BLOGGING ECLIPSE, pt. 34: Sundowner

I'm starting to feel like maybe I can reach a reconciliation of sorts with Jacob. He's still a creep here, but you can see him dialing it down. The first few layers of his manipulative outer crust cracked when that newborn crushed him, maybe. Plus, we're clearly, finally moving on to some other phase of his relationship with Bella for Breaking Dawn; S. Meyer is admirably not dragging this triangle out any longer. Maybe I just like him better because Bella's finally kicking him to the curb? Previous entries can be found in the directory.

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Chapter 26 (cont'd): Ethics

Bella pulls up to La Push at about seven or eight and Billy Black tells her “Yo, Jacob's home, smell ya later because you'll be a vampire and we'll be repulsed by you” (I'm paraphrasing). She peers through a crack in Jacob's door (what is with this girl and the never knocking?) and sees him waiting for her, face all blank and shit. It's more difficult for her to look at him, “knowing that I loved him.” Oy gevalt. Then S. Meyer makes a particularly bad judgment call transitioning from one paragraph to the next:

I wondered it it had been this hard for him, all the time.
Thankfully, someone had covered him with a quilt.

WHOOPS! Maybe rethink that juxtaposition, S. Meyer! Bella's happy to not have to see the extent of his injuries (not the extent of his boner), but as soon as she says hello Jacob seems to realize this is his Dear John letter. Bella asks if he's in pain, and he says Carlisle overdid it with the painkillers. (“What do you got? Anything good? Do you need all this percocet?”- Alice Cullen)

I bit my lip. I was never going to get through this. Why didn't anyone ever try to kill me when I wanted to die?

Well if there are plenty of painkillers around you could just overdo it too, Bella. I think it would make everyone's lives easier, especially mine. Jacob asks how she's doing, but I don't think it's like a Joey Tribbiani-style “How YOU doin'?” Bella's shocked that Jacob even cares at all. “Maybe he had taken too many drugs,” she says. S. Meyer really loves painkiller jokes, huh? Maybe she'd be kind of fun to hang out with after all! What Jacob really wants to know is how mad Edward is at her for kissing him. I see what you're doing here, Jacob. Bella tells him Edward wasn't mad, which disappoints him.

This is when the possibilities for just how much manipulation is going on get a little too mind-boggling. Jacob pretended he was going to kill himself to get Bella to kiss him, hoping apparently that it would piss Edward off enough that he'd dump Bella. So did Edward react admirably not out of the goodness of his heart, but rather just to dig the knife deeper into Jacob's back? Has anyone told the truth about ANYTHING? I never though Eclipse would obliterate my sense of the truth as deeply as Rashomon, but there you are!

(Want to fuck up your life for a few years? Watch Rashomon, if you haven't already, and discuss it at length with a few other intelligent people. For optional extra credit, read That Noble Dream by Peter Novick. Whoops, do you feel incredibly isolated and disillusioned now? Akira Kurosawa and I just broke your brain forever, you're welcome.)

Bizarrely, Bella is not hurt by the fact that Jacob is still playing her for a fool, she's pained by the realization that he's still holding out hope they can be together. When she actually does make a caustic remark about Jacob's suicide threat, she takes it back immediately. That is still a valid thing to be mad about Bella! It happened this morning! Gallingly, Jacob says he doesn't care if she's mad about it or not, he'd do it again. Good to know! When the Quileutes get together to tell wolf stories do they ever do one about that Boy Who Cried about them? Jacob's happy that the resultant kiss led Bella to realize she really loved him. I don't even WANT TO GET INTO the dark fucking psychology in that shit. How fast can Stockholm Syndrome set in?

Bella expresses frustration that no one is mad at her. She wants to be punished! If you're into that kind of thing, there's a section here that reads like an excerpt from someone else's Twilight-themed BDSM fan fic:

He grinned. It didn't touch his eyes. “You want me to haul you over the coals?”
“Actually... I think I do.”
He pursed his lips as he measured how much I meant it. A smile flashed across his face briefly, and then he twisted his expression into a fierce scowl.

