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Danse Macabre, Chapter 25
CN: Anita Blake book
Chapter 25
The chapter starts with Anita leaving the bedroom to go to the bathroom. But when the last chapter ended, she was still in the bathroom. The last time she told us her location, it was to tell us that Remus was "invading our bath" (222). Between chapters 24 and 25, LKH forgot where Anita was. The best thing about this is that there's no reason for it. Anita tells us she leaves the bedroom (which she was not in) to go to the bathroom (where she already was) so she can tell us that the vampire Elinore is in the bedroom when she "returns" to the bedroom.
Elinore "was dressed in a white gown with a high lacy collar and a cream robe that managed to look graceful, not like jammies at all" (225). Jammies, Anita? Really? JAMMIES? Does the widdle vampiwe huntew need her binky? Does she like sucking dick so much because penii are pacifiers to her? A nightgown is not pajamas anyway. And why is she surprised that nightwear can look graceful? This woman is continually surprised by the most mundane things. I think she was born yesterday. Plus she's apparently forgotten that her astral self appeared in a long white nightgown earlier in the book. How long do you think LKH goes between writing chapters? Even if it's like a month, I don't understand how she forgets everything she writes all the time. She has the memory of a fruit fly. Wait, that's an insult to fruit flies. She has the memory of a starfish.
We get a long paragraph describing Elinore's appearance. As Elinore is a woman, I don't have to tell you it's critical of her. Anita tells us her eyes are the wrong color. Literally, that is what she says. "Her eyes were a pale icy blue, the wrong color of blue for that delicate face." HER EYES ARE THE WRONG COLOR, PEOPLE. Anita says having light blue eyes makes Elinore look cold, and "gave the lie to the rest of her." There is no way to communicate the depth and breadth of Laurell K. Hamilton's misogyny; you have to read her books to truly understand it, and I do not recommend doing that. Elinore doesn't lift weights and therefore Anita says her body is "soft". I wonder if LKH thinks all men lift weights. Anita angsts about how Elinore has "the blond Nordic beauty" that would have made her "fit in" with Anita's blond, blue-eyed father "and his new family." They were your family too, Anita. And wasn't her father German? That's not synonomous with Nordic. Some Germans are descendants of Nordic peoples, especially in Northern Germany, but many are not. Germany is not Sweden, LKH. Plus saying having light blue eyes makes a woman cold is just -- I'm used to fantasy and sci-fi being hugely lookist, but that's an absurdity I don't think even George Lucas would accept.
"I'd tried to hate her, just on principle." Yes. Anita actually goes around trying to hate pretty blonde women. She does it on purpose. Then LKH perpetrates her stylistic tic of having Anita ask a question in order to answer it: "I'd failed, why?" Well, it can't be because you had a moment of basic human decency, we know that much. She says she couldn't hate Elinore because Elinore is tough and hard.
How anyone can believe Anita Blake is anything but an evil, vile, despicable piece of refuse is beyond me.
To make it clear: Anita Blake hates all women except for those who are tough and hard. If you're a victim of anything, or if you're kind, giving, emotional, sentimental, etc., she will hate you with a clear conscience. This isn't respect, or even not-hatred. This is fear. Anita Blake likes bullies.
I just realized Anita Blake is Peter Pettigrew. Or Peter Pettigrew self-insert fanfic, anyway.
Then she says "all the male vamps were prettier than me, why shouldn't some of the female vamps be prettier, too?" So vampirism makes all men Adonises but it does not make all women Venuses. Because that makes sense. If you hate women enough, that is.
Elinore came to ask Jean-Claude why she woke before noon. Anita tells us that Elinore and JC look like opposites, "one so pale, the other so dark." Um, JC is pale too, Anita. Literally deathly pale. Also she says that JC "was in his black brocade robe with all the fur on it," which is a terrible description of a terrible piece of clothing. I've often thought LKH's sexual tastes were shaped by 80s hair bands, but now I think Liberace was a bigger influence.
JC says that mass-raping Auggie's people gave JC's people lots of power. Anita asks Elinore how she feels. "She seemed to take the question seriously." (226) Why shouldn't she? Then Anita tells us that Elinore has "little girl" mannerisms. Of course she uses this to brag about how much better she is than Elinore. "If I'd been willing to play to my packaging, I might have pulled it off, but it just wasn't in me to try." That's not because you're a wonderful honest person, Anita. It's because if you attempted manipulation, a toddler could see through it, because you are stupider than everyone else on the planet. But I also think that she is lying. She uses terms like "jammies" all the time and generally has a very childish way of speaking and thinking (remember "why was she so mean?"), and she's controlled by the big strong men around her. Being guileless -- or pretending to be -- is also quite child-like.
Anita asks Elinore if she's fed. This is so that Elinore will suck up to Anita. "Quite a compliment that the Executioner cannot tell whether I've fed." Elinore hasn't fed and yet she isn't hungry, which makes JC feel "triumph". Apparently, they will now be able to take a large group into other territories and hide them from human authorities easily, since only one of them will have to feed. Sure, so long as there's another large group of metaphysically-connected people they're able to magically rape. Great. And they'll be able to hide their evil from human authorities even more than they do now, wonderful, being able to rape large numbers of people with impunity to further their own power is exactly what I want to read about the supposed heroes doing.
Anita asks Elinore where her "sweetie" is. Urgh. Elinore says he didn't wake with her. Then Anita starts to ask if Elinore's the only one who woke early besides JC, but gets interrupted by Remus coming to tell them that Requiem is here. So Requiem woke up, but not this "sweetie" of Elinore's, whoever he is. Is this because no woman but Anita is allowed to have lovers, or because LKH forgot Elinore's boyfriend's name?
