BLOGGING ECLIPSE, pt. 14: Ordnance Tactics

Previous entries can be found in the directory (updated 8/30).

Chapter 10: Scent

Bella and Edward are in mid-playful-argument because Edward is leaving for Jacob's visit; she doesn't understand why they refuse to be around each other. Still holding out for that threesome, eh Bella? When Edward hugs her goodbye, he buries his face in her hair and then laughs. I see what you are doing there, Edward – that's the most polite way of marking his territory he can think of. (And that last sentence was the most polite way of expressing that sentiment I could could think of.) Bella starts doing the dishes and Jacob comes in; there's a running gag where she keeps spilling water all over herself around him, getting soaking wet. Read into that what you will. She observes that Jacob is, as always, half-naked. It's becoming a joke now, like S, Meyer is feeling guilty. Well, starting to feel guilty; she still wants to titillate. This is having your ab cake and eating it too. “Is it so impossible to wear clothes?” Bella says, before mentally admitting that his muscles are “impressive.” See how you can straddle that divide? See how that's what she said?

Jacob explains that it's more practical to just carry around one item - “My clothes don't just pop in and out of existence when I change – I have to carry them with me when I run.” S. Meyer has decided to address the “Incredible Hulk Problem” head on, then. Jacob has a cord around his ankle that he apparently uses to keep his jorts fastened to his wolf-self. Why the jorts, if it has to be one item? Why not make it a jumpsuit, Jacob? All of the werewolves could do it, like a team uniform. Then at least they could go into convenience stores and the like. Do you think Jacob's cutoffs are the kind where the pockets stick out the bottom? I hope so.

He grinned. “Does my being half-naked bother you?”
“No.” I answered too quickly, but I felt like I had a responsibility to all women and gay men in that moment.

Bella starts blushing, which she says is “left over from embarrassment at my own stupidity” and not at all to do with Jacob's abs. I like that Bella's denial is even extending into the narration – she does not speak those lines aloud. Jacob goes and gets the scent of the intruder, and then returns to help Bella with the dishes. He asks her, “What's it like – having a vampire for a boyfriend?” which seems like a line entirely written here so it will show up in a movie later so it can be used in the trailer for said movie. I've been re-watching Weeds, and in the first season Mary-Louise Parker gets stuck with a lot of lines like, “I'm just a mother selling weed in the suburban town of Agrestic!” I guess in case people were just tuning in. This whole conversation is a little like that. But there's a “fuck you” to vampire purists in there too: Jacob asks if they kiss, and Bella says yes.

“You don't worry about the fangs?”
I smacked his arm, splashing him with dishwater. “Shut up, Jacob! You know he doesn't have fangs.”

Take that, Anne Rice! Go bitch about this at the next D&D game, nerds! Jacob continues to question her. (“Is his dick ice cold?”-Where this is heading) Bella gets frustrated. “I scrubbed a boning knife with more force than necessary,” she says. Boning knife! That's some symbolism right there if I've ever seen it. (“If there's a boning knife in the kitchen in the second act, some people will bone by the fourth book.”-Anton Chekov) Jacob brings up Bella's upcoming conversion; she tells him the plan is after graduation. Jacob's fists clench – one of them closing around the knife he was drying off.

So for a while in high school I was working as a cold-side chef at a restaurant, and my friend Brian got a job there too. It was my job to train him, and naturally I was a little too cavalier with my demonstrations. Midway through the day I went to get the pit out of an avocado, and tried to do it with the tip of the knife while holding the avocado in one hand. I don't know exactly what happened, but obviously the knife ended up in my hand rather than the avocado pit. So yeah, all of S. Meyer's descriptions of the deep gash in Jacob's hand hit a little too close to home for me, it's hard to know if it's well written or not. I was mostly just cringing and feeling phantom pains in my hand and scanning the page.

Bella starts insisting they go to the hospital, which Jacob refuses. “You look like you're going to pass out, and you're biting your lip off,” he tells her. It's been a while since we've had a good lip bite! This scene is written like we are all supposed to have forgotten that werewolves can heal, but Bella is the only one who has. Remember that scene in New Moon where Jacob offers to cut himself to show Bella? She doesn't! So when he shows her the pink line where the gaping cut was seconds before, it all comes back to her. She gets out some bleach and starts systematically scrubbing away the blood around the kitchen, like Dexter in a kill room. “We're a bit sensitive to blood around here,” she says. Though I would imagine werewolf blood would not be particularly tempting to a vampire anyway. Jacob says he's going to take off, and goes to hug Bella goodbye. He pushes her away immediately, since she reeks of vampire, nice work Edward. As he leaves he invites her to a party at La Push tonight (talk about short notice! Werewolves have no tact) and Bella is again noncommittal. Jacob bristles this time.

