In Which I Beg for Sweet Release From Breaking Dawn: Chapter 26 -- Shiny · 10:43am Jul 17th, 2018
Before Charlie leaves, he and Bella briefly talk about how much to tell Renee. They decide no more than is necessary; Charlie says he’ll think of something. He asks to hold Nessie for a moment, and… Ugh, this is creepy:
I could see it in his face — I could watch it growing there. (I know, you just said it.) Charlie was just as helpless against her magic as the rest of us. Two seconds in his arms, and already she owned him.
Thankfully, though, he still has the sanity required to call her “Nessie” rather than that other name, that name in some unspeakable eldritch tongue.
Once Charlie’s gone, Bella’s shocked she could keep it together for so long around a human, as are the other vampires:
“Edward, I did it!”
“You did. You were believable. All that worrying over being a newborn, and then you skip it altogether.” He laughed quietly.
“I’m not even sure she’s really a vampire, let alone a newborn,” Emmett called from under the stairs. “She’s too tame.”
Why all the praise? Even if it’s impressive, why are they still praising her, after the bit with the hikers? She doesn’t even need to fight against her thirst all that much, so it’s hard to get any feeling that she deserves it. It’s like being praised for going up a step on a staircase.
Edward points out that it’s unwise to antagonize the strongest vampire in the house. Emmett scoffs, so Bella challenges him to an arm-wrestling competition. She wins easily and starts laughing, enthused at finally being good at something. She’s always felt mediocre, but as a vampire, she shines. You know, it would’ve been nice if we’d seen a desire to blossom and be noticed in between all the gushing and slavering over Edward.
No, seriously. Bella has expressed no interests outside of Edward. She hasn’t tried anything. Extracurricular activities? None. Spending time with friends? Nope. “Hey, Edward, I just want to spend this night alone and read/whittle/do katas, if you don’t mind.” Ha ha, seriously? This scene about shining feels like the culmination of a character arc that was completely sliced from the book. It doesn’t have any meaning; it’s more, “Hey, lookit me! Lookit how speshul I am! Yeeeeeee!”
Clinginess Meter: 50 x 5
Chapters Left: 13
Short post is short, but because the chapter is short, not because it’s padded. Anyway, we’re seventy percent of the way through the book… and what’s happened? Bella and Edward got married. During their honeymoon, Bella got pregnant. The baby nearly killed her, but the Cullens figured out how to save her. Jacob kept Sam’s pack away. During the birth, Bella had to be changed into a vampire. She adjusted to vampiric life and learned that the baby was growing quickly. And that’s it. We are four hundred and seventy-five pages through the book and almost nothing has HAPPENED. It’s static, meaningless noise and even less engaging. Nothing truly changes. Nobody grows. It always shifts back to square one, maybe square two or three.
I swear. I started reading this series to learn stuff. “Have a plot” is NOT something I need to learn.
More trivia!
- Jimi Hendrix, being left-handed, restrung his guitar so that the strings were in reversed order. This contributed to his sound slightly; his favorite guitar, the Fender Stratocaster, had a slightly tilted pickup, giving each string a unique sound when picked. Hendrix’s left-handed playing and swapping of the strings switched around which unique quality went with which string.
- Tony Iommi of Black Sabbath (also left-handed) lost the tips of the middle and ring fingers of his right hand in an industrial accident when he was a teenager. Although he considered giving up guitar entirely, he fitted thimbles to those fingers to help him play.
- Michael Bay directed the first “Got Milk?” commercial.
- If you took all the gold mined in the world, ever, and melted it into a cube, that cube would be shorter than a tennis court is long (but longer than a tennis court is wide) along each side.
- During the production of Toy Story 2, all the files happened to be deleted from Pixar’s servers by accident thanks to an improperly-run command. The backup system failed, too. Luckily, an employee just happened to have had a baby recently and had been working from home with her own backup files, updated weekly. The vast majority of the work — two years’ worth — was recovered.
- According to the ancient Egyptians, a person’s shadow and name were valuable parts of their soul.
- Before Mad Max: Fury Road, the most recent films of director George Miller were Babe: Pig in the City and the Happy Feet movies, which creates amazing images in marketing. The film itself was so heavily storyboarded that it had no script.
- The name of Fall Out Boy’s “Thnks fr th Mmrs” came from when an executive complained that some of their song titles were too long (and with titles like “A Little Less Sixteen Candles, a Little More ‘Touch Me’” or “I’m Like a Lawyer with the Way I’m Always Trying to Get You Off (Me & You)”, it’s hard to blame him). The band responded by removing the vowels from “Thanks for the Memories”.
- To achieve its dark visuals, Batman: The Animated Series was drawn with light colors on black paper, rather than dark colors on white paper. The voice of that incarnation of the Joker was originally Tim Curry.
- If you replace every mention of “the Force” in Star Wars with “the Plot”, the dialogue actually makes more sense.
- A chickadee may make its chick-a-dee-dee song to warn others of nearby predators, in which case the number of dees indicates threat level; the more dees, the more dangerous the predator.
- Printing your own money is perfectly legal in the US, as long as you don’t claim it was issued by the US government.
In any case, Nessie does seem to be a few judiciously applied apostrophes away from being a full-fledged eldritch horror. She has the narrative singularity powers of both of her parents. I'd wonder about Charlie not saying anything about his granddaughter's contact telepathy, but his brain currently has the consistency of warm cream cheese.
The real irony of it is, last fall we watched as two neutron stars collided, producing an amount of gold roughly ten times the mass of the Earth. And yet, by mass fraction, gold is still one of the rarer natural elements.
4902568
Ooh, really? :O Where did that happen?
4902564
I vaguely recall Bella telling Nessie not to say anything to Charlie, but I don't care enough to go back and check.
As for Nessie's singularity-ness... would you believe she still manages to get worse?
4902624
Normally I wouldn't, but I won't put anything past this series.
4902582
Last year, on August 17, LIGO detected the gravitational wave signature of two colliding neutron stars just before SWIFT detected a gamma-ray burst. The concurrent detections enabled scientists to pinpoint the optical counterpart within less than a day. Studying the spectrum of the remnant as it evolved told us the composition and shape of the cloud of material ejected from the collision. That's the highly simplified outline. If you want to know more, just search for "LIGO neutron star merger". All the eggheads, myself included, were talking about it for months.
4902624
Yes, though I fail to see how.
I am to understand that people enjoyed reading this filth?
4902694
people* also enjoy reading bad self insert Displaced fanfiction, what is the surprise?
4902642
Nice :D
Here's a Wiki link for those whose google is weak :B