WOW, guess what? This is the fucking worst chapter in the series. It's got some shameful moral shit, followed by some super-boring plot machination, and then at the end it just stops making sense altogether. It's the S. Meyer hat trick!Previously: The Slow Death Of Skateland
Chapter 34: Declared
Bella comes home from J Jenks's office feeling deflated. The hoops Alice made her jump through to (as it turned out) get a fake ID for Renesmee have, if nothing else, made her feel doomed. She senses the enthusiasm coming from the other vampires crowding her house and for the first time feels apart from it. At least I think that is what this sentence is supposed to mean:
As I walked slowly to the Cullen house now, I recognized that the hope and uplift that seemed almost a visible aura around the big white house had been mine this morning, too.
Whatever. She goes inside and lies to Edward that she's been Christmas shopping for their daughter—which is a lie you have to back up, which means she swung by a store and picked up the first thing she could find on her way back from the law office. Plus, Edward says he hadn't planned on celebrating the holiday and Bella says she doesn't want to make much of it, either. Nice parents! Really going out of their way to make the holidays magical for their kid. But anyway she got her a locket. (Maybe J Jenks had one of those machines where you pump two quarters in and a piece of jewelry comes out in a plastic bubble.)
“Here, take this fucking thing.”-Bella Cullen, mom of the year
Page 652 might be the single page I hate the most in the book. Bella ponders her own destruction and comforts herself with the thought that Jacob and RNSM will probably live. “If they had a future, then that was a kind of victory, wasn't it?” NO! You're confusing “a kind of victory” with “illegal in most states” again, Bella! But seriously, look at this insidious thing that has happened: Bella has gone from freaking out about Jacob's imprinting to casual acceptance of it to comfort in the existence of it. All in the space of a few hundred pages, with no significant event or revelation to guide her. Bella gradually changes her mind apropos of nothing, because S. Meyer was really okay with Jacob & Renesmee all along and was only paying lip service to the few fans left who understood how horrific it was.
In fact, what Twilight does is confront you with a morally reprehensible relationship, tell you it is sort of awful, and then gradually try to trick you into thinking it is acceptable. It is, essentially, propaganda for child molesters. It is unconscionable.
And then, on the same page, Bella obnoxiously wonders about the afterlife, decides she can't imagine Edward “not existing somehow,” and concludes that “If we could be together in any place, then that was a happy ending.” This is the same kind of attitude people like Tim Kasher warned us about in Happy Hollow—neglecting to care about or live your life on earth because you're hoping for something better on the other side. And on the other hand, it compounds the issue of Bella being okay with leaving RNSM behind, looking forward to dying alongside Edward. She's like the Haddads and the other estranged Family Radio parents, who are right now having very awkward dinners with the kids they were planning to leave behind. “And so the pattern of my days continued,” Bella concludes. She's right. The pattern of outrage after outrage has kept up for a shockingly long time.
(How did S. Meyer cram this many evil attitudes into one little book series? Sometimes you feel like you have to hand it to her. Then you realize you don't.)
Christmas comes along. There's a funny beat where Bella looks at Charlie's “sparsely decorated tree” and can pinpoint the spot where “he'd gotten bored and quit.” Edward gives Renesmee an mp3 player (a Zune, probably) loaded with his favorite songs (the full discographies of Hoobastank, Linkin Park, Nickelback, etc.), and Jacob gives her... oh god:
On her wrist was an intricately braided Quileute version of a promise ring.
He gives her a FUCKING promise ring. As in, “do you, Renesmee, promise to save your virginity for me?” As in Purity Balls, as in chastity pledges, as in child brides, as in FUCK YOU S. MEYER. UGH. Merry Christmas.
Bella's in emotional shutdown mode, sort of like she was way back in New Moon, coldly observing the festivities. “I wondered how our gathering would have looked to an outsider,” she says. “Did we play our parts well enough? Would a stranger have thought us a happy circle of friends, enjoying the holiday with casual cheer?” Ending a paragraph like that, with rapid successions of questions, strikes me as a very Meyerian writing style, one that I fear has infected my own writing from these 18 months or so I've been writing about it. I mean, how often do I end my paragraphs with questions? Has she affected me in other ways I don't know about yet? What should I do about that?