“Is he your warden now, too? You know I saw this story on the news last week about controlling, abusive teenage relationships, and –”

Between this and the jokes about Jacob's constant nudity, there's a weird tension in this chapter. The universe of Twilight is fundamentally bizarre and morally reprehensible, but until now it never seemed like S. Meyer knew it was bizarre and reprehensible. So we could at least give her the benefit of the doubt – the story is batshit because she is also batshit. But the more it seems like S. Meyer is aware of what she is doing, the less sense any of it makes. It's like in Inception when Ellen Page brings the two mirrors together, and Leonardo DiCaprio warns her that the more dream-like (and in a sense, self-aware) she makes the dream the less structural integrity the whole thing has. It's bad enough having Quil Ateara fall in love with a two year old child unwittingly. But to do it wittingly is even worse. I thought S. Meyer was accidentally warping the minds of a generation of teenage girls. Is she doing it on purpose? This dream is collapsing.

Edward returns as Jacob leaves, asking if they got into a fight. Bella insists they didn't, and Edward indicates the bloody knife sitting on the kitchen counter. “Dang! I thought I got everything,” Bella shouts. Dang?

Edward picked up the mail on his way back in – he has an acceptance envelope for Bella. From Dartmouth. Sure, okay. I'm not saying Bella isn't ivy league material, but the fuck-up after fuck-up driving the action in New Moon isn't the strongest endorsement. Hell, her narration isn't the strongest endorsement. I guess college admissions essays rarely have scenes of dialogue, so that minimizes the damage she could have done. My aforementioned friend Brian just graduated from Dartmouth, so I asked him for a react quote to this development.

(617): As a Dartmouth alum, how does it feel to know that in Twilight: Eclipse, Bella gets accepted there?
(202): Never been more proud of my alma mater.

It's very strongly suggested again that Edward bribed the school and Bella will be staying in the Edward Cullen dormitory (which will not be co-ed, obviously), so I'm sure Dartmouth's admissions office is proud too. Bella resists, and Edward tempts her with how proud it would make her parents if she attended for just a year. Dang, he's good. It starts to work, but she shakes it off and maintains that she will be sending a deposit to the University of Alaska, but only as an alibi. When I had to cash in all of my savings bonds and close my checking account to make my first tuition check it was hard enough, and I at least was actually going to college for my trouble. “This whole secrecy and deception thing is kind of a pain,” Bella observes.

Edward's expression hardened. “It gets easier. After a few decades, everyone you know is dead. Problem solved.”

Ouch. But Bella doesn't wilt. Good for her. I don't know if we're supposed to be hoping she won't choose to be a vampire – we're not, right? So far the only reasons against are “it's not nice to upset your parents” and “it's nice to be a parent.” I'll take immortality please, I think my mom will understand.

Bella has to go and re-adjust the washing machine, which gets thrown off balance by the single towel inside. That's a nice detail – who hasn't had to deal with a washing machine like this? (“There are benefits.”-Betty Draper) It's what makes this video so cathartic:

Bella asks Edward to find out where Alice put her pillow and clothes – Edward seems perplexed by the request. He immediately concludes that the vampire intruder must have stolen the items in question; they had her scent on them. (That he doesn't have to ask Alice if she cleaned Bella's room is a little creepy. Edward must do routine brain-scans on Alice, something no normal brother with a sister as whorish as Alice would do.) Bella's not going to get her pillow back? That sucks! I mean, it's also scary that yet another person seems to be after her or whatever, but her pillow? DANG! Edward gets the newspaper and the headline again advertises mass death in Seattle – the police have “no leads.”

“Carlisle's right... yes...very sloppy. Young and crazed? Or a death with?” he muttered to himself.

Obviously it's not that sloppy, if the police have no leads! Edward is convinced it's more than one newborn vampire, and that the Volturi will soon intervene. And nobody wants the Volturi coming for a visit; they're like your relatives who live across the country and only come home every five years and you just do everything in your power to avoid going to that fucking cookout. Edward fears his family might have to do a preemptive strike.

“We don't want to step in unless it's absolutely necessary. After all, it's not our responsibility.”

Right. Dozens of people are being slaughtered just MILES away, and you have super-strength and near invulnerability. What was it that Uncle Ben said to Peter Parker again? “With great power comes hiding from responsibility?” Is that right?

BLOGGING ECLIPSE pt. 13: I Am A Breathing Time Machine

Previous entries can be found in the directory.

Chapter 9: Target

Bella goes back to her house and Charlie in the morning; he makes a big deal out of the fact that Jacob called and left a message: I'm sorry I'm such a dick. Charlie urges her to accept the apology, but Bella declines. Good.

“That's not very attractive behavior, Bella,” he said. “Forgiveness is divine.”

