BLOGGING BREAKING DAWN, pt. 26: Easy, Lucky, Free

So first things first, Bella will eat some brains. Then she's going to start rocking gold teeth and fangs. Because, well, you know. Previously: we learned about how being a vampire is like watching Blu-Ray, and Jashley imploded suddenly and unexpectedly.

Chapter 21: First Hunt

So this chapter is a little one-off episode. New Vampire Bella goes hunting for the first time and discovers her new powers. The end. Very little carries over into this chapter, and it doesn't necessarily have any major implications for the future. It will be a (probably horribly edited) montage at the beginning of Breaking Dawn pt. 2 and would be a nice little read were it not for the total narrative cop-out S. Meyer pulls with regard to Bella's newborn-ness of which we caught a depressing glimmer last time. The short version: being a vampire is startlingly easy.

Before everything became about weddings and babies, Bella's primary fear was that as a vampire, her emotional makeup would (if only temporarily) change. She'd be a dangerous, cold-blooded murderer for months, years. In Eclipse, she asked herself what it would be like if she killed someone someday. The implication was that she would, that really there'd be no way around popping her murder cherry, and that that was the price of immortality.

And Bella's brand of immortality is a particularly selfish one, right? A very long time ago (as in almost exactly a year ago) we talked about how ultimately selfish ALL of the Cullens are, except Carlisle (but even he should really be at like, an ER in Baltimore, where he could do some real good). However, Edward and Alice have done a lot to prevent violence being visited on Forks at this point, and the other Cullens have protected Bella, at the very least. That should count for something (even if Bella is not really worth protecting). But Bella's whole intention was to be granted immortality just so she could be with Edward forever. There has never been any mention of her, you know, maybe effecting positive change in the world.

“With great power comes nothing, basically.”-Vampire Uncle Ben

But that sort of base-level abdication of moral responsibility could have been okay, and possibly interesting, if Bella's power came at a price. If, say, she killed an innocent human and had to reconcile that. But it becomes clear, in this chapter, that such a complex thing will not happen. Nothing complex will happen.

The first sign of danger comes at the start, when Bella is nervous about exiting through the upstairs window. Edward is keen on doing so in part because “Renesmee and Jacob are downstairs.” In separate rooms, I hope. And by rooms I guess I mean I hope Renesmee is in a crib and Jacob's in a jail cell. “Is Renesmee...okay...with Jacob there?” Bella says, asking a more important question that she even knows.

Edward's lips tightened in an odd way. “Trust me, she is perfectly safe. I know exactly what Jacob is thinking.”

UGH. Fifty bucks says Edward's been researching trepanning in his spare time. Don't Google that. At some point Bella becomes aware that Alice must have dressed her during the transformation, she's in a “tightly fitted ice-blue silk” dress. What ELSE did Alice do when Bella was under the influence? I'm not saying Alice is a rapist—because it's consensual on some level, we all know that.

Anyway, Edward jumps out the window and Bella follows easily. Edward tells her it was “quite graceful—even for a vampire.” And there you have it. You couldn't at least have Bella land so hard she breaks one of her shoes (stilettos, natch), S. Meyer? Have her trample Esme's vegetable garden, at least! Am I the only one sick of everything turning out perfectly every single time?

They have to jump a river to progress beyond the Cullen backyard, and after some trepidation Bella thrills herself by leaping fifty-or-so yards in a single bound. There's a comical moment first, when she tears her skirt along the thigh while spreading her legs in preparation. For the leap, I mean. So she tears a matching rip on the other side and can hear Alice gritting her teeth back in the house (a comic beat only undercut by Bella's acknowledgment a paragraph earlier that Alice treats clothes as essentially disposable—so why should she care? But whatever).

The fractions are getting a little ridiculous: Bella jumps the river in “an eighty-fourth of a second.” I get that vampires brains are better than ours, but I'm picturing numbers and symbols floating around in Bella's peripheral vision like the fucking Terminator. She soars through the air, a bird, a plane, and lands high on a tree branch. “It was fabulous,” Bella says. If she derives that much pleasure from one eighty-fourth of second, maybe we should take her assertions of Edward's sexual prowess with a grain of salt.

Bella and Edward then run through the woods at lightning speed, and Bella says she understands how Edward's been managing it all along without hurting her. Well, first of all, I thought Bella's human memories were all muddled and VHS-y now, so it's weird that she can recall those occasions so easily, and second of all, she goes on to mention that the branches smashing into her don't even feel like anything, which explains how Edward does it, but not how he did it with vulnerable human Bella on his back.* But then we hear how they are running together, neither one leading or following, and the symbolic equality is enough to make you ignore that.

