BLOGGING BREAKING DAWN, pt. 16: Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes

Here's a hard truth about Breaking Dawn: even as we approach some kind of day of reckoning involving Bella and her baby, we are still mired in (by far) the most boring section of the entire Twilight Saga. And there have been some really boring sections! Chapter 12 drags and drags, so let's do this one like a band-aid: 1, 2, 3. (Previously: Division Day)

Chapter 12: Some People Just Don't Understand The Concept Of Unwelcome

1. The next morning, Leah Clearwater turns up and joins Jacob's and Seth's wolfpack. There's a lot of S. Meyer's pitiful tough talk: Leah refers to Jacob as “most high Alpha” and later “Captain Obvious” and that's about as harsh as she gets. And just because the wolves communicate telepathically doesn't mean our author should be allowed to get away with dialog this stilted:

I'm just pointing out that being unwanted is not a first for me. Not really a motivating factor, if you know what I mean.

Leah maintains that even though she hates vampires, she's along for the ride to look out for her younger brother. Her ulterior motive should be obvious, but it takes Jacob a few pages to realize she's also happy to escape Sam. We, too, should be happy to potentially see Leah in a new light, more than just a Hell Hath No Fury harpy. There's a brief and interesting moment where Jacob finally identifies with Leah's suffering as the only girl in the boy's club and truly empathizes for once, but the fact that he has been able to read her mind for all this time and somehow didn't realize how she felt until now makes this moment feel cheap once you've stepped a few feet from it.

The wolves are at a loss as to what they should be doing, much like our author. The intel they get from Leah is essentially that Sam Uley is probably not going to attack, so Seth and Leah run patrols (endless circles around Chez Cullen, which is, again, a pretty good visual metaphor for how this book is going) and Jacob heads to the house in human form.

2. Carlisle meets Jacob outside, and he looks exhausted and defeated. Much like Bella's conversation with the good doctor in New Moon, this one starts out interesting and gets ridiculous very quickly. Carlisle laments that he can't take away Bella's will, and Jacob struggles with the cognitive dissonance created by the fact that he recently criticized Sam for doing just that (in an admirably deep moment for S. Meyer). Carlisle goes on to explain that they can't seem to feed Bella or her baby anymore, and thus both of them are starving to death. “I could tell them exactly what it wanted,” Jacob thinks in anguish. “Death and blood, blood and death.”

Carlisle mentions wondering how many chromosomes the baby has, and Jacob is rightly like, “gaah-whuuuuuut?” What follows is the lamest pseudo-science S. Meyer has mustered so far, maybe the lamest anyone has ever mustered. And that includes the guys who came up with Intelligent Design.

He chuckled once-- even his laugh sounded exhausted. “Okay, How much biology have you taken? Did you study chromosomal pairs?”
“Think so. We have twenty-three, right?”
“Humans do.”
I blinked. “How many do you have?”
“Twenty-five.”

Well, I have to give the super-religious Carlisle some credit for asserting that humans aren't made out of 3 kinds of bile, Jesus's love, and dirt. He mentions wishing her knew whether the baby was closer to vampires (25) or humans (23). Well, we can all probably guess what the answer to that one is, but apparently 24 chromosomes makes... a werewolf? Carlisle took a DNA sample from Jacob after the newborn war in Eclipse, and that's what he found. If Edward and Bella give birth to a werewolf, I am going to have to stand up and applaud or something. And the insane button on this ridiculous conversation comes when Carlisle says that he's bored with studying vampires and is fascinated by the wolfpack. “Your divergence with humanity is much more interesting. Magical, almost.” Jacob dismisses this (he literally says “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo”), as he fucking should. Vampires are made by a special venom that replaces all human bodily fluids, including, as it turns out, semen (hey, what kind of DNA sample did Carlisle take from Jacob when he was all morphined up, by the way?). And then, the venom apparently changes chromosomal count! That's just as magical as a fever! Pretending that vampirization makes perfect scientific sense, as S. Meyer has done repeatedly in this book, would really kill my suspension of disbelief if my disbelief was even remotely suspended.

3. Edward comes outside, looking marginally less crazy and dead inside than before. He overheard Jacob's thoughts about the “blood and death” earlier and thinks he's on to something. He wants to try feeding Bella blood to sate her baby's appetite. This is treated by Jacob and Edward as outrageous, but Just So Crazy It Might Work. It is really neither of those things, though, right? Drinking blood is something most of the people in the room do all the time, and when Jacob was a wolf for a few months I don't think he strapped a Foreman grill to his leg with which to prepare his prey. A bunch of people in a (literal and figurative) glass house are throwing stones right now! Plus, it's not a crazy idea, it's a reasonable assumption. The baby is, conceivably, 50% vampire. So if blood isn't the first thing you try, it should really be the second. What have they been doing? “Well pizza didn't work. Let's try hot pockets.” Edward repeatedly calls it “repulsive,” but I'm only repulsed by the fact that no one in the Cullen house even had this fleeting thought for the last few weeks.

“Don't blame me, I checked out a hundred pages ago.”-Alice Cullen

There's an interesting moment where Jacob feels uneasy about Rosalie's enthusiasm for Bella's new diet. In the narration, he wonders what could be motivating her. “Was Rosalie after the kid?” he says.

From the corner of my eye, I saw Edward nod once, absently, not looking in my direction. But I knew he was answering my questions.

Nifty! These little narrative tricks are the only thing keeping me going right now. So everyone breaks the news to Bella, and when she joking asks who is going to catch a grizzly bear for her, they make it clear that she'll be drinking human blood, as they have a bunch on hand in the event they'll need to perform a transfusion (when her baby kicks her apart). That's got to suck, having the good stuff lying around like that. I bet Alice and Jasper have been sneaking sips and then adding water.

Thoughts? Or would you rather discuss something less boring? I just started watching Parks & Recreation, that's pretty good! I'm reading Never Let Me Go. Anybody reading anything good?