I thought Charlie was a cop, not my grandmother. By the way, telling your friends you wish they were dead: also not attractive behavior. While we're at it we should also add “dogmatically and nonsensically insisting on marriage and no sex before said marriage despite numerous otherworldly elements that one would assume would make registering with the state irrelevant” to that list. “Clawing off the face of your spouse in a bout of (admittedly) magic-induced rage,” is very unattractive behavior, as is “murdering the friends and security guards of your (admittedly) rapist-murderer ex-betrothed.” And “falling in love with a two year old child” deserves a spot near the top. This book is full of unattractive behavior, come to think of it – nobody is really in the position to cast the first stone. I guess Charlie sort of would be, so whatever.

Bella goes upstairs to do laundry and feels like something is amiss when she enters her room. Her pillow is gone, and a few clothing items she left scattered around are nowhere to be found. At first she assumes Alice cleaned and did laundry when she picked up Bella's things for the slumber party, but she doesn't find anything in the washing machine or the dryer. Bella goes searching for a red blouse in particular, but the doorbell rings and she goes to meet Edward. She answers the door with a smile, but Edward has a fierce, “shit is real” scowl on his face. Someone has been in the house – an unfamiliar vampire.

They talk in hushed anguish in the kitchen, and Charlie comes in and mistakes the situation for a fight, which obviously makes him happy. When they leave he's totally going to call Billy with the good news. In another, better book, that whole scenario could be played for that kind of laughter that eventually becomes sadness: Billy and Charlie are both alone, so they get too involved in silly teen dramas in order to distract themselves from their searing pain. But I'm pretty sure S. Meyer is just trying to be goofy here. WOCKA WOCKA. Bella and Edward leave in short order, calling Emmett and Jasper and dispatching them to come investigate further.

The rest of the Cullens and Bella hold an impromptu strategy meeting at Chez Cullen; when they arrive everyone is standing “still as statues in various poses of stress.” So like, a Ralph Lauren ad or something. Alice and Edward have an argument over the fact that Alice failed to see whatever happened; she complains that he's got her watching too much at once as it is. (Notably, Bella doesn't like hearing Edward speak harshly to Alice but says nothing about his sister's retorts. That's because you love Alice, Bella! When are you going to see that? If Edward is going to insist on no longer being an angry, controlling asshole the Team Alice movement is going to be that much more difficult to maintain.)

Everyone wants to suspect the Volturi or Victoria or Voldemort or some other Villainous Vampire, but it doesn't make sense that Alice wouldn't have seen them. Jasper and Emmett return with a scrap of plant – Carlisle smells it and says it's no one he's ever met before. Dude can remember the scent of everyone he's ever met? That's some nose you got there, Carlisle. That's one of the powers vampires have that I would not like: a supercharged sense of smell. Seems like more trouble than it's worth, no?

There are a few interesting character notes in this scene – Rosalie sits tense in the back of the room for most of the conversation, which at first just seems like aloof and bitchy Rosalie being aloof and bitchy. But she sighs with relief a moment before Emmett and Jasper come back in – she was just worried about her man! That's sweet, even if she fell in love with him because he looked like a giant man version of the baby she never got to have. Later, Esme proposes that maybe this vampire meant no harm, picked up the Cullen scent around Bella's house and went to investigate. Emmett asks why he or she wouldn't have just come to Chez Cullen directly. Esme has a very motherly moment.

“You would,” Esme said with a fond, sudden smile. The rest of us aren't always so direct."

But for the most part this chapter is just pages and pages of various Cullens speculating. Carlisle and Esme are cautiously optimistic; Edward and Alice are not. Ashley Greene, Peter Facinelli, Kellan Lutz, Nikki Reed, Elizabeth Reaser and Jackson Rathbone all read this chapter with crossed fingers: maybe I will actually have some lines in this movie!

Bella is overwhelmed by how many vampires there are in the world. Why? There's like, fifteen so far. How hard is that to believe?

How many times did the average human cross paths with them, completely unaware? How many deaths, obliviously reported as crimes and accidents, were really due to their thirst?

Um, it's still a crime if a vampire kills someone, Bella. Does she know that? It seems like she should know that. As they head back to Bella's house, Edward reassures her that everything will be fine, and she will never be alone – one of the Cullens will be watching her at all times. That's kind of weird, isn't it? It turns Bella on; when Edward leaves for a while she's comforted looking out into the rain and knowing that one of them (she names Alice specifically, Alice is outside getting wet, you are welcome) is out there watching (“If I'm going to be out here in the rain you should at least take your top off.”-Alice Cullen).

Next morning Charlie goes fishing (with “Deputy Mark” who I'm sure is an important character who will be mentioned again, just kidding) and Bella tells Edward she wants to let Jacob off the hook. (But not Quil right?) Edward takes the news with “an easy smile.” WHATTA GUY!

She calls the Blacks and Jacob picks up and apologizes profusely. He wants to get together – Bella is noncommittal, thinking about this new vamp and all.

“He's not thrilled with me, is he?” Jacob's voice was ashamed, rather than bitter, for once.

