Superhero Ethics

Dracula has been rewritten as a brooding romantic lead so many times that it's easy to forget he's a rapist. Matthew sits down with AK and Marlena Chesner to ask the hard question: does giving a monster a tragic backstory change what he is, or does it just make us more comfortable rooting for him?Working through three versions of the Dracula story — Bram Stoker's novel, Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula, and the recent 2025 film — the group traces how each adaptation handles consent, female agency, and the ethics of sympathy. AK brings a sharp rhetorical lens to scenes the other guests found straightforwardly troubling, reading the 2025 film as an accidental and unnervingly accurate portrait of how abuse perpetuates itself, in particular in light of the consent allegations brought against Luc Besson, writer and director of the 2025 adaptation. Marlena's re-read of the novel keeps the conversation grounded in what Stoker actually wrote — including a Mina who is far more capable and agentive than mos