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saraanzu · 10 months

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bsd speculation: what’s up with this girl in bram’s flashback from 107.5, and what can we learn about her from dracula?

(prefacing this with some rambling… actual analysis starts after the readmore)

107.5 came out the same day as the s5 trailer and it was right after an exciting mersault chapter which is the vastly more popular pov and it was a whopping 9 pages - it was bound to be disliked. I won’t pretend a 9-page chapter isn’t disappointing (no idea why recent chapters have been so short - I hope they get a bit longer again when s5 is done airing?) and I think it’s fine to prefer the mersault storyline but I’ve also seen some god-awful takes about this chapter.

aya and bram aren’t side characters! they have been core to bsd’s plot ever since their introductions (in aya’s case, her re-introduction) and you can dislike them all you want but it’s objectively incorrect to claim they aren’t important to the story.

I also don’t agree with the take that 107.5 didn’t further the plot at all - obviously not a lot can happen in, again, 9 pages (that’s 1/3 the length of 107!) but aya deciding to remove bram’s sword and him actually encouraging her to do it even when he doesn’t believe it’s possible and previously told her not to is a huge turning point in the story! 107.5 certainly isn’t a favorite of mine but I will say we’ve had (slightly) longer chapters in recent months that had more exposition and setup with less plot.

I’ve seen some people worry that, because bram pictures someone who looks like aya in what’s presumably a wedding dress, bram and aya’s relationship is going in a creepy direction. I want to make it clear that no matter who this flashback girl is, even if she’s bram’s dead lover and/or aya in a previous life, I highly highly doubt that anything weird is going to happen between bram and aya. their relationship hasn’t been set up like that at all, in fact bram has parallels with aya’s father and he explicitly sees her as a child (more on that later) (look. bsd is not above using some Weird Tropes. in particular, the tanizakis and mori come to mind (and in mori’s case, it doesn’t even really function as a reference to the irl author - vitas sexualis has nothing to do with pedophillia!) but it’s important to mention that, while I wish those tropes weren’t in bsd at all because they’re unnecessary and add nothing of value to the characters, they are ultimately gags and nothing more. they don’t really set a precedent for how weird asagiri is willing to get when it comes to legitimately serious plot points.)

okay! got it all out of my system here’s the actual post

part 1: the dress

personally, when I first read 107.5, I didn’t think this girl was in a wedding dress. my initial assumption was “this must be bram’s daughter, she’s wearing some sort of tiara and bram was a nobleman”. but looking at it again, it does resemble one, and we should consider how bram’s backstory might reference dracula.

“the brides of dracula” are three seductive vampire ladies who live in count dracula’s castle and attempt to feed on jonathan harker early on in the book before being stopped by dracula, who chastises them for trying to eat harker and feeds them a human baby instead.

while they are known as dracula’s brides in pop culture and are often portrayed as such in movie adaptations, they go unnamed in the original novel and their relation to dracula is unclear. from what we see of them they refer to each other as “sisters”, although perhaps not in the literal sense. two of them have dark hair and are described as having similar facial features to dracula while the third is blonde, which may imply the third is dracula’s wife and the other two are his daughters. I imagine they’re pretty vague and mysterious on purpose, they could be dracula’s wives/sisters/daughters, or even just some vampire ladies crashing at his house.

however, I don’t think we should disregard details exclusive to adaptations of dracula and only focus on the original book when thinking about bsd. film adaptations of the book are actually more influential on dracula’s perception in pop-culture than the book itself, so it’s not unlikely that asagiri would reference elements that appeared in adaptations but not the novel.

so, because of “the brides of dracula”, I think it’s quite possible this girl is indeed a bride. she does look a bit young for it, but I’ve seen others say they think she looks older than aya, so I guess that’s subjective (and people would get married younger in bram’s time I suppose).

that doesn’t mean she has to be bram’s bride - again, the “brides” in the original novel have no explicit relation to dracula and could easily be his daughters or sisters, and I really do think her being his daughter instead makes more sense thematically.

