BLOGGING BREAKING DAWN, pt. 25: All Deliberate Speed

Last time, Bella's evil heart finally exploded. Now she is actually a vampire. I never thought we'd get here! I mean, really! Meanwhile, the Twilight Tumblr continues to showcase the weirdest Twilight garbage I can manage to find on the Internet. If you come across something on your own, you can always submit it here.

Chapter 20: New

Bella opens her eyes and looks around, and her vision has improved along with her ability to hear. “Everything was so clear. Sharp. Defined,” Bella says. Later we'll read about how she can mentally process multiple situations and ideas at once. So she's in Blu-Ray now, basically. When she stares at the lightbulb overhead, she can see every color in the spectrum, including “an eighth color I had no name for.” You never heard of ultraviolet or infrared, Bella? God, Forks High really needs to shut down like, this instant.
Bella can see every dust mote—like you can on really sunny days, you know?— and she obsesses over it for a while, and how pretty it is, then gets distracted by how good it feels to breathe, then gets distracted by how good it smells in the room.

“Yeah, this is some pretty primo shit, huh?”-Alice Cullen

She rattles off the scents she can pick up, which is goofily reminiscent of that time in Twilight when she listed all the colors of rocks on the beach. “Cinnamon, hyacinth, pear, seawater, rising bread, pine, vanilla, leather, apple, moss, lavender, chocolate,” she says. Well the cinnamon is easy: the vampires have been serving the werewolves cinnamon rolls (am I filling out a Mad Lib here?). Seawater: Emmett maybe went for a swim earlier? Leather: Alice's bra. Actually, Bella doesn't smell rye whisky, lube and marijuana, so Alice might not be in the room. She can hear someone shift in his or her seat downstairs, then hears a car going by out on the freeway with rap music blaring (and hilariously rendered as “a faint, thudding rhythm, with a voice shouting angrily to the beat." Bella is even whiter as a vampire, literally and figuratively). Being a vampire seems kind of irritating so far!

Bella is still lying on her back, and when she realizes someone warm is touching her hand she reacts on instinct, flipping up into the air and landing in a defensive crouch. Bella rather interestingly details the amount of time it takes her to process each event in this chapter—and every time it is fractions of a second. The result is that we spent several pages detailing the first few seconds of Bella's life as a vampire, which conveys the way a vampire brain works rather well.

But it's just Edward who was squeezing her hand; now that they are the same temperature he feels normal. Well, that's going to take a lot of the fun out of it for her, isn't it? It's going to be like fucking a normal dude instead of an ice sculpture! Shit! Bella takes pains to make sure we understand the whole “processing more than one thing at once” deal which is fine, but her case is a little overstated. Stuff like this

Edward's face was the most important thing, but my peripheral vision cataloged everything else, just in case. Some instinct to defend had been triggered, and I automatically searched for any sign of danger.

gets repeated multiple times. Part of me is happy for it, and it would sort of be cool if S. Meyer went absolute with this shit and the next four hundred pages detailed the first three hours of Bella's life. But there's a certain amount of cool I am willing to sacrifice for readability. Infinite Jest is still sitting on my shelf, making me feel guilty, as we speak.

Anyway, Bella is a robot now, as she scans the room looking for threats she sees Alice peeking at her over Jasper's shoulder, grinning. And that, folks, is what snaps her out of it. Not Edward's concerned face, but Alice's loving grin.

As if Bella realizes she's just outed herself, she again restates her ability to process more than one thing at once. “All of this was a sideline,” she says. Because she's really focused on how sexy Edward's face is now that she can see it in all its glory. (“But if you can think more than one way at once, doesn't that mean that maybe you could go both ways, too?”-Alice Cullen) Remember how last time we were talking about S. Meyer's superlative problem? If Edward is the most gorgeous person on earth, how can Renesmee be better looking? And if Renesmee is better looking than him, how can Edward look even better now?

