies #honestly I am nervous about what I want to say about the first chapter #not sure it's gonna go over very well #long post #welcome to hell it's my blog #tv tropes warning. here is your rope to climb back out