Twilight: Masks and Masquerades

Twilight Recap: After being nearly smashed to a pulp by an out-of-control van and subsequently rescued by a faster-than-should-be-possible Edward, Bella lies on the cold ground and argues with Edward about whether or not he had been right next to her moments before.

Twilight, Chapter 3: Phenomenon

   "Trust me," he pleaded, his soft voice overwhelming.
   I could hear the sirens now. "Will you promise to explain everything to me later?"
   "Fine," he snapped, abruptly exasperated.
   "Fine," I repeated angrily.

Last week, I complained that while I understand and even like the characterization that Bella is holding on for dear life to her absolute certainty that Edward was on the other side of the parking lot, I do not like that this detail is relayed in the most petty manner possible: by making Bella seem like an immature child. Of course, some of this may be chalked up to the head injury Bella has sustained -- it's probably hard to be graceful when one is battling a concussion -- but let's stay with Bella and see where we go today.

   It took six EMTs and two teachers -- Mr. Varner and Coach Clapp -- to shift the van far enough away from us to bring the stretchers in. Edward vehemently refused his, and I tried to do the same, but the traitor told them I'd hit my head and probably had a concussion. I almost died of humiliation when they put on the neck brace. It looked like the entire school was there, watching soberly as they loaded me in the back of the ambulance. Edward got to ride in the front. It was maddening.
   To make matters worse, Chief Swan arrived before they could get me safely away.
   "Bella!" he yelled in panic when he recognized me on the stretcher.
   "I'm completely fine, Char -- Dad," I sighed. "There's nothing wrong with me."

These sorts of passages in Twilight really give me a moment of pause: should I consider Bella from the singular perspective of Realistic Person or do I consider her from the cumulative perspective of Women In Literature as they are often portrayed in the general?

In the specific, Bella is a relatively realistic character. Yes, it's silly and immature of her to consider the person who just saved her life a "traitor" for accurately pointing out to the medics that she's sustained a potentially serious head injury. Yes, it shows an extreme lack of perspective and a worrying tendency towards superficiality when she cares more about the "humiliation" of wearing an ugly neck brace in front of the school rather than being allowed to attractively snap her spine into two jaunty pieces. Yes, it seems cruel of her to care less about her father's genuine worry for her than to, again, dwell on the embarrassment of a police escort to the hospital.

However, while none of these things are wonderful characteristic traits to aspire to, they are realistic ones. It's not impossible to imagine ourselves in a similar situation: nothing is wrong with us, yes we're sure, please would everyone stop making a big fuss. It's not unlikely that someone in Bella's situation would just prefer for everything to go back to normal and can we stop talking about the Parking Lot Incident now, thankyouverymuch. Very few of us are perfectly gracious in every thought, word, and deed, so I should just be pleased that here we have a realistically flawed book heroine for us to enjoy, right? And... in some ways, I am -- it's nice that in Bella we have a character that shows that girls don't have to be perfect in order to be worthwhile.

But. In the general, Bella frustrates me because her "realistic" characterization meshes so nicely with a lot of trends in female fiction characters that I find generally quite toxic. She's the childish heroine, caring more about her own (faulty) self-diagnosis and her vanity than her own safety -- and it falls on the big, strong menfolk to take care of her over her objections. She's the pouting damsel, sticking out her mental tongue at the sexy, smirking "traitor" to whose charms she will eventually succumb. She's the weary child-mother who has to reassure her overprotective dad that, no really, everything is fine, please don't worry about me. And so on.

I want to make perfectly clear that these aren't bad things for a reader to like: as sexy escapist literature, this is all well and good, and I fully support buying it, reading it, enjoying it, and recommending it. But at the same time, I wouldn't think it healthy for someone to consider "sexy escapist literature" as the perfect blueprint for the perfect life, and it's there where I have a bit of a problem with the author of this series. Essentially, we're missing the "Don't Try This At Home" warning label on the front.

Then, too, from my own personal perspective, I'm a little tired of women in literature being child-women whose day-to-day wishes should-and-are overridden by the men around them because the child-woman is unable to properly care for herself. It's not that the characterization is bad, but rather that the glut of this characterization is bad. So I come back to: Bella is not a bad or unrealistic character, but she is a character that has been done so many times before that a part of me considers the repetition of this theme to be essentially damaging.

I think this is the source of my disconnect where I can say, "No, really, I can see why people can and do like Twilight and that's perfectly fine," and "Rawr, this series has serious problems with gender, relationships, communication, parenting, and race and these things deserve to be discussed in a serious forum without shaming the author and fans". If Twilight were the only book on the market with these problems, I'm not sure we'd even notice the problems so much as we'd see a lot of individuals whose personalities and issues and behaviors should not be construed as ideal. It's the trends that are a problem, I think, and not any one individual book.

Huh. Look at all those paragraphs. I guess the site is called "Ana Mardoll's Ramblings" for a reason, because that one got away from me a bit there. Welp, moving on.

   When they'd lifted me away from the car, I had seen the deep dent in the tan car's bumper -- a very distinct dent that fit the contours of Edward's shoulders . . . as if he had braced himself against the car with enough force to damage the metal frame. . . .
   And then there was his family, looking on from the distance, with expressions that ranged from disapproval to fury but held no hint of concern for their brother's safety.

And now I'd like to reiterate my latest conviction that books like this should not be told from a single character's perspective. When I was younger, I didn't like it when perspectives changed around on me, and I still don't if it's done to artificially heighten the suspense (such as when an author yanks you away from something exciting to stick you in a boring character for awhile, ack!) but when shifting perspectives are done well, they add so much depth to a piece.

For instance, I'm terribly sad that we don't get to see the family counsel that will take place in the Cullen household this afternoon. (This would, of course, drop the fact that The Cullens Are Vampires, but was that ever in doubt, even for the first readers of the book? I can't honestly begin to guess.) I kind of imagine that Rosalie would be in favor of quietly "disappearing" Bella -- it wouldn't be hard to make it look like an accident, she would argue, look how clumsy she is -- while Alice tensely meditated and announced that the future was unclear. Esme would quietly fret and suggest that they just move now, but eventually everyone would decide that Jasper should be Bella's new best friend over the next few weeks until he can successfully convince her that the whole episode was a product of her concussed and confused brain.

And, of course, the money in the FOOD MONEY jar would see a mysterious jump. Am I the only one who thinks the best scenes in Twilight are the ones we don't get to see, or is it just because I find the Cullens as a concept so much more fascinating than the love story here?

   Naturally, the ambulance got a police escort to the county hospital. I felt ridiculous the whole time they were unloading me. What made it worse was that Edward simply glided through the hospital doors under his own power. I ground my teeth together.

Back to Bella, we're really milking the "Bella is angry at Edward" cow for all its worth. I realize this is a very standard trope to heighten romantic tension, but it's also particularly out of place in this scene. Bella's complaints with Edward seem to be that: (a) he was rude to her once in Biology, (b) he's unattainably pretty, and (c) he has refused to tell her how he managed to get to her in time to save her life. Oh, and (d) he didn't need medical attention and was able to refuse it. (Apparently the medics listened to his protestations of not needing care over Bella's own protestations because He Is A Man? Or because he's the head doctor's son? But I really can't think the latter would make much of a different to most medics -- I wouldn't assume the head doctor himself would be able to self-diagnose after an accident like this one, let alone the head doctor's son.)

Of those "offenses", the first one (The Biology Incident) has been implicitly apologized for through Edward's very polite behavior in a later class, and the third one (The Speeding Bullet Trick) has been promised to be revealed to Bella in a more private moment, so neither of these things see like fair enough reasons to grind teeth over. The second and fourth items -- Unattainably Pretty and Unfairly Privileged -- are rather annoying, especially with Edward constantly smirking and lording it over everyone else, but it is perhaps worth remembering that he just saved Bella's life. I fully support her right to view Edward as a bit of a jerk, but you'd think there would be a modicum of gratitude sprinkled in to all this teeth grinding and general self-harm over the sexy jerkiness of Edward.

   They put me in the emergency room, a long room with a line of beds separated by pastel-patterned curtains. A nurse put a pressure cuff on my arm and a thermometer under my tongue. Since no one bothered pulling the curtain around to give me some privacy, I decided I wasn't obligated to wear the stupid-looking neck brace anymore. When the nurse walked away, I quickly unfastened the Velcro and threw it under the bed.

I really don't understand this passage at all. Because the curtain wasn't pulled for privacy, then clearly her injuries aren't serious enough to warrant a neck brace? Is this Moon Logic, or am I missing something here? The only way this makes sense to me is if Bella is so vain that she'll only submit to important-but-uglifying medical care behind a closed curtain, and while that characterization makes sense with her actions, it still doesn't make the logic train flow for me here. Clearly I require assistance.

   There was another flurry of hospital personnel, another stretcher brought to the bed next to me. I recognized Tyler Crowley from my Government class beneath the bloodstained bandages wrapped tightly around his head. Tyler looked a hundred times worse than I felt. But he was staring anxiously at me.
   "Bella, I'm so sorry!"
   "I'm fine, Tyler -- you look awful, are you all right?" As we spoke, nurses began unwinding his soiled bandages, exposing a myriad of shallow slices all over his forehead and left cheek.
   He ignored me. "I thought I was going to kill you! I was going too fast, and I hit the ice wrong. . . ."

(Does this follow the logic expressed above? Tyler's curtain isn't closed for privacy, so therefore his unsightly head bandages aren't necessary, so therefore the nurse takes them off for him? Is the nurse going to recover the head wounds -- perhaps after stitching -- and if so, will that necessitate the closing of the curtain? If gauze is wrapped around a head, but a curtain isn't closed, does it really happen?

Also, can anyone explain why Tyler is bleeding from a head wound and scratched all over his face and neck? It seems to me that Tyler shouldn't have sustained any injury other than (a) an airbag to the face -- which could yield a broken nose, but surely not neck scratches and what sound like forehead bandages -- and (b) the side of his car door being crushed inward, depending on where the van hit, which would surely be more likely to injure his arm and side, no? I'm not an expert on car crashes -- can someone help set this scene, please? Thank you in advance.)

It's actually interesting to me that Charlie Chief of Police isn't there in the hospital with Bella. I suppose we're meant to assume that he's gone to question witnesses, but that wouldn't make sense to me because I would think that since he's related to the victim, he would need to excuse himself from the investigation and leave the work to someone else in the police department. Maybe he's speaking to the doctors on behalf of Bella... or calling Renee to let her know what happened... but we haven't seen Charlie since Bella entered the hospital and that seems rather surprising to me. I'm not one to judge parents, but it just strikes me as odd.

And if Charlie were here, it seems like he might want to prevent Tyler and Bella from having a long heart-to-heart -- some kind of investigation is going to happen regarding this near-fatal collision, and it's probably not appropriate for the driver and the victim to be chatting to each other in the hospital. I get that this was an accident and I'm not saying they should lock Tyler up and throw away the key, but it's entirely possible that he needs to have his license revoked or suspended until he learns not to drive 40 mph in icy conditions through a crowded parking lot. Assuming that's what happened, which we really don't know because Deputy Not-Charlie hasn't finished his investigation yet.

So I have to assume that Charlie not being here and the hospital staff sticking Bella and Tyler in the same room together is a narrative convenience, but it doesn't reflect well on either Charlie or the hospital staff to me.

   "How did you get out of the way so fast? You were there, and then you were gone. . . ."
   "Umm . . . Edward pulled me out of the way."
   He looked confused. "Who?"
   "Edward Cullen -- he was standing next to me." I'd always been a terrible liar; I didn't sound convincing at all.
   "Cullen? I didn't see him . . . wow, it was all so fast, I guess. Is he okay?"
   "I think so. He's here somewhere, but they didn't make him use a stretcher."
   I knew I wasn't crazy. What had happened? There was no way to explain away what I'd seen.
   [...]
   So I was trapped in the ER, waiting, harassed by Tyler's constant apologies and promises to make it up to me. No matter how many times I tried to convince him I was fine, he continued to torment himself. Finally, I closed my eyes and ignored him. He kept up a remorseful mumbling.

 And here's another case where I kind of feel bad for Bella despite her seemingly cruel behavior. I mean, it seems kind of mean to just gloss over Tyler's repeated apologies with an oh my how annoying I can't hear you la-la-la narrative, and I do feel for Tyler and the therapy that he may very well need after nearly killing a fellow student, but at the same time Bella is likely having her own issues with mortality to work through at the moment and it's not her job to keep helping Tyler through his.

(This, incidentally, is another reason why the Forks hospital staff really shouldn't have jammed them in the same room together.)