Good for him, learning a little contrition. She puts him on the phone with Edward (do Edward's mind reading powers work over the phone?) and the two of them talk, not sounding entirely hostile for once. Bella (and the rest of us) only get half of the conversation so it reads like an unfunny Bob Hope sketch for a while. The long & short of it is, Jacob and Edward, acting as werewolf and vampire diplomats, are going to redraw the treaty-borders so the wolves can help keep up watch at Bella's house. Jacob's chances of seeing Bella naked just increased five-fold. And Jacob is coming over now, to get the scent of the vampire intruder (Scent of The Vampire Intruder is my new band name). Everyone is getting along, united by a common foe. THAT SURE WAS UNEXPECTED.

BLOGGING ECLIPSE, pt. 12: No, Non Je Regrette Rien

Last time, Jacob told Bella that Quil Ateara had imprinted with a two year old girl. So, he's fallen madly, obsessively in love with a baby. Somehow Bella resisted the urge to bash her head on a rock and get out of this nightmare forever. Where's the kick? Where's the kick? Previous entries can be found in the directory.

Chapter 8 (cont'd): Temper

“You are fucking kidding me, motherfucker,” I hissed, picking up a sharp object and heading toward Quil's house. “That asshole is DEAD, Jacob. DEAD. I am going to fucking END him.”

Okay, well, that is how Bella should have reacted. Instead she's shocked into silence.

“Claire is two,” Jacob told me.
Rain started to fall. I blinked furiously as the drops pelted my face.

Jacob points out that Quil is not actually aging, so he just has to wait a few decades and this girl will draw parallel to him. Bella is “horrified,” talk about an understatement. Jacob tries to placate all of us. It doesn't work.

“There's nothing romantic about it at all, not for Quil, not now.”

He likens the feeling of imprinting to a shift in gravity. “When you see her, suddenly it's not the earth holding you here anymore. She does.”

I'm sorry Jacob, but I was taught that shifts in gravity were supposed to lead to awesome fight scenes, not calls to Child Protective Services.

Joe Gordon Levitt is about to imprint on your FACE, Mr. Projection

And it gets worse. It just keeps getting worse.

“Quil will be the best, kindest big brother any kid ever had...And then, when she's older and needs a friend, he'll be more understanding, trustworthy, and reliable than anyone else she knows. And then, when she's grown up, they'll be as happy as Emily and Sam.”

Awesome. He will be the best big brother ever, until she grows up and he fucks her. Just like all great big brothers! And precisely when will these role-shifts occur? When will Claire be old enough to be Quil's wife? Thirteen? Fourteen? Never? Never would be the appropriate age, I think. Also left unsaid: whether or not Claire will have a face still.

“Doesn't Claire get a choice here?” Bella says. Oh, good point Bella! “Nope,” Jacob says. In so many words:

“Of course. But why wouldn't she choose him, in the end? He'll be her perfect match. Like he was designed for her alone.”

That is so how it works, Jacob. Girls always fall in love with their obsessive childhood babysitters! You can totally make any girl of any age fall in love with you out of sheer force of will. (How did S. Meyer meet her husband, by the way?) If the love doesn't take right away maybe Quil can keep Claire locked in a basement or something UNTIL SHE LEARNS TO APPRECIATE HIS SMOTHERING AFFECTION. I don't know, I'm just spitballing some ideas here! Anyway, Bella is fighting to keep the vomit out of her mouth, so naturally Jacob uses this opportunity to segue into another romantic overture. Nice work, Jacob. “I'll never see anyone else, Bella. I'll only see you. Even when I close my eyes and try to see something else.”

And he's not done yet, gang. Bella somewhat alarmingly pushes past the whole thing about she should probably call the police on Quil and goes out on her motorcycle with Jacob instead. Later they go to Jacob's shed to hang out; they drink soda and make stupid jokes about the shed being “Washington's little Taj Mahal.” Ha ha ha HEY WHAT IS THE AGE OF CONSENT IN INDIA? STILL NOT TWO, RIGHT? WHERE IS QUIL RIGHT NOW? IS SOMEONE KEEPING AN EYE ON HIM, OR BETTER A GUN ON HIM? Everything is normal between Jacob and Bella for all of thirty seconds. But Jacob brings up the treaty and Bella's plans for immortality. In flux though said plans may be, she lets slip that it might only be a few weeks away. Jacob loses his shit, but more than normal. What happens is Bella points out that Edward isn't aging past seventeen and says, “what else can I do?”

His words cracked like snaps of a whip. “Anything. Anything else. You'd be better off dead. I'd rather you were.”

OH NO YOU DIDN'T. “Fuck you!” Bella shouts (well, she should) and climbs onto her motorcycle and zooms off. Good. And that is the last we see of Jacob Black. Right? Guys? Please?

Bella gets soaked in the rain on her way back to Chez Cullen, where Alice is waiting in the garage. She's sitting on the hood of her Porche, apparently saying goodbye to it.

