la petite mort (Barbie/Dracula story)

Fanfiction
Title:	"la petite mort"
Author(s):	howlingmoonrise (TheDarkStoryteller)
Date(s):	20 March 2020
Length:	3896 words
Genre(s):	Romance, Crack
Fandom(s):	Barbie, Dracula (novel)
Relationship(s):
External Links:	https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13527304/1/la-petite-mort https://archiveofourown.org/works/23236681archived
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"la petite mort" is a Dracula/Barbie Roberts romance short story written by howlingmoonrise (TheDarkStoryteller).

Overview

Blurb

“Well,” she says, long and drawn out, and from the glint in her eyes he can tell this is some kind of inner joke, kept from him. “I’ve been a diplomat, and a race car driver, and a chef, and an astronaut, and a veterinarian--”

“An astronaut,” he repeats dryly. He wants to call her on her lie - but. But. How strange. There’s no indication of a lie: no rise in temperature, no quickening of her pulse, no change to her eyes, nothing.

She laughs. “You don’t know the half of it."

Development, narrative choices and inspiration

According to statements from the author:

• Barbie Roberts is an amalgamation of various Barbie incarnations across the multimedia Barbie franchise, notably Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse. Barbies characterization was additionally influenced by Buffy Summers and Elle Woods. The author's envisions Barbie as some sort of immortal cyptid, a hypercompetent "plastic doll turned living".
• Dracula's characterization was heavily influenced by the 2017 Castlevania animated series.
• The author intentionally used pink/red colours as motifs symbolizing innocence/passion, light/dark, etc.
• "Dracula coming back is mostly an allusion to all the movies and sequels where he returns to life rather than an in-universe fact about vampires."
• As of 2022, the author does not remember the initial inspiration for a Dracula/Barbie fic, though suspects it may have been a shower idea.
• The author later listed this story as the first installment of Howl's BCCU (Barbie Crackships Cinematic Universe), a tentatively planned series of works about Barbie's unlikely crossover romances with villains including Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, Sauron, Jason Todd, and Darth Maul.

Recursive and transformative fan works

The author has granted permission for this fic to be physically printed for personal use.

JustAJuicyVoice produced a podfic adaptation in 2022, posted here.

• 

  fan art by self-indulgentfan's friend (2022)

• 

  fan art by absolutely-and-always13 (2022)

Trivia

• The author has referred to the Dracula/Barbie crack crossover pairing as Drarbie.

Popularity

• This story was apparently recommended by someone named Lemongrass13.
• The story was also featured on a coleydoesthings' video.
• One commenter reported being directed to this story after making a Reddit thread to request fan fiction recommendations for reading while getting a tattoo.
• One commenter reported that a teacher used this fan fiction in a lesson on literary analysis in a high school English class.
• The author and some commenters have mused that this story reaches a wider audience due to the basic lore of Barbie and Dracula being accessible as icons through pop cultural osmosis, requiring no prior dedicated reading to understand the context of the characters. Thus also making it easy to recommend to those without prior knowledge of the lore.

Comments

Spoiler Warning: This article or section may contain spoilers. If this bothers you, proceed with caution.

[WoollyLambda]

holy SHIT, okay I wasn't sure I'd be here for this but your prose is STELLAR, and Barbie as a confident mid-30s adult is a dynamic on her character that I LOVE to see! 💖🌟♥️💫⭐️🌸💗💕

[howlingmoonrise (TheDarkStoryteller)]

*fingerguns* honestly half the fun of these wild crackpairings is figuring out how they can work and then dragging people down with me :'D yessss older!confident!barbie is like???? so compelling??? don't get me wrong i love young barbie a ton but i watched life in the dreamhouse and i was struck at how funny and interesting an older barbie that owns up to ALL her careers and quirks and stuff and that is confident in herself is. thank you so much for leaving a comment!!!

[FynneySeas]

"He’s not used to not leading the conversation, nor to the endless nicknames this century seems fit to bestow on everyone. Barbie seems too informal, too personal; it makes him uncomfortable in its perceived intimacy. Perhaps his centuries are finally catching up to him." establishing that character thoooooo

Barbie is a BEAST of a bulldozer, I love how you write her so much.