Too often women in fiction are forced into a nurturing role where their job is to soothe and fix everyone else's emotional problems at the cost of their own. It's refreshing to see a heroine who doesn't immediately leap to stroke Tyler's troubled head while he falls asleep like a distressed child, murmuring apologies to himself. In the most polite (some might say passive-aggressive, but I confess I'm all about passive-aggressiveness at times in Real Life) way she can imagine, Bella side-steps the issue and chooses not to step up to the nurturing plate and instead feigns sleep to get some peace and quiet.

Cold? Maybe. But Bella has the right to be "selfish" and take care of herself first, and I'm proud to see her exercise that right.

   "Is she sleeping?" a musical voice asked. My eyes flew open.
   Edward was standing at the foot of my bed, smirking. I glared at him. It wasn’t easy -- it would have been more natural to ogle.

So here's the thing: I get that Edward is gorgeous, and I like that Twilight embraces the concept of female gaze and visual arousal. That's nice, and it's good to see more of it in fiction, considering that the more frequent stereotype is that women are "emotional" creatures who only become aroused by tender hugs and kind phone calls. So I'm very much in favor of Bella scrawling EDWARD IS HAWT on the inside of her copy of "Sense and Sensibility" and then giggling to herself every time she sees her little double-joke there.

But this language I cannot and do not understand. I'm still not certain how a voice can sound musical without being sing-song, and I do not think we're meant to hear Edward in sing-song. (Although I would like that re-write of Twilight immensely.) If one of you readers has a YouTube clip to a "musical" speaking voice, can you please share, because I'm still not quite understanding this commonly used description.

Then, too, there is the ogle. When I try to imagine ogle, I have a facial expression that is something I wouldn't display in public without being considered very rude: sort of a raised eyebrow, suggestive smile, knowing smirk sort of face with maybe some self-deprecating growling noises or something similarly deliberately silly. It's not something I can imagine being easy to do in public, to an almost perfect stranger, whom I am not currently happy with. Now, I can perhaps imagine that it would be pleasant to stare and that is perhaps what is meant here by ogle, but I can't even imagine staring as being something easy or natural under the circumstances. How odd.

   Then a doctor walked around the corner, and my mouth fell open. He was young, he was blond... and he was handsomer than any movie star I'd ever seen. He was pale, though, and tired-looking, with circles under his eyes. From Charlie's description, this had to be Edward's father.

Here's hoping that he looks like a young Robert Redford. *wink*

I do have to take some issue with this passage. How many of you have had your mouth fall open just because a pretty person walked into the room? S.Meyer is writing this scene like a classic animated cartoon and it's...very cutesy, but I'm not so sure it's realistic. What frustrates me is that I never get a good sense for what the Cullens look like -- they're almost like a Somebody Else's Problem field, but instead of being a blind spot that no one notices, they're a pretty spot where that's all anyone remembers. It's a frustrating narrative technique, and also largely ensures that the movie personas are who I remember when going through the book because I have nothing else to replace them with. And while I'm not going to suggest that Peter Facinelli is anything less than lovely, I can honestly say I don't think my jaw would hit the ground if he entered the room, so there's this tension between the effect that Bella tells us and the reality that we see on-screen and in-text.

OK, a few more quick points:

   He walked to the lightboard on the wall over my head, and turned it on.
   "Your X-rays look good," he said. “Does your head hurt? Edward said you hit it pretty hard."
   "It's fine," I repeated with a sigh, throwing a quick scowl toward Edward.
   The doctor's cool fingers probed lightly along my skull. He noticed when I winced.
   "Tender?" he asked.
   "Not really." I'd had worse.
   I heard a chuckle, and looked over to see Edward's patronizing smile. My eyes narrowed.

Haha, Bella's constant self-injuries are hilarious! I'm going to give a pass to Bella for being a jerk to Edward from here on out. I mean, yes, he saved her life, but he's also apparently highly amused at the notion that she hurts herself a lot. Charming.

   "Can't I go back to school?" I asked, imagining Charlie trying to be attentive.
   "Maybe you should take it easy today."
   I glanced at Edward. "Does he get to go to school?"
   "Someone has to spread the good news that we survived," Edward said smugly.
   "Actually," Dr. Cullen corrected, "most of the school seems to be in the waiting room."
   "Oh no," I moaned, covering my face with my hands.

Words cannot express how much I love the fact that everyone at Forks High School piled into their cold cars and drove the icy streets to the hospital -- not to check on their dear friend Bella, of course, but as an excuse to miss school and soak in Serious Drama. It's a nice, realistic touch on high school life and I'm pleased to find it here, only having said that, I'd like to know why Chief of Police Charlie didn't radio his deputies on the drive over to block off the roads and get the truants back in school.

And, for that matter, it's a bit odd that so many of the students in Forks own their own wheels. When I was a kid, that wasn't a given -- and isn't the Forks community supposed to be relatively working class? 

   Dr. Cullen raised his eyebrows. "Do you want to stay?"
   "No, no!" I insisted, throwing my legs over the side of the bed and hopping down quickly. Too quickly -- I staggered, and Dr. Cullen caught me. He looked concerned.
   "I'm fine," I assured him again. No need to tell him my balance problems had nothing to do with hitting my head.

I actually think Dr. Cullen might be a good person to tell about Bella's chronic balance issues. We talked about how awesome Twilight would be if Bella's motivation for becoming a vampire was something more complex like then I wouldn't be in pain all the time; would it not be equally awesome if her relationship with Edward developed gradually while Dr. Cullen used his decades of experience and research (that he is no doubt doing in his not-sleeping hours) to help her?

   "It sounds like you were extremely lucky," Dr. Cullen said, smiling as he signed my chart with a flourish.
   "Lucky Edward happened to be standing next to me," I amended with a hard glance at the subject of my statement.
   "Oh, well, yes," Dr. Cullen agreed, suddenly occupied with the papers in front of him. Then he looked away, at Tyler, and walked to the next bed. My intuition flickered; the doctor was in on it.

I'm really disappointed in the Cullens. You'd think in their hundred plus years of hiding their true nature, they would have much better poker faces. I really want Carlisle to clap Edward on the back here with a proud grin and some beaming statement about his boy placing well in his last school's sprinting competitions or something. Acting normal would be a lot better than this oh yes hmm well ah I suppose ah how do you say WHAT ABOUT THOSE PACKERS HUH? suspicious behavior.

I know it's inserted here for the reader's sake and so that Bella can continue to be super suspicious, but it's like these vampires are complete newbies at the whole Masquerade thing.

143 comments:

Nathaniel said...

"I know it's inserted here for the reader's sake and so that Bella can continue to be super suspicious, but it's like these vampires are complete newbies at the whole Masquerade thing. "

Its never a good thing when a plot hinges on key players acting like morons.

Also, too, the fact that Bella continues to "love" Edward after displays of jerkitude such as finding her frequent injuries oh so terribly amusing makes it seem as that the only thing attracting her to him is his supposedly Adonis like looks. Which is all good and well. Plenty of relationships are based wholly on such a fact. It just makes my eyelid twitch a bit when its called "true love."

chris the cynic said...

Remember my not at all serious statement in the last thread about Edward kneeling on Bella? He totally was.

When they'd lifted me away from the car, I had seen the deep dent in the tan car's bumper -- a very distinct dent that fit the contours of Edward's shoulders . . . as if he had braced himself against the car with enough force to damage the metal frame. . . .

That's not going to work unless his back is to at least some degree vertical and, since his shoulders are up against the car and his back is vertical and there's not some king of hole in the ground to accommodate his legs, his legs have to be under him (and over Bella whom he is on top of.) He's kneeling on her or sitting on her when the van hits. (We know he's not standing or squatting on her since he wasn't that high off the ground.)

-

Edward's amusement at Bella's injuries is pretty bad even in the tiny part of Twilight I've looked at myself (two whole pages.)

When I went to look at the full text I saw something that got left out last week was that Edward points out that Bella's head has been damaged, Bella realizes, "He's right, oh my fracking god that hurts,"* and Edward's response to this revelation of pain is to suppress laughter. Half a point for realizing that he shouldn't be laughing and trying to suppress it, minus several million for responding to the pain with laughter in the first place.

I mentioned on Slacktivist that a criticism of Rayford resulted in me thinking, "That's nothing, he laughs when... wait. That's Edward." That's what I was thinking about. Rayford smiles at knowing someone will get screwed on a mortgage, Edward laughs at serious head injuries. I seriously did conflate the two for a moment.

I nominate Edward to be an honorary Tribulation Force member.

*Not actual Twilight dialog.

Morgan said...

The only way this makes sense to me is if Bella is so vain that she'll only submit to important-but-uglifying medical care behind a closed curtain...
That's how it read to me. Let me see if I can restructure it in to a chain of logic:
- Image and appearance are important. Being seen with a neck brace is embarrassing and to be avoided.
- The hospital knows this, so they should save me that embarrassment by giving me privacy for as long as I'm required to wear the brace.
- If they haven't given me that privacy, that must mean the brace isn't all that necessary, because they should expect that I would remove it myself if they didn't do that legwork on my behalf.
- Therefore, the fact that they left the curtains open means the neck brace isn't really necessary and it's safe (enough) for me to remove it.

On the "ha ha you injure yourself a lot": in Edward's defense, the "I've had worse" bit is thought, not said, and he can't hear it. All he sees is Bella denying the extent of her injuries, as a continuation of her stubborn insistence that she's totally fine, and while it's not nice to laugh at that it's not quite so jerkish as laughing at "no, this concussion is pretty much run of the mill for me".

Ana Mardoll said...

I nominate Edward to be an honorary Tribulation Force member.

The cross-over fan fic that the internet has been crying out for. :D

(And Edward can carry Carpathia's cat.)

Christine VanderSpoel said...

For instance, I'm terribly sad that we don't get to see the family counsel that will take place in the Cullen household this afternoon.

I feel like I only ever comment on this blog when trying to explain some plot points or something and I feel bad about it, but not bad enough to stop doing it ;)

If you really want to see the family counsel that takes place, it does happen IIRC in Midnight Sun, as that is the exact same story but from Edward`s perspective.

Ana Mardoll said...

Haha, that's alright, and don't stop posting! :)

I did think of Midnight Sun (which I haven't read, but mean to) while posting, but decided that anything at that point would be too little, too late, so I said damn the torpedoes and went ahead. *grin*

Kit Whitfield said...

I think it's not implausible that someone who'd just cracked their head might angrily insist that they're fine against all common sense. The one time I went under general anaesthetic, I came to myself desperate to get out of the hospital, totally convinced that I was fine and I wanted to go home now and no I didn't want any food even if I hadn't eaten all day and I wanted to go home and if they'd just leave me alone then everything would be fine ... despite the fact that my blood pressure was zooming all over the place and I was crying and confused. I only stopped insisting that I be freed from the canula and discharged right now because I came to the muddled conclusion that since they had a jailer mentality, the only thing to do was pretend to be compliant so I'd get my parole quicker. I hate having to depend on people at the best of times, and the anaesthetic exaggerated this quality to the exclusion of any understanding of the fact that I might, in fact, be in need of medical supervision. So I can see how an independent-minded and prickly girl might get irrationally, defiantly resistant to help after a bang on the head.

But the thing is, this argumentative tone Bella strikes isn't really any different from how she talks to everybody all the time, head injury or not, and there's no suggestion that the head injury is causing it - in fact, Bella insists that she's not hurt to us as well as to the other characters, so we presumably have to take her word for it and assume this is par-for-the-course interaction with people.

--

Since no one bothered pulling the curtain around to give me some privacy, I decided I wasn't obligated to wear the stupid-looking neck brace anymore.

Morgan's theory makes sense. I can think of a couple of others:

1. If I was seriously injured, they'd draw the curtains because I'd be expected to settle down for a long stay. Since they leave them open, that means they'll be back in a minute to discharge me. Hence there's clearly nothing much wrong with me and I'm halfway out the door anyway. So I might as well get rid of this stupid thing.

2. All human interaction is a question of power plays and/or quid pro quo. Putting a neck brace on me over my objections is someone trying to impose their will on me and nothing more. If they showed some consideration for me I might concede this power play; since they don't, screw 'em, I don't owe them a thing and I'm not going to submit.

The former is someone taking a guess based on the situation - a bit reckless, but not too unreasonable. The latter is ... well, let's err on the side of characterisation and say it's the limited perspective of a not-very-mature teenage girl who's in the middle of her emotionally-reasoning, I'm-immortal-and-infallible, trust-no-one-over-thirty stage.

John Magnum said...

When they'd lifted me away from the car, I had seen the deep dent in the tan car's bumper -- a very distinct dent that fit the contours of Edward's shoulders . . . as if he had braced himself against the car with enough force to damage the metal frame. . . .