“Jasper and I didn't even get to fuck in the backseat,” she sighed.

She notes that Bella looks like she could use a hot shower – lesbian slashfic authors, start your engines – and asks if she wants to talk about what happened. “You wouldn't even fucking believe me if I told you,” Bella says. I still think Bella needs to make a few phone calls to some state agencies. Instead she goes to sleep.

She wakes up in the middle of the night, realizing she's been transported from Edward's couch to his ridiculous bed. He's there and, she finds his lips in the dark in a paragraph that I will concede is sort of sweet. She can't bring herself to be angry with him, and he apparently isn't angry with her. What is going on? How did these two change back from the self-absorbed nightmares they became in New Moon? They make out instead of fighting, and Edward even cops a feel:

His hand curved around my elbow, moving slowly down my arm, across my ribs and over my waist, tracing along my hip and down my leg, around my knee.

You skipped all of the good parts, Edward! But then he pulls Bella's leg up around his own hip. See how S. Meyer just cleverly avoided saying Bella is now straddling Edward? I see what you are doing there. “I felt suddenly warm,” Bella says. I'm not even going to go there, you already did it anyway. As it turns out, Edward has a nickname for his dick: The Ire.

“Not to bring on the ire prematurely,” he whispered, “but do you mind telling me what it is about this bed that you object to?”

The gold blankets? The butterfly decals? There is a lot to object to, but maybe we should start with the rest of the room. Bella is almost too horny to answer, though. “It's unnecessary” she manages to choke out as he climbs on top of her.

“That's debatable,” he disagreed. “This would be difficult on a couch.”

Whoa, what is going on? What is “this”? Bella is just as confused as we are. “Did you change your mind?” she asks. Translation: “Are we finally going to fuck?” Bringing it up is enough to shut Edward down. “I was just trying to illustrate the benefits of the bed you don't seem to like. Don't get carried away.” (If Edward thinks you can't do that on a couch he just hasn't tried hard enough.) Bella doesn't like having a taste of her own cock-teasing medicine.

“If we're not going to get carried away, what's the point?” Bella says. That's basically the thesis statement of this entire blog so far, nearly 200 posts later. Edward maintains that sex is too dangerous. Mind you, we're still not saying the word “sex,” here. If we can forgive those heavy layers of euphemism, we get some appealingly frank (for Twilight) moments. Bella says she is going to literally die if she doesn't have an orgasm soon (again, in so many words).

“I'll tell you what's dangerous,” I said quickly... “I'm going to spontaneously combust one of these days – and you'll have no one but yourself to blame.”

Somewhere in the house, Alice says “AHEM,” as loudly as possible. Edward apologizes for giving Bella the wrong impression. I think his penis has an even newer nickname: “I don't mind if you want to give me the wrong impression again,” Bella says. But Edward keeps apologizing instead, saying it was silly to have made Alice hold Bella hostage (“Silly and hot!”-Joey Tribbiani).

Bella asks if he's angry she went to La Push. Edward says no, and seems shocked at Bella's suggestion that he would take Alice's Porsche away. “Of course not. It was a gift,” he says. She asks if he wants to know what she did (as in ditching school and hanging out with Jacob), and Edward says she doesn't have to tell him unless she wants to. Whoa. Why is Edward a likeable guy all of a sudden? Compared to Jacob and Quil he already would have seemed like a saint, but now he's like the saint who also killed Hitler. Who is the patron saint of suicide? Any Catholic readers less lapsed than I am?

“I decided that you were right. My problem before was more about my... prejudice against werewolves than anything else. I'm going to try to be more reasonable and trust your judgment.”

“Wow,” Bella says. “Holy shit. This is fucking nuts,” she continues (more or less). We're all very surprised. Edward asks if she's going back to the Rez any time soon, and she says no. She tells him about Jacob wishing she was dead, and he hugs her and says, “I could quite literally kill him for saying that to you.” Tell him about Quil, Bella! But she's far too preoccupied something that came up a few chapter back: the part of Rosalie's story about all the vampire pussy in Denali. At first he doesn't want to answer, and Bella threatens to ask Alice. This happens:

“It's late,” he said. His voice had a little edge to it that was something new. Sort of nervous, maybe a little embarrassed. “Besides, I think Alice stepped out...”

He doesn't want to tell Bella that Alice and Jasper are christening the Porsche after all! I swear that is literally what it is for once. I see what you are doing there, S. Meyer, and I like it! Bella assumes the worst about the sluts in Denali, that some kind of super-ultra sexy Rosalie times 1000 was grinding on Edward all the time. It sounds like she's right: a girl named Tanya made a pass at Edward and got rejected. He reassures Bella: “I prefer brunettes.” So were there any brunettes in Denali? He kisses her until she gets too distracted to ask that question. “You're quite adorable when you're jealous,” he says. Of course he's the kind of dude who gets off on that.