When Bella et al. come back from Charlie's, they sense commotion inside Chez Cullen. “Allistair is gone,” Edward informs them. Okay, which one was he? Inside, Carlisle is arguing with Amun. Okay, which one is he? Amun is afraid Carlisle is trying to steal Benjamin from his coven. Okay, which one is he? Carlisle talks Amun down, but Amun vows to switch teams if it comes to a fight. Well, that seems like a fairly reasonable thing to say. When you think about it, what all these vampires were originally doing is just agreeing to testify that RNSM is not a vampire baby but rather a half-human hybrid. If it comes to a fight, what they are instead doing is fighting and possibly dying to protect the future of a relationship between a teenage boy and his infant girlfriend. I can definitely see doing one and not the other.
But S. Meyer tries to write a Lord of the Rings-like scene in which the brave vampires step forward and swear their allegiance to fight—the birth of the fellowship of the fang. Imagine lots of snare drums on the soundtrack. Cutty says he got the sense from Allistair that even if the Volturi are presented with definitive evidence about Renesmee, they'll just attack anyway to get rid of the Cullens. Cutty's come a long way—from believing in the cause of the Volturi to embracing the wildest conspiracy theories about them—in just a few weeks' time! And Allistair's hunch is probably true, since every hunch anyone has ever had in any of these books has always come true.
So yeah, the Romanian guys say they'll fight, Tanya says she'll fight, Tia (whoever that is) says she'll fight. And then Garrett, who I remember because of the sexxxy ponytail, does this:
“This won't be the first time I've fought to keep myself from a king's rule,” Garrett said in a teasing tone. He walked over and clapped Benjamin on the back. “Here's to freedom from oppression.”
Except the Volturi aren't the King, which I know because for one thing there is more than one of them. And also, this is oppression that Garrett only found out about SECONDS AGO! I bet he didn't really even fight in the revolution; he just hears “freedom” and “liberty” and “revolution” and he's already flying his flag at half mast. He'd fit in well with the Tea Party movement. Peter proclaims he and his wife to be undecided, though Charlotte looks miffed and Bella wonders what that means (will we ever find out? Probably not!).
“The same goes for me,” Randall said.
“And me,” Mary added.
WHO ARE RANDALL AND MARY? WHAT THE FUCK? It just gets more incoherent and ridiculous from there. Carlisle and Siobhan have a back-and-forth about how she should visualize a positive outcome—her power, recall, is to achieve her goals through positive thinking, so The Secret basically—and she sarcastically remarks that she doesn't have to choose a side then, since it definitely won't come to a fight. They laugh. So is her power real or just a joke? It's real but they're joking about it? Huh? “Almost everyone else in the room looked mystified by Carlisle and Siobhan's clearly joking exchange,” Bella says. Well, yeah. Sometimes I feel like S. Meyer was writing on a broken computer with no delete key, so instead of just going back and deleting the stupid shit, she offers half-hearted explanations of what you just read. Like every five pages she's going, “Oh shit, how do I get myself out of this one?”
Bella, Edward, Jacob, and RNSM (who travel everywhere together now, double-dating I guess, plus Jacob keeps punching Edward's shoulder, it's weird) go hunting, and Bella has a crisis of confidence as she puzzles through the various hypothetical threats and gestures that comprise this shambling conclusion. She thinks about Demetri's power, and the fact that RNSM can penetrate her (Bella's) brain even though Edward can't, and uh, well, I mean, who even knows what we're talking about anymore? I kind of don't understand the significance of anything anymore. “I was thinking about my shield—you really think it's worth something, that it will help somehow,” she tells Edward. “What if that's a mistake? What if your trust in me is the reason we fail?” Well, now this is just full on incomprehensible; the stakes are so convoluted and rhetorical that they can't possibly be resolved by the end of the book or even really matter at all.
“This thing I have, it's faulty, it's erratic! There's no rhyme or reason to it.”
Is that Bella talking about her shield power, or S. Meyer talking about her book?
Chapter 34: Declared
Bella comes home from J Jenks's office feeling deflated. The hoops Alice made her jump through to (as it turned out) get a fake ID for Renesmee have, if nothing else, made her feel doomed. She senses the enthusiasm coming from the other vampires crowding her house and for the first time feels apart from it. At least I think that is what this sentence is supposed to mean:
As I walked slowly to the Cullen house now, I recognized that the hope and uplift that seemed almost a visible aura around the big white house had been mine this morning, too.
Whatever. She goes inside and lies to Edward that she's been Christmas shopping for their daughter—which is a lie you have to back up, which means she swung by a store and picked up the first thing she could find on her way back from the law office. Plus, Edward says he hadn't planned on celebrating the holiday and Bella says she doesn't want to make much of it, either. Nice parents! Really going out of their way to make the holidays magical for their kid. But anyway she got her a locket. (Maybe J Jenks had one of those machines where you pump two quarters in and a piece of jewelry comes out in a plastic bubble.)