part 2: her relation to bram

I believe bram subtly parallels aya’s father in a few ways. aya’s dad is verbally and physically abusive, and he berates aya for not being good at traditionally feminine activities. he doesn’t see her for what she is, a child, and instead expects her to be a perfect traditional woman.

right before we see this flashback, bram is surprised by aya’s age, and comments that she is “too young to even use a spinning wheel” (also a traditionally feminine activity). both of them question aya’s desire/ability to be an ally of justice but for different reasons: aya’s father finds it unladylike while bram finds it too big a task for a little girl (he is also sleepy)

I didn’t understand the point of this scene’s inclusion before, but in retrospect I think it serves as foreshadowing for bram’s flashback and demonstrates how he and aya’s father both associate aya with dead people, but this causes them to treat her differently.

aya will never live up to her father’s expectations because she can’t compete with his idealized memories of the dead. her own accomplishments are irrelevant in his eyes because she isn’t enough like the wife and daughter he lost. I suspect his grief is part of the reason he’s so horrible to her in the first place.

it’s the opposite case with bram. in his eyes aya does compare to someone who he remembers fondly, and the end of 107.5 implies that’s the very reason he’s okay with aya pulling the sword out.

I don’t necessarily see bram as a father figure to aya (to me he’s more of a weird creature who’s sort of grown fond of her after being unwillingly dragged around… but hey, who says that can’t be a dad?) but I do think it’s possible that this mystery girl was bram’s daughter in the past because of how he parallels aya’s father.

(note: she has normal human ears rather than pointy ones, but bram was turned into a vampire by his ability and wasn’t bitten or born as one, so I don’t know if he’d necessarily pass down his vampirism to his children. he also may have developed his ability after becoming a father, or his daughter could even be adopted).

part 3: her relation to aya

the most common idea I’ve seen to explain the resemblance between these two is that aya is a reincarnation of this flashback girl. introducing reincarnation out of nowhere seems a bit random even for bsd, but surprisingly this theory does have some basis.

in the movie bram stoker’s dracula (1992), the character mina harker, jonathan’s fiancé, is a reincarnation of dracula’s long-dead lover, elisabeta. dracula recognizes her as a reincarnation due to their resemblance and mina agrees to assist him, still harboring feelings and memories from her past life. it’s fairly common for dracula adaptations to portray dracula and/or mina as having romantic feelings for each other, but this isn’t really the case in the novel, and elisabeta is entirely an invention of this particular movie.

so, aya being a reincarnation of a girl bram once knew could work as a reference to this. I did say previously that I think it’s possible asagiri will reference adaptations of dracula and not just the novel, but I’m not so sure he would make something specific to one particular adaptation a major part of bram’s backstory.

personally, I’m partial to the idea that aya’s ability will be introduced soon, and her resemblance to this flashback girl may have something to do with it. (the ability idea and reincarnation idea aren’t inherently contradictory, aya’s ability could very well be reincarnation)

this theory by @jo-dieeee suggests that aya’s ability is called mirror, due to the discussion of mirrors in 107.5 and the book above.

mirror: the fiction and essays of koda aya isn’t actually a book written by irl koda, nor is it just a collection of her stories. it was written by ann sherif and discusses koda’s life and works, including some translations of her short stories in the second part. however, the existence of this book and aya emphasizing mirrors in 107.5 is quite an interesting coincidence! whether or not it’s called mirror, I’m fairly confident an ability reveal is coming up.

it’s also worth bringing up that aya’s resemblance to this mystery firl might not have a supernatural explanation at all. it could easily be an artistic choice simply made to indicate that bram is reminiscing about someone who aya reminds him of. I’m not too into the reincarnation idea myself.

#I’m assuming the panel is a flashback and not bram’s imagination of the future because the caption at the end of the chapter says “remember”#hoping to start making meta posts like this more often… it’s difficult for me to put my thoughts like this into words though #I wrote this post over the course of a week hence why it’s two weeks late #bsd #bungo stray dogs #bungou stray dogs #aya koda #bram stoker #aya bsd #bram bsd #talk tag #jo’s meta

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