BLOGGING ECLIPSE, pt. 11: You're Kidding Me, Quil

Oh boy. This book has finally gone off the deep end. And I mean wayyyyyy off. We're jumping from a wading pool to the middle of the fucking Pacific Ocean. We're going way the fuck 'round the bend. We're going so the fuck far 'round the bend, we won't even be able to see the bend anymore. The bend will be a dot to us. Little did I realize that Rosalie remembering fondly the sexual glares she got from men at age twelve and her later admission that she was attracted to Emmett because she reminded him of a giant baby were just appetizers, fucking mozzarella sticks before S. Meyer dropped a fucking T-bone steak on our heads. We were building toward the crescendo of motherfucking Chapter Eight, we just didn't know it at the time. Buckle the fuck up.

Previous entries can be found in the directory.

Chapter 7 (cont'd): Unhappy Ending

Rosalie again tries to impress upon Bella the consequences of becoming a vampire: it comes with a mandatory hysterectomy. “You have the choice that I didn't have, and you're choosing wrong!” she says. Somewhere, Alice snorts in disgust and goes back to having great unprotected sex with no threat of conception. Rosalie laments that she and Emmett can't grow old together, surrounded on a porch by grandchildren.

“SO THE FUCK WHAT?” -Alice Cullen, Bella Swan, Everyone Else

I refuse to believe that immortality, super-strength, and super-beauty are overrated. ADOPT! Rosalie's value system is even more fucked than Edward's. “You're too young to know what you'll want in ten years, fifteen years,” Rosalie says. But Bella will only get old enough to regret her decision if she gets older, Rosalie! I know that is a cheap, Pascal's Wager-like way out of the argument, but it also happens to be true. (Unlike Pascal's Wager, that's right I said it, want to fight about it, theologians?)

On the way to school the next day, Alice promises they'll do something fun that night. She worries that if Bella is miserable all weekend Edward will take her Porsche away. Atta girl, Alice. Look out for number one. The rest of these people are beyond saving. Between classes, Mike Newton takes Edward's absence as an opportunity to ask Bella out again. Atta boy, Mike keep fucking that chicken. It's almost like the supporting characters know they are being more marginalized than ever in this book, and in response they are getting desperate. Speaking of weird, Pirandello-lite moments, Bella doesn't get a chance to verbally castrate Mike because suddenly Jacob zooms in out of nowhere on his motorcycle.

Atta girl, S. Meyer! This development is predictable but still somehow unexpected; it reads like Jacob is literally invading the text, tacked on to a totally unrelated chapter like this. He shouts to Bella to get on his (wait for it) bike, and she runs to him, leaving school and Mike in her dust. As they speed off, she sees Alice too far away, shouting “Fuck you, cunt!” (probably).

Chapter 8: Temper

On the Rez, Jacob praises his own ingenuity, which amounted to hearing from Bella that Alice couldn't “see” his decisions and taking advantage of that fact. Still, for Jacob putting 2 and 2 together like that is a giant leap forward. I'm not saying Jacob Black is stupid, but one time he got locked in a mattress store overnight and he slept on the floor. They walk along the beach, and Bella asks jokingly what the latest “pack scandal” is. Jacob stops walking. She realizes something scandalous really must have happened, and Jacob tells her that Quil imprinted.

“That's three now. The rest of us are starting to get worried. Maybe it's more common than the stories say...”

He turns and stares at Bella, apparently attempting to force himself to imprint on her. Gross, I think! It doesn't take, obviously, but he grabs her hand and keeps walking. Bella takes a second to think about how it is probably a bad idea to hold Jacob's hand, but does it anyway because of course she does. If there is some kind of other version of imprinting, where you are irrationally compelled to cock-tease someone with unceasing effort forever, Bella must have imprinted that way on Jacob.

Bella wants to know why it is a big deal that Quil imprinted. Soon she'll be wishing she never asked. Jacob says Quil has been hanging out at Emily's place a lot, and Bella jumps to the conclusion that Quil imprinted on Emily. “No,” Jacob says. It's much worse. Emily's cousins came down for a visit recently, and Bella jumps to the conclusion that Quil imprinted on a cousin and Emily doesn't want one of her family members to get her face ripped off too. That would be understandable, but Jacob says that isn't it either.

But clearly we're building toward something. Did Quil imprint on a guy? Wouldn't that be refreshing? Of course that is not what is about to happen.

Jacob appraised me with narrowed eyes. “Try not to be judgmental, okay?”

I'm bracing myself. Are you bracing yourself? It doesn't matter.

“Claire is two,” Jacob told me.

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BLOGGING ECLIPSE, pt. 10: The Blood-Splattered Bride

Last time, Edward bought a bed at the Ed Hardy store. Previous entries can be found in the directory.

