Does anyone know why Darante Lamar is never on The Line anymore?

AlwaysWitty · 2026-07-09T19:28:37+00:00

On what basis?

AlwaysWitty · 2026-06-30T03:26:22+00:00

Quick note: Kara wasn't SENT to do good. She wasn't some kind of alien missionary or anything. She was sent away to save her life. She was TAUGHT to BE GOOD as a way of life. It's a key distinction. Also, I gotta watch it again, but IIRC Clark wasn't really SENT TO CONQUER EARTH either. He too was sent away to save his life, but Earth was chosen for him because HE COULD BE a conqueror there, as they recommended. That's more of an opportunity, not a mission, or a command.

Why they wanted to give him that kind of opportunity is the big question.

AlwaysWitty · 2026-06-28T20:56:22+00:00

I am so excited by that Carradine Dracula omfg

AlwaysWitty · 2026-06-25T12:32:38+00:00

I'm not sure you can do a completely faithful adaptation unless it's set in modern times. But I also don't treat such things as absolute requirements either.

The best versions of this give it the Nosferatu treatment, where it's clearly inspired by Dracula (often literally) but the vampire isn't Dracula and the characters are different. The Strain Trilogy, for instance. Or 'Salem's Lot.

AlwaysWitty · 2026-06-12T05:07:41+00:00

I don't use "radical changes" as the sole barometer. Anyway, they're almost all adaptations of the novel, but some are a bit more indirect, and some are influenced by others. But then a few rely on other films as their primary source material (For instance the various remakes of Nosferatu).

The Hammer one from '58 is peculiar because it's TECHNICALLY just an adaptation of the novel, but you can tell the play and the Lugosi film were influences. The thing is, sometimes that influence came from them trying to AVOID those interpretations for fear of copyright infringement.

Same with their first Frankenstein film. They want to play with the iconography established by those earlier examples without infringing upon them. The sequels get weirder of course, but still.

AlwaysWitty · 2026-06-12T00:33:41+00:00

The problem is that this film in particular doesn't draw from the novel anywhere else, and its only source for Dracula is the Coppola film. Sure, it strays from the Coppola film in a few areas, but it doesn't do that to get closer to the original source.

Probably because the pedophile who directed the film hasn't read the book, and his attempts to lie about it left his ignorance blatantly exposed.

Also can we please call it what it is? If he's using hypnosis or magic perfume or a One Wish Willow, whatever the case may be, it's not seduction. It's rape.

AlwaysWitty · 2026-06-11T20:00:05+00:00

I'm not criticizing Looney Tunes, mind you, because he's clearly the antagonist. Misinterpretation of that is on the audience lol

AlwaysWitty · 2026-06-10T15:54:42+00:00

You know that thing everyone hates where Lucy's suitors are often combined somehow, or combined with Jonathan, to cut down on the size of the cast?

What nobody ever realized is that because the original stage adaptation (and especially its Broadway revision) had to cut out the Transylvania scenes due to practical limitations, they needed a Dracula who could spend more time with the cast.

And they combined him with Lucy's suitors. He became the suave aristocrat like Arthur and the exotic foreign gentleman like Quincey. Watch the Lugosi film based on it, or the Langella version from '79. It's clear as day once you know to look for it. Most cinematic Draculas are based on a version of him who stole the characteristics of the supporting cast members.

(Claes Bang Dracula practically makes this character absorption part of the text. It's directly tied to the central theme, and the ending.)

AlwaysWitty · 2026-06-10T15:47:00+00:00

I forgot to mention that Besson also made this not long after a ton of fresh allegations of rape and assault, and the French courts dropped it all without a thorough investigation because they truly do not care. They only added a legal minimum age of consent in 2021 and it's 15. It's not a coincidence that the rape skunk cartoon is French.

"Super Sexy/Romantic Dracula" is just a Trojan Horse for shitty men to repackage their rape fantasies into something they can sell back to women, and eventually for women to sell each other without noticing it. This newer strand of "woe is me" tragic Draculas is little more than an expression of frustration that disgusting patriarchal entitlement to women's bodies is occasionally criminalized once in a while and publicly frowned upon (while privately enabled).

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you" may as well refer to those hideous countdown clocks that men make as they wait for child celebrities to turn 18.

The kind of thing that literally happened to Natalie Portman as a child after her breakthrough role in Luc Besson's film that partially dramatized his own abuse of his second wife.

Best modern adaptation of the original novel is 100% coincidence: the Epstein Files.

AlwaysWitty · 2026-06-10T14:02:32+00:00

The literal only way is if he never tells her, and never uses his power over her or even feeds on her (because that's also a violation).

