Danse Macabre, Chapter 15
Nov. 17th, 2013 03:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lliiraCN: Anita Blake book, pregnancy
I've been having a hard time continuing Danse Macabre because I have 18 more pages of bickering to get through until the characters start talking about something else. By the time I am through with this section, I will have read 50 straight pages of bickering. That's ten times as much bickering as sex in this book so far, and that's only counting this section, not the bullying of Ronnie or the strange arguments with Auggie and Thea. Plus it's entirely centered on how Richard is unhappy with Anita's sex life and how terrible he is for that. It is not only poor writing; like “Shutdown”, it's also embarrassing.
Sampson and Samuel are still in the room. I thought they'd left. But I looked back, and they've been sitting here for the last three pages listening to Anita and Richard yell at each other about incredibly private things. Jeez. I feel like sinking into the floor if my husband and I have a short, mild argument in public over yogurt flavors. I feel bad that Sampson and Samuel have to listen to this. It's like the voyeurism Anita and Nathaniel forced on Ronnie in the beginning of the book. This is forced emotional voyeurism. JC is the crappiest host ever. He's the one who asked Samuel and Sampson to stay in the room through this nonsense.
“I slammed every shield I had in place, shut, tight, metal, closed. I thought metal, smooth and thick and impenetrable” (133).
I think what I said about NaNo and writing purely for wordcount applies here. I still think it's odd that LKH wrote this, but avoided writing foreplay or describing the one sex scene in this book so far with any clarity or making it longer than thrust-thrust-thrust-bang. She'll do anything for wordcount, but she won't do that.
Samuel congratulates Anita and Richard and says that a baby is “joyous news indeed.” He cannot understand why anyone would ever possibly be upset about a pregnancy, because he is from a time when no one was ever upset about pregnancy. So he is apparently a time traveler from the year 2449, when no one ever gets pregnant when they don't want to, and he also knows nothing of Earth history.
Besides the history fail, this idea that vampires follow every cultural more from their own time and place, and only the most stereotypical of those, is one of many things that make Anita Blake's world stupid. Vampires are not only stuck in time; there were apparently no vampires who saw any problems with the culture they lived in before they were vampirized, or had any tastes differing from each other, or were political activists in their time, or etc. And according to JC, no vampires have ever been artists. Apparently only the shallowest, dullest, most ignorant, most inflexible people are ever turned into vampires.
Anita is severely pissed off, though she doesn't say anything. Samuel asks why Anita is so angry. She tells him, “don't tell me how to feel, Samuel, you don't have that right.” Anita, he did not tell you how to feel. He asked why you are feeling the way you are. You stupid, stupid person.
JC is being neutral about this as he was about Richard because he says he's afraid of upsetting Anita. She demands he say something. He asks, “are you with child?” (134) Next I'm expecting JC to be shocked and amazed at the demons making the lights turn on and off when a person touches some strange thing sticking out of a wall. Then Samuel will be confused that a woman is allowed to wear trousers in public, and Thea will not understand that the state does not kill people by crucifixion any longer.
Richard and Anita argue about her possible maybe pregnancy. SHE HAS NOT EVEN TAKEN A PREGNANCY TEST YET. No. Just no. This argument is not happening. People do not behave like this in this situation, before they know. Anita: Take. The. Damn. Test.
Anyway, Richard keeps referring to this maybe pregnancy as a “baby”, so Anita says it's just a bundle of cells, if it exists, which they don't know yet. This is precisely the opposite opinion Anita took when discussing this with Ronnie. The only way in which Anita has stood strong regarding her pregnancy scare is in refusing to pee on a stick. It makes her look like she's milking it for every bit of drama and attention she can get. If she's not pregnant, people might stop paying attention to her for a half-second. Though the only way any of her friends, especially those who might have impregnated her, should be paying attention to Anita is to be telling her to go pee on the fucking stick already.
But instead, Richard asks if Anita would “really kill our baby” (I'm not sure if a biology teacher should be referring to the bundle of cells this way, but it's an emotional situation), and Anita tells us, “I wanted to scream yes, just to see the pain on his face” (135). Ugh. I get wanting to cause emotional pain to someone you love during a fight – it's not pretty, but it's a common impulse. But in this case, I do not understand why they're even fighting because 1) Anita hasn't peed on the bloody stick yet and 2) why is she so angry and hateful here.