Chapter 7: Unhappy Ending

That night, someone knocks on the door to Edward's room while Bella mopes on the couch, refusing to sleep on the nightmare bed. Hard to blame her. She assumes Alice is coming in (wishful thinking?) but matter of fact, it's Rosalie. If we were ranking ill-defined characters, I suppose Rosalie Hale would be behind Emmett, who in my mind's eye is a muscular blur, and Esme, who in my mind's eye is a maternal blur, but she is definitely in the top five ill-defined characters of this series. Therefore my reaction to this development isn't a positive or a negative one; I feel nothing about Rosalie. The door might as well have been opened by a gust of wind. There are literally more well-defined weather patterns in this book. But all of that changes now. Sort of.

I've mentioned before the way S. Meyer makes tentative stabs at writing the Cullens' dialogue as though they were from another era. Despite Bella's protestations to the contrary Edward rarely if ever speaks in “the gentle cadences of an earlier century,” but Alice occasionally employs expressions and syntax that at least have a 1920s flair about them. Rosalie's dialogue early on in this chapter is the closest to “gentle cadences” we've ever come; she's very turn-of-the-century snob. “He so rarely leaves you alone” Rosalie says of Edward, “please don't think I'm horribly interfering.” One could argue that the Cullens have claimed in the past to be exceptionally good at adapting to new eras, so writing this way doesn't make any sense – Rosalie should be saying “For shiz, homeboy never let you outta his sight, yo” - but one could also argue that the Cullens let their guard down around Bella. One could also argue that no one cares; S. Meyer has bigger problems than her ability to convincingly write deliberately anachronistic dialogue. Are you ready for the most irritating origin story ever written, by the way?

Rosalie wants to tell Bella why she thinks she should stay human. “Did Edward ever tell you what led to this?” Rosalie says, gesturing at her super-sexy vampiric body.

“He told me it was close to what happened to me in Port Angeles, only there was no one there to save you,” I shuddered at the memory.

Interestingly, this is not actually something we've heard before (even though Bella apparently has), that Rosalie was essentially gang-raped to death. Of course we can't actually say “gang rape” - this is another chapter written to sail over the heads of younger audiences, which is fine. Younger audiences don't need to hear about gang rape. Not that S. Meyer is doing them any favors elsewhere. (Insert long rant about the bizarre values imparted by this series, obsession being equated with love, domestic abuse leading to stronger relationships and so on.)

Rosalie proceeds to tell the (supposedly) sad tale of her lost potential – from the start it's clear that she's coming at this from a pretty weird mental space. She says her story doesn't have a happy ending, but none of their stories do. “If we had happy endings, we'd all be under gravestones by now.” Uh, okay Rose. I think Alice (dead in a mental hospital?) and Edward (dead of the flu?) and Esme (dead of suicide?) and Emmett (dead of bear attack?) and Carlisle (dead of vampire attack?) would beg to differ!

So Rosalie was the child of a well-off family with aspirations to be more well-off still in the midst of the Great Depression. So assholes, basically. They saw Rosalie as their ticket into higher social circles; if her parents were alive today they'd be trying to get her a reality show. Rosalie, however, was happy with her status.

“I was thrilled to be me, to be Rosalie Hale. Pleased that men's eyes watched me everywhere I went, from the year I turned twelve.”

WHOA NOW, S. Meyer. Back up. Twelve? Are we sure you want to keep this sentence in your book? The one that millions of people (and plenty of twelve-year-olds) will read? Okay. Rosalie paints a picture of herself as the most self-absorbed horror show on the face of the earth, and she is simultaneously apologetic and nostalgic about it: “I was silly and shallow, but I was content.” Uh-huh. The longer the story goes on, the more ideologically incoherent Rosalie gets. Not unlike this series as a whole.

“I also wanted the material things in life. I wanted a big house with elegant furnishings that someone else would clean and a modern kitchen that someone else would cook in...And I didn't see any reason why I shouldn't get these things.”

Okay, that's all well and good, and Rosalie seems to express remorse for these attitudes. But the ultimate moral of Rosalie's story is still that she is sad that she never ended up getting those things – she was raped by her husband-to-be and his drunk friends and left to die. She wanted to live a life of rich bliss in a Sam Mendes-like domestic hellscape and was denied the opportunity to be the center of that hellscape. Instead she was granted immortality and (one would think) the ability to see the error of her ways, but she neither asked for nor apparently wants either. She still wants the hellscape, even though she knows it is a hellscape! She wants to go back and be a rich asshole and pop out babies and complain about having to fight WWII for the damn Jews! And ultimately, she wishes she was dead (Hey Rose, I don't want to be an asshole, but... There's The Volturi).

Rosalie doesn't understand the irony inherent in a phrase like “ignorance is bliss.” And that would be fine if it seemed like S. Meyer did, but the central problem of this story – I learned something, but actually I learned nothing – isn't really acknowledged. Unless you count all of the “what?” and “huh?” I wrote into the margins.

