BLOGGING ECLIPSE, pt. 18: Get Your War On

Last time we heard Jasper's over-long but otherwise entertaining origin story, which had an endearing and cute happy ending FOR FUCKING ONCE. Alice and Jasper (Jalice? Alsper?) pretty much won my heart already, but now there's really no going back. For the first time in what feels like a century, I'm feeling hope! And yet, instead of hearing more about the compelling characters in this book, we're heading back to spend some time with the assholes. I feel like as this story goes on we're going to come to appreciate chapter 13 more and more. That's a bad sign. With New Moon we didn't peak until chapter 17, and it can be argued that the best section of Twilight comes at the very end. This is a disturbing pattern. Previous entries can be found in the directory (updated 9/13).

Chapter 13 (con't): Newborn

Edward wraps up Alice and Jasper's back-story, since we were growing to a point about the present murder spree in Seattle a few HOURS ago and he's trying to get us back on-topic: When Jasper met Alice she had already “seen” meeting him and subsequently finding the Cullens. So the two of them just showed up on the doorstep one day. Edward, who was away on a hunting trip, says it “scared the hell out of” the rest of his family.

“Jasper shows up, covered in battle scars, towing this little freak” – he nudged Alice playfully – “who greets them all by name, knows everything about them, and wants to know which room she can move into.”
Alice and Jasper laughed in harmony, soprano and bass.
“When I got home, all my things were in the garage,” Edward continued.
Alice shrugged. “Your room had the best view.”

Okay, I'm picturing Jasper with this ridiculous James Earl Jones laugh for some reason, but otherwise it's kind of nice to see someone other than Alice having a damn chuckle for once, especially Edward “said darkly” Cullen, the Pope (Benedict to Morrissey's John Paul) of Mope. I know vampires have to avoid the sun, but lighten up, guys, get it? Sorry. But it's nice, isn't it?

One of the reasons I really loved reading Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince was that it seemed like we got to spend a lot of extra downtime with the characters we'd grown to love so much – Slughorn's parties and all that. These moments with the whole Cullen family kicking it are too few and too far between. That's part of what drives the impulse for fan-fiction; I'd wager a guess that the metric tonnage of Twilight fan-fic outweighs Harry Potter fan-fic, simply because the former leaves so much to be desired. Shit, I've almost totally given up writing MY fan-fiction as separate posts – at this point I've gone so far that I'm writing it into my fucking recaps, so great is the urge to add some depth and shading to this book.

“An army,” Alice whispered. “Why didn't you tell me?”

Having just knocked the depth and shading, it's interesting to note the little character beats we get in this scene – I'd go so far as to say it is well done. Alice speaking in a whisper tends to signal insecurity, in the above quote and later. Bella and Edward moan and mutter and hiss all the time, but Alice is usually chirping and wind-chiming and fluting and all that. Here she's on the defense; she hasn't seen any of this coming and naturally feels like shit about it.

Edward starts articulating a theory that the newborn army has been created to attack the Cullen family, and Carlisle expresses disbelief and denial while the more cynical and world-weary Jasper seems to accept it immediately. For the rest of the chapter Jasper is forcing Carlisle to deal with the truth (because obviously Edward's theory is correct). Alice says she's been seeing flickers of plans for (what she now knows is) the army - “not enough to make sense of.” She thinks whoever is in charge is being indecisive. Edward thinks someone is consciously exploiting the holes in Alice's vision.

“Who would know that?” Alice whispered.

Again with the hurt whispering. Someone give her a hug! Esme where you at? Edward and Rosalie (who breaks into the conversation suddenly, maybe S. Meyer was bored) suspect the Volturi; Edward says Aro feels vaguely threatened by their clan, he saw it in his thoughts back in Italy. Well, thanks for keeping that to yourself, dipshit! Regardless of who is pulling the strings, Jasper says they're going to have to get ready for some KILLING. He's slipping into that again awful quickly, huh?

This chapter has vaguely Bush-sympathizing themes. “No one hated violence more than Carlisle,” Bella says (Not MLK? Gandhi?), but Carlisle's peace-loving, pie-in-the-sky ways are actually to his detriment. He's pained and indecisive here, while Jasper is the fucking DECIDER. And Mr. Whitlock has effectively seized control of the Cullen family in the space of one chapter. I imagine Alice getting this little Lady Macbeth twinkle in her eyes about now.

Carlisle tells Jasper he's going to have to train everyone; Jasper says they need to call in re-enforcements. Dr. Cullen tentatively suggests Tanya's gang – the oft-mentioned but never-present family from Denali (my dad had a friend who always made reference to his wife but never brought her around; we all started to suspect she was fictional until he did finally bring her around. Turns out she was just hot and he was trying to keep that locked down) – and Jasper immediately puts a phone in Carlisle's hand, telling him he has to ask NOW. Booyah! Go Jasper! Damn, this shit works. He might as well be standing on top of a pile of rubble with a megaphone right now. Rock, flag and eagle!

