Danse Macabre, Chapter 22
Jan. 22nd, 2014 02:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lliiraCN: Anita Blake book, pregnancy, woman treated as nothing but a womb, bestiality
I apologize in advance for not being very detailed with this chapter. It starts with something that upsets me so much, I have decided to skim it.
We start with Anita's mens waking her up and her body wanting to turn into a werewolf. Shifting would be Bad because... I don't know. Claudia comes in and yells that they can't let Anita shift because she would lose the baby.
1) I hate this trope that therian women can't bear children, and it is everywhere in urban paranormal literature. And there's never any woman who says, "that's a big plus to being a werewolf"; it is ALWAYS a source of garment-rending angst and how much better the heroine is than every other woman and whatever, I hate it. It is not a necessity, either. Becoming a werewolf is already magic, so the idea that this supposedly scientific thing HAS to exist, especially among writers who enjoy making vampire sperm come alive after 100+ years of undeath, is ludicrous. It's yet another example of how women are terrible and men are awesome in a genre that lives and breathes misogyny and masculism.
2) Anita doesn't want a baby anyway. Now, even if someone doesn't want a baby, a miscarriage can be pretty traumatic, but it still makes the "danger" a lot less.
3) The author apparently thinks that once a woman is pregnant, that's all she wrote, you've transformed into nothing but a womb over which you personally have no power.
4) The worst part: CLAUDIA is the one saying this. Anita says nothing. Anita does nothing. Anita is not allowed to state her opinion about what she wants to happen to her own womb -- Claudia has to do it for her. Anita is not allowed to do anything about her own pregnancy.
5) #$^%$%^#$%!@%$!$!!!!!!!!
A bunch of people pile on Anita to keep her from shifting, and I don't understand how that's supposed to work, but whatever, LKH is an extremely stupid person so we just have to accept it. Then Anita smells wolf, which makes "her" wolf (urgh) stop being spasmy and calm down. That also makes no sense. Her body wants to become a wolf until it smells other wolves around? Wouldn't it make more sense for "her" wolf to go, "oh yay, more wolves to play with," and therefore want to change more? Anyway, there are a bunch of voices, and "the discord had a kind of harmony of its own" (196), which continues the stupidity. Discord is not harmonic. Someone get Laurell K. Hamilton a dictionary.
Anita sniffs some guy for a good long time before realizing it's Clay, Richard's bodyguard. Then she smells Graham and thinks he smells "good" and "warm."
"Now that I was seeing him [Graham], and not just looking at him, I could see that he wasn't unhappy to be nude in front of me. [That makes me think she's at a life drawing class.] That pissed me off." (197)
Anita is "pissed off" that a man is not scared or embarassed to be naked in front of her. Yup. I will bet a kidney that if he had been naked and scared and of 100% Northern European descent, she'd have been turned on and raped him then and there. Anita not only does not want someone who does want her; she gets ANGRY when someone does want her; she is PISSED OFF that someone can be naked in front of her and not upset about it.
Then Anita actually says "no", so that's something. Clay, Claudia, and JC all berate her that she needs skin-to-skin contact, and JC tells her not to be "stubborn" now. Because his job is to get Anita raped, one way or another. I just realized that's his whole point in the Anitaverse; that's why he exists.
Anita thinks that she doesn't want to have sex with Graham, and the odds of that go up if she's naked and in bed with him. Okay, that's true, but only if you're actually attracted to the person to a level where your libido shuts off the part of your brain that thinks "this isn't such a good idea." Anita is not attracted to Graham on that level, and with all these people in the room, I think it would be relatively easy not to end up fucking. Plus, Anita's body is supposed to be going through something really traumatic, serious, and painful; this is not the time for sex. I love when authors throw together two people who simply ~have~ to be in bed together and they end up screwing, but not when the body of one of the people involved is being torn apart from the inside out. LKH has no sense of... propriety is the word that keeps coming to mind.
Here's a thing: "I'd refused to let them slide wolf scent and skin over my body..." Um, ew. I know she means having a naked werewolf against her, but that sounds like someone wanted to flay Richard and lay his skin on top of her. Which I wouldn't put past LKH, honestly.
This is the most pain Anita's ever felt, btw, this trying not to transform into a werewolf. And she does not give us one clue as to why she's refusing to transform. In fact, she says, "if you could force someone to feel this forever, they'd tell you anything, do anything, to make it stop." (198)
So now Anita is between Graham and Clay and Anita tells us they're as close as they can get without putting weight on top of her. What? How does that -- you don't need to put your weight on top of someone to be close. Has LKH ever CUDDLED before?
