Sunday, October 20, 2013

Danse Macabre--chapter 3

Anita makes it to the Circus of the Damned without having to pull over for sex.

We've managed to mature this character back to Basic Human. This is actually a positive, because fuck the sex chapters are annoying.

 ...LKH needs to sort out what crosses do in the presence of vampires. Whenever they work onscreen, they make a big purdy lightshow that hurts vampires and vampires only. HOWEVER, Anita is leaving her cross in the car because she doesn't want another cross-shaped burn scar. Also, what the fuck does this mean:

 I’d left my cross in the glove compartment, because the chances of no one “accidentally” using vamp powers on me tonight were between zero and nothing.
Forget about double negatives. This is like a negative squared. Seriously. Is she saying that nobody's going to use vamp powers, or that everybody is using vamp powers?

Nathanial's ankle length hair will never stop being funny. Nor will his perfect pony princess lavender eyes.

Depending on how the light hit the shirt it brought out either the green or the yellow of his eyes, so that the color of his eyes changed with almost every breath. It was a nice effect.
It's a shirt. Anita, it's a motherfucking shirt. You are not fucking Saruman, you cannot wear all the colors, and even if you were, the rainbow robe thing never works out.

Also: I'm picturing homemade cheap porn costumes. Simplicity, Pirate Garb. You know the type.

Four-inch spikes, with open heels, and laces that wrapped around my ankles. When Jean-Claude couldn’t persuade me into a skimpier outfit for the night, we’d compromised with the totally impractical shoes.
Your fuck-me shoes are going to get you killed, Anita. I do not care how good you are at walking in them, all you need to do is torque your ankle once during a fight scene and there you go. The best thing you could do is order from the same catalogue as nurses and food service workers. (They have some really nice flats that do the dressy thing very well.)

I had a key to the new back door of the Circus of the Damned.

You know, I actually liked the hyper-paranoid system JC had. It made for good worldbuilding and it kept the people inside of it alive. OF COURSE we're getting rid of it. Anita's life trumps everyone else's safety concerns.

A werewolf answers the door because we need to introduce yet another new character .This is Grahame, a werewolf, and because I have no fucking idea if I've seen him before he is now Grahame Coats. In ferret form.

You're welcome.

Also?

His perfectly straight black hair managed to fall decoratively over his brown eyes, and still be very, very short on the bottom, so the strong line of his neck was left bare and strangely tempting. His eyes tilted up at the edges, and I now knew that he had his Japanese mother’s eyes and hair, but the rest of him seemed to have been copied from his ex-navy and very Nordic-looking father.
That's not Nordic. Unless you're talking about noses or something. Which you don't actually mention, so WTF Anita?

It turns into a pissing contest. Of course it does. We Literally cannot walk through a motherfucking door that Anita has gone through TEN MILLION times without it being a goddamn pissing contest between her and another character. GOD FORBID anything be normal, non-confrontational and routine.

Micah tries to bully his way past, and Anita reminds Grahame that she's got power in the pack and can tell him to fuck off if she wants to. Because Richard hasn't found a new Lupa yet.

There were so many reasons Graham had not made the leap from bodyguard to breakfast snack for me.

This is the creepiest line I've found so far. We're in rapy territory and we're only in chapter three. Great job, Anita. PEOPLE ARE NOT BREAKFAST SNACKS WHY DO YOU THINK THIS WAY.

Once Nathaniel moved from pomme de sang to my animal to call,

WHEN THE FUCK DID THIS HAPPEN?!? I've been READING these books. Admittedly I took a big-ass break from them, but the animal-to-call shit was something I was waiting for. Did I miss it? Did I go blind? DID LKH REALLY JUST DEVELOP SOMETHING MASSIVELY IMPORTANT TO THE SERIES OFFSCREEN?!?

WHAT THE BLEEDING FUCK ANITA.

....it was when you did that tri-whatever thing with Damian and Nathanial. Okay. Not quite offscreen. It's just defined offscreen. Oh, and having Random Ass MotC explain this OFFSCREEN isn't helping. I'm still pissed. And the reason why Anita has to "feed" (aka fuck) so often is apparently none of her current guys "count" as a full meal because they're all tied to her magically. So she needs to screw outside all her important relationships so the important relationships have lots of fuel. Got it?

Anita makes Grahame get on his knees and beg her not to kill him. Our heroine, ladies and gentlemen. She's literally kicking the dog. Okay, werewolf, but still. THIS IS HOW YOU DEVELOP A VILLIAN (lazily). WTH is this doing in a HEROIC character's development? I'd understand if we wanted Anita to be an antihero, but her holier-than-thou attitude makes that impossible. WHAT ARE WE DOING. BOOK SHOULD NOT WORK THIS WAY.

The "begging" turns out to be licking Anita's mouth. I am not making this up. It's explained as wolf behavior, but I'm pretty sure wolf behavior wouldn't be that sexualized.

Also, I've just realized how much of the non-con bullshit is covered under Anita HAVING to stand up for herself. Grahame is submissive to her, so she can't "back down" from this sexualized encounter, which Grahame knows and is taking full advantage of. A LOT of the rapy shit happens because Anita actually standing up for herself and demanding, you know, consent and that her bounderies be respected and the like, would be interpreted as weakness. She has to let these people do these terrible things to her. If she doesn't ,she'd be seen as weak.

Anita. You're packing serious heat. They'd protest once. If they survive, they'd never do it again.

The sexy lick goes on for a few pages.

HELP. ME.

Anita walks off and Grahame follows, demanding sex, and asking why Anita is always mad at him. Uh, maybe it's because she's made it very fucking clear she does not want to fuck you, and you just used wolf-pack business as an excuse to cop a feel. She's got no obligation to sleep with you, dipshit. She's pissed because you won't GO AWAY.