YES BITCH BONDING ABOUT BEING ART GOBLINS

"He’s not a fledgling vampire. He should not be this tempted, this feverish and desperate to drink the blood of a single human, and so he does not. He has control over himself. He is Vlad Dracula, the Impaler, the Scourge of the Night, bravest of the sons of the land beyond the forest; his power is beyond any human’s imagination, and if he has no control over himself, then no one else should." LMAO GET RECKT

“Shouldn’t I have been?” It’s strange enough that he snaps his eyes away from her lips to meet her, a frown heavy on his brow. “I always pay attention to what you say.” God the bar is so low but this has me full of heart eyes.

HOWL HOLY FUCK!!!!!!!!

“You’re hardly the first Master Vampire I’ve ever faced.” I love lines in the Elle Woods tradition. GET IT BARBIE!!!

ohhhh my heart :'(

I'm so glad you did this omg I love you

[howlingmoonrise (TheDarkStoryteller)]

i LOVE barbie just barreling through everything - life, careers, love interests, dracula the prince of darkness included :'D

yesssssss actually that's a double reference because ART GOBLINS and also dracula ref/pun because he's based on vlad the impaler, who is actually a 15th century boyar i could not resist the joke because they might be art goblins but i am a PUN goblin

barbie is overly-competent at everything and it brings me joy

thank you!!!!! <3 <3 <3

Comment Actions

[Daydreamfusion]

Well honestly, I'm just struck by how well-thought out this was. Like, in my mind Barbie is this gestalt of human experience and skills and to read that aspect of her character while keeping her relatable and human was truly EPIC.

Words escape me with how good this was but I've gotta ask: Is Barbie an immortal kr supernatural creature?

TL;DR Hot Dog this fic was so good

[howlingmoonrise (TheDarkStoryteller)]

Thank you so much!!!! Yeah I have much the same opinion on Barbie unless I'm thinking of a very specific version of her (like from a particular Barbie movie, for example) but for me Barbie(TM) is this.... super competent, over-achieving confident lady who grabs onto every interesting opportunity with pink-tipped industrial-strength manicured nails. I'm glad I've met someone else with this sort of opinion, and who enjoyed this crack-treated-seriously! :D

Iiiiiiiiiiii would say that, uh. Barbie *is* immortal? In some way? But like in a "plastic doll turned living" sort of way rather than a supernatural creature sort of way (and you know I'd play this perfectly straight). Might have some fun and explore that in a oneshot sometime!

Thank you so much for leaving such a fantastic comment!!

[Willowy]

Found this on Reddit in the tattoo thread, and had to come read it. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and Barbie gave off a HUGE Buffy vibe. Wonderfully imaginative and well-written. I got a big kick out of all her career references, too.

I hoped in the end, that Vlad would discover that she WAS in fact some sort of a helpful, benevolent demon, but your ending was better- she was just Barbie, after all. Well done!

[howlingmoonrise (TheDarkStoryteller)]

i'm sorry, you found this WHERE? i'm dying, HOW did a reference to this fic end up there???? do you have a link??? i would love to know how a reddit tattoo thread progressed to barbie x dracula fics ajsdhjkhdkjf

i'm glad you caught the buffy vibe! i'm a buffy fan myself, i wanted her confrontation with dracula to be somewhere between elle woods and buffy because that sort of self-confident humour is just A+++ when it comes to this incarnation of barbie.

"I hoped in the end, that Vlad would discover that she WAS in fact some sort of a helpful, benevolent demon, but your ending was better- she was just Barbie, after all." why not both? my personal headcanon is that barbie isn't quite human - she's barbie. just barbie. with all that it implies, immortality and plastic and thousand careers and all.

thank you so much for your lovely review!!

[Willowy]

Here's the thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/FanFiction/comments/nv1iki/got_a_full_day_of_tattooing_ahead_of_me_distract/

Someone was asking for one-shot recs and a user called JoChiCat recced your story. I'm glad they did! :)

My pleasure to leave the review, I enjoyed your story, it's only right! ;D

[wildwestwind]
I can't believe you actually sold me on Barbie/Dracula as a ship, you ridiculous person.

You kept the essential nature of who Barbie is as a person-- you avoided the temptation to make her more realistic, which I think would have ruined the story-- but you also thought in detail about what it would be like to be someone as absurd as Barbie in the real world. Of course she's the center of attention at parties, of course men escort her and not the other way around, and of course there's something strange about why she's the person she is.

