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LKH's Dancing
So I got LKH's Dancing because I am curious and also do not know what is good for me. What follows is my sort-of sporking of it, necessary to get myself through the thing:
1) Anita is taking Micah and Nathaniel to a party at the cop Zebrowski's house. Zebrowski's wife, Katie, hand-picked the guest list to be comfortable with Anita bringing two men she's porking. Because everything revolves around Anita's sex life.
2) They're bringing that little kid, Matthew, the son of single mom Monica. It is remarked that he wants to grow his hair long to be like Nathaniel. I'm going to have to add pedophilia to that long list of disturbing crap in Anita Blake books, aren't I?
3) Nathaniel's eyes are lavender. Not blue. Lavender. We must understand that they are lavender, which is not blue, but is lavender. Also, Nathaniel is superhumanly gorgeous and I think he's grown two inches. Oh and the "other wives" treat him like he's a "wife" too. Because being domestic = being the woman, even when you're a cis man like Nathaniel is. And Nathaniel made a bunch of salads with lite or no mayonnaise in them to be "healthy", and we're told about these at length too. LKH seems to think salad = mayonnaise. I'd hate to see how she'd make a fruit salad.
4) It's also important that we understand that Micah's eyes are both yellow and green and don't look human. This is not as important as knowing that Nathaniel's eyes are lavender, however. She slobbers significantly less over Micah than over Nathaniel. Also, Micah seems to have shrunk. I remember him being described as extremely muscular in other books. In this one, he's just bulked up a little. Hmmm.
5) It's a relatively cool August evening for St. Louis, Missouri, which LKH thinks is still hotter than "most of the country" in August. The average August temperature for St. Louis is 89 in the day, 68 at night. Does she think the "rest of the country" is Escanaba?
6) The name of the group Micah's head of is dumb. "Coalition for Better Understanding Between Human and Lycanthrope communities". That would be CBUBHLC. It sounds like someone throwing up. It should be "Human Lycanthrope Alliance" or something, not this ridiculous name that looks like a parody.
7) Anita tells us houses in American suburbs are vaguely alike, because she is a snot who looks down on everything that is not precisely like her. I don't like suburbs either, but I don't see the point of this insult.
8) We are informed that Nathaniel and "the other 'wives'" will be inside doing domestic stuff while the men are outside grilling. Anita claims "most cops like traditional roles." I don't know any cops, but somehow I think that Anita is full of shit. LKH is the one who likes so-called "traditional roles", and so that's what her manly masculine penis-bearing macho mens of cops like too. She claims that cops are so sexist (my word, not hers) because their jobs are full of "weird shit".
9) Anita claims that she used to be conservative but isn't any longer. To this I say HAH. Having a flippin' harem, some of whom you've mind-raped into being your total slave, isn't progressive. Neither is thinking all man stuff is good and all woman stuff is bad. It's not conservative either. Your life isn't some shining beacon of liberation, Anita; it's just fucking disgusting.
10) Being a single mom, Monica is not competent to take care of her child. Nathaniel is the one who decided to bring Matthew because there will be other kids at this party. Was Monica asked? Who knows? Also, why is Matthew not in preschool?
11) "Once the car was stopped I undid my seat belt. That was the signal for everyone else to undo theirs." You have got to be kidding me. First, that LKH found it necessary to inform us about seatbelt undoing. Second, that no one else is allowed to undo their seatbelts until Anita undoes hers.
12) Food again, at length.
13) Matthew looks a lot like Nathaniel and even dresses like him. Really creeped out now.
14) Katie Zebrowski is five feet tall or less. "She made even Micah and me seem not so delicate, not so tiny." Anita is one single inch shorter than the average height for American women. She also let us know earlier that she has bulked up her muscles a lot; and in earlier books, she has dwelled lovingly on her zeppelin boobs which are so ridiculously ginormous she cannot cross her arms over them. She is anything but "delicate".
15) Katie has hair to her waist too. Is this a St. Louis thing? I haven't run into a lot of people with waist-length or longer hair, but Anita meets tons of people like this.
16) Katie and her husband have been happily married for twenty years. "They gave me hope that maybe, just maybe, love could last." What experience does Anita have to make her so paranoid that it can't? No man she's loved has ever been allowed to leave her. This is LKH's own experiences seeping into Anita. But it's strange from LKH too. She's been happily married to her second husband for quite a while now, hasn't she? Why the paranoia?
17) Anita and JC have been together six years and broken up a lot during that, according to Anita. Micah and Nathaniel stabilized things. She says she used to keep trying to break the relationships herself, and "let's hear it for therapy and smart friends who intervened when I fell back into old destructive habits." Edward calls her in Affliction just when she's getting pissed off that men are discussing how they will fuck her without asking her opinion on the topic. He warns her not to do that because apparently he has become psychic, deeply worried about Anita's sex life, and totally anti-consent. What a "destructive habit", to want to have some say in how you will have sex. Also, LKH thinks if a man doesn't want to have sex with another man, or if a woman doesn't want her husband to have sex with another woman, those are issues that must be therapized out of them. I wonder what kind of therapist JC sent Anita to to get her into her current state.