For the first time, with the dimming shadows and limiting weakness of humanity taken off my eyes, I saw his face. I gasped and then struggled with my vocabulary, unable to find the right words.

See? This is what I've been saying! You've praised yourself into a corner, Bella!

Edward starts talking, and then Bella gets lost in the “velvet folds” of his voice. Last time I read a phrase like that it was in some erotic Bella/Alice fanfiction, and it wasn't being used to describe someone's voice. But anyway, Edward's voice is like “a symphony in one instrument,” which is not even, I don't think, possible. When he tells her “everything is fine” she tries to think back to her “last human hour” and can barely get there. “Already, the memory seemed dim, like I was watching through a thick, dark, veil—because my human eyes had been half blind,” she says. Humans are VHS.

As Bella looks Edward over and feels a surge of desire, she wonders why she isn't given over to her thirst completely like we were all led to believe she would be. Indeed, why wouldn't she be? Throughout the rest of this chapter, as Bella's thirst is mentioned and she briefly gets preoccupied by it then snaps out of it, the narrative starts to become about how she isn't like a newborn at all. We're supposed to be relived, like Bella and Edward are relieved, that things aren't as complicated as we thought they might be. And maybe some people really are relieved when they read this. I just feel ripped off. Forgive the ever-present pun, but there are no stakes in this book! There are never any consequences, no sacrifices. Everything works out. Everything is fine.

At least we can take some small comfort in the fact that Edward is weaker than Bella now. When she instantaneously moves to embrace him, Bella tellingly says “he was in my arms” (emphasis added). Then she nearly crushes him with her embrace. They kiss, and Edward finally doesn't have to hold back, so, you know, they really kiss for once.

Something I have never understood: if vampire venom replaces all bodily fluids, it also replaces saliva. So had Edward never been able to tongue-kiss Bella? There isn't sufficient evidence one way or another in the book, and the movies suggest otherwise. But for real: have they not even been Frenching? (Is it okay as long as she doesn't have a cut in her mouth?) And when Edward and Bella had sex, wouldn't it have made Bella into a vampire when he ejaculated? Or at least burned like a sonofabitch?

Bella feels guilty that she's able to enjoy kissing him so much. Maybe because S. Meyer feels guilty about allowing our narrator to enjoy it so much? Bella realizes mid-way the makeout session that “the way I was curved around Edward now was not exactly polite for company.” Well all right, then!

"Don't mind us."-Alice, Jasper, Emmett

Carlisle steps forward and has a conversation with Bella. Jasper follows him, standing guard, but that is just to set up the eventual reveal that she's NOT a scary newborn after all, so I'll spare you that bullshit. Carlisle asks about how the transformation felt, and Bella is too polite to tell him that it was incredibly painful and she was paralyzed and couldn't do a damn thing about it. So she lies to him, and Carlisle is super-excited that he's finally invented a cure for vamping when in fact he has only made it worse. Nice.

Every time someone mentions Bella's thirst she becomes briefly preoccupied by the burning sensation in her throat (again, we are too sophisticated to make STD jokes, but there you are, if you like). But first, she asks to see Renesmee. She has difficulty saying the name (well, sure, it's pretty hard to say) or even thinking of Renesmee as her daughter, as if all of the motherly instincts she developed while pregnant have left her already. Usually it takes a parent two or three kids before they stop caring, but everything about this pregnancy was sped up, why shouldn't the rearing part be? But anyway, no one wants Bella to see Renesmee yet for fear that Bella will finish the job started by Edward and literally eat her. “She's half human,” Edward says. “Her heart beats, and blood runs through her veins.” Bella seems to accept that, which is kind of ridiculous. “Oh, I'll just see my baby later.” She's like a new mother in the sixth or seventh season of a sitcom. But here's a little more fake dramatic tension for you: when will Bella be well enough to see her baby? I'm guessing next chapter.

