#ok next up frankenstein and the influence of motherhood

[tipsygnostalgy]

the vampyre by 18th century author john polidori is a self insert vampiric yuri

ok fucking hear me out on this one.

general thesis: lord byron (you might know him as the guy who wrote don juan), infamous for being a queer little hedonistic slut, pioneered gothic romantic horror by permanently changing the brain chemistry of one mary shelly + john william polidori. part one of two.

so the story starts off when byron and his doctor (polidori) fucked off to some mansion for the summer. shelly (~19 at the time)? + her husband (percy shelly, also rlly prolific poet) was convinced by one of byron's fangirls to chase him there, and somehow ended up living at the mansion. they did cocaine and drank and probably fucked in that lovely summer house, but MOST IMPORTANTLY they wrote. a lot. they were all authors/poets to some extent, they ended up swapping ideas and bouncing criticism and basically doing the 1800s equivalent of livejamming on discord. this went on for a few weeks or so.

one fateful night, all these fuckers got locked into the mansion because of a huuuuuuuge storm that took place, and naturally byron started telling them horror stories (The Burial: A Fragment, probably) that he made up on the spot. this scared the living shit out of his audience, and byron gleefully challenged them to come up with a story just as good. polidori attempted, proceeded to get humiliated live in front of the other authors by byron, and years later, out of spite, wrote:

THE VAMPYRE, one of the very first written vampire novels.

byron's influence in this novel cannot be understated. as aforementioned, byron thought polidori couldnt write to save his life, and polidori therefore had this weird idolizing love/hate relationship with him. the vampyre was, in essence, a giant "fuck you" to his old employer that he too could write a good book—even if, at the same time, he took parts of the burial from earlier to write it. in fact, the villain of vampyre is simultaneously 1) modeled after byron 2) a ruthless heartless sadistic vampire who ends up killing several perfect young girls and eventually the main protagonist 3) the world's first vampiric sexyman.

that's right. polidor's lord ruthven (who is, again, a lord byron insert) is the quintessential the reason why we perceive vampires today as suave queer homoerotic womanizing charismatic GAYS. this gets even funnier when you realize that in vampire, the protagonist (this young rich adventerous "i want to travel the world!" twink named aubrey) & ruthven have this yuri-esque homoerotic relationship involving death and murder and betrayal. see:

aubrey is enchanted by ruthven at first sight and capriciously requests to join his travels (to which ruthven AGREES);

aubrey notes over and over how horrible of a person ruthven is but only leaves once he realizes he's a vampire;

aubrey runs from ruthven across countries and cities only to have ruthven magically show up + kill off one of aubrey's love interests;

ruthven dramatically dies in his arms at one point and makes aubrey promise he'll follow these super specific instructions post-death, to which AUBREY agrees (swears an oath);

later ruthven comes back (duh) and tries to marry aubrey's sister—aubrey attempts to tell everyone but ruthven reminds him of the oath;

aubrey has a nervous breakdown and ends up dying while ruthven marries his sister, sucks her blood, and flees to the night.

gay. gay gay homoerotic gay you CANNOT tell me the vampyre was anything but a queer real person self-insert fiction about him and lord byron. polidori wrote the world's first self-insert about him and the man he was a DOCTOR to and performed PHYSICAL CHECKUPS ON.... C'MON GUYS YOU SEE WHAT I'M SEEING RIGHT. I'M NOT GOING INSANE RIGHT. FUCK

#lord byron #john polidori #the vampyre #gothic romanticism #gothic horror #vampire #english literature #yuri #dirkjake #do i even have to say it just iykyk #more brograndpa maybe but i digress theyre yuri coded #ok next up frankenstein and the influence of motherhood #listen i have takes and i must scream