18) Matthew says, "Uncle Natty's teaching me to cook so I'll be able to help my girlfriend when I grow up." HELP. LKH? I read an article a couple years ago about how many young men in Japan were having a difficult time living on their own because they had not been taught to cook. Young women were able to be much more independent. Also, HELP.
19) Katie calls her husband by his last name. Also, he's the only cook worse than Anita that Katie's ever met. Because of course Anita's a terrible cook. She would not be manly enough for LKH if she could cook. I mean, Gordon Ramsay is a total femme, right?
20) "Soup from scratch is hard," Nathaniel said. Bahahahahah. No wonder Nathaniel puts mayonnaise in all his salads; he is also a shitty cook. Soup is one of the easiest things to cook.
21) Zebrowski is so manly, he started a roaring fire while trying to make Campbell's soup. This is gut-bustingly hilarious, we are told. Matthew doesn't get it. Neither do I.
22) Zebrowski says, "she [Katie] recognized my hair and glasses in class the next day..." Just his hair and glasses? Uh... okay. Does LKH have a facial recognition problem and not realize that most people don't?
23) Zebrowski supposedly nearly got expelled for accidentally starting a fire while cooking. Not how the world works, LKH.
24) Micah and Nathaniel info-dump how they each started dating Anita, but "sanitized". Especially Micah's version. It he told the truth, it would be, "I raped her in the shower while she begged me to stop. Twu wuv!"
25) Matthew wants to know who the prince is. They explain that Anita used to be Prince Charming, then she got promoted to queen when Micah raped her (not in those words, but it's what happened), and now Nathaniel's the prince. Then there's this: "Talking to children is like testifying in court, answer just what's asked, don't elaborate, and don't volunteer information." Dear gods. Anita treats everything like it's a battle to the death.
26) Katie warns Micah and Nathaniel not to make out in front of other guests. Small displays of affection will be fine, but not being all over each other. This is because they're both men and blah blah blah. I'd think it was simple politeness not to be up each other's butts in public. Also, usually when people are extremely affectionate in public, their relationships are disastrous in private. Anita is way, way, WAY over the top physically affectionate with her men in public. Also she obsesses over maybe losing them a lot. Again: trouble in paradise.
27) "Literally, they risked other men screaming in their faces, or even trying to beat them up." That is what LKH thinks the worst risk men being romantically affectionate in public face. Being beaten up. For someone who pretends she's so darkity dark, LKH sure is sheltered.
28) Nathaniel gives Micah and Anita quick kisses. "Normally he would have kissed Micah more thoroughly, because he might not get another chance for hours..." HOURS. That's, like, forever! Who can last HOURS without sticking their tongue down the throat of their beloved? TORTURE I TELL YOU. Oh and LKH describes deep kissing as "tonsil-cleaning kisses", because that isn't gag-inducing or anything.
29) Matthew's been imitating what he sees at home in preschool. So he is in preschool after all. This means that he has been trying to stick his tongue down the throats of other preschoolers on a regular basis, until "we" (I don't know who, but not Monica, I'm sure) explained to him that that was only for grownups. I wonder what else Matthew's been seeing at the Circus. I'm not talking about sex, even; I'm talking about killing.
30) Katie's nerve is OF COURSE not as strong as her husband's. You see, he's a cop, but she's only a teacher. And we all know what wimps teachers are, right? After all, that's such a soft job, you don't have to navigate complicated social structures in any way. And being a teacher is girly while being a cop is manly: q.e.d. By the way, this is how LKH always juxtaposes things: girl vs. man. I don't know if she's ever typed the words "womanly" or "boyish".
31) Anita wants to go home because Micah and Nathaniel will not be able to be all over each other at the party. Is she aware that there is more to relationships than fucking? Doubt it. Isn't Nathaniel going to be in the kitchen most of the time anyway? Oh, and relegating almost all the women to the interior of the house is perfectly acceptable. But Anita's bishie boys not being able to tonsil kiss for her pleasure is so totally unbearable it ruins Anita's whole day.
32) "When you live in a way that's too different from everyone else, you get grief about it. Is it fair? No, but it's still what happens. I wanted to go home."
a) The only "grief" she's gotten about it is Katie saying maybe the dudes macking on each other in front of everyone is not such a good idea. Guess what: with the women inside and the men outside, no one else is gonna be macking on each other here either. Thank goodness. This is a family barbecue, not an orgy.
b) You have a harem. You rape people. You mindfuck them into becoming slaves. You had someone murdered because he would not fuck you. You raped every wereswan and wererat in the city. That you are allowed at this party at all is totally unfair to your victims. You should be locked up or, by my preference, dead.
33) Nathaniel and Matthew are enjoying the party, so Micah and Anita are going to have to grit their teeth through it. This is phrased thusly: "For our big boy, and our little one." Nathaniel and Matthew are in exactly the same category. I think I am going to be sick.
34) Anita then considers murdering people if they annoy her.
35) "So far I was the only female cop here." You're not a cop, Anita.