“Here, take this fucking thing.”-Bella Cullen, mom of the year
Page 652 might be the single page I hate the most in the book. Bella ponders her own destruction and comforts herself with the thought that Jacob and RNSM will probably live. “If they had a future, then that was a kind of victory, wasn't it?” NO! You're confusing “a kind of victory” with “illegal in most states” again, Bella! But seriously, look at this insidious thing that has happened: Bella has gone from freaking out about Jacob's imprinting to casual acceptance of it to comfort in the existence of it. All in the space of a few hundred pages, with no significant event or revelation to guide her. Bella gradually changes her mind apropos of nothing, because S. Meyer was really okay with Jacob & Renesmee all along and was only paying lip service to the few fans left who understood how horrific it was.
In fact, what Twilight does is confront you with a morally reprehensible relationship, tell you it is sort of awful, and then gradually try to trick you into thinking it is acceptable. It is, essentially, propaganda for child molesters. It is unconscionable.
And then, on the same page, Bella obnoxiously wonders about the afterlife, decides she can't imagine Edward “not existing somehow,” and concludes that “If we could be together in any place, then that was a happy ending.” This is the same kind of attitude people like Tim Kasher warned us about in Happy Hollow—neglecting to care about or live your life on earth because you're hoping for something better on the other side. And on the other hand, it compounds the issue of Bella being okay with leaving RNSM behind, looking forward to dying alongside Edward. She's like the Haddads and the other estranged Family Radio parents, who are right now having very awkward dinners with the kids they were planning to leave behind. “And so the pattern of my days continued,” Bella concludes. She's right. The pattern of outrage after outrage has kept up for a shockingly long time.
(How did S. Meyer cram this many evil attitudes into one little book series? Sometimes you feel like you have to hand it to her. Then you realize you don't.)
Christmas comes along. There's a funny beat where Bella looks at Charlie's “sparsely decorated tree” and can pinpoint the spot where “he'd gotten bored and quit.” Edward gives Renesmee an mp3 player (a Zune, probably) loaded with his favorite songs (the full discographies of Hoobastank, Linkin Park, Nickelback, etc.), and Jacob gives her... oh god:
On her wrist was an intricately braided Quileute version of a promise ring.
He gives her a FUCKING promise ring. As in, “do you, Renesmee, promise to save your virginity for me?” As in Purity Balls, as in chastity pledges, as in child brides, as in FUCK YOU S. MEYER. UGH. Merry Christmas.
Bella's in emotional shutdown mode, sort of like she was way back in New Moon, coldly observing the festivities. “I wondered how our gathering would have looked to an outsider,” she says. “Did we play our parts well enough? Would a stranger have thought us a happy circle of friends, enjoying the holiday with casual cheer?” Ending a paragraph like that, with rapid successions of questions, strikes me as a very Meyerian writing style, one that I fear has infected my own writing from these 18 months or so I've been writing about it. I mean, how often do I end my paragraphs with questions? Has she affected me in other ways I don't know about yet? What should I do about that?
When Bella et al. come back from Charlie's, they sense commotion inside Chez Cullen. “Allistair is gone,” Edward informs them. Okay, which one was he? Inside, Carlisle is arguing with Amun. Okay, which one is he? Amun is afraid Carlisle is trying to steal Benjamin from his coven. Okay, which one is he? Carlisle talks Amun down, but Amun vows to switch teams if it comes to a fight. Well, that seems like a fairly reasonable thing to say. When you think about it, what all these vampires were originally doing is just agreeing to testify that RNSM is not a vampire baby but rather a half-human hybrid. If it comes to a fight, what they are instead doing is fighting and possibly dying to protect the future of a relationship between a teenage boy and his infant girlfriend. I can definitely see doing one and not the other.
But S. Meyer tries to write a Lord of the Rings-like scene in which the brave vampires step forward and swear their allegiance to fight—the birth of the fellowship of the fang. Imagine lots of snare drums on the soundtrack. Cutty says he got the sense from Allistair that even if the Volturi are presented with definitive evidence about Renesmee, they'll just attack anyway to get rid of the Cullens. Cutty's come a long way—from believing in the cause of the Volturi to embracing the wildest conspiracy theories about them—in just a few weeks' time! And Allistair's hunch is probably true, since every hunch anyone has ever had in any of these books has always come true.
