BLOGGING BREAKING DAWN, pt. 37: While You Wait For The Others

As I write this, there's a huge garbage truck outside my window trying to turn around on my rather narrow street. They are not having a lot of success. It's appropriate that it would happen as I sit down to write about chapter 31, in which the coming conflict with the Volturi is re-framed and re-framed and re-framed. Vague suspicions about what the Volturi are up to get replaced by only slightly firmer suspicions. Vague expectations about Bella's vampire power become different vague expectations. And that's more or less it; here's a plot synopsis: Edward, Bella, Eleazar (Cutty), Tanya, Kate, and Carmen talk. The end.

Chapter 31: Talented

Cutty mumbles about what a talented family Edward has. “A mind reader for a father, a shield for a mother,” he says. Edward's like “WHAT DID YOU CALL MY WIFE, MOTHERFUCKER?” and Cutty is like, “Oh, I think she's a shield.” Edward seems to not know what a shield is (“'A shield?' Edward repeated, bewildered.”) but then like ten seconds later he knows EXACTLY what it is (“'A shield!' Edward said, deep satisfaction saturating his tone.”) and he even remembers a Volturi who is sort of one. Aro has a bodyguard (who is, notably, a woman) who mentally diverts his attackers. “There's a force around her that repels, though it's almost unnoticeable,” Cutty explains. “You simply find yourself going a different direction than you planned.” So in her human life, this chick was just really socially repellent?

Bella's power is different (Cutty tells us that no one's power is the same because no one thinks in precisely the same way. Our brains are snowflakes). She has an impenetrable brain (no one wanted to penetrate her during her human life, so...) but it is suggested she could possibly “project” her power outward, to protect other people. Still, it's pretty lame that Bella's power is so passive; Cutty observes that it's “purely defensive.” Is S. Meyer TRYING to give her critics more ammo?

Especially since Bella immediately thinks about how to use it to protect her husband and child; her power, really, is Super Motherhood. For two vampires and a hybrid, these guys have a pretty conventional family dynamic. (Really, it's conventional to the point of implausibility, right? It's 2011, not 1951!)

It felt like I had never wanted anything so badly before this: to be able to protect what I love.

You sure you didn't want like, the ability to shoot lasers out of your eyes? Flight? Invisibility? Kate is the one who suggests that Bella's power might be mobile, and when Bella considers the possibilities, she begs Kate to teach her to “project.” Kate is like, “one does not simply project into Mordor,” but doesn't say no. Her power, by the way, is that she can stun other vampires with her touch—knocking them to the ground like they've been Tasered. Finally, a cool power! We've been waiting for something like this since New Moon! And she can project the “current” over the surface of her whole body, which is very X-Men-like (and also suggestive of the fact that she never gets laid). I'm a Kate fan already. Maybe she and Bella will start spending time alone for training, and then Bella will be frustrated by her inability to project, and Kate will be like “You need to get to know your body better,” and one thing will lead to another...

While Bella and Kate flirt, Edward and Cutty are talking about the Volturi. Edward's suspicions of their motives set off seemingly latent suspicions in Cutty, who then has a minor existential crisis about the work he did for the Volturi earlier in his life. Right there in the Cullen living room, dude? You've never thought about this before? Cutty talks about a pattern he's just now noticed: every hundred years or so, Aro would identify a vampire out in the world whose power he admired. Soon, that vampire's coven would get busted for something, but then Aro would always find a reason to pardon the one vampire he wanted for his team. Again: you just noticed this now?

“Come to think of it, Hitler seemed to pick on Jews, gays and gypsies more than other groups.”- Dr. Joseph Mengele

The other problem with this abrupt revelation is that it seems to presume the Volturi has done exactly what they're planning to do to the Cullens to other families. But we've always been lead to believe that the Cullens are the only other family, that other vampires travel in packs of two or three, that the size of the Cullen clan is part of the reason for the attack. None of that seems to be true anymore. “Once the coven was all but destroyed,” Edward says, “Aro would grant a pardon to one member.” When you read that, does it suggest to you that a coven being all but destroyed would mean “once they'd killed the other two vampires”?

Then there's this: Cutty mentions a vampire named Chelsea, who works for Aro and has the ability to break up and re-arrange the emotional bonds between vampires. That could lead to some sexy fun! (“Okay now Edward, you blow Jasper. Emmett, you just watch.”-Chelsea) But anyway, what she does is break the emotional bonds between the vampire Aro wants and his former family, and bond him to the Volturi instead. Hey, uh, can we call this Chelsea lady in to treat Jacob, maybe? But then Cutty clarifies that the sort of bonds the Cullens have formed are probably unbreakable—Chelsea wasn't able to break his bond with Carmen (though it's unclear whether or not she tried), and probably won't be able to break the Cullen's bond either.

So maybe you're asking: why are we even talking about Chelsea, then? She is brought up and then made irrelevant in the space of two pages. The reason is the explanation for why the Cullens' bonds are so strong. Are you ready for this? This is Cutty speaking:

"Abstaining from human blood makes us more civilized—lets us form true bonds of love."

OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. There's a lot of noise in that sentence, but let's break it down to its core elements:

Abstaining lets us form true bonds of love.

DOES IT NOW? Message received, Stephenie. Kristen Stewart says Twilight doesn't force messages down its readers' throats. She's right; it just subliminally slips them in wherever it can. Yikes.

So anyway, who is Aro after? Edward thinks it's Alice, and they realize that is probably why she bailed. (Oh please tell me he caught up to her! How cool would it be if Alice was in the Volturi?) Cutty warns Edward that Aro probably wants him too, but Edward says he'd be too uncooperative and Aro knows it. But Cutty's like “What if they had Bella? Or what if it's Bella they want?” and then Edward is suddenly less cocky. “Was death the lesser concern?” Bella wonders. “Was it really capture we should fear?” I don't know, ask Osama Bin Laden am I right? USA USA USA! Sorry. (They're building a new health center on Maverick Square near where I live and on one of the I-beams right now someone wrote “Good Ridens Osama Bin Laden.”)

Finally, on the last page or so of this chapter, we start to see a way in which this plot line could be sort of interesting. “If the Volturi are abusing the trust all immortals have placed in them...” Carmen starts to say. “Does it matter?” Cutty says. “Who would believe it?” See? Now the Cullens are the One Guy Who Knows The Truth, that aliens have taken over the bodies of his neighbors, that an asteroid is going to hit earth, that a giant glacier is going to melt and destroy the Titanic II. They've got a government conspiracy they need to reveal, against all odds!

But I'm psyching myself up for one paragraph in a chapter that presents 20 different roads stretching out before us. At the end of this chapter, we have no more firm an idea of where we are going from here than we did before, it's just that our vague ideas are different ones. And the fact of the matter is, we're probably not going to go down any of those paths. We're going to hang out at Chez Cullen and wait for more vampires to show up. So uh, look forward to that?