Richard is now forbidding his wolves from carrying guns. Great.

So Grahame informs Anita that there was an emergency in the Circus that made Asher cry out for Jean Claude. He's got no idea what this is, but is worried that JC isn't upstairs yet. The book is much more focused on the who's-fucking-who politics of the (sigh) vampire kiss. Apparently there was an influx of powerful vamps, one of them's pissed, and Grahame is stuck in the middle because fuck if I know.

Anita then acknowledges that it isn't fair for her to keep her men monogamous when she isn't, but fuck if she's going to change.

End of chapter.

9 comments:

  1. "The best thing you could do is order from the same catalogue as nurses and food service workers. (They have some really nice flats that do the dressy thing very well.)"

    I don't understand why she doesn't get dressy guys' shoes. She already has this weird wannabe guy thing going on, and they must make guy shoes in small sizes since Wee Micah is always described as dressing poshly (or what LKH thinks is posh, but I digress) They're flats, they're meant for guys, they should be right up her alley. It would be a bit quirky with a skirt but it works - I have a pair of really nice vintage oxfords I got at the thrift store and I've passed muster at two funerals and a wedding with them and a brown wool skirt suit, so Anita has no reason not to go for it. Except that she wouldn't be able to be impractical, which she clearly loves being.

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    1. The best shoes I ever got were from this site called Shoes for Crews. They were kick-ass, durable, you couldn't slip in them if you tried and they looked like large, slightly dressy shoes. They also have dress shoes that are VERY nice: https://www.shoesforcrews.com/sfc3/index.cfm?changeWebsite=US_en&route=c_store.browseProductsByFilterBar&trackshoefinder=&FilterCategoryId=c4&FilterProductGroupId=pg22%3Apg23&Color=&Price=&Size=+&Represented_Industry=

      The fact that the fuck-me pumps are for Jean Claude, picked out by him, is squicky. The fact that the impractical shoes are a *compromise*--that Anita has to make up for something by wearing dangerous heels--is even more squicky. And in this context--a meeting that could go to hell in a handbasket quick--those shoes are fucking dangerous. Anita is literally risking her life because one of her boyfriends pitched a snit-fit about her not wearing platform stilettos with straps to his important meetings.

      If Anita wants to compromise sexily, she ought to wear a low-cut blouse capable of hiding a bra holster and a gun. She's certainly got the rack for it (EEE what the fucking hell)

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    2. Oooo, I am bookmarking that site, thank you - the Mary Janes are adorable!

      Maybe Jean-Claude is trying to get her killed? It's the only thing I can come up with besides "LKH wants to dress like Barbarella all the time but also feels guilty about it so wants someone else to force her to do it."

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  2. "His eyes tilted up at the edges, and I now knew that he had his Japanese mother’s eyes and hair, but the rest of him seemed to have been copied from his ex-navy and very Nordic-looking father."

    LKH has this very weird view on multi-racial people and mixing. She seems to think that black hair is a solid indicator of someone being mixed. It's particularly funny since Norwegians tend to have black/dark hair and dark eyes (Bjork is a pretty good example of a typical Norwegian). Grahame's black hair could've come from either his mother or father.

    Also, it's sickening to read him begging Anita for sex, particularly when we all know that Anita doesn't fuck anyone who isn't white enough.

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  3. Crosses glow if a vampire is using its powers (and the wearer of the cross, or anything else, has faith in what they are wearing) but they actually get hot if a vampire touches them, and make no distinction about what they burn, including the wearer. Anita got a cross shaped scar because a vampire like…pressed itself to her so that the cross would burn into its flesh and hers too.

    Btw Graham is a guy who actually does want to fuck Anita and is willing to be ardeur-food. But he’s half-Asian so he never gets to. I of course don’t think she has any obligation to fuck him, it’s just sort of glaringly obvious that all the white guys who press like this get their way (JC, Micah, even friggin’ Nathaniel!)

    The only time I know of when wolves lick each others mouths is when the mom has chewed up some meat for young puppies. But I don’t know shit about wolf behavior so maybe…wait, LKH doesn’t know shit about wolf behavior either, there’s no ‘maybe’.

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    1. I *thought* she got the scar from a couple of human servants who heated up a cross-shaped branding iron. Or something.

      I...did not connect Graham's mixed race with his not-getting-to-fuck-Anita status. Now that I have, that's fucking absurd. These books are like onions of WTF. You think you've gotten as bad as it gets and there's a whole 'nother layer.

      It sounds a *little* like horse language (Which I am not an expert on. I just read about it in Monty Robert's autobiography. Good book BTW) so I'm willing to buy it a little bit, but I'm pretty confident human beings, even wolfy human beings, wouldn't be using this kind of pack behavior. Long rant aside, it's described as a puppy thing that adults in packs use to signal submission, and what we've identified as "pack behavior" are actually the dysfunctional behaviors wolves develop when large numbers of them are kept in comparatively small enclosures. It's not instinctive, it's learned, which means that humans kept in, say, Richard's abnormally large pack, would develop other ways to cope with large numbers being kept in small spaces.

      At least that's my opinion.

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    2. I think a couple of human servants did that too, actually

      Maybe I'm just confused? I think both happened?

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  4. Have you ever noticed that every time LKH introduces a character with non white ancestry, she has to rush to assure us that in fact they still look very white?

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    1. Including Anita herself. Yep. Oh, Anita is pale-ly pale and there's several approved images from the comic that have her with pale/blue eyes, but THE GREATEST TRAGETY IN HER LIFE IS HER HISPANIC HERITAGE AND HOW IT LEFT HER OUT OF BEING POPULAR AND BLONDE.

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