Graham's eyes have "bled back to brown." Everyone's eye colors change in the Anitaverse, and LKH likes to say they "bleed to" different colors. It's stupid. Moving on.
Anita is fragile fragile owy so fragile ;_;. Richard comes in, pissed off that JC ordered him. JC says he had to or Richard wouldn't have come and that Anita needs help. Richard says no she doesn't, she's got Clay and Graham, and if JC wants tips on how to please her in bed, ask Micah. Well, Micah raped her with his baseball bat-sized dick, so there's that. Richard says he isn't into sharing, and we are reminded by Micah that Richard is "Ulfric" and Anita is "lupa." Oh look, the term for "wolf king" is capitalized, but the term for "wolf queen" is not, what a surprise.
Clay tells Richard to stop being an asshole and help Anita. Sigh. How is LKH not embarassed to write this stuff? It reads like she wrote it while crying over old letters from her ex-husband and masturbating at the same time.
The bed is so big that Richard has to "peer" over Clay to see Anita. Richard "crawled onto the bed, and showed that he was still wearing shorts." (199) How did he do that, by waving his butt in the air?
A page is taken up with stupid dog tricks, with Richard putting himself above Anita, Anita's "wolf" being pissy that he's in a dominant position over her (what the fuck ever), and Clay (not Anita herself, of goddamn course) saying Anita doesn't like that. Richard says Anita's human, she doesn't think like that, but of course he is wrong. This book should have been titled Richard Is Wrong.
Blah blah it's not working blah blah Claudia tells Richard to "bring" Anita's wolf. Because she needs a man to get her to shapechange too. Richard says she'll lose the baby, but asks Anita what she wants. I am sensing a pattern: only evil/wrong people ever ask Anita what she wants. Anita finally gives her opinion, and says no, don't. I don't know why. I guess there's a hint that she wants to keep the baby, but since she resists changing in other books even when she doesn't think she's pregnant, I don't think that's it.
Claudia talks about how Anita can fight changing even though she shouldn't be able to. Does anyone have a clue why an author would go out of their way to break their own canon in order to make their protagonist even more awesome? Wouldn't it be better to make one's protaganist awesome in ways that do not break canon? I can understand when fan authors disrespect canon, but an author disrespecting her own canon, blatantly and on purpose, does not make sense to me.
Anita thinks about how if she changes into a werewolf, she'd be Richard's, and she wouldn't be able to be Micah's any longer. Yes, of course she has to belong to a man. Anita's the best because Anita belongs to the most men. And really, this is a false dilemma. There's no reason Anita couldn't be a werewolf and still in a relationship with Micah. She wouldn't be "Nimir-Ra", the leopard queen, any longer, but she can't transform into a leopard and so shouldn't be their queen anyway now. This chapter is like an essay on why the Anitaverse is stupid and doesn't work.
"You could date outside your species, I knew that, but I remembered Richard saying once that dominants don't." (201) Why not? Stupid.
Anita has been thinking about how Richard wants her to change so she'll belong to him. Maybe he wants her to change so she'll devote a thought to the wolf pack from time to time. She's queen of all these therian groups and does absolutely nothing for them; all she does is demand their leaders bang her. She says to Richard, "you don't want me to change, that's why you won't help." Which is the opposite of what she's been claiming. So... uh... I guess I'll put this down to bad copy editing, because as written it makes no sense.
Then Anita tells Micah and Nathaniel to come over and help her call leopard. Because, of course, she needs a walking dildo to help her to get anything done. Richard turns away from her, and I guess between the last page and this one LKH changed her mind about what Richard wants, because now Anita somehow knows that if she changes, Richard will turn away from her. But then she tells us, "I didn't think he'd find someone willing to share him with what amounted to a permanent mistress, furry or not, but hey, it wasn't my life. It was his life."
1) Smug much?
2) Is he going to turn away from you or not?
3) You don't think Richard will find anyone to share him, but you expect all your men to share you. So... women can't be polyamorous? I have no idea.
4) LKH uses this construction a lot. "It wasn't my life. It was his life." "I thought X, but I kept it to myself." Etc. It's a deeply unlikable trait in Anita and deeply unlikable writing on LKH's part. It doesn't help that Anita's smug judgments are always as obnoxious as possible.
