In Which I Read Twilight: Chapter 21 -- Phone Call · 3:27pm Feb 12th, 2018
After a little more waiting, Alice gets another convenient vision of James in another room. When she sketches out the room, Bella recognizes it as her mother’s family room; James is going after Renee to get to Bella. Fortunately, the rest of the Cullens will be arriving in Phoenix soon. (Side note: there’s two or three more times when Bella says something stupid about Edward’s absence, like, “Just a few more hours to keep breathing till he was here.”, but I’m giving up commenting on them. New Moon is definitely having a Clinginess Meter for that.)
The phone rings again, but this time, it’s Renee, asking for Bella. Alice gives the phone to Bella, only for it to actually be James; he’s already captured Renee, as she arrived home early. He asks Bella to get rid of Alice and Jasper and head over to her house. Near the phone, there’ll be a number she can call for further instructions. Throughout the whole call, James is probably supposed to sound menacing, but it’s just boring, like he’s trying too hard.
You know, I really don’t know what James is trying to accomplish, here. All Bella has to do is say to Alice and Jasper, “James has my mother. He wants me to ditch you and go to my house. There’s a number there he wants me to call. If he sees you with me, he’ll kill my mother.” And then they can formulate a plan from that. Hell, they already know where he’ll be, thanks to Alice’s visions: at the ballet studio. Here’s my idea, which I cooked up in just a few minutes: They go to Bella’s house together. When Bella goes in to call James, Alice and Jasper run for the studio as fast as they can and jump James while he’s on the phone with Bella. Boom. Problem solved.
Wait, no. Not Alice and Jasper run for the studio. All the Cullens and Hales run for the studio. They’ll be here from Forks in a few hours. Wait until then. Have Edward use his mind-reading to track down James so they can evade him. Seriously, the only advantage James has is that he has Bella’s mom. And if he kills her, he doesn’t even have that. The Cullens have numbers and powers.
Anyway, Bella agrees to James’ demands for some reason. She tells Alice that Renee’s okay, if a bit worried, and she convinced her to stay away. She writes a letter to Edward explaining herself and her actions, telling Alice it’s for her mom and to leave it at the house. She’s very torn up about it all and gets stupidly melodramatic:
I folded the letter carefully, and sealed it in the envelope. Eventually he would find it. I only hoped he would understand, and listen to me just this once. (Those poor, poor misused commas.)
And then I carefully sealed away my heart.
And that’s the chapter. Ten pages or so of not much. (Yes, all of the above took ten pages.) Most of it’s taken up by James reiterating to not bring any company and trying to be scary. But there’s a problem with that: scary villains do stuff so we know they can back up their words. Darth Vader’s second scene had him choking a guy to death by lifting him two feet off the ground. Every level in Alan Wake’s American Nightmare has a scene where its villain, Mr. Scratch, does something terrible, like going to the hotel room next to his and murdering everyone there because their partying is too loud. Immortan Joe in Mad Max: Fury Road distributes water in a deliberately inefficient way so his subjects will fight over the few drops they can acquire, then mocks them for wanting water in the first place. Vaas in Far Cry 3 captures Jason and his friends to sell into slavery, shoots Jason’s brother in front of him during an escape attempt, and gloats about it. James? James hasn’t really done anything. Okay, yeah, he’s kidnapped Renee, but that happened offscreen, and things that happen offscreen are never as memorable as the ones that happen onscreen. At this point, James is just a lot of hot air.
Guys, why didn’t you take my advice and beat the stuffing out of James when you had the chance?
I've got nothing. I'd try to think of a How it Should Have Ended, but we'd have a far shorter book. I'm getting the feeling that Gloaming would be a short story.
Guess we can add "actually menacing villain with backup" and "significantly less OP Cullens" to the list of changes for the hypothetical rewrite.
Oh god, you're going to read the next book, too? D: Is there no end to this or your madness?
4795072
As well as "have less Cullens to begin with". Considering they don't get a lot of development, combining some of them would not only make a more dynamic character, but reduce the overall strength of the Cullens.
4795073
Sure there's an end. Breaking Dawn. I said I'd read the whole series. Don't worry, I'm frequently intervening on myself with better stories (Harry Potter, Artemis Fowl, Heartstrikers, horse fan words in my backlog) so I don't go mad(der).
4795079
Oh, good. ._. At least you're Twilight-ing safely.
I can't really blame Bella for not being a tactical genius. She's young, dumb, and desperate. That said, the Cullens planning around that young, dumb desperation would be nice.
4795072
To say nothing of "conflict showing up earlier than the last quarter of the story."