This passage left me flabbergasted. Like, what, has Bella stared at Edward SO HARD that she has memorized the contours of his shoulders? Memorized them so well that she can instantly, at a glance, look at a dent in a car and go "Oh yes those are definitely his shoulder impacts all right"? I guess it's consistent with the whole nebulous sexiness staring thing, but yeesh.

Also, a pet peeve of mine is the device of "As if he had braced himself against the car with enough force to damage the metal frame", that is the device of "As if ." It just seems like a cutesy way to play up the character's ignorance but still giving a completely objective and accurate depiction of events. "She glowered at Edward, as though she were angry at him for being a smug jerk." Blergh. But this is something that seems so universal that it must just be me disliking it.

chris the cynic said...

It's a strange thing to say, but it annoys me that Bella is saying, "he was standing next to me." I suppose it could be that since she's a bad liar she's sticking to the script, but the annoying thing is she doesn't have to lie.

What, for example, would be wrong with this:

"How did you get out of the way so fast? You were there, and then you were gone. . . ."
"Umm . . . Edward pushed me out of the way."
He looked confused. "Who?"
"Edward Cullen."
"Cullen? I didn't see him . . . wow, it was all so fast, I guess. Is he okay?"
"I think so. He's here somewhere, but they didn't make him use a stretcher.


Um, how do you close a question that ends in a block of quotation? It doesn't seem right to put a question mark all by it's lonesome after the quote, but before the quote the question isn't yet finished. I suppose I could simply rephrase to, "What, for example, would be wrong with the following?" but that's not really what I want to say, I want the question to be closed only after the reader knows what is being asked.

Anyway, she doesn't consider herself good at lying, she's in a position where the truth works just fine, and yet she lies. Why?

Also, even if she's going with the lie that Edward was next to her, why say "pulled" instead of "pushed." Edward pushed her, that's what knocked her off her feet and made her head crack against the pavement. That's why she's in the hospital in the first place. If he'd pulled her then:
1 Edward wouldn't have needed to stop the van.
2 The movements of Edward would have been even more inhumanly impressive because he would have needed to come to a complete stop on the ice, grab Bella, and pull her out of the way of the van back in the direction whence he came. Given the relative positions of things and the amount of time he had to do it in that would have been mindbogglingly impressive even not on slippery ice.
3 She probably wouldn't have landed on her head.

Some of that is stuff she's keeping secret, but the fact that he pushed her shouldn't be privileged information. If he was standing right next to her pushing still makes perfect sense as a way to get her out of the direct path of the van.

The whole thing about pulled is more of an aside though, what stands out is volunteering the lie when the truth should be enough.

And then we come to:
"Lucky Edward happened to be standing next to me," I amended with a hard glance at the subject of my statement.

Now you're just lying for the hell of it Bella. I get that you're making a some kind of point here, but I'm sure there are ways that don't require you, an admittedly bad liar, to lie.

depizan said...

I think we have final proof that the "Forks is owned by the Cullens" theory is right. We have a car accident bad enough to shatter windows in Tyler's van (I've been in a couple of car accidents, one involving a Jeep going from 35 mph to 0 mph on a stopped backhoe, and none have involved broken windows) that pinned Edward and Bella between Tyler's van and either Bella's truck or the mysteriously involved tan car that Edward left human shoulder shaped dents in. It doesn't matter if he looks undamaged, he'd be going to the hospital.

Also, someone would be calling Mulder and Scully. Because not only do you have mysteriously not squished people, you've got clearly identifiable human shaped dents in cars. This is not normal.

Kit Whitfield said...

Like, what, has Bella stared at Edward SO HARD that she has memorized the contours of his shoulders? Memorized them so well that she can instantly, at a glance, look at a dent in a car and go "Oh yes those are definitely his shoulder impacts all right"?

It doesn't seem that implausible to me; if the dents are shoulder-shaped, Edward is the only candidate. Besides that, well, I know I notice the shoulders on a handsome fellow. They're one of the best bits.

Kit Whitfield said...

I wonder what the effect of Edward 'vehemently' refusing the stretcher is? On plot logic grounds, it would make more sense for him to act a bit scared of the doctors, insist on being seen by his 'father' and no one else, then have a quiet word with Carlisle in the privacy of a ward so he can bring him up to speed. Alternatively, it would make more sense for him to refuse it calmly, because vehemence looks more like he's upset and confused, and that could go with having taken a knock on the head.

I think the effect may be wish-fulfillment: Bella wishes she could refuse a stretcher, Edward successfully does, so he's already embodying the elements of herself she can't embody for herself. The fact that both of them have a strong desire, not just to refuse a stretcher but to protest against one, is a sign of their oblique unity.

Carrie said...

Re: musical voices- the most obvious example of voices that go up and down in tone without being 'singsong' in the sense of being babyish or irritating would be the various dialects of Chinese- since it's a tonal language, and so varying tone is necessary to establish semantic meaning in what you're saying. This often creates a quality that I would be happy to label 'musical'- however, in general I think people use the term 'musical voice' in the more general sense of being actively pleasant to listen to, rather than being like music in any more specific way.

If I try to think of a Western person with a 'musical voice', the one who jumps to mind most readily is Antonio Banderas. Not sure why.

Steve Morrison said...

Ah well, if Harry Potter could recognize a "Snape-shaped hole" in the broken window at Hogwarts, no doubt Bella could recognize an Edward-shaped dent in a car! BTW, the links to "classic animated cartoon" and "Somebody Else's Problem" go to http://www.blogger.com rather than wherever they should.

Kit Whitfield said...

With musical voices, I've also heard speaking voices so resonant or pure-toned that it makes me wish I could hear the person sing. That might be it; not a voice that sounds like it's singing, but a voice that sounds like it could sing. (And indeed, the people like that I've encountered tend to be actors or singers.) Such a voice often tends to linger over phrases somewhat, to have a bit more rhythm and pace in its speech.

If Edward spoke like that, you'd expect him to speak a bit slower than most people, to have a kind of unhurried rhythm of speech. That could be sexy because it'd sound confident and authoritative: he doesn't rush to talk, which implies he's sure of being listened to.

It wouldn't be implausible that a vampire clan with magical powers might talk that way either; if one of them can read minds and another can manipulate emotions and another can see into the future and possibly know what you're about to say, and they've spent all their time together for a century, conversation would have a somewhat different tempo and you'd expect them to talk for the pleasure of hearing each others' voices and using their own as much as to communicate - after all, they have other ways of getting the information circulating. But in this context, I expect it just means Edward's voice is nice to listen to and has some good diaphragm behind it.

Gordon said...

It's funny you describe the Cullens that way, with the SEP field made of pretty. In one of Jim Butcher's recent Dresden Files novels, there was a very powerful vampire who basically had exactly that. She hired hitmen to take out the main character, and they were all caught. All of them describe her as being the MOST beautiful woman they had ever seen, but they could only vaguely recollect her actual appearance.

Yeah, Peter Facinelli is...very attractive, but not jaw-droppingly so. And, though I realize this is entirely subjective, I think blonde hair does absolutely nothing for him.

The whole series is full of things I think would have been much interesting from a different perspective. Like one of the nurses during the this hospital scene. Jasper's perspective during lunch one day. I'd like to get a non-Bella perspective on Edward. Maybe from someone who doesn't like him. Like Mike! I realize we get this from Jacob in Breaking Dawn, but it's not the same. Mike is relatively neutral on Edward, where Jacob is more like the Anti-Bella when it comes to affection for Edward. How about a family meeting, minus Edward, about Edward's taking up with human Bella? Victoria's perspective on the baseball game? Or during Bella's meltdown in New Moon, a series of perspectives from her father and her friends at school? In Eclipse, something from a member of Victoria's army.

redcrow said...

>>>Also, can anyone explain why Tyler is bleeding from a head wound and scratched all over his face and neck?

He was attacked either by Bella's Secret Admirers for nearly killing her or by Bella's Secret Haters for *not* killing her.

>>>it's like these vampires are complete newbies at the whole Masquerade thing

Or... they *want* her to suspect something. All those seeming attempts to keep the truth from her are nothing but a complicated game, and Bella is not the first person they chose to intrigue, entrail and entrap. A bit of reverse psychology never hurts. They take turns playing the bait (right now it's Edward), the token hater (right now it's Rosalie) whose presence in family makes things somewhat less suspicious than they'd be if *all* Cullens adored the girl (or the boy)...

Ana Mardoll said...

@Steve Morrison, thank you for pointing out the broken links. Blogger does that sometimes and I'm not sure why. Should be fixed now. Thanks!! :)

chris the cynic said...

Or... they *want* her to suspect something. All those seeming attempts to keep the truth from her are nothing but a complicated game

I'm trying to figure this out. Specifically, I'm trying to figure out how vast the conspiracy is. It would seem an absurd coincidence for the van thing to happen to their chosen subject , so does that mean that Tyler was involved?

What about the person Edward was trying to convince to change his schedule, if he'd actually succeeded that might throw a giant wrench into the plan. She must have been in on it.

In fact, I submit that this is a conspiracy so vast it encompasses the entire town. They go from place to place, each time taking over an entire small town, forcing them to be a party to their twisted games, and then once the town is entirely under their control, they wait. The very next person to arrive is who they toy with.

Or, you know, something like that.

redcrow said...

Yes, the whole town (except for werwolves) is on it - not all of them voluntarily, though. Humans are mostly brainwashed into not noticing what they shouldn't notice... oh, did I forget to mention that Cullens and werwolves are *not* the only not-humans in town? Because, yes, in this AU version a lot of people are not what they seem. Some are also not what they think they are. But Charlie probably *is* Charlie. I still didn't deside about him yet.

DarcyPennell said...

I give Bella a pass on the neck brace. She is in highschool, a time when shallowness and vanity, and bad decisions based on same, are nothing out of the ordinary. No offense to anyone of high school age reading this! When I was in high school I got chicken pox. (It was awful, by the way; sickest I've ever been. If you have to have chicken pox I highly recommend getting it over with as a toddler.) I was so mortified by the pox on my face that I wouldn't let friends bearing gifts visit me, and even tried to stop my mother from coming in to care for me. To me the line about how she nearly died of humiliation when everyone saw her wearing the brace, makes her sound just like a normal teenager.

I also sympathize with Bella on her refusal to engage with Tyler's endless apologies. There's a way of apologizing that makes it clear it's all about the apologizer and their need to feel better about themselves, not at all about the person they harmed. I confess that like Bella, I don't have much patience for the "I said sorry so now you must tell me it's okay, over and over" sort of apology.

F'rinstance, a couple of nights ago I was at a baseball game and the guy sitting behind me spilled a full cup of beer on my seat, on me, on the floor all around me, and into the bag containing a new team shirt I had just bought. I didn't ask him to pay for the shirt but I did pull it out of the bag and exclaim "Oh no, my new shirt! I hadn't tried it on yet, I hope it fits!" which would have been a nice opportunity for him to offer. Instead he kept babbling sorry sorry sorry, and clearly expected me to forgive him over and over and over. Eventually I left the game because, well mainly because I stank of beer, and I don't drink so I really don't like the smell of beer. But also because I knew if he apologized one more time I wouldn't be able to grit my teeth and say it was okay. I was going to tell him how not okay it was, and I was going to be a dick about it. So I left. (The beer washed out, and the shirt did fit, so no harm done except for my disrupted evening.)

Will Wildman said...

I’m not entirely clear on how Edward managed to avoid absolutely all medical attention anyway, nor why he feels ‘smug’ this whole time. And HOW DOES NO ONE ELSE NOTICE OR CARE ABOUT THE SHOULDER DENTS? This is not a complicated thing – you pull two metal objects apart and they have caved in to roughly match the shape of the supposedly-fragile meatbags inside, the logical issue should be screamingly obvious. I now consider the Cullens’ cosa-nostra-style ownership of Forks to be canonical. There is no other way that a 17-year-old boy would get pulled out of twisted metal and then be allowed to ride in the cab, surely.

I’m actually pretty okay with characters not being physically described, especially if the important trait is supposed to be ‘hottest person EVERS’. I’m just going to end up swapping in conflicting features anyway, and I’d rather not have to nod along with the writer’s idea of what a pretty face looks like. There’s a character in Song of Ice and Fire whom we are constantly told is incredibly ugly, but the one time her features actually got described, I found myself wondering if we were all supposed to be meta-victims of changing beauty standards, such that she was attractive according to concepts of 21st century North American beauty but considered hideous by her fellow characters.

(I’ve got one fantasy story where all of the action takes place essentially within a convention centre over the course of three-ish days. Part of me wants to not describe any of the characters except in incredibly vague terms and just see what wildly divergent mental images readers come up with.)