They have a multi-paragraph argument over whether Remus can stay with them; Remus wants to because Claudia told him to, but JC tells him to go, and Remus says he's "caught between masters" (227) and they say they need a chain of command. Isn't JC Claudia's boss? Anyway, this little argument is boring, annoying, and pointless, yay!
Requiem has a black eye, which makes Anita muse on how bright his eyes are and how Belle Morte tried to buy him from his master so she could have a "matching set" of men with blue eyes, and I don't care. Why are we getting this infodump about Belle Morte? I don't care. Belle Morte is not important to this book. I think this is so Anita can show up Belle, ooh look she has the "matching set" Belle Morte couldn't have, Asher and JC and Requiem, and it's extremely pathetic to write characters who exist just so your self-insert can be better than them, and I don't care.
Anita asks Requiem (I am sensing a theme here) how much blood he's using to heal the bruises on his face, and he looks at her in a way that makes her think she's said something smart. Everyone in her world has known about vampires forever. That vampires heal themselves through drinking blood is not some kind of deeply-held secret. When you claim your main character is "smart" for saying something so mundane, you make yourself and her look stupid. Plus he answers, "much," and JC asks "how fares the rest?" (228) which is both 1) irritating faux-Shakespearian and 2) improper grammar. It's how fare the rest, not fares. Fares is third-person singular. FFS. Faux-Shakespearean in an urban fantasy is irritating enough, but ungrammatical faux-Shakespearean is even more obnoxious.
JC tells Anita to go get scissors so they can look at Requiem's wounds, and she says she does it without being asked. That... what... but... okay, not only can LKH not keep up continuity between chapters; she can't keep up continuity between consecutive sentences.
They spend two pages taking off Requiem's bandages and looking at his wounds. That's the only reason they're taking off his bandages, btw, to look at his wounds. Not to replace the bandages or to help him in any way. Just to ogle him. Anita says that Requiem seems as "empty" as "a painting of some handsome prince come back from battle" (229). Has she ever actually seen such paintings? The first thing I think of with that description is the Pre-Raphaelite painters, and they did not paint princes who looked "distant." Their paintings are highly emotional. Medieval paintings often seem more "distant", but they weren't big on the "handsome prince back from battle" theme. (I can't find any paintings of princes back from battle on the web. Lots of pictures of shirtless Prince Harry, though.) LKH gets everything wrong, always and forever. It is a gift.
So they're sitting around gazing at -- drooling over, really -- Requiem's many wounds. Anita is surprised that Meng-Die was trying to kill him, though JC says he told her that. I don't think he told her that. I certainly don't remember it, anyway. And so I am further creeped out by JC, because a common tactic of manipulators is to pretend they told you something they didn't. Anita is impressed that Meng Die knew just where to stick a blade to kill Requiem. I am not; Meng Die is a vampire in a ridiculously violent culture, of course she knows how to kill other vampires. Anita says her "respect for Meng Die went up, and so did my fear" (229). I wrote that spiel about how Anita only doesn't hate women she fears before I read this. Yep. Also, I kept reading "and" as "but" in that sentence, because fearing someone and respecting them are not things that go together in my brain. Nor is respecting someone who tries to kill someone for not sleeping with her any longer. I don't think Anita actually respects anyone; I think she just confuses fear for respect.
Elinore hasn't said anything for three pages.
I'm skimming a lot of the description of Requiem's wounds because the ogling makes me feel icky, and also it's boring. I can't even imagine it being interesting to someone with a wound fetish. The combination of boring and creepy is completely off-putting. No one bothers to ask Requiem how he feels about any of this, just as they didn't ask him if they could remove the bandages. I think he went distant as a coping strategy in response to this abuse. First he got beaten up and nearly killed, and now he's going through this. It's completely disgusting.
Anita asks if they called the cops, and it sounds like she actually disapproves of them not doing so, so that's something. JC says he and Asher hypnotized the crowd to forget that they'd witnessed a major crime, because "mass hypnosis is not illegal, ma petite, only personal hypnotism." (229)
BULLSHIT. No. I refuse to believe that even Anita Blake's world is so stupid that something that's illegal to do to one person is perfectly acceptable so long as you do it to a lot of people at once. Jean-Claude isn't a goddamn bank and he's not talking about stealing people's houses. He's not a government and he's not starting a war. He's talking about mindrape. LKH, shockingly, put enough thought into her unformed turd of a world to make mindrape illegal in it. There is NO FUCKING WAY mindraping one person is illegal, but mindraping a few dozen isn't. I call foul. You are not allowed this, LKH. I refuse.
So, JC and Asher mindraped a bunch of people so they'd forget about the crime they witnessed. Whether it's illegal or not (which it is, fuck you LKH), it's hugely unethical. Why would they do this? Why protect Meng Die from the legal consequences of her actions? Who knows? We sure don't get to. I doubt LKH even knows.
Then we get a bit where Anita blames Requiem for causing Meng Die to attack him. He should have known she'd fly into a murderous rage, you see.
Remember when I said this book wasn't as bad as Twilight? I was wrong. It's not written quite as badly, for the most part, but there is too much badness here to say that it's better than anything else. It is tied for worst novel in the world with all the other worst novels in the world. It's sitting in the cesspit with L. Ron Hubbard's Mission Earth, the Left Behind books, and every other book that makes the world a much worse place by its existence. It is a poisonous, despicable, evil piece of work. Decent human beings are capable of writing dreck, but they aren't capable of writing a book like this.
