In Which I Beg for Sweet Release From Breaking Dawn: Chapter 20 -- New · 10:39am Jul 11th, 2018
The moment Bella wakes up, she realizes she can everything much more clearly than she could as a human. Everything’s sharply-defined and she can notice things that were too small before. It’s an interesting idea, but like many interesting ideas in this series, it’s botched. Like in this description:
The brilliant light overhead was still blinding-bright, and yet I could plainly see the glowing strands of the filament inside the bulb. I could see each color of the rainbow in the white light, and, at the very edge of the spectrum, an eighth color I had no name for.
She doesn’t even add a guess like, “…an eighth color I had no name for but was probably infrared.” Stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid.
Bella’s other senses are also heightened; she can smell and hear things she couldn’t before. Basically, her human senses sucked. Bella realizes someone’s holding her hand, but although the fingers are vampire-smooth, they’re the same temperature as she is instead of cold. She reacts reflexively and moves far faster than a human, jumping out of the bed in a fraction of second. For some reason, we need to know that it was “about a sixteenth of a second”. She calms down, embarrassed, when she realizes it was Edward who was holding her hand, and surveys the room; all of the other vampires are there sans Rosalie.
Edward’s face was the most important thing, but my peripheral vision catalogued everything else, just in case.
CM + 1
Alice was peeking around Jasper’s elbow with a huge grin on her face; the light sparkled off her teeth, another eight-color rainbow.
LIGHT DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY. Even with more sensitive eyes, you wouldn’t be able to see a rainbow in white light. Rainbows happen because the frequencies are being separated from each other due to refraction caused by a medium transition, and- Forget it. I’m already putting more effort into this than the story is.
All this was a sideline. The greater part of my senses and my mind were still focused on Edward’s face.
I had never seen it before this second.
How many times had I stared at Edward and marveled at his beauty? How many hours — days, weeks — of my life had I spent dreaming about what I then deemed to be perfection? I thought I’d known his face better than my own. I’d thought this was the one sure physical thing in my whole world: the flawlessness of Edward’s face.
I may as well have been blind.
For the first time, with the dimming shadows and limiting weakness of humanity taken off my eyes, I saw his face. I gasped and then struggled with my vocabulary, unable to find the right words. I needed better words.
Bella’s senses are heightened, but all we hear about is Edward’s fucking face. She doesn’t marvel at small details she missed before, at patterns in the floorboards, at formerly-invisible paint swirls on the wall. She doesn’t talk about how the eighth color makes everything look different. Edward’s stupid face is the only thing that matters. Uuuuuuuuuugh. CM + 1
“Bella?” he asked in a low, calming tone, but the worry in his voice layered my name with tension.
I could not answer immediately, lost as I was in the velvet folds of his voice. It was the most perfect symphony, a symphony in one instrument, an instrument more profound than any created by man…
CM + 1
Bella tries to pull herself together and finds that her human memories feel dim, blurred. This isn’t presented as a terrifying potential loss of identity, but evidence that humanity is weak. She briefly wonders if everyone she knows is still all right, but then Edward touches her and she forgets that and hugs him.
He smiled the kind of smile that would have stopped my heart it it were still beating.
CM + 1
There’s a vaguely interesting bit that doesn’t get followed up on. Bella, noticing that her everything — senses, emotions, physical strength — is more potent, remembers a time when Edward said that vampires were easily distracted. She knows what he means now, now that she can take in so much more. But then she just makes an effort to focus, and poof! No more distractions. Well. Isn’t that convenient. No trouble allowed for our protagonist, no sir. I guess human minds suck, too.
All this Edward-obsessing takes five pages, by the way.
Carlisle reminds Bella that other people exist and comments that she’s very controlled for being a newborn, which is convenient. When he asks if she feels thirsty, Bella realizes that her throat feels like it’s burning. Edward asks if she wants to go hunting with him.
I laughed in a short burst of humor (part of me listened in wonder to the pealing bell sound) as his words reminded me of cloudy human conversations. And then I took a whole second to run quickly through those first days with Edward — the true beginning of my life — in my head so I would never forget them.
CM + 1
Bella says she wants to see (hulgalgh) Renesmee first, but Edward says that’s not a good idea; since she’s half-human, her heart beats and she has blood, so Bella needs to get herself under control first. Bella decides that’s probably a good idea. Carlisle gives a brief rundown of the other people — Rosalie’s downstairs with (helck) Renesmee, Jacob’s still hanging around, and Charlie thinks Bella’s at the CDC in Atlanta. Alice makes Bella look in a mirror and Bella realizes she’s rully rully purty and simply looking in the mirror takes two whole pages. Bella manages to control her shock, which is apparently speshul rare for a newborn. Edward’s disappointed that he still can’t read Bella’s mind.
“I guess my brain will never work right. At least I’m pretty.”
…That is positively hilarious for all the wrong reasons. Anyway, Edward drags Bella away from the mirror so the two of them can go hunting.
Clinginess Meter: 39 x 4
Chapters Left: 19
Eighteen pages. “I wake up. I’ve got super senses! I can see the world in a whole new way, but I only wanna see Edward. Wow, Edward’s hot. Hm, my throat hurts. Should I go hunting? I want to see my baby first, but- Wait, she’s half-human. Better not risk it yet. Mirror! Wow, I’m hot. Anyway, Hottie McHotterson and I gotta go hunting.” Eighteen pages.
Have any of you read, for lack of a better term, transhuman fiction, where a person becomes something other than human and has to deal with senses changed from what they’re used to? I want to see this sort of thing done by a competent author. The closest thing I’ve come to writing that is when a blind character was asked if she’d become sighted if the option was available to her, and (after some deliberation) she said no, because, “I wouldn’t know what I was looking at. I don’t know what my house looks like. I don’t know what the street looks like. I don’t know what you look like. I don’t know what ‘looks like’ looks like.” and I’d like to see how other authors would handle it.
I've seen a number of transhumanish ponyfics, and some of them do fall into this "wow, being human sucked" trap. Though thankfully none of them had Edward Cullen in them.
Also, what do you want to bet that this eighth color is never going to crop up when Bella, say, looks at flowers, but is just there so she can show off her super-special polarized corneas?
Ima backpocket these ideas
Wow.
Wowwie wow wow wow.
Actually, it is possible to see multiple colors in the reflection of a white light source. Go outside on a sunny day and look at the Sun’s reflection on your thumbnail. You should see a multitude of tiny, colorful specks; this is known as a speckle pattern, and is the result of wave interference. Any coherent light source, i.e. one sufficiently small and distant as to produce nearly-parallel incident rays, can produce a speckle pattern, as long as the surface is rough on a scale larger than one wavelength. For more details and examples, click here.
4899154
I bet nothing. Betting implies I'm unaware of the outcome, while this series is laughably predictable when it's not utterly stupid.
4899353
No! You're putting more thought into this than the author has! Stop! (Besides, the phrasing implies that it's a rainbow Bella is seeing, not speckles. Thank you very much for that bit of science, though. Very fascinating.)
4899423
Well, these are Meyerpires, after all. Maybe their teeth are as sparkly as their skin? Or was there something in the first book about sunlight being special? Some kind of fluorescence within a crystal matrix?
... You're right, I should stop overthinking this. Save the science for pastel ponies.