Get your whips out, freaks! But as soon as Jacob jokingly starts to yell at her, she starts crying. Don't ask for it if you don't want it! Anyway, Jacob seems to realize that Bella isn't going to pull the trigger, so he starts loading her gun for her, pushing the conversation toward a conclusion. “I'll be your friend,” he says. “I won't ask for more than that.” She's understandably like, “Yeah the fuck right.” Then, on the last line of page 597, Jacob says “You know that story in the Bible?”

That's the end of the page. My heart skipped a fucking beat. But it's a fake out; we don't veer off into weird religious territory like we have in the past. Zealotry is apparently exclusive to male vampires.

Instead Jacob just talks about Solomon. “I'm not going to cut you in half anymore, Bella,” he says. Bella sees through that one immediately too. How did Bella get so smart all of a sudden? Force me into kissing you once, shame on you, Trick me into kissing you twice, I'll finally start calling you on all your bullshit! That's how the saying goes, right?

So Jacob drops the games and goes for the straight-up appeal. “The worst part is knowing what would have been,” he says. He arrogantly insists that he was “the natural path” Bella's life would have taken. Aren't you sixteen, buddy? How do you know Bella's natural path wouldn't have been to college and way the fuck away from you forever?

I get that people have problems with the idea of Young Romance – Edward & Bella getting engaged when she's only 18 years old – because in our divorce-saturated society, the talking-point is “exercise caution” before you jump in to that sort of thing. I don't necessarily subscribe to that line of thinking, and when people throw neuroscience at me like, “your brain doesn't finish developing until you are 25” or whatever, I subscribe to it even less. (If subscribing less is something you can really do. “I'd like only six issues a year, please.”) Neuroscience is bullshit. I think you can meet the right person at a young age. I don't think there is a such thing as a “soul mate,” but I think there is a such thing as “a person who is really good for you who you should be with.” And within the narrative framework of a fantasy novel, I'm even less inclined to tell Edward & Bella not to rush in, and not just because Where We're Going, We Don't Need Divorce Lawyers.

All of that said, even my credulity is way fucking strained when Bella agrees with Jacob completely and starts talking about how she has “two soul mates.” Shut up, Bella. Jacob moves the conversation to a different, even dumber place. “He's like a drug for you,” he says, in a weird callback to Edward's terrible metaphor about how Bella was his “brand” of heroin. “But I would have been healthier for you. Not a drug; I would have been the air, the sun.” This metaphor is already tenuous enough, but Jacob & Bella keep going.

“I used to think of you that way, you know. Like the sun. My personal sun. You balanced out the clouds nicely for me.”
He sighed. “The clouds I can handle. But I can't fight with an eclipse.”

Hey, that's the name of this book! Wasn't Edward “a drug” earlier in this metaphor? Is he a giant rock of crack cocaine in the shape of a moon now? I'm trying to wrap my arms around this. Technically, I guess we should remember that the shadow in a lunar eclipse is caused by the earth itself. So is Edward the earth and Bella the moon in this metaphor? Because we all know the sun and the moon aren't meant to be together no matter what Paula Abdul says. Jacob probably shouldn't have gone down this road, or S. Meyer should have specified which kind of eclipse we're dealing with. But Jacob pretty much resigns after that speech anyway, and asks Bella when the vamping is going to happen. Well, either that or she's asking when he's going to have sex.

“How long do you have left?”
“That depends on how long it takes Alice to pull a wedding together.” I suppressed a groan, imagining what Alice would do.
“Before or after?” he asked quietly.
I knew what he meant. “After.” […]
“Are you scared?” he whispered.

She says she's worried about the pain (again, could go either way). “I've never been much of a masochist,” she says. Really, Bella? Weren't you just asking Jacob to rake you over the coals? Haven't you been semi-consciously screwing yourself over for over a thousand pages? Aren't you dating a vampire and cock-teasing a werewolf? Didn't you just stab yourself in the arm with a sharp rock? Not a masochist? Really!?