---

I'm still not certain how a voice can sound musical without being sing-song, and I do not think we're meant to hear Edward in sing-song.

Too late; I’m reading all of his dialogue in Gregorian chant now. It is a whole new experience.

---

I really like the idea wherein Bella works out that they’re vampires, threatens to tell the town unless they vampire her so she can fix her ‘defective’ body, but Carlisle says ‘give me one year to try science first’, and then her constant interactions with him are what cause her to spend so much time around Edward, who would otherwise be trying to avoid her just like he avoids everyone else at school.

(It would also work if Edward et al were college students instead of trapped in junior year at Sisyphus High.)

---

Remember my not at all serious statement in the last thread about Edward kneeling on Bella? He totally was.

But if he was kneeling on Bella, then a certain amount of force should have been translated directly through his rigid body and crushed her into the ground like a garlic press when the truck hit, no? At this point I’m going with ‘straddling’.

Pthalo said...

It would make more sense for Alice, with her premonition skills, to walk up to Bella before Tyler's car even appears, chat her up while walking with her away from the scene of the future accident. That's how this scene was handled in Luminosity and it just makes so much more sense. (Then the hospital scene is skipped, Tyler, is able to recover control of the vehicle because he's not panicking about killing Bella, and everything's fine.)

chris the cynic said...

I'm actually willing to give Tyler a bit of a pass because he's the only one who was seriously injured and the impression that I have is that at least for a certain amount of time he was convinced that he had killed Bella. (He was probably told that he didn't well before he was put in the bed next to her, but that doesn't change that his brain is still going to be well off balance based on the fact today is the day it first processed the thought, "I just killed someone.")

In Bella's position I think I would be frustrated, annoyed, and just want him to shut the hell up, so I'm not holding anything against her for not constantly comforting him. But I do think that there's a possibility beyond Tyler making it all about him.

It's possible that he's not even fully aware of what he's doing. Perhaps if he were healthy, unharmed, and of sound mind he'd apologize once and that would be it, but at the moment he's skipping like a worn out record and it really has nothing to do with making him feel better. Perhaps any number of things.

If Bella were acting in a way different from normal I'd give her a pass too, but she seems to be the same as she ever was so her actions cannot be reasonably blamed on traumatic experience and injury.

Inquisitive Raven said...

Side windows, e.g. the ones in the car doors are tempered. Windshields are typically laminated. Does anybody make vehicles with those triangle shaped side windows anymore? Actually, I suppose if the van is of the same vintage as Bella's truck, it might have them, but in that case I wouldn't expect it to have airbags since I think car manufacturers stopped putting in those side windows long before airbags started being offered as an option, much less as standard equipment. (To give an idea of the timeline here, when I was a wee bairn in the 1960's, my parents had cars with those triangular side windows. By the time they got what would now be called an SUV in the early 70's, cars weren't being made with those windows anymore. I think airbags started showing up as an option in the 80's and were starting to be installed as standard equipment in the 90's.)

And then there's the question of whether or not Tyler was belted. Airbag + seatbelt = minor injuries, and I'd be surprised at the glass cuts. Airbag + no belt = driver slides under the airbag and gets broken legs. Completely unrestrained = driver attempts to go through the windshield head first and he's lucky if the worst he has is cuts. Belted + no airbag = possibly hitting the windshield, especially if the driver bypassed the shoulder strap (assuming there was one; again how old is the van? Also, shoulder straps became standard on vans after they'd been standard on passenger cars for a while). Oh, if he's got a lap belt and no shoulder strap, he'd better have it secured around his hips and not his waist or the belt itself could cause injuries.

chris the cynic said...

But if he was kneeling on Bella, then a certain amount of force should have been translated directly through his rigid body and crushed her into the ground like a garlic press when the truck hit, no? At this point I’m going with ‘straddling’.

I did consider mentioning straddling and then left it out.

This is, more or less, why I left it out:
Bella has to be on her side for reasons more or less already established. (Or she has detachable legs, but somehow I think that would have been mentioned.) So she's on her side facing the oncoming van. which means that her body is perpendicular to the van or thereabouts. If Edward has a leg on either side of Bella then his legs are perpendicular to the van or thereabouts, and that, to me, would seem to make it very awkward (what part of this scene isn't awkward?) to get his hands and shoulders into a good van stopping position.

Also, I have never been straddled, certainly not while in mortal danger, but somehow I feel like she'd be more likely to notice that the thing on top of her pinning her to the ground was a human being if one of it's legs was in front of her, which would have to be the case if she were being straddled. Maybe she honestly never looked, she did say that that she didn't have time to notice much, but it seems like "Hey, there's something pinning me to the ground which also extends in front of me and behind me and in front of me is a knee/foot," depending on which way Edward is facing, "so I guess the thing on top of me must be a person," would be a pretty reasonable, and pretty quick chain of reasoning.

That said, it's true that I wasn't considering the forces a vampire would be imparting on Bella. That Bella didn't notice she was being straddles is probably more reasonable than the idea that neither Bella nor the EMTs nor the doctors noticed that Bella had been crushed.

Ana Mardoll said...

I checked the movie scene, and it seems that the film-makers couldn't make heads or tails of the situation, either. It's been completely re-written:

http://youtu.be/sMtpI1N87Wc

This version makes a lot more sense, but it does seem as though Edward is bracing against Bella, which would mean that either she's going to have a bruise there from absorbing the shock, or he's dissipating force into the ground.

I can't figure out why they take her to the hospital afterward, though.

I love the Gregorian chant idea, but I still can't stop thinking about Edward being ELIZA after the comment that suggested the same. "How do you feel about Moving To Forks?"

Ana Mardoll said...

Wow, Gelliebean, that was wonderful! I started all "oh, a sweet Charlie story to explain why he's not in the hospital with Bella" and ended all "OMG GET OUT NOW CHARLIE". Actual shivers over here. Nicely done!

graylor said...

I can give Bella and Tyler passes for the hospital scene. On Bella's part, she may be completely unhurt, but major weirdness has just entered her life and she did just have a near death experience. In her place, I'd probably pretend to be alseep rather than be apologized at endlessly, too. On Tyler's part, even being rear-ended and getting a dented bumper can be upsetting. I could see the shock of a real glass-breaking-metal-screaming accident with added near death for an innocent bystander turning somebody into an endless fount of apology.

The neck brace thing, on the other hand, makes me dislike Bella, however it's explained. Vanity, stupidity, or air-headedness--these are not traits I want to hear about in the main character unless the character is going to grow out of them. I haven't read the entire series, but from what I gather, emotional growth is not part of the great plan here. Of course, given the author's choice to consign her vampires to high school hell this shouldn't come as a surprise, I guess.

*
Karen Nilsen recced your blog to me a while back and, while I have been a dedicated lurker, your Twilight deconstruction inspired my parody of "paranormal romance" over <a href="http://graylor.livejournal.com/169304.html> here</a>. It plays on a story very similar to Twilight *cough* with added LK Hamilton *cough* but told from an outsider's POV.

Brin Bellway said...

DarcyPennell: When I was in high school I got chicken pox. (It was awful, by the way; sickest I've ever been. If you have to have chicken pox I highly recommend getting it over with as a toddler.)

Yikes.
My parents decided if I hadn't noticeably had chicken pox by age twelve, I'd have a blood test to check if I'd had it asymptomatically. If I didn't have the proper antibodies, I'd get the vaccine. I didn't show symptoms, I didn't have antibodies*, and I did get the shot.
(Since I have no idea how old you are, it's possible the vaccine didn't exist yet when you were a teenager.)

*Despite having spent a Passover party when I was two playing with a girl who broke out in pox the next day.

Will Wildman: I’m actually pretty okay with characters not being physically described, especially if the important trait is supposed to be ‘hottest person EVERS’. I’m just going to end up swapping in conflicting features anyway, and I’d rather not have to nod along with the writer’s idea of what a pretty face looks like.

I almost never imagine people in detail**, so the descriptions don't really matter; I'm either not going to bother remembering or just not get detailed enough to put it into use. Or, occasionally, I end up with the mental images having physical traits expressly contradicted by canon***.

**I hear this is a prosopagnosic thing.

***Most recently, my imagination insists that Felaben Jackson has brown skin, despite getting his twin sister's whiteness correct.

@chris the cynic, re: greatest possible painkiller
I've never been fond of “lol”, so I'll go with *laughs*.

graylor said...

'Musical' makes me think of 'lilting', which makes me wonder, does Edward have a discernible accent? Should he, since he does spend most of his daylight hours among other speakers of contemporary English, which might tend to wear away at his original speech patterns? ... Now I want at least one of the Cullens to have a hard time with langauge, the opposite of somebody who travels abroad for two weeks and brings home a strong accent. What if part of becoming a vampire sets only portions of the brain in stone, so that they have to consciously think about details of slang and intonation? If only certain portion sof the brain were marbelized, say, emotional development centers, for instance, memories could still be put down, and ideas developed, but emotional growth would cease.

bbrugger said...

Argh. The EMTs are fired! If Edward was able to talk his way out of stabilizing and transport then they are incompetent ninnies who are going to get someone paralyzed or dead. Then the ER staff should be written up for leaving her unattended and not making it clear to her she needed to have an Xray to confirm there was no spinal injury before the collar could be taken off (Neutral c-spine, people! It's basic protocol! Any ten year old who watches TV knows this stuff! )

While this is going on we'll set up a time for a full staff meeting at the high school to explain proper emergency responses- including getting the kids out of the area and into a safe central location. They can figure out the wording for the stern announcement about leaving school grounds that will be read over the intercom AND sent home to all parents to be signed and returned no later than next Monday. And why does the whole student body love her so much they follow the ambulance?

Enter Carlisle, he of the overwrought even by Cullen standards backstory. I cannot wait to hear what you think.

Bella calls her father Chief Swan? Seriously?

As for Edward and the Dent of Doom- screw it. The laws of physics have evidently gone on strike for the duration of this series and have demanded their names be removed from the credits.

Edward smirks and Bella whines and ghu help me I'm almost convinced they deserve each other- though not in the way SMeyer thinks. More like "At least they ain't spoilin' two houses."

chris the cynic said...

The EMTs have to get in line to be fired behind whoever it was that decided not cancel school on black ice day.

I mostly came back to say, "Crap, I forgot the part where Ben tells Tricia it wasn't her fault, it was the fault of whoever's job it was to cancel school."

And now I go to sleep.

Ana Mardoll said...

Snarky Twilight (also a continuation from last time):

Chris, if we all took up a donation, what number would we have to get to -- hypothetically -- to get you to do this for the whole book? Because these are hilarious, I swear. :D

Dash1 said...

Will Wildman: I’m actually pretty okay with characters not being physically described, especially if the important trait is supposed to be ‘hottest person EVERS’.

(Apologies in advance for getting all pedantic.) That's actually a fine old literary tradition. Shakespeare has Enobarbus describe Cleopatra floating down the river on her barge without ever describing what she herself looks like physically. He describes the things and people surrounding her and the appearance of the barge and her attendants and the effect she has on everyone. But nothing about her, personally. Homer never describes Helen of Troy, although he does describe the effect she has on people.

Also (what the heck, I'm being pedantic), chris the cynic, your material is fantastic! Makes much more sense than the original. To answer your question about where to put the question mark, you'd put it immediately after the question itself: "What's the matter with this?" The "this" would be understood to refer to the following material.

"Musical voice" is usually, in my experience, ascribed to a woman, and that mostly in literature at least a century old. For a man, I keep thinking of Dudley Do-Right (the cartoon version).

Pthalo said...

People besides me do that?

I do that, Miss Mardoll! Sometimes just a short conversation with an accented individual is enough. I had one poor girl think I was making fun of her. I wasn't! I just would've had to break out my fake British accent if I wanted to avoid the southern drawl I was copying from her, and that would've been more work and I found her southern accent pleasant anyway.

chris the cynic said...

So what happened to my whole, going to sleep plan? I don't know.

Chris, if we all took up a donation, what number would we have to get to -- hypothetically -- to get you to do this for the whole book?

I'll answer this seriously because: why not?

Unfortunately I travel light (er, except for the traveling part) which means that there's very little in the way of reasonably priced things that I actually want or need. Unless you make a collection big enough to pay for a college education or, say, half a farm so that I can buy out my evil aunt from Here/France/Norway/Texas/[Doesn't anyone stay in one place anymore?] there probably wouldn't be much I could do with it.

That said, I'll probably do it for free. Although if you wanted it to be done more quickly than you're going through the book it would doubtless help if I had a copy of Twilight, which I don't.

