Wednesday, July 6, 2011

BLOGGING BREAKING DAWN, pt. 47: No One Would Riot For Less

Guys, this is the second-to-last installment of Blogging Breaking Dawn. Ahhhhhhhhh!

Anyway, last time, S. Meyer stabbed me in the back with Alice's dildo, using my favorite character to introduce the cheapest plot development ever conceived: Aro wouldn't allow Renesmee to live because no one knew what she'd be like in a few years, so Alice showed up with a new character who was exactly what Renemee would be like in a few years. And this new character said, basically, “Don't worry everybody, I turned out fine.”

HOW CONVIENIENT, RIGHT? It's especially convenient when you think about the fact that when Alice left to go get this fucking guy in the first place, Aro's problem with the Cullens was COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. He (and the rest of the Volturi) thought Renesmee was a vampire baby, not a human-vamp hybrid toddler (it's a big difference, just take my word for it). The rhetorical conceit that RNSM was too unpredictable to be allowed to live is a new development, one that came up as a result of the back-and-forth between the Cullens and Aro on the battlefield five pages ago. What if Alice had showed up ten minutes earlier? The new character she was introducing wouldn't make any sense!

“You have an immortal baby!” Aro shouted. “You must be punished for this transgression.”
“Hi!” Alice shouted. “Hey I found someone who proves that hybrid children grow up to be totally docile and boring!”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” everyone said.
“Aw fuck, I've been drinking again,” Alice admitted.


Chapter 38 (con't): Power

So Nahuel, the hybrid-ex-machina, tells the Volturi about his sisters (yes that's right, there are dozens of other Renesmees out there, and none of these assholes figured it out), who are like him in every way (except they are not venomous? If that matters). He explains that his father thinks of himself as a scientist, creating a new “super-race” in South America. Oh my god, Mengele is a vampire!

Caius suggests they kill Nahuel AND Renesmee and then “follow it south” (“I've got something you can follow south.”-Alice Cullen). But Aro, who always seemed like a pretty good guy and then was briefly evil when S. Meyer needed him to be more threatening, is back to being a good guy again. He shares a long eye-fuck with Bella and then votes that there is no danger and they should go in peace. And everyone breathes a sigh of...relief? No. Confused boredom? Yeah, that's closer to how this feels.

Caius and Aro indicate that they will be speaking with the Nazi Doctor Vampire, and Nahuel is like “kill him but leave my sisters alone,” and Aro is like “word, dog.” And then they fist bump (probably). My god, the Aro thing annoys me so much. He has literally NEVER done anything wrong or bad in any of these books. In Volterra and here in the field, he has allegedly THOUGHT bad things, but never acted on them.* If you wanted to interpret this entire series as the story of an evil vampire (Edward) who misleads his wife and family into thinking Aro is evil in order to accomplish his own agenda (getting a virgin bride and knocking her up with his demon seed) you would actually have MORE EVIDENCE for your theory than S. Meyer has for the book as it stands.

(*That evil thoughts are essentially considered worse than evil deeds in this book is genuinely troubling to me.)

Anyway, Aro tells his guard to stand down, but Bella keeps her shield up. “Maybe this was ANOTHER trick,” she thinks. Shut the fuck up, Bella. As they depart, Aro holds his hands out, “almost apologetic.” Like, sorry for wasting your time with a plot that went nowhere. He tells Carlisle he is sorry to earn his disapproval and hopes they can be friends again. Carlisle says maybe some day. Whoa, what a dick!

Then everybody on Team Cullen erupts into cheers and spontaneous makeout sessions. This is totally Alice's shot at getting in Bella's pants, but Esme is hugging her and Jasper. Cockblocked! (A couple of my Twitter friends were discussing what you would call the female equivalent of cockblocking. Failing any meaningful rhyme with “clit,” I think they arrived at “Twat swat.”) Interestingly, the three South American possibly-lesbians just stand very close together with their fingers interlocked. They don't feel comfortable expressing their feelings around all these judgmental types, I get it.

And I half-climbed the giant russet wolf to rip my daughter off his back and then crushed her to my chest.

EASY BELLA! But am I the only one who took comfort at RNSM being ripped away from Jacob? I sort of hoped the police would be the ones doing it, but whatever. And then Bella and Edward celebrate the fact that they have “forever” to be young and boring and safe, and I think we're supposed to be happy, too. Are we? Be honest: when you first read this, were you happy? It's OK if you were.

Tomorrow: An alternate version of the ending, written by me.

11 comments:

bryan said...

ugh.

Unknown said...

I think I would have been less disappointed if S. Meyer stopped a couple chapters ago and said "I give up! The end."

ZL said...

I'm not imagining how bad this is, right? I mean, HOLY SHIT! This book doesn't reach a conclusion, it just kind of wanders into the desert and dies.

Ally said...

Yeah, I was actually happy that they had their boring eternity ahead of them when I first read the ending. But I was like 12 at the time, so god knows was going through my head.

Anonymous said...

Cunt shunting.

ZL said...

Well played, Anonymous.

Suzette Smith said...

venom discrepancies!

Kim said...

Clam dam? Box block? Cooch mooch?

I can't believe I'm going to defend this choice, but here goes. This ending is terrible. Like a truly, truly awful ending to a truly awful book. However, it would have been so much worse had they had an actual fighting showdown. Of course this entire series, especially this book, was moving towards everything being wrapped up in a pretty pink bow. There's no way a writer as un-talented as she is could have pulled off anything differently. Can you imagine her trying to figure out how to pull off an actual fight? She can't even make the Volturi into legitimate villains, so they can't start the fight. And if the Cullens start the fight, they can't be the saints she imagines them to be anymore. Also, for the fight to be believable, someone would have to die. There is no way they could fight vampires as powerful as the Volturi without losing someone. And you know she'd never be able to write a convincing death and grieving scene. A fight ending would be super out of place. That's not to say I wouldn't have loved to see her try and possibly have killed off both Edward and Jacob. That would have been awesome in a what the fuck kind of way. But, for once, I think she made the right choice, as much as I hate it. There really was no other way she could have gone. Not without rewriting the entire series (which she probably should have done anyway). Ugh.

Queen of Pluto said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
KatieOfPluto said...

Breaking Dawn was the book I actually stopped reading in protest. I read through all three of the books before it. I was fooled by a few teenage girls who apparently loved it before it exploded onto the scene (even before all of the hate it really deserves!) and read through it to see what all the fuss was about. I thought the first three were stupid, but I persisted. I was dragged through all the terrible plotlines, writing, dialogue tags, and boring filler, but I still survived. Then I read Breaking Dawn and refused to go farther than the birth of the demon spawn and the imprinting because I was essentially being asked by S. Meyer to abandon all my common sense for her story.
I just looked up the ending. And you know what? It was ten times more satisfying than it would have been if I had just read it, because I knew at least this way I had saved my precious time that I would have had to waste to get to the end. My god is that ending so crap, unoriginal, boring, pointless, and infuriating. Almost as infuriating as everything before it in total. S. Meyer tried to get me to read a 756 page fanfiction and I refused. So HA!
I still feel unclean and misused though...

ZL said...

Katie, I almost wish we'd done it that way on the blog.

And Kim, isn't it sad that "it would have been worse if she tried" is a PRETTY GOOD ARGUMENT against changing the ending? "Makes me sick, motherfucker, how far we done fell."-The Bunk