36) "It took us almost thirty minutes of conversation to try and explain that Matthew wasn't ours, but he spent a lot of time with us." Oh bullshit.
37) The women ask more questions than the men. Because the men "were men and they were cops, most of that combination learns early not to ask too many personal questions." *headdesk* Here's a question: why aren't there any teachers here? Katie's coworkers? I guess because she's a good little wife and therefore has zero interests outside her husband.
38) "Because I was a woman they expected me to be the chatty one." On what planet? Jesus Christ. Everyone in these books is a podperson. All the women are precisely the same and all the men are too, and they are exact opposites in every way. "The women just didn't seem to understand that I was the "husband", and that our "wife" was actually in the kitchen with Katie." Maybe they don't "understand" because it's FUCKING STUPID. Most people are not going to think, "oh, a man who cooks and cleans, he must be the wife! And a woman who works outside the home, she must be the husband!" Because it's FUCKING STUPID. Oh and also "we didn't try to explain that part either." So Anita's getting down on the women for not reading her mind. Also, why does she care if they understand? The details of your personal living arrangements are not everyone else's business, Anita! Here, I'll help: "we all live together and love each other." Done. Stop making trouble for yourself.
You know, considering the real problems people who aren't cis and straight actually have, this is really offensive. "Oh no, we're not allowed to make out at a family barbecue, the horrors!" I hope LKH is just ignorant, but considering what absolutely heinous attitudes she's revealed herself to have both in her fiction writing and in interviews, I'm not giving her the benefit of the doubt.
39) Anita is miserable from being at this get-together. Now, in most characters, I'd be saying, "right there with you." My parents (father, really, as he is by far the more social one of my parents, fuck you LKH) used to have parties at our house all the time. I was all partied out well before I was 16. I don't like large gatherings of people under most contexts, actually. But this is Anita Blake. She's perfectly fine with huge group rapes, but a few questions at a social gathering freaks her out? Pathetic.
40) "I hadn't realized how much I relied on touching my lovers..." Everyone else has. You are the most dependent character I have ever seen, Anita.
41) Almost all the women at the party have gone inside to try to flirt with Nathaniel. Of course. Of course it's the women who are a danger. Laurell K. Hamilton is a terrible person.
42) Anita gets PISSED OFF that some drunk women are hot for Nathaniel. One of them asks, "Nathaniel belong to you?" Oh bullshit, LKH. Big steaming piles of bullshit.
43) LKH means never having to say you're kidding: it was a blonde who said that. A brunette grabs her arm and steers her out of the kitchen. Are there any redheaded women in the Anitaverse, ever?
44) Oops. Just pretend there's something brilliantly insightful and funny here.
45) There are still lots of women in the kitchen because of Nathaniel. There's a tall one Anita specifically singles out.
46) "Women are more sexually aggressive at strip clubs than men, and their energy can be much angrier." Further, "If it had been a female stripper recognized by men it would have been much more covert, because a bunch of men standing there gazing at a woman gets creepy pretty fast..." Oh yes and men NEVER creepily stare at or sexually threaten women. I repeat: LKH is a terrible person.
By the way, LKH having all these women be so gross over Nathaniel is not only unrealistic and misogynistic: it also fetishizes Nathaniel something fierce. This is LKH creeping on her own creation. He's so so so so hot and he needs rescuing from all the drooling leches because he is so so so so hot and incapable of taking care of himself.
47) Blather blather blather women are awful blather blather. Finally we learn Nathaniel danced at a private party for one of these women, and he took everything off, whereas he leaves a g-string on when stripping at his normal job. Anita did not know that Nathaniel ever did this. She is mad. She pretends not to be, but she obviously is. She also says it's weird and she doesn't know how to act around the women now, and Nathaniel agrees with her that it's weird. Uhhh... no it's not weird. Stripping is just another job. That someone else has seen one of your bishies naked in that context -- or in most contexts -- is not weird at all.
I wonder how Anita treats her harem's proctologists.
48) Anita tries to figure out why the naked stripping thing bothers her. It's boring.
49) The tall woman Anita had noticed before, Elise, told the woman Nathaniel danced for that she'd had sex with him. This was a lie. The woman's husband threatens to beat up Nathaniel until Zebrowski (why is his first name never used?) mentions that the husband had sex with a stripper at his bachelor party, and he'll tell the wife if the husband doesn't back off.
50) Now this is hilarious. Here is how Nathaniel convinces the guy that he didn't have sex with his wife:
"I was living with Anita when I was hired for your bride's party. If she found out I was doing customers she wouldn't forgive that. I wouldn't risk her being that angry at me, not for anyone."
Clint looked at me, then at Nathaniel. "Blake does have a reputation. I guess you wouldn't want her mad at you.
Clint backs off because everyone in St. Louis knows that Anita Blake does not share, and that she is violent and horrible enough to do something terrible to anyone she's angry with. Yep.
So they stand around talking about how terrible Elise is. She's mean to her friends, she propositions all the men but most of them don't take her up on it, etc. Well of course. She is a tall woman. There is no way she could be anything but pointlessly evil.