She yells “NO!” at him instead (Harry Potter sent an owl, he wants his capslock back). Then Anita's terrified because Richard is acting all gooey toward her (for him) at the thought of having a baby with her. It makes her feel “as if I were suffocating in a nightmare”. I do not know why; Anita claims she loves Richard, so why doesn't she want him to love her back? Hm. I think this is connected to the fact that Anita never has sex that is consensual, that LKH does not describe Anita's emotions in sex scenes, and that Anita seems to avoid men who want her but rapes men who don't instead. It sounds cheesy, but I think Anita is terrified of love. Not solely romantic love, but that's the only kind she seems to recognize.
I'm often sad for Anita because she's such a pitiable example of a self-insert. Instead of men falling at her feet because she is awesome, they HAVE to fall at her feet; they are forced to by the ardeur, or because they sense an “animal” in her that matches theirs, or because no other woman wants them. Instead of men staying with her because they want to, they HAVE to stick around or they will die, or they're metaphysically bound to her by being her animal to call, or she's a therian queen to their king. It gets worse as the books go on, so that in her latest books, she has a mind-wiped sex slave who literally cannot do anything to displease her.
LKH has written a main character whom no one loves. Lots of men say they love her, but the only one who so far has shown anything like love in this book is Richard, and Anita is horrified by this. It's just really sad.
Anyway, to make Richard stop looking at her like he loves her, Anita says, “what if it's not yours?” She tells us that she wants this to hurt Richard. Whhhyyyyyy why do you keep beating up on Richard. Is it because you love him?
Richard thinks it's most likely that the non-existent kid is his, and Anita brings up the fact that Samuel has recently had kids, though he's an old vampire, so it could be a vampire's. “Jean-Claude sighed, and stepped back as if he'd given up trying to stop the fight.” When did he ever do anything to try to stop the fight? Did LKH forget JC was here, and stick that line in when she realized it?
Then Anita brings up Micah and Nathaniel. Richard says, “Micah's fixed.” Wow, that's a creepy way to talk about a human being who got a vasectomy. So “that leaves Nathaniel” and now Richard's so angry that Anita actually regrets bringing it up. Good. I wish for her to suffer.
“As if on cue,” Micah and Nathaniel pop up. Did LKH lampshade herself there?
Richard asks Nathaniel if they knew about “the baby”, and Nathaniel actually behaves like a normal person and asks, “are we sure?” Richard is pissy that Nathaniel and Micah knew first, and Anita says, “I didn't want any of you to know until I did the test.” WHICH SHE STILL HAS NOT DONE. She could easily have peed on that stick AND gone to a doctor in the time since she has started to worry about being pregnant. I think that she is lying. After all, if she's not pregnant, she can't get all this drama.
Richard says to Nathaniel that if Anita is pregnant, the father is one of them, and Richard is using his angry voice to say this. And then steam comes out of my ears.
Since when did Nathaniel ever “bottom” for Richard? They have never had sex. Also, bottoming and submitting ARE NOT SYNONYMS. They mean entirely different things, stop using them as synonyms! Because you just wrote that Nathaniel had been fucked by Richard in the past, and I do not think that was what you intended.
My expression right now is not careful, and it sure as hell isn't submissive. It is extreme fury. LKH, you know NOTHING about what a submissive is and is not. IT DOES NOT MEAN PUTTING UP WITH ENDLESS BULLSHIT FROM EVERYONE. How much bullshit do you think I put up with? And I am submissive to exactly one person, and not to him under all circumstances. There are submissives who submit to more than one person, and under more circumstances, but there are NONE who submit to everyone always. It would be like a heterosexual woman wanting to have sex with every man in the world and wanting sex at all times.
Oh and then Anita says she's happy Nathaniel isn't being submissive toward Richard any longer. She quite obviously thinks there is something wrong with anyone who is a submissive, or at least any man who is.
Anita thinks Richard and Nathaniel are gonna have a physical fight, and that Richard would win it, but Anita would dump him over it. Apparently Anita, JC, Micah, Samuel, and Sampson would all stand around doing nothing while Richard kicked the crap out of Nathaniel. Since Richard is JC's “animal to call”, I think JC could force Richard to not kick Nathaniel's ass, but I guess he wouldn't. Perhaps his relative opinions of Richard and Nathaniel are the same as mine; namely, Richard's kind of an ass but redeemable, while Nathaniel is a vile manipulative bully who looks like Cousin It.
