History YMMV / Dracula

* AmericansHateTingle: In the first set of years after this novel's publication, it was heavily despised by Romanians as being a xenophobic "story made up by a foreigner to titillate other foreigners" which is not wrong since the novel's plot is largely about an evil Eastern European count coming to steal the pure and virtuous Anglo-Saxon women beloved of many Invasion Literature tropes. It is also disliked by others for more or less immortalizing and scapegoating UsefulNotes/VladTheImpaler as a monster, and making the name of the Christian "Order of the Dragon" (which is what Dracula is supposed to mean) into a demonic being of low-grade pulp fiction. Romanian nationalism in the 19th century also lionized and gave Vlad a HistoricalHeroUpgrade around the era when this book was published[[note]]Which was also a recent phenomenon. Since, the oral tradition among the peasants recorded by Archbishops in the seventeenth century was more or less negative[[/note]], and the novel, to Romanians, seems like someone making a cheap propaganda about their IconOfRebellion in the same period they were struggling against the Ottoman Turks and the Russian Empire. Granted, even though Romanians' loathing for Creator/BramStoker's Dracula has ameliorated and they have even been willing to capitalize on the fictional Count Dracula's association with the country by selling vampire related souvenirs, it is still not wise to talk about Dracula at length.

** Mina sure likes describing how pretty Lucy is. They even share a kiss in ''Film/BramStokersDracula''. The TV series outright makes Lucy a lesbian.

** In the epilogue, it's mentioned that Dr. Seward and Arthur are happily married. Obviously, the text doesn't specify "to each other", but it also provides no indication that they aren't.

** Dracula is very interested in and possessive of Jonathan while Jonathan is at his castle, forbidding the sisters to touch him with such declarations as "This man belongs to me!" and "Yes, I too can love, you yourselves can tell it from the past" (more or less explicitly saying that he feels for Jonathan what he once felt for them).
** Believe it or not, Dracula and ''Renfield'' get this sometimes, albeit with Dracula and Renfield [[SelfFanservice recast]] as a pair of {{Bishonen}} pretty-boys rather than the old man and the maniac from the book.

* AmericansHateTingle: In the first set of years after this novel's publication, it was heavily despised by Romanians as being a xenophobic "story made up by a foreigner to titillate other foreigners" which is not wrong since the novel's plot is largely about an evil Eastern European count coming to steal the pure and virtuous Anglo-Saxon women beloved of many Invasion Literature tropes. It is also disliked by others for more or less immortalizing and scapegoating UsefulNotes/VladTheImpaler as a monster, and making the name of the Christian "Order of the Dragon" (which is what Dracula is supposed to mean) into a demonic being of low-grade pulp fiction. Romanian nationalism in the 19th Century also lionized and gave Vlad a HistoricalHeroUpgrade around the era when this book was published[[note]]Which was also a recent phenomenon. Since, the oral tradition among the peasants recorded by Archbishops in the seventeenth century was more or less negative[[/note]], and the novel, to Romanians, seems like someone making a cheap propaganda about their IconOfRebellion in the same period they were struggling against the Ottoman Turks and the Russian Empire. Granted, even though Romanians' loathing for Creator/BramStoker's Dracula has ameliorated and they have even been willing to capitalize on the fictional Count Dracula's association with the country by selling vampire related souvenirs, it is still not wise to talk about Dracula at length.

** People have come to see the novel as a kind of egregious MaliciousSlander on UsefulNotes/VladTheImpaler (which ''Film/DraculaUntold'' ran with). While the novel has the hypocritical xenophobia typical to all Victorian invasion literature (i.e. fears of foreigners [[MoralMyopia invading the largest and most rapacious empire of the 19th century]]), the ameliorative reputation of Vlad the Impaler is very much NewerThanTheyThink. The oral tradition of Vlad the Impaler among the slavic peasantry was negative for most of its history, as chronicled by Romanian orthodox priests in the [=1700s=], so while Bram Stoker's novel is not especially flattering to foreigners and minorities (especially the Romanian people), its portrayal of Vlad the Impaler as a blood-sucking monster is actually far more consistent to the tradition than the Romanian nationalistic movement of the 19th Century (which like all romantic nationalism was a bourgeois phenomenon with invented traditions and little connection to the majority of the people).