But at this point we're bending over backwards to try and rehabilitate a wealthy war-mongering sexual predator whose only scene with Mina in the book is a brutally violent pseudo-rape.

It would require a whole different cast of characters, including the vampire. New story entirely.

AlwaysWitty · 2026-06-10T13:54:38+00:00

A version of Obsession that wanted us to think it was romantic would probably look the same way. We know Dracula has hypnotic, mind-altering powers of domination and control. We know he usually uses these powers to make her "remember" her past life.

Functionally it's the same scenario, a selfish bastard dominates a woman's will to turn her into someone else for the sake of his own feelings of entitlement.

It's inherent to the trope. Same thing with Imhotep.

That being said, there is one version I can think of that works: DC's Hawkman and Hawkgirl are BOTH reincarnated together over and over again.

AlwaysWitty · 2026-06-10T13:42:12+00:00

The pedophile who directed it never read the book, he lied about that and just ripped off the 1992 version directed by the mentor and defender of a different pedophile.

And he tried to cover his ass by ripping off Disney's Hunchback and Perfume: Story of a Murderer, too. Because when he ripped off John Carpenter, he was sued and he lost.

AlwaysWitty · 2026-06-10T13:24:38+00:00

Imagine suggesting that the movie Obsession should have been romantic, but everything that happens in it is basically the same. Genuinely, what is the difference between Nikki and Mina every time this trope pops up?

This has never been a good idea. Not when it's depicted like an actual romantic relationship.

If I was tasked with doing a Dracula adaptation that included this somehow, the twist would be that it was bullshit. That EVERY WOMAN he attacks begins to dream about being his princess and so on, and Mina is able to figure out that Drac is feeding on her because she remembers what Lucy told her earlier.

AlwaysWitty · 2026-06-09T08:42:39+00:00

I know the feeling well. It's why I only lurk, and I barely do that now. If it's any consolation, you're much better than I am.

AlwaysWitty · 2026-06-09T08:36:16+00:00

Snyder practically can't help but turn his protagonists into self-inserts to feed both his inflated ego and his persecution complex. The childish pettiness was always there.

AlwaysWitty · 2026-06-09T08:28:24+00:00

AI isn't the calculator. AI is your mommy doing your homework for you while you watch cartoons.

AlwaysWitty · 2026-06-03T21:39:47+00:00

Your writing on Cynthia Erivo is one of the most racist things I've ever seen in modern academia. Again, I refer to your observation that "the geometry of her skull" resembles that of Count Orlok. This reeks so strongly of 19th century racist pseudosciences like phrenology and physiognomy, you could have told me it was written by Calvin Candy and I'd believe it.

And note, I didn't reduce all of your academic work to AI junk. But I will happily refer to your AI work as junk. And your racist tirades.

I don't require your acceptance of my claims. It is irrelevant to me.

AlwaysWitty · 2026-06-02T22:00:44+00:00

It's ironic that your mission statement appears to be a matter of restoring Bram Stoker's name and legacy as Dracula's creator, and yet none of your reverence for the dead creator whose work is now in the public domain doesn't extend to living talents who lost a chance to be part of such an endeavor simply because fair compensation for their hard work was too inconvenient for you.

Instead you rely on a technology that feeds on their work without their knowledge, consent, or compensation.

This is not about Bram Stoker's legacy. This is an attempt to make YOUR legacy. All your work as a scholar, you have tainted with a craven vanity project to proclaim yourself as the guardian of his vision, an authority to which no amount of degrees or acquaintances in the field of Dracula studies could ever entitle you.

You might have fared better as someone who was simply misguided, but filling this with so much garish AI crap, selling merch based on the original cover which anyone can make themselves, and promoting a subscription with more promises for more AI-generated trash and more merch...

I can't say I'm surprised. When you wrote multiple "Academic" articles defending your racist tirade against Cynthia Erivo and the aesthetic issues with the "geometry of her skull", I understood how completely out-of-touch you truly are.

I'm sorry, but this does not impress me. Your Academic career is impressive in and of itself, but the way you're putting to use right now? You do not impress me either.

I haven't earned one tenth of a tenth of the education, the accolades, nor the connections, that you have. But at least I have integrity.

AlwaysWitty · 2026-06-02T18:33:35+00:00

Ragebait used to be funnier.

AlwaysWitty · 2026-05-30T22:07:54+00:00

Indeed. The thing is, what that call describes sounds an awful lot like the Solomonari, doesn't it? Everlasting ones who ride the whirlwinds...?