(*I wouldn't ordinarily even nitpick THIS much, but I've been working my way through the Eclipse DVD commentary track with Wyck Godfrey and Stephenie Meyer, and the latter alludes to getting very upset with the former over a scene in which Edward aggressively grabs Jake's shoulder. She says, according to the “mythology,” he would have crushed Jacob by doing that. So if the “mythology” is going to be this holy thing, I guess we'll have to start holding it to higher standards of consistency and coherence.)

So anyway, being a vampire feels GREAT! You never get winded! Cold air feels warm! If their bodies are so insensitive how do they ever reach orgasm? Edward stops their little fun run, and he teaches Bella to sense the elk nearby. But then the wind changes direction, and Bella catches a more delicious scent, which we quickly realize is a human. She takes off unthinkingly in that direction, and when she senses that she is being followed she turns around and involuntarily lets loose a “feral snarl.” But it's Edward who is following her, and that snaps her out of attack mode. She runs in the opposite direction of the human scent to get away from temptation.

See kids? Waiting for sex until marriage pays off! You get so used to denying yourself pleasure that you can do it easily whenever necessary! (How are you observant types doing with Lent?) Edward is astounded and pleased by Bella's self-control. I know, it makes everything so easy now!

“We can skip like ten potential chapters!”- Edward Meyer

There's a CLASSIC Bella and Edward moment in the woods after Bella stops running: Edward starts apologizing for not making sure the hunting grounds were clear of humans, and Bella starts apologizing for snarling at him. He's like: why are you apologizing to me? She's like: why are you apologizing to me? These two, eh? Always apologizing to the other and getting mad at the other for wanting to apologize! When Edward starts laughing, Bella has a CLASSIC Bella moment where she gets inappropriately offended by Edward's joy. Vampire power doesn't come with better interpretative skills? Or did the transformation only enhance her borderline autism?

“I'm not laughing at you, Bella. I'm laughing because I am in shock. And I am in shock because I am completely amazed.”

Uh, what? Anyway, the gist of this whole section is that being a newborn vampire actually ISN'T hard. The risks, originally, were that you'd lose your family, you wouldn't be able to start your own family, and you'd maybe kill someone else's family. Those were the dramatic counterweights for the last three books. And each threat has been made irrelevant rather than dealt with. Whoops, actually you can have it all! We we all worried for nothing. But at least it kept us reading, eh?

Luckily it's not all easy and clean, and in an act of contrition S. Meyer more or less closes this chapter with a fun scene in which Bella messily attacks a mountain lion. The start of the battle takes place high in the trees, so like most S. Meyer action scenes it's not something you can really visualize. But what you can visualize is Bella tearing open the neck of a giant cat on the forest floor while it mauls most of her clothes off, which is what happens. She tosses its corpse off of her body, and then there is this sentence:

I wrenched myself erect in one quick move.

Well, it's not going to get any better than that. Bella's still hungry, so as they run home they attack a group of deer. Bella admits that she's always feared really seeing Edward hunt, but it turns out to be a “surprisingly sensual” experience. Where does he bite them? Watching him manhandle the deer gets Bella's venom going, which is pretty weird, but far be it for me to judge what other people get off on. Whatever wrenches you erect, you know? So, Bella gets full but her throat still burns.

Then again, I'd known thirst was just an inescapable part of this life.
And worth it.

Why is that the one thing that comes true? Is that really supposed to be enough for us? “Oh she had to give up SO MUCH. Her throat will feel kinda weird forever.” Bella thinks over her afternoon. “I did feel pretty good about not killing someone today,” she says, and decides that she can be around her daughter after all. Well, that's fair enough. The only thing we ask of straight couples in this country is that they not be murderers, and then they can have all the kids they want. Gay couples though? Forget about it. ANYWAY, thinking of Renesmee brings on a case of sudden-onset postpartum depression.

It as so odd, so wrong to not have her inside me still. Abruptly, I felt empty and uneasy.

(Are you sure you're not referring to Alice?) Of course, thinking of pregnancy gets Bella horny, and she starts making out with Edward. “My lips no longer shaped themselves around his,” she says, trying to appease the feminists out there that—well—that probably stopped reading a long time ago. “They held their own.” And of course she segues immediately into wondering whether her power, the “part of me that I'd brought forward to be intensified in my new life,” is her ability to love Edward. Half a step forward, a fifty-yard leap back.

Maybe I would love Edward more than anyone in the history of the world ever loved anyone else.

If that's it, I'm going to be fucking pissed.

Holland 1945, Blogging Twilight: In Conclusion, We Are All Team Edward, Some Things Are Better Left Undead