Because these are hilarious, I swear. :D

Thank you.

[the opposite of somebody who travels abroad for two weeks and brings home a strong accent.]

People besides me do that? I'm not impossibly weird and strange? *whew*


For a while years ago I had the opportunity to talk to a wonderful woman from Ireland on an almost daily basis. At some point she mentioned that my voice changed whenever we'd been talking for a while. It had, I'd start a conversation talking normally, but by the end I'd have some bizarre combination of my accent and an Irish accent that was probably recognizable as neither.

Presumably if I were surrounded by people with the same accent for a time I'd do the same thing but on a thicker and more lasting level.

Kit Whitfield said...

Guys, seriously: paying someone to write fan fiction is against the law. Parody is protected, but there's a grey area, and if money started changing hands, on ethical grounds I'd have to leave.

Carrie said...

(Apologies in advance for getting all pedantic.) That's actually a fine old literary tradition. Shakespeare has Enobarbus describe Cleopatra floating down the river on her barge without ever describing what she herself looks like physically. He describes the things and people surrounding her and the appearance of the barge and her attendants and the effect she has on everyone. But nothing about her, personally.

(Apologies in advance for getting even MORE pedantic)- while I agree with you that this is a common thing in literature, I don't think Shakespeare is a very good example of it, since he was writing a play. I would assume that he goes out of his way to describe the barge in detail on the assumption that this was all too complex and expensive to actually stage. Whereas Cleopatra's awesome beauty would have to be represented by whichever teenage boy the company had on hand, wearing whatever they had that would look most like an exotic queen, and so it was best not to get into specifics of her appearance in case that unhelpfully boxed in the director.

I actually think this quality of Shakespeare is a major reason why his plays have remained popular- because he tends to be kind of vague on the specifics of stuff like what people look like or precisely why they are doing what they're doing, and so that gives people much more flexibility to reframe the plays in terms of whatever they currently feel makes a compelling story, even if that's not something that Shakespeare himself would ever have considered writing in.

(Actual Shakespeare scholars may want to correct me on this, however)

Inquisitive Raven said...

Well, a good question here is how old is Edward officially supposed to be? If his records say he's eighteen, then as long as he's conscious, alert, and oriented X 3 (who, where, when), he can refuse treatment and transport and the only thing the EMTs can do is make sure the paperwork is properly filled out for the refusal. Of course, they should explain what could go wrong if he does refuse, but presumably Bella's in no position to hear that discussion. If he's supposed to be seventeen, hence officially a minor, then nope sorry, gotta collar and board you, dude. Take it up with your dad when we get to the hospital. Of course, the fact that he's ambulatory means it would be hard for them to screw him up worse than he's already screwed himself up. Not a problem, I generally ran into as an EMT. No, usually what we got was what my partner called "documenting the lawsuit." IOW, they wanted us to use every procedure that might be remotely appropriate so they'd have something to sue the other driver over in hopes of a big settlement from the insurance company even if the physical exam indicated that it probably wasn't necessary. *sigh* One thing I ran into every time we collared and boarded a patient was that at some point the patient would try to lift or turn zir head no matter how many times we explained "don't do that."

DarcyPennell said...

Brin: You are correect! There was no vaccine for chicken pox when I came down with it. I'm glad there is now!

Everyone who pointed out that Tyler also deserves a pass is also correct. He didn't just spill beer on someone at a ballgame; he nearly killed a classmate, or thought he did. That would mess with anyone's head. His babbling endless apologies would be hard to take, but it probably comes from an honest place.

What was the hospital staff thinking, putting them in neighboring beds? You'd think it would be standard procedure to separate them as much as possible. For the important reason Ana mentions, to preserve witness memories for the investigation. And also because, what if both participants in an accident have big families. And one of the families is quick to assign blame without waiting for the facts, and quick to act on their assumptions. And both families are now crammed together in the same waiting room, or worse yet crowded around the side-by-side beds. What could go wrong?

chris the cynic said...

Kit, I can say with about as much surety as I say anything that involves making predictions about the actions of others, that money isn't going to start changing hand here.

Everything I said in my post is accurate, and it applies to pretty much anything that involves the question of, "How much would it cost to compel you to do X," but given the answer I'm pretty sure ethical concerns won't come up.

If Ana were to surprise me and offer me enough money to buy my aunt's half of the farm then, if I'm honest with myself, even though I don't think of myself as a criminal I'd almost certainly take the money and write the fan fic for it. But, first off I don't think a six figure bribe for writing fan fiction is likely, and second I just said that I'd probably end up doing it for free anyway which, I think, disincentivizes the giving of a bribe more than twice the size of the average American household income.

Ana Mardoll said...

I am so glad to hear there are other people who take on garbled accents when hearing a (proper) accent of same. I've done that all my life and have zero explanation for it. In the last 5=10 years, it's also developed that two of my dreadfully bad accents -- British and a very thick Southern Georgia -- will sometimes spontaneously issue forth when I'm extremely upset, angry, or agitated.

It baffles Husband to no end. "Why are you doing that fake southern accent?" he will ask. "I don't have any control over it!" I will reply, but it will come out sounding like "Ah dun't haf eeny cantrahl avher et!" Very odd.

Alas, Chris, as you suspected, I have not an extra 6 figures handy to donate to your college fund, though I wish I did because I'd love to be so rich I could be a fairy godmother for all my friends. That would be pretty cool, I think. :D I *can*, however, mail/send/gift you a copy of Twilight or the money to buy same, though, and will if you're at all interested in continuing along with the reading. Let me know. ;)

chris the cynic said...

I'd love to be so rich I could be a fairy godmother for all my friends.

It's a wonderful fantasy, isn't it?

I *can*, however, mail/send/gift you a copy of Twilight or the money to buy same, though, and will if you're at all interested in continuing along with the reading. Let me know. ;)

I think I would be interested in that but, in addition to what Kit has pointed out about the legality of compensation for fan fiction, my own difficulties with productivity mean that you shouldn't do it with the expectation of ... anything really.

Anyway, the reason I got on facebook in the first place was to swap personal information somewhere outside of the open web, so talk to me there I guess.

JohnKnl said...

It's a wonderful fantasy, isn't it?

I wanna be a billionaire...

chris the cynic said...

On the subject of not being good at not being suspicious, if we think back to a month ago Bella asks Edward, "Did you get contacts?" resulting in him being confused and answering, "No."

This is not good masquerade material. He has no idea what Bella is talking about or why she is asking (this is itself problematic, we'll get to that) but what he should be able to pick up on is that in the question itself Bella is offering up a rational explanation that she is already prepared to believe. This is a golden opportunity. Maybe he wouldn't want to take that opportunity, but he should at least find out what this is all about first.

If you're trying to keep up the appearance of normality it would make sense to fish for the reason for such a question. Instead of, "No," it would be better to respond with something like, "Why?" which leaves the door open for both yes and no while potentially getting some idea of the lay of the land.

The other problem is that his eyes change colors*. He's been around a hundred years or so, his eyes have been changing colors almost the entire time. People must have noticed. He must have had to come up with excuses. He should have been using the contact lens excuse for ages, at least since the release of the first commercial eye color changing lenses in 1987 (date grabbed via google.) That date should be in his mind as one of the times when being a vampire was completely changed, right up there with the fact that some jerk movie producer had to let the world in on the previously secret fact that vampires didn't like the sun in 1922.

But no, Bella hands him a perfect excuse and he just bats it away. This is not someone who is good at keeping his oddness secret.

-

This is how Edith would handle it:

"Do you wear contacts?" I asked her, not really thinking.
She smiled and said, "I'm glad you noticed. Sometimes I feel like I put all this thought into what color my eyes should be today and it's like they're invisible. No one ever seems to notice." She looked away for a moment, her tone dropped into a more tired place, "Which is probably why I'm down to two colors these days. I used to use all colors of the rainbow but now I just feel like, 'What's the point?'"
"So, what color are your eyes really?" I asked.
"Purple."

-

*And not the way my eyes change colors between green and grayish-blue/bluish grey (you try to figure out whether they're gray or blue when they always resolve to green if you look at them up close.) No, his eyes change color between "very few people have this eye color" and "no one has has this eye color" which happen to be two very, very different colors.

DarcyPennell said...

The appearance of Dr. Cullen brings up a couple of questions for me:

First, aren't the vampires supposed to have flesh that's cold and hard as stone? Am I remembering that right? Wouldn't it be incredibly uncomfortable to be touched by a doctor who feels like a stone statue? (not to mention obvious that something really weird is up.) Why would a vampire choose a career that requires touching people on a daily basis? If he wants to help people why not be a researcher or something, so he could spend his days in a windowless lab, not sparkling and not touching anybody?

Second, how is it possible that he has dark circles under his eyes? I looked it up and the Mayo Clinic gives a bunch of possible reasons for dark circles:

Allergies
Atopic dermatitis (eczema)
Heredity — dark under-eye circles can run in families
Lifestyle factors, such as physical or emotional stress, smoking, or chronic alcohol use can take a toll on your appearance
Nasal congestion (which can dilate and darken the veins that drain from your eyes to your nose)
Pigmentation irregularities — these are a particular concern for people of color, especially blacks and Asians
Rubbing or scratching your eyes
Sun exposure, which prompts your body to produce more melanin, the pigment that gives skin its color
Thinning skin and loss of fat and collagen — common as you age — can make the reddish-blue blood vessels under your eyes more obvious

None of those seem possible for a vampire. Are the vampires trapped in whatever physical state they had when they were turned? If so, then maybe Dr. Cullen was a tired and worn out human who's stuck with dark circles forever, regardless of how he feels now?

Amarie said...

As far as Bella’s ire with Edward, I have to come to the conclusion that this is simply another example of her extreme tunnel-vision mentality. Ana is right; even though Edward is nine kinds of a smug jerk, she *should* be grateful that he saved her life. She *should* be thinking more about Charlie’s worry than her own vanity. I don’t think anyone is saying that she can’t be a little…uncomfortable with the unexplained in regards to Edward saving her from the van. But, one would think that a *mature* protagonist would be able to push that little sentiment to the back of her mind and feel more strongly about gratitude and appreciation for her father’s worry.
Yet, we’re dealing with an author that doesn’t quite seem to grasp multitasking when it comes to emotions. All too often, her characters have one sentiment about something and one sentiment only. Then, when that ‘something’ is over, there are no aftereffects; the feelings disappear as soon as the situation is resolved. With Bella specifically, she’s a character that makes life-long/altering decisions based on those tunnel-vision sentiments. What’s so irking about that is her author doesn’t see anything wrong with this; it would have been *wonderful* to see Bella grow up in Breaking Dawn not because she [shallowly] gets everything she wants, but because her close-minded decision making process made her pay a hefty price that she didn’t get a return on.
And…from a storytelling standpoint, you could say that Bella’s whining/irrational anger kind of acts as an amateurish plot device all by itself. I mean that it almost makes the reader think that the books actually have conflict, story, and/or plot. That sort of makes sense because so much (or all) of the series’ plot is driven by what Bella Swan does or does not want. And that goes from everything as small as literally hating a graduation party to loving a bruised, sexual encounter. If you think about it, without Bella’s snark and neuroticism…the audience would be bored much, much more quickly.

Silver Adept said...

Oh, goodness. The aftermath of the improbable incident only compounds the improbability. Soon enough, I will start expecting Arthur Dent to arrive.

However, regarding Edward's chuckle - I think there's a double entendre here, and we're supposed to realize that "tender" is asking about both Bella's head injury and whether or not Edward was gentle (or tender) with her when he bounced her head off the pavement. (That could be reading too much and giving too much credit to S. Meyer.)

I can attest, however, to small-town life and wheels of your own. In small-town places, if you want to get anywhere and have a social life, you have your own car. You trade back and forth with others to avoid Cinderella curfews or license / permit violations about other people in your car, but you've got your own wheels as soon as you can afford one with your part-time job, or your parents pass off an old beater on to you as your birthday present - in the same way that Charlie bought an old truck for Bella, plenty of parents might be buying older cars from each other as learners for their kids.

(Ah, and my accent slides toward someone else's accent when I'm in their company. Or when I watch their television programmes - I think I've developed Canadian pronunciation on a lot of things through the CBC and the BBC.)

chris the cynic said...

Looking at the random ramble:

Ana is grateful her head is attached to her shoulders, else she would surely leave it somewhere.

I've never understood the family of expressions this sort of thing is a part of. Surely you never lose your head, it's your body that you absentmindedly allow to wander off, right?

Ana Mardoll said...

Alas, the only "Nash" I know is from Lunar Silver Star Story. :/

Ana Mardoll said...