Rosalie was also super jealous of a poor friend of hers who had a baby. She tells Bella that despite her young age she was ready for motherhood, but she doesn't exactly convince me of her maturity here. Her reasons essentially amount to “my friend's baby had really cute dimples.” Babies were her next “must have” accessory. Babies were so in that fall. So the message she seems to be sending Bella is “get out while you still have fully-functioning lady-parts.” That Rosalie's threat (you won't be able to make babies!) isn't greeted by immediate, derisive laughter from Bella is gallingly sexist, but what did you expect, exactly? All along we've been wondering what exactly the drawbacks are to being a vampire, and here they finally are. You can't start a family the way god intended. This scene needs Alice as a counter-balance.

“Um, hello, babies are disgusting and I've never had to use a condom in my life.”-Alice Cullen

But she is too busy getting laid or high or both to trifle with these bitches. Rosalie keeps talking. I'll sum it up for you. There was this guy, see, and his name was Royce, see, and he was a real mover-and -shaker at the bank. When Royce saw Rosalie, well, she was suddenly sitting pretty, a life of wealth and splendor rolling out before her. Wedding bells started a-ringing soon after Royce started a-courting. But you see Royce, he liked the sauce. And see here: one night Rose was walking home too late at night and she ran into Royce and a couple of his boys and they were all three-sheets and then some. One thing led to another and our Rose found herself lying in the street bloodied up and dying. That's when this cat Carlisle came along, sensing something amiss. Carlisle was the local MD, see, but he and his family didn't mingle much with society. So Rosalie was surprised to find the guy was no ordinary doctor at all, no ma'am, no ordinary doctor at all.

I could point out that Rosalie's story slowly degrades into S. Meyer telling the story herself with an extra layer of quotation marks -

“'Here's my Rose! Rose!' Royce shouted, laughing with them.”

- who tells a story like that? But whatever. When you get past all of the ideological incoherence, the end of Rose's story is pretty cool. She becomes a vampire at the Cullen house, aware enough of her surroundings to hear Edward complaining about Carlisle's decision to save her. Carlisle defends the choice, saying it was “too much waste” to let Rosalie die. “I mean, she's so hot,” he says. Okay, well, that's what he was thinking. It is moderately interesting to learn that at the time, Edward pretended to be Esme's brother. I'm never terribly impressed by S. Meyer's explanations as to how the Cullen's stay inconspicuous. I feel like she should have watched The Wire before she wrote this thing. Or maybe I just shouldn't have watched The Wire. I'm probably the only person wondering about the Cullen family's cell phone policy. Do they their toss burners every two weeks? (“I do, but only because my dealer makes me.”-Alice Cullen) It seems strange to me that Rosalie would still have her original last name – Jasper seems to have adopted it also – especially since apparently it was known in plenty of social circles a few decades ago. Plenty of those people would still be alive. Not in Forks, I guess, but still. It seems reckless. Avon Barksdale would not approve.

"The game is out there, and it's either play or get played, Carlisle."

Anyway, Rosalie mentions that she has a better record than most of the rest of her family – she has never tasted human blood. She says her record is a thousand times better than Edward, bringing back that bad taste in all of our mouths that comes from imagining Edward as a vigilante with a code. It's not the vigilante part that bothers me, it's the idea of what Edward's code would be.

“You are a murderer/child molester, so you have to die.”-Dexter Morgan
“You had sex out of wedlock, so you have to die.”-Edward Cullen

No mention of Alice or Jasper's record. I bet before they found the Cullens they were in the Manson Family or something. But Rosalie has only killed five people: the five men who raped her. Our Rosalie went on a roiling rampage of revenge, see? She hunted down the dastardly doers of the deed, leaving Royce for last and least. She found him well fortified, driven nearly mad with panic as he learned of the mysterious deaths of his brothers-in-arms. She made short work of a couple of his guards -

“Oops – seven murders,” she corrected herself. “I forgot about the guards. They only took a second.”

Ah Rosalie, always having a condescending attitude toward servants, even in your one shining moment. Oh well. Still this whole scene is pretty badass – Rosalie stole a wedding dress to wear when she killed Royce; that is pretty awesome. We have to cling to these details because Rosalie gets ridiculous again pretty quickly, confessing that she didn't like Bella at first because Edward found her attractive, whereas he'd never felt that way toward Rosalie herself. That's a nice wife you got there, Emmett.

Edward was also never tempted by the clan of vampires up in Denali, where Rosalie suggests that there were plenty of females for the taking. “He was balls deep in a vampire pussy,” she says. Bella's mouth tightens into a “hard line.” It's weird that she's troubled by the idea that Edward could have gotten laid a few decades ago and isn't troubled by the fact that he was a confirmed bachelor for literally a century. But whatever. Bella reminds Rosalie that she has Emmett – and Rosalie admits that what attracted her to him in the first place is that he looked like a giant version of her friend's baby. Perfect.