51) Anyway, we learn that the boys were mean to Matthew about dancing until the girls came over and talked about how great he was. A 10-year old girl is "quite taken with" him. Matthew is in pre-school. Yeah, 10-year olds love hanging out with 4-year olds, right.
52) There's a tiny paragraph about it being time to eat, then it's back to discussing the dancing habits of children. That's what people look for in an Anita Blake book: children dancing. Is LKH trying to alienate every possible audience she has? Except for people who make fun of her crap, that is, but even my heart is quailing here. Children. Dancing. Juxtaposed with sexy stripper stalking and there is a tall pretty woman with good cheekbones we hates her we do. (Btw, LKH has as much against women with strong cheekbones as she does against tall women.)
53) So now the vampire executioner's stripper boytoy is going to get the boys to dance with the girls, something that OF COURSE they would normally not want to do.
54) The next time Anita Blake calls one of her harem her "sweetie", I am going to knock out her teeth.
55) There's a cop who wants to work with "homicide, or preternatural." What? Wouldn't that be two pretty different skillsets? And there's a branch that deals with ALL preternatural things? LKH's worldbuilding is as terrible as those salads Nathaniel made.
56) At this barbecue, everyone but Anita and her boytoys has eaten. LKH spent a lot of time describing the food and none having Anita eat it.
57) We're completely going with the "Anita Blake is now a cop" thing, apparently. In the context of cops transferring to different departments, a woman asks Anita if she'd want to transfer and Anita says she's not sure.
58) Matthew gets into a fight with some boy. A little girl gets hurt too. "I was betting the other little boy's foot had caught her as he went over the table." Because in Anita's world, no boy or man ever purposefully hurts a girl or woman, ever.
59) The boy had called Matthew gay and so there was a fight. The boy's father is completely flummoxed that anyone would ever think being gay is not bad. Okay, I know there are dumbasses who think being gay is bad, but is any American ever actually surprised to meet someone who does NOT think being gay is bad? Come on! God, LKH's characters are stupid.
60) Oh goody, a lecture from Anita Rapist Blake about how love between consenting adults is good. I hate her even more when she says things I agree with, because SHE IS A RAPIST-MURDERER-BRAINWASHER DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE.
61) Turns out the little boy did kick the girl on purpose. By the way, the girl's twelve. The boys are supposed to be four. But of course the girl is a female who is not Anita Blake so she cannot even hold her own in a fight with a goddamn preschooler. She doesn't accept the little boy's apology, by the way, which makes Anita Blake like her, at least so we're told.
62) Then the boy apologizes to Matthew too, and Matthew also does not accept it. LKH, you are really good at making me feel sorry for the supposed bad guys here. This is a small boy. You do not look badass for writing characters who do not accept his sincere apologies.
63) Oh look, people being unbelievably stupid again to show how enlightened Anita supposedly is! A little girl says Matthew fought to protect her and Anita says, "you know, girls can protect themselves." The girl and her mother "looked at me as if I were speaking in tongues, blinking big, blue eyes at me."
LKH thinks she is the most enlightened person on the planet, doesn't she? We are all but cavepeople basking in her progressive wisdom.
64) The little girl's mom and dad met because he rescued her from someone who tried to assault her at a bar. Could I be more tired of learning how all these random characters who don't matter met their spouses? No, I could not.
65) Anita makes sure none of the kids hurt the fireflies they're chasing. I am not kidding. This is what she is doing. Rapist. Murderer. Brainwasher. Firefly-protector.
66) Nathaniel dances with a little girl in the living room. Then the little girls and little boys start to dance, and not normal kid dancing or even ballroom or something, but ballet. Page after page after page of small children learning ballet.
You know, everyone on lkh_lashouts was predicting this book would be about how dancing is like sex and Anita's such a good dancer because sex is like dancing and so on. At this point, I WISH.
67) Anita asks a rhetorical question as if being an audience stand-in for herself, which is one of LKH's writing tics I most loathe. "How did I know how to do ballroom dancing?" She learned so she could dance at vampire balls. Why can't we be at a vampire ball? No, instead we are in a suburban household watching little kids try to do ballet. Oh wait, I think we've moved on to adults doing ballroom. I don't care.
I hope Elise turns out to be a wereswan looking for revenge. I want her to have poisoned food that was meant for Anita, but then Anita didn't eat anything, so she had to go back home to get her gun.
68) Dancing. Pages. And. Pages. Of. Dancing. Written by Laurell K. Hamilton. I cannot impart to you how boring this is. Nor will I subject you to any of it. The boredom is just... if you're a Trek fan, do you know the episode Shades of Gray? I would watch that three times in a row rather than subject myself to this again.
69) Elise's husband learned she came on to Nathaniel and they had a huge fight and left. Haha, take that, tall high-cheekboned woman! And that's the end of any hope of this book being about something in the least interesting.
70) Having conquered the suburbs with lecturing and ballet lessons, the Three Stooges and their small minion drive home. The novella ends thusly:
Life is like dancing, sometimes one of you leads, sometimes the other, and if you do it right it’s beautiful, even when it’s hard.