Someone hypothesized in an earlier thread that Charlie's FOOD MONEY jar in the kitchen (which is stuffed will bills -- an odd thing in a family where no one is being paid in cash, unless Charlie is making change daily at the diner) is subsidized with bribes from the Cullen family.

My god, we've gotten to the point where we have in-jokes! I can't tell you how happy this makes me. :)

chris the cynic said...

My god, we've gotten to the point where we have in-jokes!

So where does this put us on the plan for world domination?

Brin Bellway said...

In-jokes created here, even, as opposed to ones stolen from the Inner Slacktisphere like the Robert Redford one.

Silver Adept said...

@Randy Owens

Beep beep, beep beep, his horn went beep beep beep...

The Dread Pirate Matt said...

I'd also consider Gaelic to be rather 'musical' in speech without being sing-song. Welsh and Irish accents, for example.

Philboyd Studge said...

Dr Carlisle probably wears makeup to play the part of a tired and stressed-out doctor. As the head doctor or whatever, he's probably run off his feet - people would start asking questions if he didn't look stressed out now and then.

Of course, this raises the question of why the other Cullens don't make judicious use of blush or foundation to disguise their corpse-like pallor.

Bificommander said...

"Here's hoping that he looks like a young Robert Redford. *wink*"

Oh my God. The Cullens act all friendly and are about being tollerant towards other attitudes (even those of murderous vampires, apparently). Dr Cullens IS the Anti Christ. If this were true, the books would immediately double in awesome. I hope Meyers will still be the writer of this blended book though. I don't care what Mark said, she's still way, way better a writer than Jenkins.

chris the cynic said...

I'd add the Beatles accent, which I'm told is known as Scouse, to the list of musical accents. Find any interview with the band and they still sound musical to me when not singing. If Edward talks like John Lennon then I'd be willing to accept that he has a musical voice even if he never sings and isn't singsong*. Of course if Edward talks like John Lennon then the Cullens have some serious explaining to do.

-

*Of course I'm still not convinced he could demonstrate that in a single word.

chris the cynic said...

Of course, this raises the question of why the other Cullens don't make judicious use of blush or foundation to disguise their corpse-like pallor.

Or contact lenses to hide their mood ring eyes. It would be easy enough for them to appear to have eyes that were brown or green or blue. Instead they seem to be going for, "Look at me, I'm not normal."

"Your eyes are black as coal."
"That's not good, hang on a moment." (Goes away, returns.)
"Now your eyes are the color of petrified tree sap."
"That's called amber, just so you know."
"Hey, where's my horse?"
"Don't ask."

chris the cynic said...

Because it's easier to write this than to do what I should be doing:

Carlisle: Actually, most of the school seems to be in the waiting room.
Bella: Isn't a bit odd that they'd all come here over the three of us?
Carlisle: Well, in fairness, you three weren't the only students here. We've had several kids come in with minor injuries, and a few more serious cases, due to the myriad car accidents today. Why wasn't school canceled, by the way?
Bella: You're asking me? I just got here.
Edward: Well don't look at me.
Carlisle: (sighs) There must be a reason. Then again, a school that lets the students all leave to crowd a hospital waiting room might very well be the only place in the United States that doesn't know to call off classes when it's icy. A delay would have been enough, once the salt has a chance to work on the roads everything will be fine, but no. They had to fill my beds with teenagers and teachers.
Bella: Finished yet?
Carlisle: Yes, actually. (Writes something on Bella's chart.) I mean no offense, but I hope I don't have to see you again. It sounds like you were extremely lucky this time.
Bella: (Spoken flatly:) Lucky Edward happened to be standing next to me.
Edward: (Gives Bella a "what the hell" look for making it obvious she's lying.)
Carlisle: Before I respond to that, let me ask you something. Would it be more suspicious if I responded with overenthusiastic backslapping for the person who I want you to think is my son, or if I I mumbled halfhearted agreement and then ignored you in favor of Tyler's paperwork?
Bella: Definitely the second.
Carlisle: Oh, right, standing next to you... lucky. (Starts shuffling through paperwork and walks to Tyler's bed.)

Carrie said...

Well, first of all, I have the impression that he's a surgeon which makes him unlikely to be touching a conscious patient. This has me wondering what the heck he's doing in the Forks Community Hospital ER looking at X-Rays, btw. Also, I suspect that AIDS was a major boon from his point of view, since it provides a justification for him to be always wearing exam gloves when he's likely to come in physical contact with anyone at work. I suspect that the cold and hard is less evident when there's a layer of latex or Nitrile between him and whomever he's examining.

Do the books establish what Carlisle's specialty is? Istr that orthopaedic surgeons, for example, tend to be not only the guys cutting you up when you're unconscious, but also the guys doing the consult beforehand where they decide what your options are surgery-wise. If someone comes in with a busted knee, I would expect the orthopaedic surgeon to be making lots of skin contact as they check stuff like what kind of range of movement the patient has (however, not having ever had surgery, I could well be wrong about this).

Or is Forks too small to have a bevy of different kinds of specialists, keeping only a few general surgeons on hand for really routine stuff like skin biopsies, plus emergencies like "this person was hit by a car and now we think they're about to die from internal bleeding", referring anything less urgent/ more specialised to a surgeon in a larger town? I don't know much about the economics of healthcare in rural America.

Ana Mardoll said...

I have to say, the "Before I answer that..." line fits nicely with my view of Carlisle's personality. It's so sincere and quietly eager to please...

Will Wildman said...

Alas, the only "Nash" I know is from Lunar Silver Star Story. :/

So on the one hand, I want to cheer because for all its supposed popularity I almost never run into people who know Lunar. On the other hand, I am plunged into the depths of despair that your primary reference is Silver Star Story instead of the original Lunar: The Silver Star. (The original is so much better! The bad guy has actual motives and everything - in a fractionally different game, he would be the hero rescuing the downtrodden and fighting the supreme oppressor.)

---

Now I'm imagining a variant story in which the Cullens do disguise themselves properly with makeup and contacts, and Bella's first hint that they're not human (as opposed to just superhuman) is when someone gets water splashed on them I'm melting I'm melting and the masque smears. (Although there could certainly be a very powerful scene of Bella and Edward hesitantly removing it all to reveal his actual face.) It doesn't help that in my mind this is followed by:

"I know what you are."
"Say it."
"...Albino."
*awkward silence*

chris the cynic said...

"I know what you are."
"Say it."
"...Albino."
*awkward silence*


Have an internet.

chris the cynic said...

On the subject of both circles under eyes and albinism, this is where the circles were introduced (five months ago, which is before I started reading):

Every one of them was chalky pale, the palest of all the students living in this sunless town. Paler than me, the albino. They all had very dark eyes despite the range in hair tones. They also had dark shadows under those eyes — purplish, bruiselike shadows. As if they were all suffering from a sleepless night, or almost done recovering from a broken nose.

White white white skin marred by dark purple bruises. I'm not entirely sure what this would look like, but I imagine it would be jarring and unmissable. Photos from the movie I have seen make no attempt to reproduce this effect.

It seems somewhat odd that Bella's first thought on seeing person who is really pale with the familiar discolorations under his eyes is not, "What does that remind me of?" given how distinctive purple like unto a bruise on chalk white skin would probably be. Even ignoring the color difference, it's dark on an otherwise extremely white surface.

So I looked to see if Bella talked about albinism before. She said her mother is partially albino. I'm pretty sure that that's not a human trait so I think all of this focus on vampires is missing the truly impressive thing: Bella is half pigeon. (Yes, she was being sarcastic, but be honest. Don't want her to be half pigeon? Aren't you, even now, trying to imagine how that would change the story?)

-

I should probably try to stop double posting.

Brin Bellway said...

She said her mother is partially albino. I'm pretty sure that that's not a human trait

Partially albino, depends on what you mean by it. Just plain albino, certainly. You don't even have to go farther than Wikipedia to see that. The example picture on the Wikipedia page for albinism is of an albino human, and most of the article is about humans.

DavidCheatham said...

Am I the only person who thinks 'albino' would be an excellent Masquerade option? It explains the paleness, it explains the sun thing, it even explains the 'contact lens' thing. (Their eyes would be pale pink, and they got tired of people staring, so they wear color contacts. And sometimes get bored with normal colors.)

It even explain why they're a family of weird. Carlisle and Esme are albinos, and know about the condition, so specifically adopt albinos to give them a safe place. This could even be a 'secret' that the school administration was helping keep, so they can live normal lives.

The only problem is the hair. It would be possible to claim to dye it, but most people don't dye their eyebrows or, for that matter, their arm hair. But instead of outright albinism, Carlisle could claim they all have some sort of made-up genetic disease that causes many of the same symptoms, that only affects three out of a million people so no one's ever heard of it.

In fact, Wikipedia list five different syndromes that can cause albinism already, so it's not like it's some crazy concept. And throw in some unique _dietary_ requirements and you've explained a lot.

In fact, in a universe _with_ a Masquerade, surely such an disease has been invented already. However, I've not actually read the books, so I have no idea how the Masquerade works in them.

chris the cynic said...

I'm pretty sure that either humans are albino or they aren't, with partial albinism being something that's more likely to be found in birds and (wikipedia tells me) reptiles. Certainly seeing a pigeon with albino portions is no big deal where I've never heard of a partially albino person.

Of course if by "albino" we just mean lack of pigment causing skin to be white instead of, you know, using it to mean albino, then there are absolutely people who have that going partially rather than totally.

-

A problem with using albino as an excuse is that, as I understand it, the hair reflects the skin when it comes to non-standard pigmentation. If you've got a portion of your scalp that is white for albino-like reasons then it will produce white hair even if the rest of your head produces jet black hair. But, again, as far as I know it would have to be "albino-like" rather than albino because as far as I know in human beings albino is all or nothing. (With the possible exceptions of chimeras.)

Of course even with the inconsistency about the hair color it would still seem a better to have that as an excuse than to have none.

Ana Mardoll said...

@Will,

Lunar is so tricky to discuss because there's like 18 different versions. I never played the original because it was (I think) on Sega CD and my parents felt that a Sega Genesis, a SNES, and a computer were enough for one child.

My first intro to the series was the "Awesome Anniversary Edition" (or whatever) on the Playstation, where they added cut-scenes and let Luna follow you on the boat and her role was expanded nicely and there was a song and everything! Very pretty.

And I like Ghaleon as a villain; I agree that he definitely seems to be a well-intentioned extremist. I never really liked Lemia's story about, um, Dyne (sp?) saving the puppy AND the village because good people don't have to make hard choices. Gah. And I also liked that the three sisters of the outcast clan were characterized beyond just EVUL.

(I like Eternal Blue, too, but for different reasons, and frankly it kind of reads like Ghaleon Was Right.)

But I'm not 100% clear on the diffs between the SSS PS edition and the original.

Will Wildman said...

And I like Ghaleon as a villain; I agree that he definitely seems to be a well-intentioned extremist. I never really liked Lemia's story about, um, Dyne (sp?) saving the puppy AND the village because good people don't have to make hard choices. Gah. And I also liked that the three sisters of the outcast clan were characterized beyond just EVUL.

The differences between TSS and SSS are indeed vast. For one, I have no idea what puppy story you're talking about; that's new. There were no 'three sisters' of the tribe, just their one leader (Xenobia, inexplicably a hot human woman from a tribe of winged demons), and as you note, Luna didn't get to go along on the journey, which was sad. I don't know how I could get SSS to play for myself, but I find myself wondering what Luna does during the first mainland jaunt, aside from following Alex around. One of the things I liked about Lunar is that everyone always has very clear and strong motivations for whatever they're doing; none of this 'I have nothing else going on so I will join your random adventuring party' stuff.

I've just read the wikia page on Ghaleon in SSS and... if accurate, I don't know what they were thinking. It says he protests the goddess becoming human because he thinks the world must have a deity, so he tries to become a new deity? In the original version, his best friend was nearly killed and sacrificed all his power to prevent a catastrophe and save the goddess' life. Once saved, the goddess refused to restore his friend or any of the other harm that had been done, to which Ghaleon said 'Well, you've just proven you don't deserve to be a deity' and devoted his life to bringing her down. Essentially he decided a non-interventionist goddess who chose not to do maximum good was unfit to rule.

Ana Mardoll said...

Wow, those are different. Hmm, lemme break down.

In SSS, Althena decides that the world doesn't need a deity anymore (she's holding them back), so she gives up her divinity to be reborn as a human child (Luna). Dyne sacrifices his DragonLord (is that the right term? I'm so bad at terms) power to help her through the difficult transition process.