Let's just hope the rest of this plot doesn't mirror George Bush's presidency: in two weeks Jasper will bring everyone's attention to another army of vampires a few states away, and the Cullens will be like “what do these vampires have to do with anything?” And Jasper will be like “I have intelligence that these vampires pose an even greater threat to us, and were probably involved with the vampire army in Seattle anyway.” And everyone will go along with it for a while and the Cullens will find themselves spreading their resources too thin, trying to manage two different vampire wars at once. And they'll bomb the living shit out of Seattle and Moab or wherever, killing literally thousands of innocents, and after a few years they will not even be able to remember why they invaded Moab in the first place, because the anger they all felt when they discovered Jasper had been lying about his “intelligence” and supposed “Weapons of Vampire Destruction” will have long sense dissipated too – in some ways the time will have flown by, and in others their protracted double-war will seem infinite, like it never began and will never end. And it will be and have been too easy to give in to that inertia. When Alice and Jasper withdraw from power and go essentially into hiding, leaving Jacob and the wolf-pack in charge, everyone will feel a brief moment of hope that the wars will finally end, only to succumb to that fucking inertia again before long. Eventually it will get exhausting to watch the body count rise in the paper, so everyone will stop reading the paper until the paper goes back to reporting about whatever vampire celebrity just got busted by the Volturi. So when almost two years later Jacob Black announces that combat troops are finally being withdrawn from Moab, everyone will breath a sigh of relief and feel a surge of guilt that they hadn't been thinking about it much lately. And then people will keep dying in Moab anyway, nothing having been learned or gained.

I seriously doubt that will happen, though.

Anyway, the Cullens get refused by Tanya's clan, because as you may recall, the late Laurent spent some time up there before he met his end via the wolf-pack. Tanya has a sister named Irina, and it turns out Laurent was hitting that shit. In a perfect world, Laurent would be played by JB Smoove. In a perfect world, JB Smoove would play everyone.

“God damn Laurent and his wandering dick!” Edward exclaimed.

What's weird is that Edward seems to glean this information from Carlisle's thoughts and share it with the rest of his family – you'd think their vampire-hearing would allow them to catch both sides of the conversation, but whatever. Jasper doesn't like having to face an even fight. “We'd have the upper hand in skill, but not in numbers,” he says. Bella realizes this war could have casualties, and she looks at the faces of her “family” wondering who might die. Probably Rosalie, right? It'll be Rosalie.

Chapter 14: Declaration

A day or so later, Bella is sitting with Alice and Edward in the cafeteria, and Alice is maintaining that the party must go on – approaching vampire army or not.

“Say whatever you like about me,” Alice answered. “The party is still on.”
“You have pretty eyes!” I shouted. “You said to say whatever I like about you.”

Alice likes to party – life imitates art for Ashley Greene. But Bella says a party is “hardly appropriate.” This conversation could literally be taking place between Greene and Kristen Stewart, really. “Graduation is what's going on right now, and a party is so appropriate it's almost passe,” Alice says. Alice perfected her teen girl impersonation in the 90s and she hasn't revised it since.

Bella pries some specifics out of Edward and Alice: Carlisle is tracking down some old friends, doing some recruiting. Jasper is doing the same, seeking out Peter and his wife Charlotte. Redshirts, in other words. Jasper is even considering getting in touch with Maria, so great is the need for extraneous characters for S. Meyer to kill off.

Alice shuddered delicately.

Ordinarily I'd object to such a bizarre turn-of-phrase, but with Alice it works. I can imagine what that would look like. I'd say Emmett and Alice are S. Meyer's greatest successes, character-wise. Their internal universes are coherent – even though neither of them has much in the way of a back-story. Huh. What does that say about S. Meyer's writing?

The plan is to launch Operation Enduring Vampires in one week, and Bella suggests she be vamped now in order to help. Edward almost has an aneurism, but Alice very calmly tells Bella that as a newborn she wouldn't have the self-control necessary to be of any use. Bella realizes Alice is right and drops it immediately. Was that so hard, Edward? You don't have to lose your shit every time this comes up! He whispers “Not because you're afraid” in Bella's ear like he's trying to take credit for Alice's little moment, the fuckward. Maybe Edward, like the rest of us, is realizing his sister is a better match for Bella anyway.

“Oh,” Alice said, and a blank look crossed her face. Then her expression because surly. “I hate last minute cancellations.”

She sees the future, folks! Renee cannot attend the graduation party, and Bella, who did not even know her mother had been invited, is relieved. What? You don't want to see your mother, Bella!? Ungrateful bagascia! I don't think Bella deserves Alice. I mean, Jasper might be a racist with a totalitarian streak, but he would never disrespect his mother like that.

By the way, it's Bella Swan's birthday today. I mean, it obviously isn't really, because she is not a real person, but people are celebrating it anyway. So that's happening.