Okay so Anita is being touched by a bunch of guys and her wolf and leopard rise within her and they cancel each other out somehow. A couple pages of that. Then Nathaniel kisses her while turning into a leopard. Then she licks his leopard teeth. This isn't really bestiality, because Nathaniel still has a human brain in leopard form, but still, yuck. Licking anyone's teeth is already yuck.
Anita's got shapechanger goo on her, and she tells us Nathaniel's fur is dry and she doesn't understand why. That preternatural biology degree sure was worth it, wasn't it? She thinks about how she'd like to fuck him while he's in this leopard form, which yuck, again. She also muses about how cat-people look better than dog-people, because it is of vital importance to shit on one's ex while admiring one's current fucktoy.
Now it's time for "Lion", and Anita dubs Haven "Cookie" for "Cookie Monster" because he has blue hair. Auggie's entourage arrives, minus Auggie. Anita informs us, again, that Octavius is Auggie's human servant.
Anita finally realizes that it's daytime, and that if JC sleeps touching her, he doesn't die at dawn. She thinks about how Damian doesn't either so long as he's touching her when he falls asleep, and wait a damn minute. I thought Damian was always a daywalking vampire and it had nothing to do with Anita.
Octavius and JC have a pissing match about how Anita called them and she shouldn't have done that and whatever. JC implies that he wants to start conquering new territory, and Anita tells us she can sense his thoughts and knows that he doesn't actually want to do that, but that implying that he does gives him leverage. Uh. Huh. First, JC obviously does want that. Second, saying you want to conquer people does not give you leverage over them. It makes them much more likely to want to kill you, in fact. So so so stupid. And what JC ACTUALLY said was that he wanted an alliance with Auggie to rule "the middle of this country" (207), which makes me think, again, that LKH's vocabulary is pathetic.
Anita calls "Cookie" and Octavius says if he's not strong enough to fight, whatever, let him go, which is exactly what happened with Samuel and Valentina but we were supposed to see Valentina as creepy there. Also, have I mentioned lately how much I hate this might-makes-right stuff LKH loves? Besides it obviously being morally reprehensible, it wouldn't work as a society for two seconds. Pierce, being a non-evil person, tries to hold on to Haven, but Octavius orders him to let Haven go. Anita toys with the idea of getting Pierce to come over too, but decides one lion is enough for now. I set fire to her hair. End chapter.
I apologize in advance for not being very detailed with this chapter. It starts with something that upsets me so much, I have decided to skim it.
We start with Anita's mens waking her up and her body wanting to turn into a werewolf. Shifting would be Bad because... I don't know. Claudia comes in and yells that they can't let Anita shift because she would lose the baby.
1) I hate this trope that therian women can't bear children, and it is everywhere in urban paranormal literature. And there's never any woman who says, "that's a big plus to being a werewolf"; it is ALWAYS a source of garment-rending angst and how much better the heroine is than every other woman and whatever, I hate it. It is not a necessity, either. Becoming a werewolf is already magic, so the idea that this supposedly scientific thing HAS to exist, especially among writers who enjoy making vampire sperm come alive after 100+ years of undeath, is ludicrous. It's yet another example of how women are terrible and men are awesome in a genre that lives and breathes misogyny and masculism.
2) Anita doesn't want a baby anyway. Now, even if someone doesn't want a baby, a miscarriage can be pretty traumatic, but it still makes the "danger" a lot less.
3) The author apparently thinks that once a woman is pregnant, that's all she wrote, you've transformed into nothing but a womb over which you personally have no power.
4) The worst part: CLAUDIA is the one saying this. Anita says nothing. Anita does nothing. Anita is not allowed to state her opinion about what she wants to happen to her own womb -- Claudia has to do it for her. Anita is not allowed to do anything about her own pregnancy.
5) #$^%$%^#$%!@%$!$!!!!!!!!
A bunch of people pile on Anita to keep her from shifting, and I don't understand how that's supposed to work, but whatever, LKH is an extremely stupid person so we just have to accept it. Then Anita smells wolf, which makes "her" wolf (urgh) stop being spasmy and calm down. That also makes no sense. Her body wants to become a wolf until it smells other wolves around? Wouldn't it make more sense for "her" wolf to go, "oh yay, more wolves to play with," and therefore want to change more? Anyway, there are a bunch of voices, and "the discord had a kind of harmony of its own" (196), which continues the stupidity. Discord is not harmonic. Someone get Laurell K. Hamilton a dictionary.