I've been having a hard time continuing Danse Macabre because I have 18 more pages of bickering to get through until the characters start talking about something else. By the time I am through with this section, I will have read 50 straight pages of bickering. That's ten times as much bickering as sex in this book so far, and that's only counting this section, not the bullying of Ronnie or the strange arguments with Auggie and Thea. Plus it's entirely centered on how Richard is unhappy with Anita's sex life and how terrible he is for that. It is not only poor writing; like “Shutdown”, it's also embarrassing.
Sampson and Samuel are still in the room. I thought they'd left. But I looked back, and they've been sitting here for the last three pages listening to Anita and Richard yell at each other about incredibly private things. Jeez. I feel like sinking into the floor if my husband and I have a short, mild argument in public over yogurt flavors. I feel bad that Sampson and Samuel have to listen to this. It's like the voyeurism Anita and Nathaniel forced on Ronnie in the beginning of the book. This is forced emotional voyeurism. JC is the crappiest host ever. He's the one who asked Samuel and Sampson to stay in the room through this nonsense.
“I slammed every shield I had in place, shut, tight, metal, closed. I thought metal, smooth and thick and impenetrable” (133).
I think what I said about NaNo and writing purely for wordcount applies here. I still think it's odd that LKH wrote this, but avoided writing foreplay or describing the one sex scene in this book so far with any clarity or making it longer than thrust-thrust-thrust-bang. She'll do anything for wordcount, but she won't do that.
Samuel congratulates Anita and Richard and says that a baby is “joyous news indeed.” He cannot understand why anyone would ever possibly be upset about a pregnancy, because he is from a time when no one was ever upset about pregnancy. So he is apparently a time traveler from the year 2449, when no one ever gets pregnant when they don't want to, and he also knows nothing of Earth history.
Besides the history fail, this idea that vampires follow every cultural more from their own time and place, and only the most stereotypical of those, is one of many things that make Anita Blake's world stupid. Vampires are not only stuck in time; there were apparently no vampires who saw any problems with the culture they lived in before they were vampirized, or had any tastes differing from each other, or were political activists in their time, or etc. And according to JC, no vampires have ever been artists. Apparently only the shallowest, dullest, most ignorant, most inflexible people are ever turned into vampires.
Anita is severely pissed off, though she doesn't say anything. Samuel asks why Anita is so angry. She tells him, “don't tell me how to feel, Samuel, you don't have that right.” Anita, he did not tell you how to feel. He asked why you are feeling the way you are. You stupid, stupid person.
JC is being neutral about this as he was about Richard because he says he's afraid of upsetting Anita. She demands he say something. He asks, “are you with child?” (134) Next I'm expecting JC to be shocked and amazed at the demons making the lights turn on and off when a person touches some strange thing sticking out of a wall. Then Samuel will be confused that a woman is allowed to wear trousers in public, and Thea will not understand that the state does not kill people by crucifixion any longer.
Richard and Anita argue about her possible maybe pregnancy. SHE HAS NOT EVEN TAKEN A PREGNANCY TEST YET. No. Just no. This argument is not happening. People do not behave like this in this situation, before they know. Anita: Take. The. Damn. Test.
Anyway, Richard keeps referring to this maybe pregnancy as a “baby”, so Anita says it's just a bundle of cells, if it exists, which they don't know yet. This is precisely the opposite opinion Anita took when discussing this with Ronnie. The only way in which Anita has stood strong regarding her pregnancy scare is in refusing to pee on a stick. It makes her look like she's milking it for every bit of drama and attention she can get. If she's not pregnant, people might stop paying attention to her for a half-second. Though the only way any of her friends, especially those who might have impregnated her, should be paying attention to Anita is to be telling her to go pee on the fucking stick already.
But instead, Richard asks if Anita would “really kill our baby” (I'm not sure if a biology teacher should be referring to the bundle of cells this way, but it's an emotional situation), and Anita tells us, “I wanted to scream yes, just to see the pain on his face” (135). Ugh. I get wanting to cause emotional pain to someone you love during a fight – it's not pretty, but it's a common impulse. But in this case, I do not understand why they're even fighting because 1) Anita hasn't peed on the bloody stick yet and 2) why is she so angry and hateful here.
She yells “NO!” at him instead (Harry Potter sent an owl, he wants his capslock back). Then Anita's terrified because Richard is acting all gooey toward her (for him) at the thought of having a baby with her. It makes her feel “as if I were suffocating in a nightmare”. I do not know why; Anita claims she loves Richard, so why doesn't she want him to love her back? Hm. I think this is connected to the fact that Anita never has sex that is consensual, that LKH does not describe Anita's emotions in sex scenes, and that Anita seems to avoid men who want her but rapes men who don't instead. It sounds cheesy, but I think Anita is terrified of love. Not solely romantic love, but that's the only kind she seems to recognize.
