In Which I Beg for Sweet Release From Breaking Dawn: Chapter 18 -- There Are No Words for This · 10:41am Jul 9th, 2018
…There really aren’t. This is ugly.
Held up by Rosalie, Bella starts convulsing. Edward, Rosalie, and Jacob run her to a ward-like room while Alice calls Carlisle. Edward screams for morphine. Which is a painkiller, not a sedative. Bella is going to be awake for all this. She screams at them to get the baby out. Rosalie grabs a scalpel and cuts Bella’s stomach open, but the scent of blood gives her pause. Jacob quickly pushes her into the hallway (she keeps enough control to not resist), where Alice drags her away. You know, based on the previous ways threats have been dealt with in this series, I half-expected Jacob to throw Bella across the room.
Bella’s choking; Edward tells Jacob to do CPR. Before he can start, a crack signifies that the baby’s broken Bella’s spine. What is it with the sudden tone shift in this chapter? Jacob gives Bella mouth-to-mouth as Edward continues what Rosalie started. Finally, Edward takes the baby out of Bella. It’s a girl: Renesmee.
Dammit. Renesmee is still a stupid name.
Bella, still barely alive, weakly asks to hold (gack) Renesmee. She gets a moment before (hulgh) Renesmee bites her. Edward pulls (jeeg) Renesmee away, reprimanding her and giving her to Rosalie (who just came back) to watch. However, Jacob hears Bella’s heart and breathing stop and continues CPR. Out of desperation, Edward takes a syringe filled with his venom and attempts to save Bella with a shot to the heart and he’s to blame; readers, he gives loo-oo-oove a ba-ad name. Jacob continues with the compressions, but it feels harder, like her blood is congealing. Eventually, he gives up, feeling no more draw to Bella, and leaves.
I felt empty again, now that I’d lost my purpose. Saving Bella had been my fight for so long now.
CM + 1
Jacob’s ready to just leave the house, run away, and never come back. However, he passes Rosalie, and notices that she’s feeding (bleag) Renesmee blood. Jacob snaps and decides to kill both of them — Rosalie for being so protective of the baby, the baby for killing Bella. He monologues for three pages about this before actually doing anything. As he moves toward them, (yech) Renesmee looks at Jacob and he sees that her eyes are the same color as Bella’s.
And then Jacob imprints on Renesmee.
Really.
What the fuck. What the fucking fuck. WHAT THE FUCKING FUCKER FUCK. WHAT THE FUCKING FUCKITY FUCKER FUCK. She’s a newborn baby and he’s almost an adult and the universe has decreed that they should be together.
I don’t know what to say. This is wrong wrong wrong wrong WRONG. There are no words for this. And just when you think it couldn’t get any worse, the actual description of the imprinting reads like something out of a horror story:
Everything inside me came undone as I stared at the tiny porcelain face of the half-vampire, half-human baby. All the lines that held me to my life were sliced apart in swift cuts, like clipping the strings to a bunch of balloons. Everything that made me who I was — my love for the dead girl upstairs, my love for my father, my loyalty to my new pack, the love for my other brothers, my hatred for my enemies, my home, my name, my self — disconnected me in that second — snip, snip, snip — and floated up into space.
I was not left drifting. A new string held me where I was.
Not one string, but a million. Not strings, but steel cables. A million steel cables all tying me to one thing — to the very center of the universe.
I could see that now — how the universe swirled around this one point. I’d never seen the symmetry of the universe before, but now it was plain.
The gravity of the earth no longer tied me to the place where I stood.
It was the baby girl in the blond vampire’s arms that held me here now.
Renesmee.
CM + 1, and adding… two multipliers. This is messed up. I’m honestly considering taking that first paragraph, nearly word-for-word, to show someone’s viewpoint as they fall victim to mind control.
And that’s where the chapter ends, thank heavens.
Clinginess Meter: 32 x 4
Easily the worst, ugliest chapter in the series yet, and that’s saying something. The tone shift to bloody horror is sudden and jarring, the “birth” is disgusting and downright unpleasant, and the imprinting is so damn creepy. I really don’t have anything to say that isn’t obvious.
This chapter sounds like something I'd write.
Minus the romantic infant pedophilia. Even I don't go there.
To be fair though. I've been present at a birth. There is a lot of body horror involved.
Isn’t that basically what’s actually happening?
[Viva Reverie]: oh no she’s deaaad
I mean, I'd be more skeeved out if this hadn't already happened (isn't someone else imprinted on like a toddler?), but fuck's sake, what is wrong with this author?
Not to mention how none of this makes any logical sense D:
Screw love, Edward gives LIVING a bad name. Oh wait...
Not even the creator of XKCD could come up with a name dumber than Renesmee.
Well, now I'm burdened with the knowledge of where that incredibly dumb name came from.
I'd heard about the – eugh – imprint. My stepmother had an inexplicable love for this series.
So, were these werewolves created to be some kind of race of slaves and bodyguards? That's about the only reason I can see for what I can only describe as self-mind-rape.
I'd say I need a drink, but I don't drink. How did this woman write this crap? How are you still reading it with an intact liver? You, sir, are made of sterner stuff.
4897823
Yeah, only this one's supposed to be horrifying and make your skin crawl.
4897897
One werewolf thinks it's genetic; werewolves imprint on whoever's supposed to be the most genetically compatible to carry on the werewolf gene, so they're forced to be whatever the imprintee wants. How are they able to tell it from sight alone? Don't worry about it. That's not the worst genetics fail in these books.
I don't drink, either. And nothing in the world can make me drink, because alcohol is one of the most disgusting things I've tasted. I've survived through a combination of spacing out when I read, reading much much better books, and doing writing of my own (bouncing between heisting, home invading, and garbagemares IN SPACE).
Yeah, yeah, yeah! I was waiting for you to get to this chapter ever since I saw you were reading the series!
Although, you really downplayed the violence here. Jacob doesn't just push Rosalie out of the room, he jumps (over a table!) and tackles her, gets a few kicks in for good measure, then she gets grabbed by the throat and dragged away. Also Edward breaks Jacob's hand. It's like an underground cage fight happening around a difficult childbirth, and it is wonderful.