Requiem gets on his knees to beg Anita to have sex with him because he's addicted to the ardeur. I think the only person to ever have wanted to have sex with Anita simply because he wanted her was Richard, and even their first time was a weird mutual rape. JC wants the power she gives him and everyone else is drawn to the ardeur. I've said it before, and will probably say it again, but that's one of the most pathetic things I've ever seen. How do you write a self-insert and make the only reason men want her some kind of horrible, addictive magic? How is that at all satisfying? The self-hatred on display here makes me extremely uncomfortable. That other women find this hot because they enjoy slotting themselves into Anita's position makes me even more uncomfortable. You do not have to be some kind of walking meth for men to want to fuck you. I can't believe I'm reading something that made me feel the need to write that. Have we come to the point in our culture where the misogyny is so deep and all-encompassing that many of us now find it hard to imagine men wanting to have sex with women?
JC talks about how Requiem is powerful enough to be Master of a City if he wanted, and Elinore remembers she exists and says there's no shame in not wanting to rule. JC says sure, but it's a big deal that Anita can make someone as powerful as Requiem addicted to her. I don't understand how LKH's dumbass, halfass, Dragonball Z magic system works, but that is not how addiction works. Having a genetic and personal makeup that causes you to be pre-disposed to addiction does not make you weak. More powerful people are not less likely to be addicted than weak people. If anything, people with a need for and ability to control everything else are less likely to seek help when they are addicted than others are. Addiction is about neither physical nor mental strength. I am completely sick of the cultural myth that it is.
Elinore thinks Anita should fuck Requiem. Anita argues with her, saying she already has plenty of lovers, and she doesn't have the emotional capacity to add one more, especially one as "high-maintenance" as Requiem. That has a weird blamey tone to it. Elinore thinks it's ridiculous that Anita is turning down Requiem as a lover because she doesn't think she can love him. JC says Anita is very young." (232). Oh yes, sex and love only go together for YOUNG people. OLD people go around screwing lots of people all the time. Young people are well-known for being totally monogamous, but old people go to clubs to pick up randoms. And if you only want to have sex if you also have love, you are naive and silly and there is something wrong with you.
Elinore talks about how great it is that Anita has all these dudes, and that she's like Belle Morte in that she collects men. Anita says she doesn't want to collect men. She wants Requiem to stop being "besotted" with her. This is entirely rational. Elinore claims there is no cure, but JC says there is.
Okay, maybe there are occasional redeeming qualities in this book. I went to a wedding where the priest had the same speech impediment, btw. He started the ceremony by saying "mawwiage." That I managed not to laugh is one of my proudest moments.
So. "'Love,' he said, 'true love.'" (233). Yup. I guess I should talk about how ridiculous love breaking a spell is, or get pissy about the concept of "true love", but I can't, for a few reasons. One, love breaking a curse is a perfectly fine and good thing, with a long and honorable tradition. I'm not sure it belongs in urban fantasy, but I don't much care about urban fantasy so I can't much care about this. (I'm reading this book mostly for the bad romance and sex and politics and magic -- the vampires are a bug, not a feature, as far as I'm concerned.) Second, as in The Princess Bride, the concept of "true love" also has a long and pervasive history in fiction. I'm not going to tear into it. Third, and most importantly, the way LKH deploys it is hilarious. She had her Frenchie Pepe le Pew character say not just "love," and not just "true love," but the whole thing: "love, true love."
Getting on with it... they talk about some past history of Requiem's. LKH name-drops a London carriage-maker; I could look this person up to see if he existed, but I don't care enough to. They go on for a long time about how Requiem escaped Belle Morte twice. I think LKH would rather have written a book about that period of Belle Morte's life than this book. Actually, I often get the strong impression that LKH would much rather be writing more traditional fantasy. The faux-Shakespearian, the goofy outfits, the men in high heels, the intrusive purple prose, characters being judgy at Anita for having sex, the fact that there may as well be no laws or law enforcement agencies, the societies based on ownership of other people: it would all fit much better in some kind of pseudo-16th century fantasy world. But then she couldn't have all the guns, so I guess that's out.
"'Love,' Jean-Claude said. 'Love is the only cure.'" (234)
Now I'm thinking of The Captain and Tenille. You can never repeat the word "love" like that without being hilarious. You just can't.
They decide that Jean-Claude is not addicted to Anita because he's her master and also has the ardeur, and that Asher is protected because "love protects him." The word "love" is starting to not look like a word, and that is just wrong. Love is too important to keep repeating the word like this, LKH! It's fine in a song or poetry, but in prose like this, it's borderline insulting. It makes something deep and meaningful seem virtually nonexistent.
Anita says that she'd assumed JC and Asher were fucking when she wasn't around, but had never asked, because "don't ask, don't tell worked just fine for me." Well. That's incredibly offensive. On multiple levels. You should know if two of your lovers are screwing each other, you should not be so incurious about whether two of your lovers who adored each other before you came along are screwing because you should care about their lives, and YOU SHOULD NOT USE INSTITUTIONALIZED OPPRESSION AS A CUTESY JOKE. Holy crap.
She decides it's "too complicated" for her. Um, yeah, "so, JC, are you and Asher fucking?" That's super-complicated. She says "I literally waved the thought away." No, LKH. She didn't. Unless she thinks in thought bubbles, like in a comic strip.
They keep telling Anita she has to screw Requiem. Anita points out that one reason Elinore is with JC is that JC doesn't make her fuck people besides her "knight" (whatever his name is, and I do think LKH forgot it.) JC tells Anita, "you must meet this obligation." That is would be "cruel" of her to "cast him away" after she's addicted him to her. The hell?! No, it is not cruel to not have sex with someone. I don't care how much they want it or claim to need it. No one has an obligation to have sex with anyone they don't want to have sex with, ever. This is violent Nice Guyism, and I really don't have to go into where this leads, do I? Because I don't want to. We all know. We already all knew, but now we know even better.