** Quincey Morris' portrayal as a gun-toting cowboy from Texas is so outrageously stereotypical that it borders on being offensive to modern readers. Yet considering how British literature of the 19th Century tended to stereotype Americans as boorish and uncultured, the fact that ''Dracula'' includes an American character who's portrayed as not only sympathetic but heroic is notable in and of itself. Stoker was very enamored of American culture and included Morris specifically as a tribute to his American friends. In the book, Quincey also admits that he puts on a fake "cowboy" stereotype because Lucy finds it funny and tends to be laconic and pragmatic away from her. Lucy bluntly notes he has what a lady of her station considers at least passably proper education and manners.

** How much of Jonathan's [[GenreBlindness obliviousness]] and SkewedPriorities at the start of the novel is legit, and how much is him essentially going into survival mode in a ''very bad'' situation he can't easily get out of? Memes aside, his journals indicate that he has a sense something really isn't right very early, and he does hang onto the rosary the innkeeper's wife gives him. He says it's because she was so genuinely concerned and kind and he didn't want to discard her gift, but it could also indicate that deep down, he's not sure it wouldn't help to have a holy symbol on him. Later, when he realizes Dracula has no reflection, and the Count shatters his mirror, Jonathan's first reaction is to comment that it's annoying because now he can't shave properly... but the rest of that entry describes him realizing he's trapped in the castle, and he is clearly ''freaking the hell out''. It's very possible Jonathan was honing in on irrelevant or silly details, like being able to shave or the food he's enjoying, and trying to ignore the increasingly-obvious bloodsucking elephant in the room, because his only other option was to panic and/or go insane. At least once, Jonathan writes in his journal that he feels like he's losing his mind, and that he's journaling for much the same reason as [[Literature/TheMartian Mark Watney]]: to try and keep his head in a stressful, life-or-death situation, and have an outlet to talk himself through plans for survival.

* AntiClimaxBoss: The final confrontation with Dracula takes less than three pages, and that includes the heroes fighting off his mooks.
** As noted by many followers of Dracula Daily, the actual climax is the race to catch up to Dracula and finish him off before he can wake up on his home turf. It isn't a classic battle of good and evil between the heroes and the villain, it's the heroes desperately trying to defuse a bomb before the countdown runs out. Dracula's shapeshifting powers are his main threat, and they're largely disabled during the day; if the group catches him before sunset, they can dispatch him with almost no effort. If the Count can evade them until sunset, ''he'' can dispatch ''them'' with almost no effort.

** While sunlight is a weakness to Dracula in the original book, it wasn't the outright lethal weakness it became in adaptations like ''Film/{{Nosferatu}}''. It just [[WeakenedByTheLight weakened his powers]] and [[ShapeshifterModeLock robbed him of his shape shifting abilities]] while exposed to it. The Count also seems to generally dislike bright lights of any kind rather than "just" sunlight.

** Any time the name 'Van Helsing' is mentioned in any form of media, it either depicts the character himself as a hardcore VampireHunter or gives the audience the heads up that the character in question is a HunterOfMonsters. In the original book Van Helsing is nothing of the sort; he has a wide range of accomplishments and interests, and his knowledge of Balkan folklore is by no means his speciality. Seward initially turns to him because he's an expert in rare ''diseases,'' so it takes him a fairly long time to suspect that Lucy's condition is caused by a vampire, at first trying to cure her through scientific means before turning to more traditional methods of protection, and in the end his efforts to save her life are all in vain. Van Helsing is able to lead the group to the conclusion of vampires ''not'' because he is an vampire expert with experience slaying them but because he is an open-minded scholar willing to seriously consider folklore, myth, and ridiculous-sounding claims. Most of his hypotheses about vampires derive from comparing descriptions in various old stories and texts to his experience with Lucy and the observations Jonathan made in his journal, and even as the heroes set out on their mission he constantly needs to do further research on how to understand and defeat Dracula and the vampires created by him, basically adapting as he goes along and hoping desperately that his ideas work rather than knowing everything right from the start.

