In Which I Tolerate Eclipse: Chapter 7 -- Unhappy Ending · 12:44pm May 6th, 2018
Well, I’m unhappy, so why isn’t the series ending?
Entering Bella’s room, Rosalie says she wants to talk to Bella while Edward’s away, since he rarely leaves her alone and it’s unlikely she’ll get an opportunity like this. Specifically, she’s going to give Bella a more concrete reason as to why she should stay human. And then, guess what: more backstory!
1933. Rosalie was eighteen, and her family was rich because her father had a stable job in a bank.
Her father had a stable job in a bank during the Great Depression.
Her father had a stable job in a bank during an economic crisis caused by banks failing.
Hey, here’s something more logical than that:
Okay, getting back to the story…
Based on what her father said, Rosalie thought that poor people had brought it on themselves by being lazy and not getting jobs. She herself was the daughter of social climbers, and they used her beauty to help with that. She didn’t mind; she loved being shown off, having people stare at her, even when she was a preteen. She could get pretty much everything she wanted with her beauty. But “pretty much everything” isn’t “absolutely everything”; when one of her friends got married and had a baby, Rosalie was jealous for the first time in her life. She wanted a family, like her friend had. Because every female wants babies.
Soon, Rosalie got engaged to Royce King, the son of one of the richest men in town. Her parents were pleased, and so was she. It seemed like she was going to get that family, after all. But one night, when she was walking home from the aforementioned friend’s house, she ran into a drunken Royce and some of his friends on the street, who raped her and left her for dead. (This is still the 1930’s, by the way.) Carlisle found her, cared for her, and turned her into a vampire. When Carlisle explained to her what she was, she stayed with him — after finding Royce and his friends and going all Kill Bill on their asses.
Vampire Kill Bill. Why, Twilight, why couldn’t you have been that? And, no, Rosalie didn’t feed on them. She didn’t spill a drop of blood. She even killed Royce while wearing a wedding dress.
Anyhoo. Why did Rosalie tell Bella this?
“Don’t you see, Bella?” Her voice was suddenly more passionate than before, even while she’d told her unhappy story. “You already have everything. You have a whole life ahead of you — everything I want. And you’re going to throw it away. Can’t you see that I’d trade everything I have to be you? You have the choice that I didn’t have, and you choosing wrong!”
Boom. Nice, concise reason for Bella to stay human. Everything Edward hasn’t been saying. In fact, Bella doesn’t even deny this, but quickly changes the subject. (Side note: Rosalie saved Emmett from a bear attack and brought him to Carlisle because he reminded her of her friend’s baby. And they’re romantically involved. Ew.) Rosalie doesn’t demand Bella stay human, but she does tell Bella to give it some serious consideration.
Bella mopes at school the next day:
Without Edward, the day guaranteed to be unbearable.
CM + 1
But in between periods, as she’s walking to her next class, Jacob swoops in on a motorcycle and tells her to run. Bella quickly gets on the motorcycle and Jacob drives them to La Push before Alice knows what’s going on. Jacob says he remember hearing that Alice couldn’t see werewolves and decided to try to free Bella. (While I can’t argue with Jacob’s motives, it seems like Bella’s already skating on thin ice with Edward, and something like this is really pushing it.) Bella’s ecstatic about her newfound freedom for the day.
Clinginess Meter: 13
Rosalie’s backstorying really annoyed me, not just because of excessive backstorying, but because she tells it like a novelist. She remembers who said what during important events and uses language more suited for prose than speech. If you took out her external quotation marks in those bits, it’d be a standard third-person narrative. Maybe it’s just me, but I really feel like a person’s flashbacks should be filtered through that person. They don’t remember things, they summarize, that sort of thing. (I’ve even seen flashbacks that included incidents that the person flashing back had no way of knowing, which is wrong wrong wrong wrong WRONG.) They don’t talk like a narrator. Nobody talks like a narrator.
Also, Vampire Kill Bill. WANT.
Time to make it happen yourself! Twilight fanfiction is really popular, from what I hear... :V
Why did Meyers use a bank? I don't think ANYONE would have trusted banks for a good while after 1929