Neon’s A Doll A Day… Again (2020)

[neon_jellyfish]

Thank you very much, guys!!!

It's so cool to see that you have all these legends and lore about Slavic mythical creatures. It might just be my lack of local knowledge, but I don't think we have such here in Hungary. This might be a totally dumb guess, but I believe it might have to do with the country getting smaller and smaller over time, and the lores kind of got... stuck on the other sides of borders? Vampires are a good example of this - their popular versions are usually said to be a Transylvanian thing - and back in the times of Dracul and Tepes, Transylvania was part of Hungary - unlike today (and due to this, it often factinates me how pop culture vampires are often given typically Hungarian names - like László or Nándor ). My relationship with, and knowledge of vampires, is totally blurred, because it comes from the aforementioned literary works, based on 'then' locals, who are no longer locals to my country, written by non-locals, and not from anything actually local. It'd be interesting to look into this topic more on a local level, I'll try to dig around

I'm often torn between whether I like Orlok or Béla-Dracula more. I truly love them both, but I usually side with Béla in the end. It must be a subconscious local side-taking thing... but I just really like his acting and his funny Hungarian-English accent (that otherwise hurts my ears in local everyday situations, even though I know why it's difficult for us to pronounce some of those "similar but not exactly the same" phonemes that English language has. But it can be done. Been there, done that, still do).

I don't know anything about Hungarian folklore. I never tried to research it, I'm still busy trying to learn about my own, but I wonder what I would find if I did. I believe that Transylvania being a vampire hangout is a result of Dracula's popularity rather than local beliefs, and that Hungarian names of modern vampires are a tribute to the great Béla. I don't know how vampires spread from Slavs to other nations (except for finding fertile burial ground in Greece), but I believe that historically, vampires weren't a major Transylvanian thing. Tepes was linked with vampirism for the first time in Dracula, not before that, and it's obvious from the book that Stoker had no idea about Transylvania and its people, his Transylvania is full of Czechs and Slovaks, with a very few Hungarians, and practically no Romanians, complete opposite from reality. I think he simply chose a mysteeeerious, daaark, and distant region with a controversial historical figure as its no.1 celebrity, because it was perfect for his book, and that he didn't actually do any research on vampire folklore (it's hard to hold that against him, reliable sources are hard to find today, let alone back then).

I like Orlok the best, but I consider him his own beast, eventhough he was based on Dracula. I think that Nosferatu becoming what it did because they didn't get the rights to make an actual Dracula movie was a good thing. Béla-Dracula is my favorite Dracula-Dracula (gee, what a sentence ), as in, my favorite Dracula, not Dracula-inspired character. He's my default Dracula, and every new one gets compared to him (and none ever impressed me nearly as much, not even Christopher Lee).


Day 336

I still didn't fix the numbers, because it's so hard, it's definitely not procrastination, nope, nope, not in the least...
ADAW #48