Elinore claims that Anita drawing people to her is helping JC, since if Anita weren't there, all these people would be begging to fuck JC instead. Anita demands to know if JC is doing this on purpose. He says "I swear that I am not" (235). That sounds like a lie, along the lines of "I swear it shall be done" from The Princess Bride. Elinore says it's just the way things are, that all these servants of vampires are "instruments to help their masters grow in power and control."
And then Anita takes out a stake and drives it through JC's heart. I can dream, can't I?
So, Anita and all the animals to call and etc. are all just "instruments," things to make Jean-Claude more powerful. Something else I've said before and will say again: Anita is not the true black hole Mary Sue of these books. Jean-Claude is. It's just been spelled out, right there in the text: she exists to make him more powerful. Remember the Anita of the early books? I never liked the books, but still, Anita used to be a character in her own right, she had friends and hobbies and ideas of her own and she did stuff. Jean-Claude was an antagonist then. He won. She lost. We're now reading the attempt of a mind-raped and literally raped slave trying to cope with her slavery without admitting what it is. That could be interesting if the author would admit what it is.
Elinore claims that it's not JC doing this, it's the power itself. See, he's not at fault! Really! I think she is lying and she knows it. Anita calls herself "the ardeur's pinup girl." No, you're JC's sex slave. Veeery different from a pinup girl.
Then they talk about how the ardeur is choosing Anita's animals to call too. JC chose Richard, and that's the normal way of it, but Anita can't choose. Because of course she can't. They go on a tangent about how Anita is going to have a lion to call next, then JC tells her she has to schtupp Requiem. She says, "'I cannot believe that my' -- and I hesitated because boyfriend seemed too junior high, lover not enough -- 'the man I love is encouraging me to take another lover.'" (236)
You call your penii "sweeties," Anita. I wish you'd mature to junior high level. And "lover" is "not enough" -- it's not junior high enough? She can't mean that, can she? I guess she must mean that it's not a meaningful enough term for their relationship, but I'm just guessing here. Also, don't you hate Richard passionately because he doesn't want you to have other fucktoys? Why are you surprised that JC is the opposite of that? Was JC ever monogamous? He's a disgusting creep who wants to pass you around no matter what you say about it, and you've only just realized he doesn't care if you screw people besides him?
Anita says she'll screw Requiem to help JC. Blech. Then she says not now, because the ardeur isn't hungry, and they blab about that for a while. They wonder if it's because of all the people she and JC metaphysically raped last night, but JC and Elinore hedge and say the ardeur is unpredictable. Can't set rules for the magic, then LKH might have to follow them! JC says Anita should use her ardeur on purpose to "trap" other vampire masters. They carefully avoid the word "enslave." Anita says it would be evil. JC's response is to scold her for not being pragmatic.
I hate the current trend in fantasy of claiming evil stuff is simply rational or "pragmatic" or whatever. Hate it. It's a bullshit excuse for doing evil crap. Evil is not pragmatic, enslaving people is not reasonable, and rape is not rational. Simply insisting it is, and that doing good is somehow naive, is not only evil in itself, it's also deeply irrational. We don't do good only because of some pie-in-the-sky morality no one really follows. We do good because it's the smartest, most pragmatic, most optimal way to live for the long-term. That's why it's good.
Anita insists that "just because you're enjoying the abuse doesn't make it not abuse." JC responds, "does it not, ma petite?" Um, yeah, it doesn't. Go die in a fire, Jean-Claude. Or would that be too good for him?
Elinore then repeats "love, true love" in a paragraph attempting to persuade Anita that it's okay to rape Requiem because she's put a spell on him. I don't have to actually talk about this, do I? It's so completely evil on the face of it, any analysis is redundant.
Blah blah, they go into Anita being a panwere. Elinore doesn't care to hear Anita's opinion about it, only JC's. Because she "wanted an opinion of someone powerful enough to have an opinion." And Anita "wanted to argue, but I couldn't." (239) I think LKH is getting this garbage from her completely fucked-up idea of BDSM. Hey, dumbshit, subs' opinions are as important as doms'. You waste of oxygen. And if it's not her warped and toxic idea of BDSM where she gets it, but her "might makes right" philosophy, then the verdict is the same: waste of oxygen.
I think this chapter is the clearest LKH has ever been about her absolutely horrific excuse for a moral system. It's her manifesto. Again: decent people write dreck all the time. Decent people do not write this.
Oh and also it's boring. They've been sitting around arguing about whether Anita will screw Requiem for the whole damned chapter, with frequent digressions into other things that are even more boring. Do something, people! Even if it's only to talk about something important, like the fact Auggie's people hate your guts now for very good reason!
So then Remus pops up again to tell them Wicked and Truth are here. I can't with those names. Can I call them Walter and Todd instead? Or would that get too confusing? Wait, how about William and Ted? Oh my god you guys. Everyone thinks they're Aragorn and Legolas expies. I say they're Bill and Ted!
Anita refuses to try to enslave Bill and Ted. JC badgers her, but she says no three times, and he actually backs down and says instead to let them watch her feed. Hm, saying anything three times to make it work is a very common magical trope, especially when dealing with hostile magical beings. Interesting. Likely unintended interesting, but interesting nonetheless.
Speaking of three times, Elinore repeats the "love, true love" thing again, albeit with Anita's name in the middle. LKH has got to be trolling us, doesn't she? No one could do this accidentally.
Then we learn that London's outside. Urgh. Anita has a line saying, "great, now I'm damage" (240), which she is, but I get no pleasure from it, because of what happens to London in this book.
The chapter ends with them all deciding to do an experiment to see under what conditions Anita will accidentally addict people to the ardeur, because... I don't know. I'm too depressed by the mention of London to think about it. It's only an excuse for sex, anyway, because LKH thinks she needs those.