** Any time the name 'Van Helsing' is mentioned in any form of media, it either depicts the character himself as a hardcore VampireHunter or gives the audience the heads up that the character in question is a HunterOfMonsters. In the original book Van Helsing is nothing of the sort; he has a wide range of accomplishments and interests, of which a knowledge of Balkan folklore is only one. Seward initially turns to him because he's an expert in rare ''diseases,'' so it takes him a fairly long time to realise that Lucy's condition is caused by a vampire, at first trying to cure her through scientific means before turning to more traditional methods of protection, and in the end his efforts to save her life are all in vain. Van Helsing is able to lead the group to the conclusion of vampires ''not'' because he is an vampire expert with experience slaying them but because he is an open-minded scholar willing to seriously consider folklore, myth, and ridiculous-sounding claims. Most of his hypotheses about vampires derive from comparing descriptions in various old stories and texts to his experience with Lucy and the observations Jonathan made in his journal, and even as the heroes set out on their mission he constantly needs to do further research on how to understand and defeat Dracula and the vampires created by him, basically adapting as he goes along and hoping desperately that his ideas work rather than knowing everything right from the start.

** "[[GroundhogDayLoop Jonathan is stuck in a time loop]]." [[labelnote:Explanation]] With "Dracula Daily" starting up again every year on May [=3rd=], there are many posts about poor Jonathan going through the same events year after year, or hoping that this is the year the loop breaks and Jonathan really does have a pleasant but ultimately uneventful business trip.[[/labelnote]]

** "[[GroundhogDayLoop Jonathan is stuck in a time loop]]." [[labelnote:Explanation]] With "Dracula Daily" starting up again every year on May [=3rd=], many post about poor Jonathan going through the same events year after year, or hoping that this is the year the loop breaks and Jonathan really does have a pleasant but ultimately uneventful business trip.[[/labelnote]]

** Jonathan just took the bar exam.[[note]]Readers who have taken the bar (or a similarly grueling professional exam) have defended his early actions by saying that nobody who recently qualified as a solicitor would be in a mental condition to think about anything ''but'' real estate law, no matter how fearful and outlandish everything else is.[[/note]]

** Terrible roommates [[note]]The implication that Dracula does all the work around his castle himself despite having three women living there with him has led to a lot of jokes about the Weird Sisters being PrettyFreeloaders.[[/note]]

** Any time the name 'Van Helsing' is mentioned in any form of media, it either depicts the character himself as a hardcore VampireHunter or gives the audience the heads up that the character in question is a HunterOfMonsters. In the original book Van Helsing is nothing of the sort; he has a wide range of accomplishments and interests, of which a knowledge of Balkan folklore is only one. Seward initially turns to him because he's an expert in rare ''diseases,'' so it takes him a fairly long time to realise that Lucy's condition is caused by a vampire, at first trying to cure her through scientific means before turning to more traditional methods of protection, and in the end his efforts to save her life are all in vain. Van Helsing is able to lead the group to the conclusion of vampires not because he is an vampire expert with experience slaying them but because he is an open-minded scholar willing to seriously consider folklore, myth, and ridiculous-sounding claims. Most of his hypotheses about vampires derive from comparing descriptions in various old stories and texts to his experience with Lucy and the observations Jonathan made in his journal, and even as the heroes set out on their mission he constantly needs to do further research on how to understand and defeat Dracula and the vampires created by him, basically adapting as he goes along and hoping desperately that his ideas work rather than knowing everything right from the start.

