Fanfiction- The Making of a Monster

[dangerousdame]

Title: The Making of a Monster

Fandom: Dracula
Prompt: Written for the 6impearfics prompt The Queen of Hearts.  "Lily of the Valley, Calla Lily, stephanotis and a drop of cherry."
Rating: T
Summary: What would it have taken for Mina to love Dracula?  What kind of person might she have been to accept his courtship?

Comments

[assimbya]

I hadn't seen one that made Mina a full-on Lady Macbeth type equal.

Kate Cary's Blodline novels have an evil Mina. Though they're really awful books, you might be interested in looking at them just for comparison. But you're completely right that it's rare - though there are a lot of versions that try to set Mina up as an 'equal' to Dracula, that generally goes along with romanticizing him as well.

I think Mina is tempted, but it's hard to say how much of that is genuine attraction and how much is mind control. As you said, a relationship between her and Dracula with her as she is in the book could never be non-abusive. I imagine that if he had fully turned her, it either wouldn't be her (as we are led to believe with Lucy) or if it was her, some part of her would always be fighting him.

True - I personally don't like writing with the 'it wouldn't be her' premise just because I find it more interesting to write about manipulation and slow psychological battles than a complete loss of self, but that's just my taste and personal lens talking. How to define where 'genuine attraction' begins is a really difficult topic.

Hence, one might say, when Mina is attacked it is because she has been isolated.

Yes, yes - very much so. I agree entirely.

but not in the sense of keeping from being seduced- I think it's what keeps her from giving in to despair and trying to end her life.

To me, it seems like the being seduced and giving into despair are two sides of the same thing, in some ways - I think, if she's in that place of giving up, how Dracula deals with that could very easily tip the scales in either direction.

I don't think you need to worry about the summary - some Dracula/Mina people might take offense, but we've all written bash-y summaries at one time or another.

[dangerousdame]

Good point about two sides of the same coin. That seems to be what Dracula does- he conquers rather than persuades. I've enjoyed your Mina/Dracula stories and do believe he could be a charming man if he so chose (he's intelligent and manipulative, certainly, and says that he is capable of love) and so am not exactly against Mina/Dracula as a ship. It's just hard for me to remove who I think of her as being from the equation, and while she might crumble under coercion or manipulation, to accept being his consort full on- to agree to live with the torturer of her husband and the murderer of her best friend- and to think of it as entirely positive and romantic, I think she would have to be much darker than she is shown to be.

This does get into some tricky issues, granted, since it's not my place to judge how people respond to trauma. People certainly have come to sympathise and care for their abductors or tormentors, and I can't say "Mina would never do that" because we just don't know, given the story.