Ghaleon doesn't approve of this because he believes that without a protective deity, the world will be overrun by forces of evil. (This does actually happen in Eternal Blue, but it's a sneaky overrunning.) He wants to either set himself up as god or restore Althena (brainwashed into behaving herself this time, as far as he's concerned) as a protective measure.

Xenobia gets two sisters in the remake -- Phacia and Royce -- and there's a lot of characterization poured into the three. Phacia is actually also very much a well-intentioned extremist, and she's essentially fighting for her tribe's right to live on the nice parts of Lunar.

Luna follows Alex because they grew up together and she loves him. I liked that because I HATE the "woman stays at home" plots in games, and it added a lot more to the "rescue" story because I actually cared about her as a character by the time she's kidnapped. (When Ghaleon offs Quark, IIRC.) Plus, she's a healer and you gots to have those in the party.

The story that Lemia tells is hard to find -- the remake literally has millions of unique dialogs to collect. Basically she contrasts Ghaleon and Dyne as practical and idealistic -- when they were racing to save a village, Dyne stopped to save a drowning puppy but Ghaleon considered the puppy an acceptable sacrifice. Only Dyne doesn't have consequences for his actions -- he saves the puppy AND the village.

In the same way, Dyne and Alex save the world AND let Althena live a human life, whereas Ghaleon thought that eternal slavery (on both the part of Althena and the humans) was an acceptable sacrifice for safety. He's wrong... until Eternal Blue when Zophar shows up and takes over the world because Althena isn't around anymore. Gah.

Carrie said...

A problem with using albinism as an excuse is that, as I understand it, the hair reflects the skin when it comes to non-standard pigmentation. If you've got a portion of your scalp that is white for albino-like reasons then it will produce white hair even if the rest of your head produces jet black hair. But, again, as far as I know it would have to be "albino-like" rather than albino because as far as I know in human beings albino is all or nothing. (With the possible exceptions of chimeras.)

There are conditions that depigment large patches of skin, such as vitiligo. I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that once vitiligo gets to a certain degree of severity, the hope is that it will continue until virtually all visible skin is affected- because the social stigma of having almost all your face be very pale is considerably less than that of having light and dark patches.

(At least, this is the case with Caucasian patients- as I understand it, it affects people of all ethnicities and skin colours, but I don't know how that affects management protocol or perceptions of what would be preferable from a stigma-management perspective)

Will Wildman said...

I kind of feel bad for derailing onto the Lunar tangent, but... not enough to stop, I guess? Mine is an irrelevant sorrow that serves to make me look more virtuous while doing whatever I want.

Luna follows Alex because they grew up together and she loves him. I liked that because I HATE the "woman stays at home" plots in games, and it added a lot more to the "rescue" story because I actually cared about her as a character by the time she's kidnapped. (When Ghaleon offs Quark, IIRC.) Plus, she's a healer and you gots to have those in the party.

I am totally in favour of avoiding the 'boys have adventures, girls stay at home' thing. But in turn, it feels like at least Luna staying home was her choice, whereas Luna going on the boat is just following her boyfriend like a puppy. (Metaphorical puppies are everywhere today!) However, Luna is basically the Staff Chick, whereas the next healer you meet (in addition to Alex, who can heal in TSS) is Jessica, who lives to tap dance on the Staff Chick stereotypes: a boisterous priest-initiate who only heals people when she's not busy bashing sorcerous con artists with a mace. (Jessica was always my favourite.)

I feel like there's a happy middle ground where Luna has some other thing that she actually wants to do, which either justifies her leaving home and going to the mainland, or necessitates her staying behind for reasons other than 'I will keep my adoptive parents company while you get uber-rich and become a wizard'.

Nash is a bit of a deconstruction on that -- he joins in the usual "oh, hey, I have a character sheet so I guess I'll go with you then" way and then half-way through the game BAM! he's a double-agent. Oh-ho, player, looks like the joke is on you. :P

Although, I think that was added in the remake too?


Yes and no. At first, he joins because it's in his best interests, then he ditches the party to continue with his job, then you track him down to ask for his help, then he says 'Hey, you're good at magic, you should see if you can come study in my awesome flying city', at which point he introduces you to Ghaleon who gets all "MUAHAHA-ahem", and then he becomes a double agent, only it turns out that he is actually a triple agent and only betrayed you so he could find out how to sneak your party through impassable mountains. Rather than having to fight him, he just stumbles into the house you're staying at on the verge of death, arms full of all your legendary artifacts that he stole.

Possibly for SSS they cut down on his other motivations so they could work the double agent aspect to a greater degree?

chris the cynic said...

I'm having some connectivity problems, which are distracting and frustrating, and as a result my last post wasn't as clear as it could have been. Then the first version of this post was destroyed by a fickle internet browser. I'm still doing this from the wrong computer because mine is angry.

Ok, so to try to be somewhat clearer.

Albanism itself probably wouldn't work as an actual excuse but, if they've decided to ignore all obvious things (if I use makeup I won't sparkle) something described as "albinism like' would be a great solution.

I picture someone with justifiable suspicions trying to look into things as a precursor to getting the kids out of what appears to be a bad situation and Carlisle saying that the kids have to be with him because he's the only one around who understands their medical needs, the person asks what's so hard about raising an albino teen and Carlisle patiently explains that an albino child wouldn't have dark hair, what we have here is clearly [16 syllable scientific sounding name] and that's something much more difficult to deal with. Getting the special diet wrong, or even a short exposure to sunlight, or heaven forbid someone mistake their naturally low body temperature for hypothermia and start trying to warm them up ... these things could have catastrophic results. And most of this is said while Jasper from Gelliebean's version of the story is holding concerned stranger's hand (supposedly to demonstrate the strange body temperature, actually to make this stuff seem believable.)

-

While, as far as I know people cannot be partially albino it I should not have left out that there are levels of albinism. My understanding is that you either are or you aren't (it's controlled by a recessive gene, if you've got two copies you are, if you don't you aren't) but if you are that does not necessarily mean that your skin color will be as light as it can be. There is a range in color among those who are albino. So while partially albino would be a no, albino without it being instantly noticeable might be ok.

-

As I recall my introduction to vitiligo was when I learned the story of a reporter who had it. He was not Caucasian. His solution was to wear makeup over the parts of his face that had been altered by it. He did not do the same to his hands, and eventually a small child to freaked out when she looked at his hands. After that there was soul searching on his part and he decided to tell his story to increase awareness.

Carrie said...

what we have here is clearly [16 syllable scientific sounding name] and that's something much more difficult to deal with. Getting the special diet wrong, or even a short exposure to sunlight, or heaven forbid someone mistake their naturally low body temperature for hypothermia and start trying to warm them up ... these things could have catastrophic results.

I like this. But perhaps for maximum plausible deniability, the part about frequent camping trips should be worked in somehow (just to avoid the hassle if someone sees the Cullens driving off to practice their dubious wilderness conservation methods in a truck loaded down with camping supplies).

Hm- perhaps Carlisle could claim this was a rare autoimmune disorder. That would potentially explain a wide variety of strange symptoms, including unusual pigmentation, while also being plausibly so complex and deadly that only Carlisle can be trusted to manage it (plausible enough when combined with some fast talking and Jasper's mind control, anyway).

The frequent camping trips could be explained as being based on the hygiene hypothesis (as in, the belief that raising babies in a clean and sterile environment makes them more likely to develop allergies, since their immune system is encountering fewer germs than it 'expects' to, and so becomes paranoid and quick to turn on the body.) I seem to recall reading somewhere that there is not currently a huge amount of direct evidence to support this idea, but I could be wrong about that. In any case, it's a plausible enough idea by pop culture standards, so Carlisle could certainly use that to argue that exposing the teens' immune systems to a variety of bacteria (via camping in the woods) is a crucial part of their treatment.

This could also potentially explain why the Cullen kids never eat in public (though not why they stare at their lunches and then throw them away every single day of school)- they have a very complex range of food allergies and must eat on a carefully timed schedule so as not to upset their sensitive digestive systems.

It could even explain why the Cullens keep going through high school over and over again, instead of college- it could be that Carlisle's fictional autoimmune disorder is plausible enough that the average person (or even the average small-town doctor) will nod and accept it- but if the Cuillens spent a long time interacting with researchers at a decent college, there's a higher risk of one of them either realising that the details don't add up, or thinking this rare disease sounds fascinating and then wanting to know more.

chris the cynic said...

I kind of feel bad for derailing onto the Lunar tangent, but... not enough to stop, I guess? Mine is an irrelevant sorrow that serves to make me look more virtuous while doing whatever I want.

It doesn't mean that much since I would have thought the tangent was fine anyway, but you just bought a lot of license with that. I'm going to have to steal the "Mine is an irrelevant sorrow,: sentence so that I might use it in the future.

Also, for whatever it's worth, I actually prefer your derail to my own even though I have no idea what the two of you are talking about.

-

While I see the problem with, "You can save both, difficult choices are unnecessary," I think that sometimes certain characters need to be smacked with that sentiment.

Consider the not very good movie, The Core. Female lead is told that she won't be a leader until she has to make a bad call. For the development of her character she needs to face a situation where all the outcomes are bad. Sure enough she makes a bad call later on the movie.

Setting aside whether the Kobayashi Maru test is really necessary to be a good leader, the situation she faced was one where the painful and difficult choice was completely unnecessary. She really could save them both.

The situation, for those who have not seen the movie, was that the ship was made in various compartments and if one was damaged it would kill them all if not ejected. Someone was trapped in the damaged compartment. They could rescue the trapped person if they delayed the ejection of the compartment. Fearless leader could do so with the push of a button. She chose not to thus killing the person but saving ... wait, what did she save exactly?

Not the ship. The person who designed and built the ship, the one person with the knowledge of how long the ejection of a compartment could be delayed without killing everyone on the ship, was the one who was desperately working to do manually what she could have done with the press of a button. She knew that. She knew that the ship's designer/manufacturer/engineer/[person who came up with the ejection scheme in the first place] had already determined that they did have time to save this person without losing the ship. So on the one hand she saves the person and the ship is ok, on the other hand she lets the the person die and the ship is ok. Why choose option 2 again?

Plus she was presented as being a genius, surely she must have realized that they wouldn't have made it possible to delay the ejection sequence unless there was some non-suicidal reason to do so*.

I think she could have used a lesson in, "Sometimes it's possible to save the village and the puppy," because she ended up killing someone over a false dilemma.

-

*It is brought up later in the movie that the ship was not designed with improvisation in mind (Paraphrase: "Why is the necessary equipment to do that in a place it is impossible to reach without dying?" "Because the only stuff we put on the inside was stuff we expected to use.") The fact the decided to make it possible to interrupt the ejection sequence implies that they thought it might be practical.

Ana Mardoll said...

I have mixed feelings on Luna. On the one hand, it's great that she's not "I'ma stay at home 'cause I'ma girl." And her tissue-thin motivation of "There's something off about me, maybe traveling will clue me in on what it is" isn't MUCH more flimsy than Alex's "I'ma be a Dragonmaster" (yeah, right, kid) and Ramen's (sp?) "I'ma be a big shot merchant" (double yeah, right, kid).

So it's hard for me to critique her for following you as opposed to a better third option ("I'ma go to COLLEGE") because the world hasn't given her much to hang her hat on in terms of goals. (You can stay home and be a farm boy... or journey to be a legendary warrior. No middle ground. Huh.) And she is a healer and I will happily throw away all my characterization principles for the healer of the party because OMG HEALS. I'm a hypocrite that way. :P

But, yes, I have to admit that her motivation is pretty flimsy and a third option would have been much better. We need to remake it so that she explicitly wants to go to Vale to explain how she can do IMPOSSIBLE HEALING MAGIC WITH HER VOICE. (Which is a clue that she's actually the goddess.)

Possibly for SSS they cut down on his other motivations so they could work the double agent aspect to a greater degree?

I think so. The remake focuses a LOT on the Redemptive Power Of Love, and the three triple couples (Alex/Luna, who is redeemed from Dark Goddess via Alex's ocarina; Nash/Mia, who is redeemed from assholism by Mia's sudden and uncharacteristic badassitude; Jessica/Kyle, who is...um....... Well, that one is complicated.). I'm not usually a big fan of Love Conquers All plots, but the characters are so delightful that I forgave all. And you're right: Jessica is the bestest healer/Staff Chick ever.

Will Wildman said...

Alex's instrument was also originally a harp, and I have no idea why it was turned into an ocarina. SSS came out two years before Ocarina of Time, so it wasn't ocarina bandwagoning. (My brain refuses to fully accept linear time and insists that there is something sketchy going on there.)

And her tissue-thin motivation of "There's something off about me, maybe traveling will clue me in on what it is" isn't MUCH more flimsy than Alex's "I'ma be a Dragonmaster" (yeah, right, kid) and Ramen's (sp?) "I'ma be a big shot merchant" (double yeah, right, kid).

