In Which I Beg for Sweet Release From Breaking Dawn: Chapter 28 -- The Future · 10:50am Jul 19th, 2018
Edward and Carlisle are unable to find Irina, so they let the matter drop. Days go by with nothing bad happening, so the Cullens decide to go about business as usual. But one day, while arranging some vases, Alice gets a vision so shocking that she drops one: the Volturi are coming for the Cullens. All of them. They’ll be arriving in about a month. Because there’s so many of them, it can’t just be to check up on Bella’s current life/undeath status; it’s about Nessie. When Irina saw Nessie hunting with Jacob and being too graceful to be a human child, she thought Nessie could be an immortal child. You know, one of those things that was mentioned twenty-five chapters ago and never again.
Except Nessie was being trained to hunt animals, and one of the most dangerous things about immortal children was that they couldn’t be taught. She has brown eyes (which Irina, with vampiric super-vision, should’ve been able to see) rather than red or gold. And in spite of it being a clear day, she wasn’t sparkling. At no point should Irina have thought Nessie was an immortal child. Something new and possibly dangerous? Yes. But not an immortal child.
Anyway, Irina (for some reason) thinks Nessie’s an immortal child, and since the Cullens are friends with werewolves, the enemies of vampires, it could mean nothing was beyond them, and so she told the Volturi. With so many people coming, it’s probably going to be a show trial followed by summary execution for everyone involved. Yay! Wait, that includes Alice. No!
So given how dangerous immortal children are, why are the Volturi waiting a month to send everyone? This is the kind of threat that should be nipped in the bud. Aro should send one of his many subordinates over now, just to be sure. And that’s not even taking into account the way Carlisle left the Volturi because he couldn’t convince them to veg out and only eat animals. When Aro saw Edward and Alice at the end of New Moon, they had golden eyes, showing that they were still eating animals. Carlisle creating an immortal child would be very unlike him, and Aro knows this. Furthermore, Aro and Carlisle are friendly with each other; Aro wouldn’t want one of his friends to be killed just like that.
Bella angsts about having problems.
Was this the limit, then? I’d had more happiness than most people ever experienced. Was there some natural law that demanded equal shares of happiness and misery in the world? Was my joy overthrowing the balance? Was four months all I could have?
CM + 1
The Cullens quickly put a plan together: ask all the other vampires they know to stand beside them against the Volturi, give the Volturi reason to pause, and take advantage of the hesitation to explain their case.
Why fight? Carlisle knows Aro. Call him. “Hey. Aro. You know the immortal child Irina told you about? She’s not an immortal child. If you come here peacefully, I can explain. Actually, I’ll just let you read my memories. You can see her growing.” And they’ve even got a scrapbook documenting Nessie’s growth for physical evidence. Plus, Aro’s been willing to bend the laws for the Cullens in the past (if he hadn’t, Bella would’ve been killed in New Moon for knowing about vampires), so there’s no reason he shouldn’t let them state their case.
Alice can’t see the future, as Jacob’s coming over, so she grabs Jasper and runs away to get a clear view. Jacob arrives, sees everyone’s condition, and Bella dully explains that everyone’s going to die. Leave Alice alone, and I’ll be fine with that.
Clinginess Meter: 55 x 5
Chapters Left: 11
So we finally get to an actual plot, and already, it’s built on stupidity and contrivances, to the point that I spend more time picking out plot holes than doing any actual summary. Sounds like Twilight.
Small post, so you know what that means!
- Die Hard is based on a book (Nothing Lasts Forever) that’s not only a sequel, but a sequel to a book (The Detective) that had already been adapted into a movie over a decade earlier. Starring Frank Sinatra as the character that would get retooled into John McClane. In fact, A Good Day to Die Hard is the only Die Hard movie that began life as an original script.
- The EULA of iTunes forbids you from using it to design or make nuclear, missile, chemical, or biological weapons. This is due to the strong encryption software used in its DRM, as strong encryption is classified as a weapon under US law.
- With only eighteen minutes of screentime as Hannibal Lecter, Anthony Hopkins holds the record for the smallest role to win the Oscar for Best Actor.
- The Hollywood Sign originally said “Hollywoodland” and was an ad for real estate put up in 1923. It was only meant to stay up for eighteen months, but its construction coincided with the beginning of the Golden Age of Hollywood, so recognition meant it stayed up, even as it fell apart. Reconstruction efforts in 1949 took down the “land” part.
- “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo” is grammatically correct. It relies on an old meaning of “buffalo” that’s a synonym with “to bully” or “to bother”: “Bison from Buffalo that bison from Buffalo bully, themselves bully bison from Buffalo that bison from Buffalo bully.”
- It’s nearly impossible to find comics of The Far Side online because Gary Larson put out a polite letter explaining that his comics are like his children — and finding one on a website, unauthorized, is like one of those children calling at 2 in the morning with a problem in the next state over. The fans respected his wishes.
- The Lord of the Rings was supposed to be shorter than The Hobbit, but, as Tolkien put it, “the tale grew in the telling”. Technically, it’s all one book, and was originally going to be published as such, but had to be split due to paper shortages.
- Nicolas Cage is Francis Ford Coppola’s nephew. He changed his last name (to that of Luke Cage) to avoid nepotism.
- R. Lee Ermey was one of the few actors Stanley Kubrick ever allowed to go off-script. He was originally brought in as a technician to help the actual actor playing the drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket, only for Kubrick to see his tapes of him screaming insults at the camera nonstop for fifteen minutes without flubbing or repeating himself, getting pelted with rotten fruit all the while.
- Originally, Friendship is Magic was going to have a running gag where Pinkie Pie would eat too much sugar, get hyper, and plow through the door of Sugarcube Corner, forcing the Cakes to repair it every episode.
- Admiral Yamamoto of the Japanese Navy in World War II was opposed to attacking the United States due to various factors, saying that he could run wild across the Pacific for six months, but couldn’t guarantee anything after that. The Battle of Midway, the first major Pacific victory of the Allies against Japan and the turning point of the Pacific theater, ended six months to the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
- William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes (author of Don Quixote) died on the same day: April 22, 1616.
Ugh, it's probably not important, but who is Irina again? <.<
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A convenient background character who conveniently briefly showed up last chapter, conveniently had a history with immortal children, and conveniently thought Nessie was an immortal child and told the Volturi about it. Think that's vague? I was actually reading the books and she showed up so little and so inconsequentially before now I couldn't remember who she was. That first sentence is all we really know about her, plus the fact that she has some vampire "sisters". She's a plot device, plain and simple.
Thank goodness they dropped that literal running gag with Pinkie. It would've gotten old really fast.
Also, wow. Meyer didn't even try to hide the shipping manifest for this manufactured conflict, much less the serial numbers. I guess she wasn't paying any more attention to the details than anyone else.
Y'know, the random trivia at the end almost makes up for the reminder that the Twilight franchise exists. Did Meyer ever get to making that ctrl+f genderswapped Twilight? Or did she mercifully lay it to rest?
Are vampires allergic to phones or something? This whole manufactured conflict could be over in minutes.
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She published it. One thing she laid to rest, however, was a version of the first book from Edward's perspective, Midnight Sun. After the first twelve or so chapters got leaked, she said she couldn't complete it.
4903893
Ah. That was my mix-up. I'd forgotten about that second one, likely because it sounded similar enough to the first in concept.