LKH has no concept of people doing things as partners, does she? Whatever, IT'S OVER.
1) Anita is taking Micah and Nathaniel to a party at the cop Zebrowski's house. Zebrowski's wife, Katie, hand-picked the guest list to be comfortable with Anita bringing two men she's porking. Because everything revolves around Anita's sex life.
2) They're bringing that little kid, Matthew, the son of single mom Monica. It is remarked that he wants to grow his hair long to be like Nathaniel. I'm going to have to add pedophilia to that long list of disturbing crap in Anita Blake books, aren't I?
3) Nathaniel's eyes are lavender. Not blue. Lavender. We must understand that they are lavender, which is not blue, but is lavender. Also, Nathaniel is superhumanly gorgeous and I think he's grown two inches. Oh and the "other wives" treat him like he's a "wife" too. Because being domestic = being the woman, even when you're a cis man like Nathaniel is. And Nathaniel made a bunch of salads with lite or no mayonnaise in them to be "healthy", and we're told about these at length too. LKH seems to think salad = mayonnaise. I'd hate to see how she'd make a fruit salad.
4) It's also important that we understand that Micah's eyes are both yellow and green and don't look human. This is not as important as knowing that Nathaniel's eyes are lavender, however. She slobbers significantly less over Micah than over Nathaniel. Also, Micah seems to have shrunk. I remember him being described as extremely muscular in other books. In this one, he's just bulked up a little. Hmmm.
5) It's a relatively cool August evening for St. Louis, Missouri, which LKH thinks is still hotter than "most of the country" in August. The average August temperature for St. Louis is 89 in the day, 68 at night. Does she think the "rest of the country" is Escanaba?
6) The name of the group Micah's head of is dumb. "Coalition for Better Understanding Between Human and Lycanthrope communities". That would be CBUBHLC. It sounds like someone throwing up. It should be "Human Lycanthrope Alliance" or something, not this ridiculous name that looks like a parody.
7) Anita tells us houses in American suburbs are vaguely alike, because she is a snot who looks down on everything that is not precisely like her. I don't like suburbs either, but I don't see the point of this insult.
8) We are informed that Nathaniel and "the other 'wives'" will be inside doing domestic stuff while the men are outside grilling. Anita claims "most cops like traditional roles." I don't know any cops, but somehow I think that Anita is full of shit. LKH is the one who likes so-called "traditional roles", and so that's what her manly masculine penis-bearing macho mens of cops like too. She claims that cops are so sexist (my word, not hers) because their jobs are full of "weird shit".
9) Anita claims that she used to be conservative but isn't any longer. To this I say HAH. Having a flippin' harem, some of whom you've mind-raped into being your total slave, isn't progressive. Neither is thinking all man stuff is good and all woman stuff is bad. It's not conservative either. Your life isn't some shining beacon of liberation, Anita; it's just fucking disgusting.
10) Being a single mom, Monica is not competent to take care of her child. Nathaniel is the one who decided to bring Matthew because there will be other kids at this party. Was Monica asked? Who knows? Also, why is Matthew not in preschool?
11) "Once the car was stopped I undid my seat belt. That was the signal for everyone else to undo theirs." You have got to be kidding me. First, that LKH found it necessary to inform us about seatbelt undoing. Second, that no one else is allowed to undo their seatbelts until Anita undoes hers.
12) Food again, at length.
13) Matthew looks a lot like Nathaniel and even dresses like him. Really creeped out now.
14) Katie Zebrowski is five feet tall or less. "She made even Micah and me seem not so delicate, not so tiny." Anita is one single inch shorter than the average height for American women. She also let us know earlier that she has bulked up her muscles a lot; and in earlier books, she has dwelled lovingly on her zeppelin boobs which are so ridiculously ginormous she cannot cross her arms over them. She is anything but "delicate".
15) Katie has hair to her waist too. Is this a St. Louis thing? I haven't run into a lot of people with waist-length or longer hair, but Anita meets tons of people like this.
16) Katie and her husband have been happily married for twenty years. "They gave me hope that maybe, just maybe, love could last." What experience does Anita have to make her so paranoid that it can't? No man she's loved has ever been allowed to leave her. This is LKH's own experiences seeping into Anita. But it's strange from LKH too. She's been happily married to her second husband for quite a while now, hasn't she? Why the paranoia?
17) Anita and JC have been together six years and broken up a lot during that, according to Anita. Micah and Nathaniel stabilized things. She says she used to keep trying to break the relationships herself, and "let's hear it for therapy and smart friends who intervened when I fell back into old destructive habits." Edward calls her in Affliction just when she's getting pissed off that men are discussing how they will fuck her without asking her opinion on the topic. He warns her not to do that because apparently he has become psychic, deeply worried about Anita's sex life, and totally anti-consent. What a "destructive habit", to want to have some say in how you will have sex. Also, LKH thinks if a man doesn't want to have sex with another man, or if a woman doesn't want her husband to have sex with another woman, those are issues that must be therapized out of them. I wonder what kind of therapist JC sent Anita to to get her into her current state.