** Any time the name 'Van Helsing' is mentioned in any form of media, it either depicts the character himself as a hardcore VampireHunter or gives the audience the heads up that the character in question is a HunterOfMonsters. In the original book Van Helsing is nothing of the sort; he has a wide range of accomplishments and interests, of which a knowledge of Balkan folklore is only one. Seward initially turns to him because he's an expert in rare ''diseases,'' so it takes him a fair while to realise that Lucy's condition is caused by a vampire, at first trying to cure her through scientific means before turning to more traditional methods of protection, and in the end his efforts to save her life are all in vain. Van Helsing is able to lead the group to the conclusion of vampires not because he is an vampire expert with experience slaying them but because he is an open-minded scholar willing to seriously consider folklore, myth, and ridiculous-sounding claims. Most of his hypotheses about vampires derive from comparing descriptions in various old stories and texts to his experience with Lucy and the observations Jonathan made in his journal, and he constantly needs to do further research on how to understand and defeat Dracula and the vampires created by him, basically adapting as he goes along and hoping desperately that his ideas work rather than knowing everything right from the start.

* CharacterPerceptionEvolution: Two major characters have had their perceptions re-evaluated upon exploration of the source material, as opposed to their common depictions in adaptations. Interestingly, the perception of one has gotten much better, the other much worse.
** Jonathan Harker, as outlined in subsequent entries on this page, has not fared well in adaptations or [[Literature/DraculaTheUnDead2009 the official sequel]] of the book. He's usually presented as the repressive and/or dull alternative to the mysterious, seductive Count. Ironically, when Dracula Daily kicked off and readers went back to the original source material, Tumblr users quickly embraced Jonathan as [[PlayAlongMeme their new best friend]], connecting with his open adoration of his wife and his struggles to survive an extremely traumatic situation as the Count's prisoner, neither of which get covered much, if at all, in the adaptations.
** On the flip side, as more and more people go back to the source material through Dracula Daily, the title character is being seen less and less positively as he was in decades past. Now, especially on Tumblr, he is seen much more as a sexual predator/rapist and a serial killer. The interpretation that Dracula represents sexual liberation for Mina is frequently mocked and critiqued, with people pointing out that equating Dracula (who is presented as a rapist in the original novel) with sexual liberation is ''full'' of UnfortunateImplications, not to mention invalidating the experiences of sexual assault/rape victims. Adaptations have increasingly made Dracula a tragic, romantic, even heroic figure, where going back to the original novel shows him as a thoroughly vile monster.

* DiagnosedByTheAudience: Jonathan is not explicitly identified as anything, but to a modern reader, his behavior after escaping from Dracula's castle (frequent nightmares, jumpy and easily frightened, needing Mina's comfort and support to get through his daily life, and has a panic attack upon seeing reminders of his experience) is very reminiscent of Post-traumatic stress disorder. It may very well be that Bram Stoker intentionally wrote Jonathan as suffering from trauma, but lacked the terminology to describe it ("Shell-shock" wasn't coined until 1915).

** Relatedly, while we never see Mina's reaction specifically to Jonathan being attacked by the Weird Sisters, she's nothing but mournful that her husband had to go through his ordeal at Dracula's Castle and supportive of his attempts to recover from it. She never blames him for cheating her, seeming to recognize that he had no control over the matter, and this is well before her own encounters with Dracula. Say what you will about the gender politics of the novel, but men and women are treated equally in the lack of victim-blaming.