Anita sniffs some guy for a good long time before realizing it's Clay, Richard's bodyguard. Then she smells Graham and thinks he smells "good" and "warm."
"Now that I was seeing him [Graham], and not just looking at him, I could see that he wasn't unhappy to be nude in front of me. [That makes me think she's at a life drawing class.] That pissed me off." (197)
Anita is "pissed off" that a man is not scared or embarassed to be naked in front of her. Yup. I will bet a kidney that if he had been naked and scared and of 100% Northern European descent, she'd have been turned on and raped him then and there. Anita not only does not want someone who does want her; she gets ANGRY when someone does want her; she is PISSED OFF that someone can be naked in front of her and not upset about it.
Then Anita actually says "no", so that's something. Clay, Claudia, and JC all berate her that she needs skin-to-skin contact, and JC tells her not to be "stubborn" now. Because his job is to get Anita raped, one way or another. I just realized that's his whole point in the Anitaverse; that's why he exists.
Anita thinks that she doesn't want to have sex with Graham, and the odds of that go up if she's naked and in bed with him. Okay, that's true, but only if you're actually attracted to the person to a level where your libido shuts off the part of your brain that thinks "this isn't such a good idea." Anita is not attracted to Graham on that level, and with all these people in the room, I think it would be relatively easy not to end up fucking. Plus, Anita's body is supposed to be going through something really traumatic, serious, and painful; this is not the time for sex. I love when authors throw together two people who simply ~have~ to be in bed together and they end up screwing, but not when the body of one of the people involved is being torn apart from the inside out. LKH has no sense of... propriety is the word that keeps coming to mind.
Here's a thing: "I'd refused to let them slide wolf scent and skin over my body..." Um, ew. I know she means having a naked werewolf against her, but that sounds like someone wanted to flay Richard and lay his skin on top of her. Which I wouldn't put past LKH, honestly.
This is the most pain Anita's ever felt, btw, this trying not to transform into a werewolf. And she does not give us one clue as to why she's refusing to transform. In fact, she says, "if you could force someone to feel this forever, they'd tell you anything, do anything, to make it stop." (198)
So now Anita is between Graham and Clay and Anita tells us they're as close as they can get without putting weight on top of her. What? How does that -- you don't need to put your weight on top of someone to be close. Has LKH ever CUDDLED before?
Graham's eyes have "bled back to brown." Everyone's eye colors change in the Anitaverse, and LKH likes to say they "bleed to" different colors. It's stupid. Moving on.
Anita is fragile fragile owy so fragile ;_;. Richard comes in, pissed off that JC ordered him. JC says he had to or Richard wouldn't have come and that Anita needs help. Richard says no she doesn't, she's got Clay and Graham, and if JC wants tips on how to please her in bed, ask Micah. Well, Micah raped her with his baseball bat-sized dick, so there's that. Richard says he isn't into sharing, and we are reminded by Micah that Richard is "Ulfric" and Anita is "lupa." Oh look, the term for "wolf king" is capitalized, but the term for "wolf queen" is not, what a surprise.
Clay tells Richard to stop being an asshole and help Anita. Sigh. How is LKH not embarassed to write this stuff? It reads like she wrote it while crying over old letters from her ex-husband and masturbating at the same time.
The bed is so big that Richard has to "peer" over Clay to see Anita. Richard "crawled onto the bed, and showed that he was still wearing shorts." (199) How did he do that, by waving his butt in the air?
A page is taken up with stupid dog tricks, with Richard putting himself above Anita, Anita's "wolf" being pissy that he's in a dominant position over her (what the fuck ever), and Clay (not Anita herself, of goddamn course) saying Anita doesn't like that. Richard says Anita's human, she doesn't think like that, but of course he is wrong. This book should have been titled Richard Is Wrong.
Blah blah it's not working blah blah Claudia tells Richard to "bring" Anita's wolf. Because she needs a man to get her to shapechange too. Richard says she'll lose the baby, but asks Anita what she wants. I am sensing a pattern: only evil/wrong people ever ask Anita what she wants. Anita finally gives her opinion, and says no, don't. I don't know why. I guess there's a hint that she wants to keep the baby, but since she resists changing in other books even when she doesn't think she's pregnant, I don't think that's it.
Claudia talks about how Anita can fight changing even though she shouldn't be able to. Does anyone have a clue why an author would go out of their way to break their own canon in order to make their protagonist even more awesome? Wouldn't it be better to make one's protaganist awesome in ways that do not break canon? I can understand when fan authors disrespect canon, but an author disrespecting her own canon, blatantly and on purpose, does not make sense to me.