18) Matthew says, "Uncle Natty's teaching me to cook so I'll be able to help my girlfriend when I grow up." HELP. LKH? I read an article a couple years ago about how many young men in Japan were having a difficult time living on their own because they had not been taught to cook. Young women were able to be much more independent. Also, HELP.
19) Katie calls her husband by his last name. Also, he's the only cook worse than Anita that Katie's ever met. Because of course Anita's a terrible cook. She would not be manly enough for LKH if she could cook. I mean, Gordon Ramsay is a total femme, right?
20) "Soup from scratch is hard," Nathaniel said. Bahahahahah. No wonder Nathaniel puts mayonnaise in all his salads; he is also a shitty cook. Soup is one of the easiest things to cook.
21) Zebrowski is so manly, he started a roaring fire while trying to make Campbell's soup. This is gut-bustingly hilarious, we are told. Matthew doesn't get it. Neither do I.
22) Zebrowski says, "she [Katie] recognized my hair and glasses in class the next day..." Just his hair and glasses? Uh... okay. Does LKH have a facial recognition problem and not realize that most people don't?
23) Zebrowski supposedly nearly got expelled for accidentally starting a fire while cooking. Not how the world works, LKH.
24) Micah and Nathaniel info-dump how they each started dating Anita, but "sanitized". Especially Micah's version. It he told the truth, it would be, "I raped her in the shower while she begged me to stop. Twu wuv!"
25) Matthew wants to know who the prince is. They explain that Anita used to be Prince Charming, then she got promoted to queen when Micah raped her (not in those words, but it's what happened), and now Nathaniel's the prince. Then there's this: "Talking to children is like testifying in court, answer just what's asked, don't elaborate, and don't volunteer information." Dear gods. Anita treats everything like it's a battle to the death.
26) Katie warns Micah and Nathaniel not to make out in front of other guests. Small displays of affection will be fine, but not being all over each other. This is because they're both men and blah blah blah. I'd think it was simple politeness not to be up each other's butts in public. Also, usually when people are extremely affectionate in public, their relationships are disastrous in private. Anita is way, way, WAY over the top physically affectionate with her men in public. Also she obsesses over maybe losing them a lot. Again: trouble in paradise.
27) "Literally, they risked other men screaming in their faces, or even trying to beat them up." That is what LKH thinks the worst risk men being romantically affectionate in public face. Being beaten up. For someone who pretends she's so darkity dark, LKH sure is sheltered.
28) Nathaniel gives Micah and Anita quick kisses. "Normally he would have kissed Micah more thoroughly, because he might not get another chance for hours..." HOURS. That's, like, forever! Who can last HOURS without sticking their tongue down the throat of their beloved? TORTURE I TELL YOU. Oh and LKH describes deep kissing as "tonsil-cleaning kisses", because that isn't gag-inducing or anything.
29) Matthew's been imitating what he sees at home in preschool. So he is in preschool after all. This means that he has been trying to stick his tongue down the throats of other preschoolers on a regular basis, until "we" (I don't know who, but not Monica, I'm sure) explained to him that that was only for grownups. I wonder what else Matthew's been seeing at the Circus. I'm not talking about sex, even; I'm talking about killing.
30) Katie's nerve is OF COURSE not as strong as her husband's. You see, he's a cop, but she's only a teacher. And we all know what wimps teachers are, right? After all, that's such a soft job, you don't have to navigate complicated social structures in any way. And being a teacher is girly while being a cop is manly: q.e.d. By the way, this is how LKH always juxtaposes things: girl vs. man. I don't know if she's ever typed the words "womanly" or "boyish".
31) Anita wants to go home because Micah and Nathaniel will not be able to be all over each other at the party. Is she aware that there is more to relationships than fucking? Doubt it. Isn't Nathaniel going to be in the kitchen most of the time anyway? Oh, and relegating almost all the women to the interior of the house is perfectly acceptable. But Anita's bishie boys not being able to tonsil kiss for her pleasure is so totally unbearable it ruins Anita's whole day.
32) "When you live in a way that's too different from everyone else, you get grief about it. Is it fair? No, but it's still what happens. I wanted to go home."
a) The only "grief" she's gotten about it is Katie saying maybe the dudes macking on each other in front of everyone is not such a good idea. Guess what: with the women inside and the men outside, no one else is gonna be macking on each other here either. Thank goodness. This is a family barbecue, not an orgy.
b) You have a harem. You rape people. You mindfuck them into becoming slaves. You had someone murdered because he would not fuck you. You raped every wereswan and wererat in the city. That you are allowed at this party at all is totally unfair to your victims. You should be locked up or, by my preference, dead.
33) Nathaniel and Matthew are enjoying the party, so Micah and Anita are going to have to grit their teeth through it. This is phrased thusly: "For our big boy, and our little one." Nathaniel and Matthew are in exactly the same category. I think I am going to be sick.
34) Anita then considers murdering people if they annoy her.
35) "So far I was the only female cop here." You're not a cop, Anita.
36) "It took us almost thirty minutes of conversation to try and explain that Matthew wasn't ours, but he spent a lot of time with us." Oh bullshit.