Chapter 25
The chapter starts with Anita leaving the bedroom to go to the bathroom. But when the last chapter ended, she was still in the bathroom. The last time she told us her location, it was to tell us that Remus was "invading our bath" (222). Between chapters 24 and 25, LKH forgot where Anita was. The best thing about this is that there's no reason for it. Anita tells us she leaves the bedroom (which she was not in) to go to the bathroom (where she already was) so she can tell us that the vampire Elinore is in the bedroom when she "returns" to the bedroom.
Elinore "was dressed in a white gown with a high lacy collar and a cream robe that managed to look graceful, not like jammies at all" (225). Jammies, Anita? Really? JAMMIES? Does the widdle vampiwe huntew need her binky? Does she like sucking dick so much because penii are pacifiers to her? A nightgown is not pajamas anyway. And why is she surprised that nightwear can look graceful? This woman is continually surprised by the most mundane things. I think she was born yesterday. Plus she's apparently forgotten that her astral self appeared in a long white nightgown earlier in the book. How long do you think LKH goes between writing chapters? Even if it's like a month, I don't understand how she forgets everything she writes all the time. She has the memory of a fruit fly. Wait, that's an insult to fruit flies. She has the memory of a starfish.
We get a long paragraph describing Elinore's appearance. As Elinore is a woman, I don't have to tell you it's critical of her. Anita tells us her eyes are the wrong color. Literally, that is what she says. "Her eyes were a pale icy blue, the wrong color of blue for that delicate face." HER EYES ARE THE WRONG COLOR, PEOPLE. Anita says having light blue eyes makes Elinore look cold, and "gave the lie to the rest of her." There is no way to communicate the depth and breadth of Laurell K. Hamilton's misogyny; you have to read her books to truly understand it, and I do not recommend doing that. Elinore doesn't lift weights and therefore Anita says her body is "soft". I wonder if LKH thinks all men lift weights. Anita angsts about how Elinore has "the blond Nordic beauty" that would have made her "fit in" with Anita's blond, blue-eyed father "and his new family." They were your family too, Anita. And wasn't her father German? That's not synonomous with Nordic. Some Germans are descendants of Nordic peoples, especially in Northern Germany, but many are not. Germany is not Sweden, LKH. Plus saying having light blue eyes makes a woman cold is just -- I'm used to fantasy and sci-fi being hugely lookist, but that's an absurdity I don't think even George Lucas would accept.
"I'd tried to hate her, just on principle." Yes. Anita actually goes around trying to hate pretty blonde women. She does it on purpose. Then LKH perpetrates her stylistic tic of having Anita ask a question in order to answer it: "I'd failed, why?" Well, it can't be because you had a moment of basic human decency, we know that much. She says she couldn't hate Elinore because Elinore is tough and hard.
How anyone can believe Anita Blake is anything but an evil, vile, despicable piece of refuse is beyond me.
To make it clear: Anita Blake hates all women except for those who are tough and hard. If you're a victim of anything, or if you're kind, giving, emotional, sentimental, etc., she will hate you with a clear conscience. This isn't respect, or even not-hatred. This is fear. Anita Blake likes bullies.
I just realized Anita Blake is Peter Pettigrew. Or Peter Pettigrew self-insert fanfic, anyway.
Then she says "all the male vamps were prettier than me, why shouldn't some of the female vamps be prettier, too?" So vampirism makes all men Adonises but it does not make all women Venuses. Because that makes sense. If you hate women enough, that is.
Elinore came to ask Jean-Claude why she woke before noon. Anita tells us that Elinore and JC look like opposites, "one so pale, the other so dark." Um, JC is pale too, Anita. Literally deathly pale. Also she says that JC "was in his black brocade robe with all the fur on it," which is a terrible description of a terrible piece of clothing. I've often thought LKH's sexual tastes were shaped by 80s hair bands, but now I think Liberace was a bigger influence.
JC says that mass-raping Auggie's people gave JC's people lots of power. Anita asks Elinore how she feels. "She seemed to take the question seriously." (226) Why shouldn't she? Then Anita tells us that Elinore has "little girl" mannerisms. Of course she uses this to brag about how much better she is than Elinore. "If I'd been willing to play to my packaging, I might have pulled it off, but it just wasn't in me to try." That's not because you're a wonderful honest person, Anita. It's because if you attempted manipulation, a toddler could see through it, because you are stupider than everyone else on the planet. But I also think that she is lying. She uses terms like "jammies" all the time and generally has a very childish way of speaking and thinking (remember "why was she so mean?"), and she's controlled by the big strong men around her. Being guileless -- or pretending to be -- is also quite child-like.
Anita asks Elinore if she's fed. This is so that Elinore will suck up to Anita. "Quite a compliment that the Executioner cannot tell whether I've fed." Elinore hasn't fed and yet she isn't hungry, which makes JC feel "triumph". Apparently, they will now be able to take a large group into other territories and hide them from human authorities easily, since only one of them will have to feed. Sure, so long as there's another large group of metaphysically-connected people they're able to magically rape. Great. And they'll be able to hide their evil from human authorities even more than they do now, wonderful, being able to rape large numbers of people with impunity to further their own power is exactly what I want to read about the supposed heroes doing.
Anita asks Elinore where her "sweetie" is. Urgh. Elinore says he didn't wake with her. Then Anita starts to ask if Elinore's the only one who woke early besides JC, but gets interrupted by Remus coming to tell them that Requiem is here. So Requiem woke up, but not this "sweetie" of Elinore's, whoever he is. Is this because no woman but Anita is allowed to have lovers, or because LKH forgot Elinore's boyfriend's name?
