Methodology

How this site decides what is true — and what it does when it isn't sure.

Canon vs. invention

This site maintains a hard boundary between two kinds of content:

• Persona canon — the fictional world of the Vizlings “Count Dracula” character: his traits, lore, castle, cast, lines, and timeline. All of it is original writing for the app character (2026). It is labeled as fiction wherever it appears — with badges like “Persona canon” and “Fictional lore” — and it never borrows authority from real history.
• Real-world material — Stoker’s novel and its history, vampire folklore, Transylvania, real castles, film history. Every factual claim is cited to a source listed on the sources page.

Where the two touch — the persona’s deliberate echoes of Stoker (“enter freely,” “children of the night”) — the echo is named as homage, and the genuine quotation is cited separately on the lines page.

Quotation policy

• Persona lines are never presented as quotations. The fourteen lines on the lines page and the ten in the social pack are labeled “written for the Vizlings character — not a sourced quotation.”
• Genuine quotations are cited with author, work, date, and context. Only quotations verified against the 1897 text of Stoker’s Dracula appear.
• Paraphrase is never presented as quotation. When the site describes what a source says, it says so.

Uncertainty policy

Uncertainty is stated, not smoothed over:

• The etymology of nosferatu is disputed — the site says so on the mythology and glossary pages rather than picking a folk etymology.
• The Bran–Stoker connection has no evidence — the castle page states the tourism framing plainly.
• The persona’s lore deliberately leaves mysteries unanswered (the east wing, the stranger) — the lore page names them as load-bearing mysteries rather than inventing answers.
• The app card description on the stream page is shown verbatim as captured, truncation included, with the truncation disclosed.

Image honesty policy

• Every image is AI-generated dramatization art, produced in-house, captioned as such on the page. No exceptions.
• No image depicts a real person — not Stoker, not Vlad III, not any actor. Historical subjects are illustrated evocatively, never faked as documentary photographs.
• No hotlinking. Every image is self-hosted with alt text.
• See the image captions for credits and context. Illustrated character art is a dramatization.

What this site will not do

It will not present persona fiction as history, folklore as fact where scholars disagree, tourism marketing as documentation, or AI-generated imagery as historical evidence. Where a claim’s status is ambiguous, the page says so — that sentence is always cheaper than the correction.

Source notes

This is the methodology page; it states policy rather than making external claims. The source list it references is on the sources page. The site’s orientation for new readers is on the start-here page.