37) The women ask more questions than the men. Because the men "were men and they were cops, most of that combination learns early not to ask too many personal questions." *headdesk* Here's a question: why aren't there any teachers here? Katie's coworkers? I guess because she's a good little wife and therefore has zero interests outside her husband.
38) "Because I was a woman they expected me to be the chatty one." On what planet? Jesus Christ. Everyone in these books is a podperson. All the women are precisely the same and all the men are too, and they are exact opposites in every way. "The women just didn't seem to understand that I was the "husband", and that our "wife" was actually in the kitchen with Katie." Maybe they don't "understand" because it's FUCKING STUPID. Most people are not going to think, "oh, a man who cooks and cleans, he must be the wife! And a woman who works outside the home, she must be the husband!" Because it's FUCKING STUPID. Oh and also "we didn't try to explain that part either." So Anita's getting down on the women for not reading her mind. Also, why does she care if they understand? The details of your personal living arrangements are not everyone else's business, Anita! Here, I'll help: "we all live together and love each other." Done. Stop making trouble for yourself.
You know, considering the real problems people who aren't cis and straight actually have, this is really offensive. "Oh no, we're not allowed to make out at a family barbecue, the horrors!" I hope LKH is just ignorant, but considering what absolutely heinous attitudes she's revealed herself to have both in her fiction writing and in interviews, I'm not giving her the benefit of the doubt.
39) Anita is miserable from being at this get-together. Now, in most characters, I'd be saying, "right there with you." My parents (father, really, as he is by far the more social one of my parents, fuck you LKH) used to have parties at our house all the time. I was all partied out well before I was 16. I don't like large gatherings of people under most contexts, actually. But this is Anita Blake. She's perfectly fine with huge group rapes, but a few questions at a social gathering freaks her out? Pathetic.
40) "I hadn't realized how much I relied on touching my lovers..." Everyone else has. You are the most dependent character I have ever seen, Anita.
41) Almost all the women at the party have gone inside to try to flirt with Nathaniel. Of course. Of course it's the women who are a danger. Laurell K. Hamilton is a terrible person.
42) Anita gets PISSED OFF that some drunk women are hot for Nathaniel. One of them asks, "Nathaniel belong to you?" Oh bullshit, LKH. Big steaming piles of bullshit.
43) LKH means never having to say you're kidding: it was a blonde who said that. A brunette grabs her arm and steers her out of the kitchen. Are there any redheaded women in the Anitaverse, ever?
44) Oops. Just pretend there's something brilliantly insightful and funny here.
45) There are still lots of women in the kitchen because of Nathaniel. There's a tall one Anita specifically singles out.
46) "Women are more sexually aggressive at strip clubs than men, and their energy can be much angrier." Further, "If it had been a female stripper recognized by men it would have been much more covert, because a bunch of men standing there gazing at a woman gets creepy pretty fast..." Oh yes and men NEVER creepily stare at or sexually threaten women. I repeat: LKH is a terrible person.
By the way, LKH having all these women be so gross over Nathaniel is not only unrealistic and misogynistic: it also fetishizes Nathaniel something fierce. This is LKH creeping on her own creation. He's so so so so hot and he needs rescuing from all the drooling leches because he is so so so so hot and incapable of taking care of himself.
47) Blather blather blather women are awful blather blather. Finally we learn Nathaniel danced at a private party for one of these women, and he took everything off, whereas he leaves a g-string on when stripping at his normal job. Anita did not know that Nathaniel ever did this. She is mad. She pretends not to be, but she obviously is. She also says it's weird and she doesn't know how to act around the women now, and Nathaniel agrees with her that it's weird. Uhhh... no it's not weird. Stripping is just another job. That someone else has seen one of your bishies naked in that context -- or in most contexts -- is not weird at all.
I wonder how Anita treats her harem's proctologists.
48) Anita tries to figure out why the naked stripping thing bothers her. It's boring.
49) The tall woman Anita had noticed before, Elise, told the woman Nathaniel danced for that she'd had sex with him. This was a lie. The woman's husband threatens to beat up Nathaniel until Zebrowski (why is his first name never used?) mentions that the husband had sex with a stripper at his bachelor party, and he'll tell the wife if the husband doesn't back off.
50) Now this is hilarious. Here is how Nathaniel convinces the guy that he didn't have sex with his wife:
"I was living with Anita when I was hired for your bride's party. If she found out I was doing customers she wouldn't forgive that. I wouldn't risk her being that angry at me, not for anyone."
Clint looked at me, then at Nathaniel. "Blake does have a reputation. I guess you wouldn't want her mad at you.
Clint backs off because everyone in St. Louis knows that Anita Blake does not share, and that she is violent and horrible enough to do something terrible to anyone she's angry with. Yep.
So they stand around talking about how terrible Elise is. She's mean to her friends, she propositions all the men but most of them don't take her up on it, etc. Well of course. She is a tall woman. There is no way she could be anything but pointlessly evil.