* VanillaProtagonist: Sir Arthur Holmwood, despite being the one Lucy ultimately chooses to marry, is generally seen as the least interesting of her three love interests. He doesn't have Quincy Morris's rough American charms or Dr. Seward's dark, moody intellectual expertise. He's just a wealthy British nobleman and NiceGuy. While this makes him ''slightly'' more of an everyman (wealth and status aside) so the audience can relate better when his beloved perishes, turns into a vampire child-predator, and needs be impaled to prevent her harming more people and children (a duty that's given to him), poor Arthur is still given the least to distinguish him from the rest of the main cast. Not helping is that Arthur provides ''very'' little in the way of documents that make up the novel (only a few letters and telegraphs), about as much as Morris, but as mentioned, Morris has "[[GenreRefugee American cowboy in a Gothic Horror story]]" going for him. Even during the final expedition to kill Dracula, he doesn't get to avenge his fiancee himself and his primary means of supporting it is through his money and connections.

* VanillaProtagonist: Sir Arthur Holmwood, despite being the one Lucy ultimately chooses to marry, is generally seen as the least interesting of her three love interests. He doesn't have Quincy Morris's rough American charms or Dr. Seward's dark, moody intellectual expertise. He's just a wealthy British nobleman and NiceGuy. While this makes him ''slightly'' more of an everyman (wealth and status aside) so the audience can relate better when his beloved perishes, turns into a vampire child-predator, and needs be impaled to prevent her harming more people and children (a duty that's given to him), poor Arthur is still given the least to distinguish him from the rest of the main cast. Not helping is that Arthur provides ''very'' little in the way of documents that make up the novel (only a few letters and telegraphs), about as much as Morris, but as mentioned, Morris has "[[GenreRefugee American cowboy in a Gothic Horror story]]" going for him.
Even during the final expedition to kill Dracula, he doesn't get to avenge his fiancee himself and his primary means of supporting it is through his money and connections.

** To many familiar with modern vampire works, where vampirism, blood drinking, and vampires themselves are blatant (sometimes ''too'' blatant) metaphors for sex and sexuality, it can be surprising to find that the actual text of the Ur-Example vampire novel sports very little in the way of sexual subtext, and when discussed actually outright dismisses the idea. At her funeral Arthur suggests to Van Helsing that donating blood to Lucy symbolically married them in some way, and Van Helsing finds the suggestion literally laughable, breaking down into hysterics as soon as he's out of Arthur's earshot (though much of his mirth comes from, if the idea is carried to its logical conclusion, it means Lucy is a polyandrist and Van Helsing himself a bigamist). If they're metaphors for sex at all, Dracula and the other vampires are metaphors for ''rape'', and the text treats vampirism more like the spread of an insidious and fatal disease than anything to do with sexuality. The closest thing to actual textual evidence for a sexual interpretation is vampire Lucy, [[CameBackWrong reawakened as a hideous, distorted parody of the sweet, innocent girl she used to be]], repeatedly described as having a kind of animalistic sexuality (emphasis on "animal," with her growling over a child like a dog over a bone), something which all the men react to in horror. Also in the "Weird Sisters" attacking Jonathan, mesmerizing him so that he's unwilling to resist them, ''willing'' to let them "[[DeadlyEuphemism kiss]]" him. Later generations sneering at Victorian repression ran with these scenes to equate vampirism with sexual liberation while leaving the children Lucy and the Sisters were preying on in the same scene conveniently out of shot. For the same reason, many will claim ''Dracula'' started the trend of vampire as sex metaphor, when that honor is more accurately placed on adaptations, derivative works, and [[BreadEggsBreadedEggs adaptations incorporating elements from derivative works]].

* VanillaProtagonist: Sir Arthur Holmwood, despite being the one Lucy ultimately chooses to marry, is generally seen as the least interesting of her three love interests. He doesn't have Quincy Morris's rough American charms or Dr. Seward's dark, moody intellectual expertise. He's just a wealthy British nobleman and NiceGuy. While this makes him ''slightly'' more of an everyman (wealth and status aside) so the audience can relate better when his beloved perishes, turns into a vampire child-predator, and needs be impaled to prevent her harming more people and children (a duty that's given to him), poor Arthur is still given the least to distinguish him from the rest of the main cast. Even during the final expedition to kill Dracula, he doesn't get to avenge his fiancee himself and his primary means of supporting it is through his money and connections. Not helping is that Arthur provides ''very'' little in the way of documents that make up the novel (only a few letters and telegraphs), about as much as Morris, but as mentioned, Morris has "[[GenreRefugee American cowboy in a Gothic Horror story]]" going for him.