I'm often sad for Anita because she's such a pitiable example of a self-insert. Instead of men falling at her feet because she is awesome, they HAVE to fall at her feet; they are forced to by the ardeur, or because they sense an “animal” in her that matches theirs, or because no other woman wants them. Instead of men staying with her because they want to, they HAVE to stick around or they will die, or they're metaphysically bound to her by being her animal to call, or she's a therian queen to their king. It gets worse as the books go on, so that in her latest books, she has a mind-wiped sex slave who literally cannot do anything to displease her.
LKH has written a main character whom no one loves. Lots of men say they love her, but the only one who so far has shown anything like love in this book is Richard, and Anita is horrified by this. It's just really sad.
Anyway, to make Richard stop looking at her like he loves her, Anita says, “what if it's not yours?” She tells us that she wants this to hurt Richard. Whhhyyyyyy why do you keep beating up on Richard. Is it because you love him?
Richard thinks it's most likely that the non-existent kid is his, and Anita brings up the fact that Samuel has recently had kids, though he's an old vampire, so it could be a vampire's. “Jean-Claude sighed, and stepped back as if he'd given up trying to stop the fight.” When did he ever do anything to try to stop the fight? Did LKH forget JC was here, and stick that line in when she realized it?
Then Anita brings up Micah and Nathaniel. Richard says, “Micah's fixed.” Wow, that's a creepy way to talk about a human being who got a vasectomy. So “that leaves Nathaniel” and now Richard's so angry that Anita actually regrets bringing it up. Good. I wish for her to suffer.
“As if on cue,” Micah and Nathaniel pop up. Did LKH lampshade herself there?
Richard asks Nathaniel if they knew about “the baby”, and Nathaniel actually behaves like a normal person and asks, “are we sure?” Richard is pissy that Nathaniel and Micah knew first, and Anita says, “I didn't want any of you to know until I did the test.” WHICH SHE STILL HAS NOT DONE. She could easily have peed on that stick AND gone to a doctor in the time since she has started to worry about being pregnant. I think that she is lying. After all, if she's not pregnant, she can't get all this drama.
Richard says to Nathaniel that if Anita is pregnant, the father is one of them, and Richard is using his angry voice to say this. And then steam comes out of my ears.
Nathaniel had once of the most careful looks I'd ever seen on his face. He looked blank, pleasant, but not sorry, not submissive. [WTF do “sorry” and “submissive” have to do with each other?] Always before when dealing with Richard, Nathaniel had given off subservient vibes. Now, suddenly, there was nothing subservient about him. He might still bottom for me, but his days of doing it for Richard were over” (136).
Since when did Nathaniel ever “bottom” for Richard? They have never had sex. Also, bottoming and submitting ARE NOT SYNONYMS. They mean entirely different things, stop using them as synonyms! Because you just wrote that Nathaniel had been fucked by Richard in the past, and I do not think that was what you intended.
My expression right now is not careful, and it sure as hell isn't submissive. It is extreme fury. LKH, you know NOTHING about what a submissive is and is not. IT DOES NOT MEAN PUTTING UP WITH ENDLESS BULLSHIT FROM EVERYONE. How much bullshit do you think I put up with? And I am submissive to exactly one person, and not to him under all circumstances. There are submissives who submit to more than one person, and under more circumstances, but there are NONE who submit to everyone always. It would be like a heterosexual woman wanting to have sex with every man in the world and wanting sex at all times.
Oh and then Anita says she's happy Nathaniel isn't being submissive toward Richard any longer. She quite obviously thinks there is something wrong with anyone who is a submissive, or at least any man who is.
Anita thinks Richard and Nathaniel are gonna have a physical fight, and that Richard would win it, but Anita would dump him over it. Apparently Anita, JC, Micah, Samuel, and Sampson would all stand around doing nothing while Richard kicked the crap out of Nathaniel. Since Richard is JC's “animal to call”, I think JC could force Richard to not kick Nathaniel's ass, but I guess he wouldn't. Perhaps his relative opinions of Richard and Nathaniel are the same as mine; namely, Richard's kind of an ass but redeemable, while Nathaniel is a vile manipulative bully who looks like Cousin It.