51) Anyway, we learn that the boys were mean to Matthew about dancing until the girls came over and talked about how great he was. A 10-year old girl is "quite taken with" him. Matthew is in pre-school. Yeah, 10-year olds love hanging out with 4-year olds, right.
52) There's a tiny paragraph about it being time to eat, then it's back to discussing the dancing habits of children. That's what people look for in an Anita Blake book: children dancing. Is LKH trying to alienate every possible audience she has? Except for people who make fun of her crap, that is, but even my heart is quailing here. Children. Dancing. Juxtaposed with sexy stripper stalking and there is a tall pretty woman with good cheekbones we hates her we do. (Btw, LKH has as much against women with strong cheekbones as she does against tall women.)
53) So now the vampire executioner's stripper boytoy is going to get the boys to dance with the girls, something that OF COURSE they would normally not want to do.
54) The next time Anita Blake calls one of her harem her "sweetie", I am going to knock out her teeth.
55) There's a cop who wants to work with "homicide, or preternatural." What? Wouldn't that be two pretty different skillsets? And there's a branch that deals with ALL preternatural things? LKH's worldbuilding is as terrible as those salads Nathaniel made.
56) At this barbecue, everyone but Anita and her boytoys has eaten. LKH spent a lot of time describing the food and none having Anita eat it.
57) We're completely going with the "Anita Blake is now a cop" thing, apparently. In the context of cops transferring to different departments, a woman asks Anita if she'd want to transfer and Anita says she's not sure.
58) Matthew gets into a fight with some boy. A little girl gets hurt too. "I was betting the other little boy's foot had caught her as he went over the table." Because in Anita's world, no boy or man ever purposefully hurts a girl or woman, ever.
59) The boy had called Matthew gay and so there was a fight. The boy's father is completely flummoxed that anyone would ever think being gay is not bad. Okay, I know there are dumbasses who think being gay is bad, but is any American ever actually surprised to meet someone who does NOT think being gay is bad? Come on! God, LKH's characters are stupid.
60) Oh goody, a lecture from Anita Rapist Blake about how love between consenting adults is good. I hate her even more when she says things I agree with, because SHE IS A RAPIST-MURDERER-BRAINWASHER DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE.
61) Turns out the little boy did kick the girl on purpose. By the way, the girl's twelve. The boys are supposed to be four. But of course the girl is a female who is not Anita Blake so she cannot even hold her own in a fight with a goddamn preschooler. She doesn't accept the little boy's apology, by the way, which makes Anita Blake like her, at least so we're told.
62) Then the boy apologizes to Matthew too, and Matthew also does not accept it. LKH, you are really good at making me feel sorry for the supposed bad guys here. This is a small boy. You do not look badass for writing characters who do not accept his sincere apologies.
63) Oh look, people being unbelievably stupid again to show how enlightened Anita supposedly is! A little girl says Matthew fought to protect her and Anita says, "you know, girls can protect themselves." The girl and her mother "looked at me as if I were speaking in tongues, blinking big, blue eyes at me."
LKH thinks she is the most enlightened person on the planet, doesn't she? We are all but cavepeople basking in her progressive wisdom.
64) The little girl's mom and dad met because he rescued her from someone who tried to assault her at a bar. Could I be more tired of learning how all these random characters who don't matter met their spouses? No, I could not.
65) Anita makes sure none of the kids hurt the fireflies they're chasing. I am not kidding. This is what she is doing. Rapist. Murderer. Brainwasher. Firefly-protector.
66) Nathaniel dances with a little girl in the living room. Then the little girls and little boys start to dance, and not normal kid dancing or even ballroom or something, but ballet. Page after page after page of small children learning ballet.
You know, everyone on lkh_lashouts was predicting this book would be about how dancing is like sex and Anita's such a good dancer because sex is like dancing and so on. At this point, I WISH.
67) Anita asks a rhetorical question as if being an audience stand-in for herself, which is one of LKH's writing tics I most loathe. "How did I know how to do ballroom dancing?" She learned so she could dance at vampire balls. Why can't we be at a vampire ball? No, instead we are in a suburban household watching little kids try to do ballet. Oh wait, I think we've moved on to adults doing ballroom. I don't care.
I hope Elise turns out to be a wereswan looking for revenge. I want her to have poisoned food that was meant for Anita, but then Anita didn't eat anything, so she had to go back home to get her gun.
68) Dancing. Pages. And. Pages. Of. Dancing. Written by Laurell K. Hamilton. I cannot impart to you how boring this is. Nor will I subject you to any of it. The boredom is just... if you're a Trek fan, do you know the episode Shades of Gray? I would watch that three times in a row rather than subject myself to this again.
69) Elise's husband learned she came on to Nathaniel and they had a huge fight and left. Haha, take that, tall high-cheekboned woman! And that's the end of any hope of this book being about something in the least interesting.
70) Having conquered the suburbs with lecturing and ballet lessons, the Three Stooges and their small minion drive home. The novella ends thusly:
Life is like dancing, sometimes one of you leads, sometimes the other, and if you do it right it’s beautiful, even when it’s hard.
LKH has no concept of people doing things as partners, does she? Whatever, IT'S OVER.