#thank you honestly
not sure why specifically there’s so much scholarly pushback against reclaiming dracula as a romantic figure: he is clearly written that way in the book, as ambiguously charismatic in terms of his looks as he is clearly amoral, and the vampire genre itself began as a romantic thing (polidori’s lord ruthven and le fanu’s carmilla are both intensely and explicitly romantic figures- this is not debatable). i don’t know where this denial of dracula’s inherent romanticism comes from but we really ought to move past it as a literary movement because it doesn’t give the character, his historicity, and- i believe- stoker’s intention any credit whatever.