* VanillaProtagonist: Sir Arthur Holmwood, despite being the one Lucy ultimately chooses to marry, is generally seen as the least interesting of her three love interests. He doesn't have Quincy Morris's rough American charms or Dr. Seward's dark, moody intellectual expertise. He's just a wealthy British nobleman and NiceGuy. While this makes him ''slightly'' more of an everyman (wealth and status aside) so the audience can relate better when his beloved perishes, turns into a vampire child-predator, and needs be impaled to prevent her harming more people and children (a duty that's given to him), poor Arthur is still given the least to distinguish him from the rest of the main cast. Even during the final expedition to kill Dracula, he doesn't get to avenge his fiancee himself and his primary means of supporting it is through his money and connections.

** To many familiar with modern vampire works, where vampirism, blood drinking, and vampires themselves are blatant (sometimes ''too'' blatant) metaphors for sex and sexuality, it can be surprising to find that the actual text of the Ur-Example vampire novel sports very little in the way of sexual subtext, and when discussed actually outright dismisses the idea. At her funeral Arthur suggests to Van Helsing that donating blood to Lucy symbolically married them in some way, and Van Helsing finds the suggestion literally laughable, breaking down into hysterics as soon as he's out of Arthur's earshot (though much of his mirth comes from, if the idea is carried to its logical conclusion, it means Lucy is a polyandrist and Van Helsing himself a bigamist). If they're metaphors for sex at all, Dracula and the other vampires are metaphors for ''rape'', and the text treats vampirism more like the spread of an insidious and fatal disease than anything to do with sexuality. The closest thing to actual textual evidence for this interpretation is vampire Lucy, [[CameBackWrong reawakened as a hideous, distorted parody of the sweet, innocent girl she used to be]], is repeatedly described as having a kind of animalistic sexuality (emphasis on "animal," with her growling over a child like a dog over a bone), something which all the men react to in horror. Also in the "Weird Sisters" attacking Jonathan, mesmerizing him so that he's unwilling to resist them, ''willing'' to let them "[[DeadlyEuphemism kiss]]" him. Later generations sneering at Victorian repression ran with these scenes to equate vampirism with sexual liberation while leaving the children Lucy and the Sisters were preying on in the same scene conveniently out of shot. For the same reason, many will claim ''Dracula'' started the trend of vampire as sex metaphor, when that honor is more accurately placed on adaptations, derivative works, and [[BreadEggsBreadedEggs adaptations incorporating elements from derivative works]].

** To many familiar with modern vampire works, where vampirism, blood drinking, and vampires themselves are blatant (sometimes ''too'' blatant) metaphors for sex and sexuality, it can be surprising to find that the actual text of the Ur-Example vampire novel sports very little in the way of sexual subtext, and when discussed actually outright dismisses the idea. Although some jokes are made about how Lucy's suitors sharing blood with her makes her a polyandrist, at her funeral Arthur suggests to Van Helsing that donating blood to Lucy symbolically married them in some way, and Van Helsing finds the suggestion literally laughable, breaking down into hysterics as soon as he's out of Arthur's earshot. If they're metaphors for sex at all, Dracula and the other vampires are metaphors for ''rape'', and the text treats vampirism more like the spread of an insidious and fatal disease than anything to do with sexuality. The closest thing to actual textual evidence for this interpretation is vampire Lucy, [[CameBackWrong reawakened as a hideous, distorted parody of the sweet, innocent girl she used to be]], is repeatedly described as having a kind of animalistic sexuality, something which all the men react to in horror. Later generations sneering at Victorian repression ran with this scene to equate vampirism with sexual liberation while leaving the child she was preying on in the same scene conveniently out of shot. For the same reason, many will claim ''Dracula'' started the trend of vampire as sex metaphor, when that honor is more accurately placed on adaptations, derivative works, and [[BreadEggsBreadedEggs adaptations incorporating elements from derivative works]].