They have a multi-paragraph argument over whether Remus can stay with them; Remus wants to because Claudia told him to, but JC tells him to go, and Remus says he's "caught between masters" (227) and they say they need a chain of command. Isn't JC Claudia's boss? Anyway, this little argument is boring, annoying, and pointless, yay!
Requiem has a black eye, which makes Anita muse on how bright his eyes are and how Belle Morte tried to buy him from his master so she could have a "matching set" of men with blue eyes, and I don't care. Why are we getting this infodump about Belle Morte? I don't care. Belle Morte is not important to this book. I think this is so Anita can show up Belle, ooh look she has the "matching set" Belle Morte couldn't have, Asher and JC and Requiem, and it's extremely pathetic to write characters who exist just so your self-insert can be better than them, and I don't care.
Anita asks Requiem (I am sensing a theme here) how much blood he's using to heal the bruises on his face, and he looks at her in a way that makes her think she's said something smart. Everyone in her world has known about vampires forever. That vampires heal themselves through drinking blood is not some kind of deeply-held secret. When you claim your main character is "smart" for saying something so mundane, you make yourself and her look stupid. Plus he answers, "much," and JC asks "how fares the rest?" (228) which is both 1) irritating faux-Shakespearian and 2) improper grammar. It's how fare the rest, not fares. Fares is third-person singular. FFS. Faux-Shakespearean in an urban fantasy is irritating enough, but ungrammatical faux-Shakespearean is even more obnoxious.
JC tells Anita to go get scissors so they can look at Requiem's wounds, and she says she does it without being asked. That... what... but... okay, not only can LKH not keep up continuity between chapters; she can't keep up continuity between consecutive sentences.
They spend two pages taking off Requiem's bandages and looking at his wounds. That's the only reason they're taking off his bandages, btw, to look at his wounds. Not to replace the bandages or to help him in any way. Just to ogle him. Anita says that Requiem seems as "empty" as "a painting of some handsome prince come back from battle" (229). Has she ever actually seen such paintings? The first thing I think of with that description is the Pre-Raphaelite painters, and they did not paint princes who looked "distant." Their paintings are highly emotional. Medieval paintings often seem more "distant", but they weren't big on the "handsome prince back from battle" theme. (I can't find any paintings of princes back from battle on the web. Lots of pictures of shirtless Prince Harry, though.) LKH gets everything wrong, always and forever. It is a gift.
So they're sitting around gazing at -- drooling over, really -- Requiem's many wounds. Anita is surprised that Meng-Die was trying to kill him, though JC says he told her that. I don't think he told her that. I certainly don't remember it, anyway. And so I am further creeped out by JC, because a common tactic of manipulators is to pretend they told you something they didn't. Anita is impressed that Meng Die knew just where to stick a blade to kill Requiem. I am not; Meng Die is a vampire in a ridiculously violent culture, of course she knows how to kill other vampires. Anita says her "respect for Meng Die went up, and so did my fear" (229). I wrote that spiel about how Anita only doesn't hate women she fears before I read this. Yep. Also, I kept reading "and" as "but" in that sentence, because fearing someone and respecting them are not things that go together in my brain. Nor is respecting someone who tries to kill someone for not sleeping with her any longer. I don't think Anita actually respects anyone; I think she just confuses fear for respect.
Elinore hasn't said anything for three pages.
I'm skimming a lot of the description of Requiem's wounds because the ogling makes me feel icky, and also it's boring. I can't even imagine it being interesting to someone with a wound fetish. The combination of boring and creepy is completely off-putting. No one bothers to ask Requiem how he feels about any of this, just as they didn't ask him if they could remove the bandages. I think he went distant as a coping strategy in response to this abuse. First he got beaten up and nearly killed, and now he's going through this. It's completely disgusting.
Anita asks if they called the cops, and it sounds like she actually disapproves of them not doing so, so that's something. JC says he and Asher hypnotized the crowd to forget that they'd witnessed a major crime, because "mass hypnosis is not illegal, ma petite, only personal hypnotism." (229)
BULLSHIT. No. I refuse to believe that even Anita Blake's world is so stupid that something that's illegal to do to one person is perfectly acceptable so long as you do it to a lot of people at once. Jean-Claude isn't a goddamn bank and he's not talking about stealing people's houses. He's not a government and he's not starting a war. He's talking about mindrape. LKH, shockingly, put enough thought into her unformed turd of a world to make mindrape illegal in it. There is NO FUCKING WAY mindraping one person is illegal, but mindraping a few dozen isn't. I call foul. You are not allowed this, LKH. I refuse.
So, JC and Asher mindraped a bunch of people so they'd forget about the crime they witnessed. Whether it's illegal or not (which it is, fuck you LKH), it's hugely unethical. Why would they do this? Why protect Meng Die from the legal consequences of her actions? Who knows? We sure don't get to. I doubt LKH even knows.
Then we get a bit where Anita blames Requiem for causing Meng Die to attack him. He should have known she'd fly into a murderous rage, you see.
Remember when I said this book wasn't as bad as Twilight? I was wrong. It's not written quite as badly, for the most part, but there is too much badness here to say that it's better than anything else. It is tied for worst novel in the world with all the other worst novels in the world. It's sitting in the cesspit with L. Ron Hubbard's Mission Earth, the Left Behind books, and every other book that makes the world a much worse place by its existence. It is a poisonous, despicable, evil piece of work. Decent human beings are capable of writing dreck, but they aren't capable of writing a book like this.