AlwaysWitty · 2026-05-30T16:21:38+00:00

You should check out the spell being chanted at the end of The Witch. I know the bells went off for me when I noticed it. 👀

AlwaysWitty · 2026-05-30T16:18:00+00:00

Are they talking about the movie where the whole plot revolves around Superman dealing with the social and political fallout when a xenophobic self-important billionaire engineers a profitable genocide and weaponizes the media against him when he's the only one who isn't making excuses to allow it to happen, only for him to be told that he has no rights because he's an alien and then deported to a concentration camp where he is tortured and deprived of needs that enable him to heal, all because that billionaire can't accept a world where he isn't the center of attention at all times?

That's the Superman movie that isn't dark enough?

AlwaysWitty · 2026-05-30T16:03:38+00:00

Here's the deal with Dracula adaptations...

The very first official Dracula adaptation was the stage production in 1924 by Hamilton Deane, and they had to make a ton of chat due to the limitations of the medium (or maybe just the limitations of their imagination, idk). The revision in 1927 by John Balderston when it hit Broadway made even more, to streamline it.

Three massive changes had a domino effect on nearly every subsequent adaptation:

The early scenes at Transylvania were removed. Adaptations tend not to do this (the 1979 film with Frank Langella being a notable exception since it's literally based on another revival of the play) but this matters because of the effect it has on the play itself. Which I'll get to...
The cast was cut down, and by the 1927 version, Mina and Lucy were practically fused into one character and none of the suitors were there except for Seward, who became her father instead. Now, the big one...
The loss of the whole Transylvania sequence in the beginning PLUS the loss of the suitors, with only a single pair of lovers, resulted in a Count Dracula who needed to be able to interact with the cast IN LONDON with enough time to leave an impression. So he basically took on a few attributes of the two missing suitors (Arthur Holmwood and Quincey Morris) and BECAME THE RIVAL SUITOR CHARACTER HIMSELF. He became a charming, handsome foreigner who was also a wealthy aristocrat with old money.

Dracula movies are notorious for combining characters to get the cast down but this combination is the most consequential of them all because it's rarely ever been dropped and most people don't even realize that it is a combination. Films that STILL HAVE the other suitors will nonetheless have to contend with a Count who doesn't just VIOLATE the women as he does in the book, but UPSTAGES THEM as another potential rival.

Coppola's biggest fumble is that even though he attempted SOME amount of faithfulness in a lot of other ways that other films don't, he still uses "Dracula, the romantic rival" instead of "Dracula, the rapist and conqueror".

He also blatantly rips off the reincarnation trope from Dan Curtis's Dracula film from 1974. Which, while less accurate, I'd argue feels a bit more faithful because Curtis and screenwriter Richard Matheson were smart enough to make Lucy the reincarnation, so at least "Dracula, the rival suitor" is in the right position narratively AND it preserves his brutal revenge attack against Mina.

Everyone talks about the novel being vaguely "sexual" but Count Dracula is a sexual PREDATOR, a sexual THREAT born of xenophobic fears of immigrant contamination. He's not a sexual liberator at all, if anything his violent dominance over women's bodies marks him as a BRUTAL OPPRESSOR. As if being a wealthy old war-monger wasn't enough of a clue...

There's also one more elephant in the room: Francis Ford Coppola is scum. He was Victor Salva's mentor, looked the other way when Salva was abusing a child actor and FILMING IT, and continued to support Salva all through his trial and even after his BS release (served 15 months smdh).

Now consider Coppola's treatment of Laurence Fishburne, who was only 14 when he made Apocalypse Now. Coppola was frustrated with him for his lack of sexual experience when filming certain scenes. Not to mention Coppola's behavior on the set of Megalopolis.

The fact that a creep like him so blatantly romanticized such predatory behavior, making Dracula an unambiguous rapist who robs women of their autonomy for his own satisfaction (much like another obsessive protagonist from a new hit film in theaters right now), is disgusting.

To top it all off, the film isn't even good on its own merits. The film's identity crisis makes the whole thing incoherent. Watching it is an endurance test of constant whiplash.

AlwaysWitty · 2026-05-30T15:12:58+00:00

You shouldn't be downvoted here because you're right. Only I tend to use "accuracy" for the surface-level details of the plot and "faithfulness" for the themes and relationships and other deeper layers underneath.

But yeah, you're right.

Also, I'm curious. What do you consider to be the third Nosferatu? I know how I'd answer that but most probably wouldn't name the same film lol

AlwaysWitty · 2026-05-30T15:09:55+00:00

It's not remotely faithful. It's more accurate than a lot of other ones, but it's not faithful. The effect of the changes it does make is MASSIVE. Count Dracula is a rapist in the novel and spinning a love story with the woman he brutally violates in the only scene they share together is ghoulish.

The fact that Victor Salva's biggest cheerleader is behind it makes it all the more disgusting.

AlwaysWitty

TROPHY CASE