I really loved the running joke about how many jobs Barbie has.

The end was perfectly satisfying. I thought that Barbie and Dracula were going to have to be separated forever, but of course Dracula always comes back! If there's one thing we've learned from Hammer Horror it's that! I really like the way that it's not really foreshadowed but is still deeply satisfying because it's set up by the external work you're referencing: doing things like that is something I find really cool about fanfiction in general.

[https://archiveofourown.org/comments/545170497%5D
thank you so much!!!!! barbie is barbie, she walks the thin line between what someone would consider a "normal human" and the entirety of the barbie lore that would directly contradict such an existence, which i chose to make canon as a whole :'D i like to think she's her own creature, some sort of eldritch tulpa living doll being powered by the love and trust of little kids all over the multiverses!

> I really like the way that it's not really foreshadowed but is still deeply satisfying because it's set up by the external work you're referencing: doing things like that is something I find really cool about fanfiction in general.

THIS!!!!!!! THIS!!!!!!!! this is the WHOLE POINT of writing fics like this, and characters like these - they have their own folklore and their own lore and their own culture, and though you can mix and match the adaptations there's always some measure of it engraved in people's minds, and that's SO much fun to play with!!!! i love that you went directly to the source of why it was like that, thank you so much for your lovely and thoughtful comment!!!!!

[https://archiveofourown.org/comments/524473726%5D
The Concept of Barbie vs the Concept of Vald Dracula, what a wild romp though archetypes! I love how this works b/c Barbie is genre aware!

[https://archiveofourown.org/comments/533428950%5D
In a retrospective of Weird Al's career in parody, I read that 2 factors are essential to his success : his skill is exceptional, and his respect for the source material is immeasurable. That kind of loving attention is the only way to make the riff work (beat for beat) as well as the original.

Seeing that kind of dedicated focus in action in your story was a lot of fun.

The fact that you took this deep dive into a *fluffy canon* that's usually overlooked as a known quantity... that's just an absolute joy to me, especially because it's about a female-centric canon. Digging through the layers upon layers that reveal the complexities of Barbie's worldbuilding demonstrates, to me, a kindness and cleverness I love seeing in the world.

The way you played with the motiv of pink, red and black as an indication of the tension between trivialised girliness and our culture's validation of brooding masculinity felt like a clever technique.
Acknowledging Barbie's infinite career options in a plot-relevant way deepened the story for me.
The moment suprême for me was realising that part of Dracula's fascination is tied into Barbie's maturity - you've positioned her between her canon youthfulness and her real life age of 55+. The way life blooms within her, the way you developped her bland, painted-on smile into poise, grace and indomitable will... I heart it 3000.

And of course, there's also the magic of your prose *grin*
Dracula stuttering through tri-partite ellipses, either in fascination or in horror...? That's fantastic!

I don't want to go all Bridget Jones/English major on you, but this post-modern deconstruction through a recontextualisation confronting another canon is my absolute favourite thing to discover. It reveals the potential for beauty is everywhere, you know?
It's part of why I deeply appreciate fan fiction as a non-commercial cultural conversation.

[https://archiveofourown.org/comments/534281181%5D

vlad meets ex-bf ken unrealistically nice and helpful guy next door who gets along with everyone but is pretty much a human accessory.

[https://archiveofourown.org/comments/534281181%5D
wait that's so funny i need to write ken into a drarbie fic IMMEDIATELY

[https://archiveofourown.org/comments/534281181%5D
please i beg of you to do this it will mean the world to me. like this man is so nonthreatening he'd be such a good ex there's not even like a jealous threat thing he's just here to be a human handbag.

[https://archiveofourown.org/comments/534281181%5D
i hope you know that this was the entire inspiration for the ken on my next (horrendously big, gods, when the fuck will i finish writing it????) drarbie fic and the whole ken side-plot. like i had COMPLETELY forgotten about this discussion originating it but i left this comment marked as unread on my inbox PRECISELY so i would remember to do this dumb little plotline, i love it so much. IT'S ALL YOUR FAULT.

An original, fascinating take on two iconic characters with rich imagery to keep it feeling rooted. This fic does an amazing job of depicting the full lives and personalities of each character, though it is more of a Transylvania!Dracula in the hot, well-cultured aristocrat way as opposed to the magic-heavy, creepy Stoker!Dracula.