Requiem gets on his knees to beg Anita to have sex with him because he's addicted to the ardeur. I think the only person to ever have wanted to have sex with Anita simply because he wanted her was Richard, and even their first time was a weird mutual rape. JC wants the power she gives him and everyone else is drawn to the ardeur. I've said it before, and will probably say it again, but that's one of the most pathetic things I've ever seen. How do you write a self-insert and make the only reason men want her some kind of horrible, addictive magic? How is that at all satisfying? The self-hatred on display here makes me extremely uncomfortable. That other women find this hot because they enjoy slotting themselves into Anita's position makes me even more uncomfortable. You do not have to be some kind of walking meth for men to want to fuck you. I can't believe I'm reading something that made me feel the need to write that. Have we come to the point in our culture where the misogyny is so deep and all-encompassing that many of us now find it hard to imagine men wanting to have sex with women?
JC talks about how Requiem is powerful enough to be Master of a City if he wanted, and Elinore remembers she exists and says there's no shame in not wanting to rule. JC says sure, but it's a big deal that Anita can make someone as powerful as Requiem addicted to her. I don't understand how LKH's dumbass, halfass, Dragonball Z magic system works, but that is not how addiction works. Having a genetic and personal makeup that causes you to be pre-disposed to addiction does not make you weak. More powerful people are not less likely to be addicted than weak people. If anything, people with a need for and ability to control everything else are less likely to seek help when they are addicted than others are. Addiction is about neither physical nor mental strength. I am completely sick of the cultural myth that it is.
Elinore thinks Anita should fuck Requiem. Anita argues with her, saying she already has plenty of lovers, and she doesn't have the emotional capacity to add one more, especially one as "high-maintenance" as Requiem. That has a weird blamey tone to it. Elinore thinks it's ridiculous that Anita is turning down Requiem as a lover because she doesn't think she can love him. JC says Anita is very young." (232). Oh yes, sex and love only go together for YOUNG people. OLD people go around screwing lots of people all the time. Young people are well-known for being totally monogamous, but old people go to clubs to pick up randoms. And if you only want to have sex if you also have love, you are naive and silly and there is something wrong with you.
Elinore talks about how great it is that Anita has all these dudes, and that she's like Belle Morte in that she collects men. Anita says she doesn't want to collect men. She wants Requiem to stop being "besotted" with her. This is entirely rational. Elinore claims there is no cure, but JC says there is.
Okay, maybe there are occasional redeeming qualities in this book. I went to a wedding where the priest had the same speech impediment, btw. He started the ceremony by saying "mawwiage." That I managed not to laugh is one of my proudest moments.
So. "'Love,' he said, 'true love.'" (233). Yup. I guess I should talk about how ridiculous love breaking a spell is, or get pissy about the concept of "true love", but I can't, for a few reasons. One, love breaking a curse is a perfectly fine and good thing, with a long and honorable tradition. I'm not sure it belongs in urban fantasy, but I don't much care about urban fantasy so I can't much care about this. (I'm reading this book mostly for the bad romance and sex and politics and magic -- the vampires are a bug, not a feature, as far as I'm concerned.) Second, as in The Princess Bride, the concept of "true love" also has a long and pervasive history in fiction. I'm not going to tear into it. Third, and most importantly, the way LKH deploys it is hilarious. She had her Frenchie Pepe le Pew character say not just "love," and not just "true love," but the whole thing: "love, true love."
Getting on with it... they talk about some past history of Requiem's. LKH name-drops a London carriage-maker; I could look this person up to see if he existed, but I don't care enough to. They go on for a long time about how Requiem escaped Belle Morte twice. I think LKH would rather have written a book about that period of Belle Morte's life than this book. Actually, I often get the strong impression that LKH would much rather be writing more traditional fantasy. The faux-Shakespearian, the goofy outfits, the men in high heels, the intrusive purple prose, characters being judgy at Anita for having sex, the fact that there may as well be no laws or law enforcement agencies, the societies based on ownership of other people: it would all fit much better in some kind of pseudo-16th century fantasy world. But then she couldn't have all the guns, so I guess that's out.
"'Love,' Jean-Claude said. 'Love is the only cure.'" (234)
Now I'm thinking of The Captain and Tenille. You can never repeat the word "love" like that without being hilarious. You just can't.
They decide that Jean-Claude is not addicted to Anita because he's her master and also has the ardeur, and that Asher is protected because "love protects him." The word "love" is starting to not look like a word, and that is just wrong. Love is too important to keep repeating the word like this, LKH! It's fine in a song or poetry, but in prose like this, it's borderline insulting. It makes something deep and meaningful seem virtually nonexistent.
Anita says that she'd assumed JC and Asher were fucking when she wasn't around, but had never asked, because "don't ask, don't tell worked just fine for me." Well. That's incredibly offensive. On multiple levels. You should know if two of your lovers are screwing each other, you should not be so incurious about whether two of your lovers who adored each other before you came along are screwing because you should care about their lives, and YOU SHOULD NOT USE INSTITUTIONALIZED OPPRESSION AS A CUTESY JOKE. Holy crap.
She decides it's "too complicated" for her. Um, yeah, "so, JC, are you and Asher fucking?" That's super-complicated. She says "I literally waved the thought away." No, LKH. She didn't. Unless she thinks in thought bubbles, like in a comic strip.
They keep telling Anita she has to screw Requiem. Anita points out that one reason Elinore is with JC is that JC doesn't make her fuck people besides her "knight" (whatever his name is, and I do think LKH forgot it.) JC tells Anita, "you must meet this obligation." That is would be "cruel" of her to "cast him away" after she's addicted him to her. The hell?! No, it is not cruel to not have sex with someone. I don't care how much they want it or claim to need it. No one has an obligation to have sex with anyone they don't want to have sex with, ever. This is violent Nice Guyism, and I really don't have to go into where this leads, do I? Because I don't want to. We all know. We already all knew, but now we know even better.