Anita thinks about how if she changes into a werewolf, she'd be Richard's, and she wouldn't be able to be Micah's any longer. Yes, of course she has to belong to a man. Anita's the best because Anita belongs to the most men. And really, this is a false dilemma. There's no reason Anita couldn't be a werewolf and still in a relationship with Micah. She wouldn't be "Nimir-Ra", the leopard queen, any longer, but she can't transform into a leopard and so shouldn't be their queen anyway now. This chapter is like an essay on why the Anitaverse is stupid and doesn't work.
"You could date outside your species, I knew that, but I remembered Richard saying once that dominants don't." (201) Why not? Stupid.
Anita has been thinking about how Richard wants her to change so she'll belong to him. Maybe he wants her to change so she'll devote a thought to the wolf pack from time to time. She's queen of all these therian groups and does absolutely nothing for them; all she does is demand their leaders bang her. She says to Richard, "you don't want me to change, that's why you won't help." Which is the opposite of what she's been claiming. So... uh... I guess I'll put this down to bad copy editing, because as written it makes no sense.
Then Anita tells Micah and Nathaniel to come over and help her call leopard. Because, of course, she needs a walking dildo to help her to get anything done. Richard turns away from her, and I guess between the last page and this one LKH changed her mind about what Richard wants, because now Anita somehow knows that if she changes, Richard will turn away from her. But then she tells us, "I didn't think he'd find someone willing to share him with what amounted to a permanent mistress, furry or not, but hey, it wasn't my life. It was his life."
1) Smug much?
2) Is he going to turn away from you or not?
3) You don't think Richard will find anyone to share him, but you expect all your men to share you. So... women can't be polyamorous? I have no idea.
4) LKH uses this construction a lot. "It wasn't my life. It was his life." "I thought X, but I kept it to myself." Etc. It's a deeply unlikable trait in Anita and deeply unlikable writing on LKH's part. It doesn't help that Anita's smug judgments are always as obnoxious as possible.
Okay so Anita is being touched by a bunch of guys and her wolf and leopard rise within her and they cancel each other out somehow. A couple pages of that. Then Nathaniel kisses her while turning into a leopard. Then she licks his leopard teeth. This isn't really bestiality, because Nathaniel still has a human brain in leopard form, but still, yuck. Licking anyone's teeth is already yuck.
Anita's got shapechanger goo on her, and she tells us Nathaniel's fur is dry and she doesn't understand why. That preternatural biology degree sure was worth it, wasn't it? She thinks about how she'd like to fuck him while he's in this leopard form, which yuck, again. She also muses about how cat-people look better than dog-people, because it is of vital importance to shit on one's ex while admiring one's current fucktoy.
Now it's time for "Lion", and Anita dubs Haven "Cookie" for "Cookie Monster" because he has blue hair. Auggie's entourage arrives, minus Auggie. Anita informs us, again, that Octavius is Auggie's human servant.
Anita finally realizes that it's daytime, and that if JC sleeps touching her, he doesn't die at dawn. She thinks about how Damian doesn't either so long as he's touching her when he falls asleep, and wait a damn minute. I thought Damian was always a daywalking vampire and it had nothing to do with Anita.
Octavius and JC have a pissing match about how Anita called them and she shouldn't have done that and whatever. JC implies that he wants to start conquering new territory, and Anita tells us she can sense his thoughts and knows that he doesn't actually want to do that, but that implying that he does gives him leverage. Uh. Huh. First, JC obviously does want that. Second, saying you want to conquer people does not give you leverage over them. It makes them much more likely to want to kill you, in fact. So so so stupid. And what JC ACTUALLY said was that he wanted an alliance with Auggie to rule "the middle of this country" (207), which makes me think, again, that LKH's vocabulary is pathetic.
Anita calls "Cookie" and Octavius says if he's not strong enough to fight, whatever, let him go, which is exactly what happened with Samuel and Valentina but we were supposed to see Valentina as creepy there. Also, have I mentioned lately how much I hate this might-makes-right stuff LKH loves? Besides it obviously being morally reprehensible, it wouldn't work as a society for two seconds. Pierce, being a non-evil person, tries to hold on to Haven, but Octavius orders him to let Haven go. Anita toys with the idea of getting Pierce to come over too, but decides one lion is enough for now. I set fire to her hair. End chapter.