Is there a reason for Renesmee being half-human and having functioning organs other than this way she'll be a reproductive match with Jacob? Is that what all of that chromosomal bullshit was about, as some of you have suggested in the comments? If Twilight is showing us anything, it's that a relationship is not whole until sex has been used to reproduce. We can't curse Renesmee to the same barren future that Alice (closeted lesbian) and Rosalie (bitch) will suffer, right?

Apparently this kind of reductive interpretation of family dynamics is not exclusive to Twilight. The new children's film Mars Needs Moms has taken a lot of critical flack for being wildly sexist, homophobic, and otherwise reductive. You weren't planning on seeing it anyway, but don't. Read about it here.

Anyway, even though we've just seen how Bella can easily and skillfully lie to Carlisle about the transformation, the subject of Renesmee can barely be breached (I guess I mean broached but BABY PUNS!) without like forty cryptic hints about the Jacob thing being dropped by Bella's less smooth new family.

“Is Rosalie with her?”
“Yes.” Edward answered in a clipped tone, and I could see that something he'd thought of upset him.
…
“What's wrong?” I whispered.
“Nothing is wrong,” Carlisle told me, emphasizing the last word in a strange way.

Nothing is wrong? Nothing? Is wrong? Nothing is? Bella asks directly after Jacob and Charlie, and hears that Jacob is still here and Charlie thinks Bella is at the Center for Disease Control. Oh, that's good. I'm sure he's not tearing his hair out for no reason right now! Has Alice at least been going over there and helping him... relax?

Speaking of Alice, when Bella's questions about Jacob start to get specific everyone is like “You're so thirsty” and they prepare to leave for their first hunting trip. But Alice runs out of the room to grab a mirror first. Okay, well, that's not exactly what she does:

“Wait, wait, wait,” Alice trilled from the doorway, She danced across the room, dreamily graceful. As with Edward and Carlisle, I felt some shock as I really looked at her face for the first time. So lovely.

Then Bella notices Jasper, and realizes that with vampire-vision all of his scars are much more prominent than she once thought. “It was hard to take my eyes off his ravaged neck and jaw,” she says. “How many vampires had tried to kill Jasper? Hundreds? Thousands?”

“Those scars ain't from fighting, babe.”-Alice Cullen
“You think that's scary, wait till you see his cock!”-Alice Cullen

And then Alice makes the weirdest joke so far, seemingly taking a dig at Edward's method of child-delivery (and/or S. Meyer's writing?):

“Edward gave me grief for not getting you to a mirror before the wedding,” Alice said, pulling my attention away from her frightening lover. “I'm not going to be chewed out again.”
“Chewed out?” Edward asked skeptically, one eyebrow curving upward.
“Maybe I'm overstating things," she murmured absently as she turned the mirror to face me.

What the hell is THAT?

Anyway, Bella is really gorgeous, “full lips,” nice hair, “smooth and strong” limbs, big boobs (probably). If Bella is so hot now, I wonder what has been running through the minds of Edward's brothers during this whole exchange? Oh, and she's got bright red eyes. She asks how long she'll have them, and learns they'll stick around for a few months. She freaks out a little, and Jasper gets ready to restrain her. But of course, he doesn't have to. “No, I'm fine,” she says. Edward and Jasper wonder how she's doing it.

“Controlling your emotions, Bella,” Jasper answered. “I've never seen a newborn do that—stop an emotion in its tracks that way.”

Well, it figures. Bella and Edward's relationship was one-of-a-kind in the first place. Hell, Edward was a one-of-a-kind conscientious vampire who fell in with a one-of-a-kind FAMILY of like-minded vampires and stayed a virgin for a hundred years and met a one-of-a-kind girl. Then they finally had sex and, naturally conceived a one-of-a-kind baby (on the first try!) so it makes perfect sense that Bella would be a one-of-a-kind newborn vampire, too. Who says lightning never strikes FIVE TIMES IN A ROW?