Elinore claims that Anita drawing people to her is helping JC, since if Anita weren't there, all these people would be begging to fuck JC instead. Anita demands to know if JC is doing this on purpose. He says "I swear that I am not" (235). That sounds like a lie, along the lines of "I swear it shall be done" from The Princess Bride. Elinore says it's just the way things are, that all these servants of vampires are "instruments to help their masters grow in power and control."
And then Anita takes out a stake and drives it through JC's heart. I can dream, can't I?
So, Anita and all the animals to call and etc. are all just "instruments," things to make Jean-Claude more powerful. Something else I've said before and will say again: Anita is not the true black hole Mary Sue of these books. Jean-Claude is. It's just been spelled out, right there in the text: she exists to make him more powerful. Remember the Anita of the early books? I never liked the books, but still, Anita used to be a character in her own right, she had friends and hobbies and ideas of her own and she did stuff. Jean-Claude was an antagonist then. He won. She lost. We're now reading the attempt of a mind-raped and literally raped slave trying to cope with her slavery without admitting what it is. That could be interesting if the author would admit what it is.
Elinore claims that it's not JC doing this, it's the power itself. See, he's not at fault! Really! I think she is lying and she knows it. Anita calls herself "the ardeur's pinup girl." No, you're JC's sex slave. Veeery different from a pinup girl.
Then they talk about how the ardeur is choosing Anita's animals to call too. JC chose Richard, and that's the normal way of it, but Anita can't choose. Because of course she can't. They go on a tangent about how Anita is going to have a lion to call next, then JC tells her she has to schtupp Requiem. She says, "'I cannot believe that my' -- and I hesitated because boyfriend seemed too junior high, lover not enough -- 'the man I love is encouraging me to take another lover.'" (236)
You call your penii "sweeties," Anita. I wish you'd mature to junior high level. And "lover" is "not enough" -- it's not junior high enough? She can't mean that, can she? I guess she must mean that it's not a meaningful enough term for their relationship, but I'm just guessing here. Also, don't you hate Richard passionately because he doesn't want you to have other fucktoys? Why are you surprised that JC is the opposite of that? Was JC ever monogamous? He's a disgusting creep who wants to pass you around no matter what you say about it, and you've only just realized he doesn't care if you screw people besides him?
Anita says she'll screw Requiem to help JC. Blech. Then she says not now, because the ardeur isn't hungry, and they blab about that for a while. They wonder if it's because of all the people she and JC metaphysically raped last night, but JC and Elinore hedge and say the ardeur is unpredictable. Can't set rules for the magic, then LKH might have to follow them! JC says Anita should use her ardeur on purpose to "trap" other vampire masters. They carefully avoid the word "enslave." Anita says it would be evil. JC's response is to scold her for not being pragmatic.
I hate the current trend in fantasy of claiming evil stuff is simply rational or "pragmatic" or whatever. Hate it. It's a bullshit excuse for doing evil crap. Evil is not pragmatic, enslaving people is not reasonable, and rape is not rational. Simply insisting it is, and that doing good is somehow naive, is not only evil in itself, it's also deeply irrational. We don't do good only because of some pie-in-the-sky morality no one really follows. We do good because it's the smartest, most pragmatic, most optimal way to live for the long-term. That's why it's good.
Anita insists that "just because you're enjoying the abuse doesn't make it not abuse." JC responds, "does it not, ma petite?" Um, yeah, it doesn't. Go die in a fire, Jean-Claude. Or would that be too good for him?
Elinore then repeats "love, true love" in a paragraph attempting to persuade Anita that it's okay to rape Requiem because she's put a spell on him. I don't have to actually talk about this, do I? It's so completely evil on the face of it, any analysis is redundant.
Blah blah, they go into Anita being a panwere. Elinore doesn't care to hear Anita's opinion about it, only JC's. Because she "wanted an opinion of someone powerful enough to have an opinion." And Anita "wanted to argue, but I couldn't." (239) I think LKH is getting this garbage from her completely fucked-up idea of BDSM. Hey, dumbshit, subs' opinions are as important as doms'. You waste of oxygen. And if it's not her warped and toxic idea of BDSM where she gets it, but her "might makes right" philosophy, then the verdict is the same: waste of oxygen.
I think this chapter is the clearest LKH has ever been about her absolutely horrific excuse for a moral system. It's her manifesto. Again: decent people write dreck all the time. Decent people do not write this.
Oh and also it's boring. They've been sitting around arguing about whether Anita will screw Requiem for the whole damned chapter, with frequent digressions into other things that are even more boring. Do something, people! Even if it's only to talk about something important, like the fact Auggie's people hate your guts now for very good reason!
So then Remus pops up again to tell them Wicked and Truth are here. I can't with those names. Can I call them Walter and Todd instead? Or would that get too confusing? Wait, how about William and Ted? Oh my god you guys. Everyone thinks they're Aragorn and Legolas expies. I say they're Bill and Ted!
Anita refuses to try to enslave Bill and Ted. JC badgers her, but she says no three times, and he actually backs down and says instead to let them watch her feed. Hm, saying anything three times to make it work is a very common magical trope, especially when dealing with hostile magical beings. Interesting. Likely unintended interesting, but interesting nonetheless.
Speaking of three times, Elinore repeats the "love, true love" thing again, albeit with Anita's name in the middle. LKH has got to be trolling us, doesn't she? No one could do this accidentally.
Then we learn that London's outside. Urgh. Anita has a line saying, "great, now I'm damage" (240), which she is, but I get no pleasure from it, because of what happens to London in this book.
The chapter ends with them all deciding to do an experiment to see under what conditions Anita will accidentally addict people to the ardeur, because... I don't know. I'm too depressed by the mention of London to think about it. It's only an excuse for sex, anyway, because LKH thinks she needs those.