* VanillaProtagonist: Sir Arthur Holmwood, despite being the one Lucy ultimately chooses to marry, is generally seen as the least interesting of her three love interests. He doesn't have Quincy Morris's rough American charms or Dr. Seward's dark, moody intellectual expertise. He's just a wealthy British nobleman and NiceGuy. While this makes him ''slightly'' more of an everyman (wealth and status aside) so the audience can relate better when his beloved perishes, turns into a vampire child-predator, and has to have be impaled to prevent her harming more people and children (a duty that's given to him), poor Arthur is still given the least to distinguish him from the rest of the main cast.

** How much of Jonathan's obliviousness and SkewedPriorities at the start of the novel is legit, and how much is him essentially going into survival mode in a ''very bad'' situation he can't easily get out of? Memes aside, his journals indicate that he has a sense something really isn't right very early, and he does hang onto the rosary the innkeeper's wife gives him. He says it's because she was so genuinely concerned and kind and he didn't want to discard her gift, but it could also indicate that deep down, he's not sure it wouldn't help to have a holy symbol on him. Later, when he realizes Dracula has no reflection, and the Count shatters his mirror, Jonathan's first reaction is to comment that it's annoying because now he can't shave properly... but the rest of that entry describes him realizing he's trapped in the castle, and he is clearly ''freaking the hell out''. It's very possible Jonathan was honing in on irrelevant or silly details, like being able to shave or the food he's enjoying, and trying to ignore the increasingly-obvious bloodsucking elephant in the room, because his only other option was to panic and/or go insane. At least once, Jonathan writes in his journal that he feels like he's losing his mind, and that he's journaling for much the same reason as [[Literature/TheMartian Mark Watney]]: to try and keep his head in a stressful, life-or-death situation, and have an outlet to talk himself through plans for survival.

** While Light is a weakness to Dracula in the original book, it wasn't the outright lethal weakness it became in adaptations like ''Film/{{Nosferatu}}''. It just [[WeakenedByTheLight weakened his powers]] and [[ShapeshifterModeLock robbed him of his shape shifting abilities]] while exposed to it.

** To many familiar with modern vampire works, where vampirism, blood drinking, and vampires themselves are blatant (sometimes ''too'' blatant) metaphors for sex and sexuality, it can be surprising to find that the actual text of the Ur-Example vampire novel supports very little in the way of sexual subtext, and actually outright dismisses the idea. At Lucy's funeral, Arthur suggests to Van Helsing that donating blood to Lucy symbolically married them in some way, and Van Helsing finds the suggestion literally laughable, breaking down into hysterics as soon as he's out of Arthur's earshot. If they're metaphors for sex at all, Dracula and the other vampires are metaphors for ''rape'', and the text treats vampirism more like the spread of an insidious and fatal disease than anything to do with sexuality. And yet many will claim ''Dracula'' started the trend of vampire as sex metaphor, when that honor is more accurately placed on adaptations, derivative works, and adaptations incorporating elements from derivative works.

* VanillaProtagonist: Sir Arthur Holmwood, despite being the one Lucy ultimately chooses to marry, is generally seen as the least interesting of her three love interests. He doesn't have Quincy Morris's rough American charms or Dr. Seward's dark, moody intellectual expertise. He's just a wealthy British nobleman and NiceGuy. While this makes him ''slightly'' more of an everyman (wealth and status aside) when his beloved perishes, turns into a vampire child-predator, and has to have be impaled to prevent her harming more people and children (a duty that's given to him), and thus serves something of a narrative function, poor Arthur is still given the least to distinguish him from the rest of the main cast.