In Which I Beg for Sweet Release From Breaking Dawn: Chapter 32 -- Company · 10:43am Jul 23rd, 2018
More and more vamps start hanging out at the Cullens’. Naturally, they need to hunt humans. Jacob’s miffed at the killing, but he shuts up for Nessie’s sake. In the space of three sentences. Really:
Jacob was even more upset. The werewolves existed to protect the loss of human life, and here was rampant murder being condoned barely outside the packs’ borders. But under these circumstances, with
RenesmeeNessie in acute danger, he kept his mouth shut and glared at the floor rather than the vampires.
This is revolting. I can understand Jacob objecting and being overruled, but that’s not what’s happening. He just sits back and lets them kill people without a word. And what about the other werewolves? Would they really think Nessie, Jacob’s imprintee or not, was worth all the murders going on? Are they just okay with this, too? I guess they must be, since their reactions go unmentioned. And Edward actually lends the vampires cars to extend their range without so much as a grimace. Because humans aren’t nearly as important as pweshush Nessie. Adding another multiplier to the Clinginess Meter.
Idea: everyone adores Nessie, right? What if she saw how human-killing was affecting her Jacob and tried to ask the other vampires to only eat animals for the time being. She doesn’t need to instantly convince everybody, but it’d be something rather than shrugging and letting it happen. But no. Humans don’t matter.
We get lots of pages of meaningless names of vampires showing up and agreeing to protect Nessie. None of them are really all that important. One of the vampires is named “Amun”, which is (sometimes) another name for Ra, and now I’m picturing Anubis and Horus just kicking back around the Cullens’. There’s a somewhat amusing bit where Jacob grumbles that, if he’s expected to keep them all straight, someone should provide him with an index… only for an asterisk to point to an appendix that lists all of the vampires. Of course, that’s really just indicative of how indistinguishable everyone is, not a solution. One vampire named Zafrina shows up, who can project illusions into the mind. She briefly does it to Edward to show him her capabilities. Then Nessie speaks up:
RenesmeeNessie was fascinated with the conversation, and she reached out fearlessly toward Zafrina.“Can I see?” she asked.
“What would you like to see?” Zafrina asked.
“What you showed Daddy.”
Zafrina nodded, and I watched anxiously as
Renesmee’sNessie’s eyes stared blankly into space.A second later,
Renesmee’sNessie’s dazzling smile lit up her face.“More,” she commanded.
“‘More,’ she commanded.” Not, “‘More, please,’ she requested” or “‘Can you show me more?’ she asked” or even “‘M-more,’ she stammered, too enraptured for anything else.” Just, “‘More,’ she commanded.” What a bitch.
Bella tries to learn how to fight. Edward can’t teach her, since he has a hard time thinking of her as a target, so Emmett and some of the other vampires help. She also works with Kate to project her shield (Kate, who said she wasn’t very good at it; can none of the other vampires do it?). The training largely amounts to Kate shocking Edward over and over while Bella attempts to block it with varying degrees of success. Edward’s in pain, so I’m happy. Deciding Bella needs better incentive, Kate asks Nessie if she wants to help. Bella gets really angry and envelopes Nessie in her shield… which Kate confirms by asking Edward if he can hear anything from Nessie’s mind. It was all a plan between the three of them. Kate didn’t want to do it that way, but with the time limit, she can’t afford to be gentle. Bella’s still angry, so they go back to only working with Edward, this time with more success. An experiment with Zafrina’s illusions also shows that Bella can expand it to protect multiple people. Everyone’s in awe over Bella’s abilities. Of course they are.
Then they hear Carlisle talking with a new, unexpected group of people: a pair of Romanian vampires who once had an empire before the Volturi destroyed it fifteen hundred years ago. We don’t hear much about it, but I’m suspecting it was evil, since I’ve yet to see anything to imply the Volturi are evil.
The chapter ends with Bella reflecting on all the vampires that have come to help them: twenty-one in all, making it one of the largest gatherings of mature vampires in history. And yet only two or three of the newcomers get any real development. What’s the point in introducing all these characters if you’re never going to use them?
Clinginess Meter: 58 x 6
Chapters Left: 7
It's just so much wheel-spinning, with plenty of opportunities to make you hate the characters more. :C Why.
Eh… I don’t actually think it’s a problem to give names and a bit of background for side characters, even if they aren’t that important to the plot. Let’s take a look at Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone for a moment. Are Dean Thomas and Seamus Finnigan actually meaningful to the story in any way?
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At least in Harry Potter, those characters' introductions were simple and to the point. IIRC, Dean's intro was basically "a black boy even taller than Ron" and about that long. This chapter is nothing but character intros, and long ones, too, with backstory dumps, mentions of relationships, and descriptions of power. Yet 80% of them aren't mentioned at all after this chapter except in crowds in which they presumably appear. Twilight spends a huge amount of time on introduction with almost no time on interaction.
Of course, Harry Potter was actually good, so maybe I'm missing something else.
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There were a few other details given out, but it was spread out instead of being one giant infodump. Dean is muggleborn, he likes soccer, he’s got a team poster on the wall in their dorm. Seamus is halfblood, grew up in a magical household, and was genuinely perplexed by the non-moving poster.
My favorite sort of story is the one where characters make "horrible, immoral" decisions, like letting a few hundred people be devoured out of love for one person, but the issue here is not the story, but instead that the characters doing the devouring should be likable in at least a meta way (like most Jason Statham characters, sure he always plays shitty people, but it is so fun to watch him in action so you pick up the plot line about the girlfriend and how the baddies are super-criminal baddies of the extra-baddy sort and let it excuse everything despite being incidental and half-assed). The reader has to, at least momentarily, think that murders are justified, and that is where the Twilight series failed for me, but apparently succeeded for others, since I cannot find any reason in my heart to care about Renesmee or Bella beyond numbers in a simple calculation where 2=2 and 2 is less than numbers greater than 2, so fuck the guy who is about to be run over by the trolley.
And now I kind of want to see a crossover with American Gods, just so Mr. Jacquel can be repulsed by all of the walking, sparkly corpses.