So yeah, the Romanian guys say they'll fight, Tanya says she'll fight, Tia (whoever that is) says she'll fight. And then Garrett, who I remember because of the sexxxy ponytail, does this:
“This won't be the first time I've fought to keep myself from a king's rule,” Garrett said in a teasing tone. He walked over and clapped Benjamin on the back. “Here's to freedom from oppression.”
Except the Volturi aren't the King, which I know because for one thing there is more than one of them. And also, this is oppression that Garrett only found out about SECONDS AGO! I bet he didn't really even fight in the revolution; he just hears “freedom” and “liberty” and “revolution” and he's already flying his flag at half mast. He'd fit in well with the Tea Party movement. Peter proclaims he and his wife to be undecided, though Charlotte looks miffed and Bella wonders what that means (will we ever find out? Probably not!).
“The same goes for me,” Randall said.
“And me,” Mary added.
WHO ARE RANDALL AND MARY? WHAT THE FUCK? It just gets more incoherent and ridiculous from there. Carlisle and Siobhan have a back-and-forth about how she should visualize a positive outcome—her power, recall, is to achieve her goals through positive thinking, so The Secret basically—and she sarcastically remarks that she doesn't have to choose a side then, since it definitely won't come to a fight. They laugh. So is her power real or just a joke? It's real but they're joking about it? Huh? “Almost everyone else in the room looked mystified by Carlisle and Siobhan's clearly joking exchange,” Bella says. Well, yeah. Sometimes I feel like S. Meyer was writing on a broken computer with no delete key, so instead of just going back and deleting the stupid shit, she offers half-hearted explanations of what you just read. Like every five pages she's going, “Oh shit, how do I get myself out of this one?”
Bella, Edward, Jacob, and RNSM (who travel everywhere together now, double-dating I guess, plus Jacob keeps punching Edward's shoulder, it's weird) go hunting, and Bella has a crisis of confidence as she puzzles through the various hypothetical threats and gestures that comprise this shambling conclusion. She thinks about Demetri's power, and the fact that RNSM can penetrate her (Bella's) brain even though Edward can't, and uh, well, I mean, who even knows what we're talking about anymore? I kind of don't understand the significance of anything anymore. “I was thinking about my shield—you really think it's worth something, that it will help somehow,” she tells Edward. “What if that's a mistake? What if your trust in me is the reason we fail?” Well, now this is just full on incomprehensible; the stakes are so convoluted and rhetorical that they can't possibly be resolved by the end of the book or even really matter at all.
“This thing I have, it's faulty, it's erratic! There's no rhyme or reason to it.”
Is that Bella talking about her shield power, or S. Meyer talking about her book?
5 comments:
I don't even know, Man. As always, I marvel that no one held SMeyer to higher writing standards, to let the final draft be THIS weird and awkward and boring.
OR...
Maybe the first draft was infinitely worse! Maybe this *is* the result of rigorous rewrites and a team of editors' focused attention! Maybe this was as good as they could make it!
Remember being in college and having to peer review each other's papers? You'd give your paper to as many people in class as possible and they'd have to read it and give you feedback, and it always sucked because everyone's writing is awful and what can you really do? When every single sentence is the worst sentence you've ever read, you can't really give helpful feedback. "Cover this with lighter fluid and burn it in your backyard" isn't considered constructive, even if it's really the most helpful advice available.
So, maybe these books are like that. Maybe the editors tried and were worn down by how relentlessly bad Smeyer's writing was and eventually were like, "Sure, Whatever. You used the wrong for of 'their' in this paragraph about the toddler being betrothed to the adult, but otherwise looks fine! (Mental note: submit request for transfer to non-fiction department ASAP.)"
Who writes a book series and brings in 20 new characters halfway into the last book? I need to stop making excuses for SMeyer and admit that this is all her fault.
I think they were too distracted by the dollar signs in their eyes to do any serious editing.
Indeed, Kim. How fast do you think they pumped this damn thing out? Meyer maintains she had this story in her all along, added Eclipse and New Moon in the middle. That's a lie, right?
And LOL IRL Kira.
I'm pretty sure she said that part of the adult book that became New Moon also had bits of Eclipse and Breaking Dawn in them. So she took one book and made it into three books. Which I guess would explain all the extraneous filler stuff.
Also, yeah, all the Jacob and Renesmee stuff? What the hell, right? You think you reach a point of incredulous acceptance of the books, but then she manages to top herself.
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