I can again only reference TSS here, but in the original Ramus had just received a colossal diamond that he intended to use as the down payment on his shop, and Alex had received a ring from Quark that explicitly marked him as 'could potentially become Dragonmaster some day', so both of them at least had something solid to base their wacky dreams on. It does seem that Vane is pretty much the only 'college' equivalent, but yeah, Nash could have helped a lot by seeing her heal wounds and smite foes with her voice and saying "That's unheard of; you should totally come with."

I am now thinking more about the social and economic structures of the Lunar world than I have at any previous time, which is neat. Most people are still operating at sufficiency-economy level; everyone's main job is to keep their village running so that no one starves. The exceptions we know of are Meribia, which is a major trade centre; Vane, the scholastic fantastic flying city; and the order of the goddess's priests, who seem to be a bit less like a church and more like a slightly apathetic Doctors Without Borders. None of the temples to Althena are in major population centres, nor is there any talk of religious observance among the populace - it's a religion that is happy to do its own thing separately from society, monasticlike.

By wanting to be a merchant, Ramus has identified what seems to be the only possible socioeconomic step up for anyone without any magical potential - excepting of course that magical potential obviously has a hereditary component (Mia's family all being superpowered) so presumably someone looking to the long term could also try to marry into a magical family. (Nonmagic folk could also possibly get in on Myght or Taben's engineering schools/workhouses, but those are miles upon miles away and thus not something anyone in Burg would have heard about.)

I am definitely thinking about this too much.

Ana Mardoll said...

I would also like to say that I love Chris' point about the date of color contacts being significant to vampires, along with the Edith re-write about "thank you for noticing". Very nice.

But.. the more we talk about this, the more it seems like if vampires REALLY existed, they would have long since changed culture minds into thinking that albinism of the "oh-but-my-hair-isn't-changed" variety is real and relatively common.

And then of course, I hit up against, "well, why not just mainstream entirely and make 'vampirism' common but minus the blood sucking and the blood sucking thing is a PREJUDICED LIE that people persist on spreading" and my immersion breaks because it just seems so logical that there would be better cover stories for all this eye-color changing, pale skin having, diamond reflection in the sunlighting, marble skin, etc. etc.

Ana Mardoll said...

Alex's instrument was also originally a harp, and I have no idea why it was turned into an ocarina.

You carry it around as an inventory item and it plays the game music on command, in addition to being a key item in the final end game. Maybe they thought the ocarina would be more portable?

so presumably someone looking to the long term could also try to marry into a magical family.

Ramus is so upwardly mobile that I have to take as personal canon now that his goal post-merchant establishment phase is to find a mage wife, and somehow -- SOMEHOW -- he is an ancestor of Lemina (Eternal Blue). This would explain her constant obsession with money.

Maybe Nash and MIa had a daughter and Ramus' son married her? That would be timeline friendly.

DavidCheatham said...

I'm reminded of the 'VMR Theory' books, where vamperism _is_ such a disease. A billion food allergies, alabaster skin that you don't want to expose to sun, screwed up sleep cycles, and occasional hormone-induced super-strength. It's claimed to be a slow acting bacteria like leprosy that only about 5% of the population can get.

And I'm pretty certain the vampires in True Blood claim that what is going on with them is a disease. They are lying, it is supernatural. But that claim was just invented when they went public. (I have not read far enough in the series to know what happens when other supernatural races go public. Vampirism could, in theory, be a weird disease, as long as people don't know about various impossible things that the True Blood vampires can do. But shape-shifting, that's pretty much impossible to start with.)

Seriously, if there actually were vampires, and there actually was a Masquerade, there _really should_ be a very rare disease that looks exactly like vamperism that the Masquerade has invented a long time ago. And, yes, if such a disease existed, there would probably be claims about 'prejudice' and the ridiculous libel that they drink blood. In fact, there probably would not _be_ vampire stories as we know them. (And I suspect the Masquerade would have fallen, too.)

chris the cynic said...

I was thinking, imagine that the Cullens did use make up, and a little bit of Edward's came off, and it was sunny, and Bella mistook sparkles for sparks. Then you'd have:

"I know what you are."
"Say it."
"...Robot."
*awkward silence*

-

I would also like to say that I love Chris' point about the date of color contacts being significant to vampires, along with the Edith re-write about "thank you for noticing". Very nice. '

Thank you for saying so.

I'm trying to figure out how best to say this without sounding like I'm fishing for complements because ... I'm not fishing for compliments. I tend to worry a lot that what I write is worthless or worse, so when no one says anything it can be easy to think everyone else thought it was worthless. Or that no one even noticed in the first place.

So to hear that you read it an liked it really means a lot to me.

Will Wildman said...

The harp is the same in terms of getting hauled around and ultimately saving the world. The ocarina is probably lighter, but I wonder about durability. Of course, harp strings would probably scream in horror at the many environments they were going to be exposed to ("Quick, everyone get out of the volcano and into this underground river!") so... yeah.

How do we explain the "thief city" where everyone steals from everyone all the time?

At that point we're approaching the Frontier, so lawlessness is easier to maintain - I assume that the thief city is a traditional wretched hive of scum and villainy where thieves from other towns and villages go to hide when it's not safe for them to stay in their normal haunts. If their Thieves' Guild operated on Ankh-Morpork rules they could actually be one of the safer places to live that far east of Meribia. Similar to Kyle's system, depending on how successful he is at recruiting former bandits to become bodyguards. (But as I recall Kyle was placed there after he ran afoul of Jessica's dad, Mel, and he has that constant pressure to prevent backsliding.)

(I'm thinking now more about Damon, with his library tower in the middle of nowhere. He's kind of a jerk, really. He has a repository of vast amount of information which he's just keeping to himself, not doing anything for anyone. I realise he's a plot device, but he's not exactly a unique plot device, and he's representative of a larger problem of non-philanthropic scholars and wizards in fantasy worlds. Thinking about this has now given me a key part of a story that I've been confounded by for a while. I could actually get progress out of this.)

Brin Bellway said...

SSS came out two years before Ocarina of Time, so it wasn't ocarina bandwagoning. (My brain refuses to fully accept linear time and insists that there is something sketchy going on there.)

Also, the Bible ripped off the Byrds.

chris the cynic said...

Also, the Bible ripped off the Byrds.

Credit where credit is due though, the writers of that book were plagiarists, yes, but they were plagiarists with great taste in music.

Ana Mardoll said...

@Chris, I understand, and it's one reason why I'm always so thrilled when someone de-lurks to praise a post. OMG I HAVE VALUE!

And then I read someone else's fanfic/comment and it's SO FREAKING AWESOME that clearly they already know that because it's SO OBVIOUS and then I have to consciously remember to comment on the obvious awesomeness because, hey, if I like my praise, other people probably do too. ;)

bbrugger said...

Just to show willing I offer this to the harp vs ocarina derail-

I had friend who was a harpist. A realio trulio made a living playing and teaching harpist.

Her description of life on the road with a harp- Imagine travelling 48 weeks out of the year, by car, plane, train and bus. Now imagine doing all this with an elderly invalid aunt. Is she too hot? Is she too cold? Does she have enough room? Is anyone jostling her? Is she going to get rained on or snowed on and get sick? Will she be all right here while you go to the bathroom or do you have to take her along? Will there be enough seats?

Now- imagine that your entire livelihood depends on the answers to these questions and she's one of those little old ladies who is NEVER happy.

Timothy (TRiG) said...

Since other people here are making a virtue of pedantry, I'll remark that Welsh isn't Gaelic. The Gaelic languages are Irish, Scots Gallic, and Manx. Welsh, like Cornish and Breton, is a Brythonic language (the other side of the Celtic family).

TRiG.

johnny said...

why do you call your personal reviews "deconstructions"? they don't deconstruct, but only give your opinion and perspective. this is not quite the same...

Philboyd Studge said...

Let me chip in here and say that I appreciate your little fictional interludes too, Chris - the gender-flipping idea is brilliant and you're pulling it off.

(Also: I misread *awkward silence* as *awkward sparkles*, and it suddenly became twice as awesome.)

chris the cynic said...

(Also: I misread *awkward silence* as *awkward sparkles*, and it suddenly became twice as awesome.)

That is awesome. At some point someone somewhere in the greater Slacktiverse (of which I count this a part) said that we have the best misreadings, and it's true. We really, really do.

Ana Mardoll said...

bbrugger, your post made me laugh so hard. Thank you. :D

Ana Mardoll said...

Hi, Johnny. :)

I like the term "deconstruction" because according to my online dictionary the word means:

de·con·struct (dkn-strkt)
tr.v. de·con·struct·ed, de·con·struct·ing, de·con·structs
1. To break down into components; dismantle.
2. To write about or analyze (a literary text, for example), following the tenets of deconstruction.

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/deconstruct

The writing is being broken down into its component pieces for analysis, hence, "deconstruction". :)

chris the cynic said...

Plus if you called it "disassembly" then Number 5 (who is alive) would freak out.

Also, unless someone sneaks in ahead of me, this is post 100 in this thread. Things are moving pretty fast. The previous Twilight thread didn't make it to 90 (at least it hasn't yet.)

Ana Mardoll said...

I, too, am impressed at the 100 comment post. And all it took was a massive Lunar derail. :P

Speaking of, @Will: The "old guy sitting in a tower on a ton of rare books and refusing to share" is a common trope in fantasy, but you're right that unless he's got a really good reason (i.e., hoards of slavering barbarians sitting outside the tower), it comes off as sort of a jerk move. I always felt rather ambivalent about Good Magician Humphrey in Anthony's Xanth series because, yeah, it's explained that he "sells" the information in order to discourage people from becoming too dependent on him, but would it kill him to invent the internet or something similar to help people help themselves?

It's like he looked at the "give a man a fish / teach a man to fish" conundrum and decided that the BEST answer was to SELL them man the fish. And then complain about all the hungry people that keep pestering him to take their money in exchange for fish.

chris the cynic said...

I think I just hit the wrong button and lost my post, but if this shows up twice: sorry.

I see two separate post counts. At the moment they both agree, I've noticed that they don't always agree but when they don't it seems to always be just after a post is made (the one that is lower on the page has the higher number*) and it resolves itself later on. I get the impression that the one lower down is generated by disqus, so I would guess that if there was a problem on the blogger side of things that number would still be accurate.

On the other hand, I'm wildly guessing based on limited information.

-

* I originally wrote, "The lower one has a higher number," because, saying the lower one is higher makes so much sense.

Brin Bellway said...

At some point someone somewhere in the greater Slacktiverse (of which I count this a part) said that we have the best misreadings, and it's true. We really, really do.

Of course we're in the Greater Slacktisphere here. There's links in This Week in the Slacktiverse and everything. Not sure exactly where the outer borders are: my guess is we reach as far as the Pervocracy (NSFW), but it's hard to say.

And yeah, we have some lovely misreadings. Just look at the Slacktivite Pledge: "I promise not to kill sheep, nor by sheep cause others to come to harm..."

Philboyd, I love the awkward sparkling. I can totally imagine Edward doing that.

Ana Mardoll said...

Of course we're in the Greater Slacktisphere here. There's links in This Week in the Slacktiverse and everything. Not sure exactly where the outer borders are: my guess is we reach as far as the Pervocracy (NSFW), but it's hard to say.

Are we a system of planets like the Federation in Star Trek? Can we make peace treaties with the rest of the internet?

Loquat said...

Avatar: The Last Airbender (which you totally need to watch!) has its own take on the "old guy in a remote tower with a lot of books who doesn't want to share" - the guy in question is an ancient deity who loves knowledge for its own sake and hates the human habit of "abusing" knowledge to gain advantages, military or otherwise, over other humans. And no, he doesn't care how noble or justified you claim your particular cause is; he's heard all that human BS before and you're no different. Of course, since the entire overarching plot of the series revolves around the Fire Nation attempting to conquer the world and the Avatar and friends trying to stop them, well... you can probably guess what the main conflict was in that particular episode.

bbrugger said...

chris the cynic- the avoid sunlight line made me laugh so hard it hurt.

PS Awkward Sparkles is the name of my new band. We play thrash death metal on ocarinas.

Ana Mardoll said...

Oooh! Ooh! I can answer this one: I use "succor".

Not in casual conversation, unfortunately. I learned in sixth grade or so that saying "he ejaculated" (it's in Sherlock Holmes for crying out loud) or "she's queer" or "succor" ended up with very confused stares and people unwilling to talk to me anymore. But I do use it. Yay! :D

I would also like to see pop/soda/coke worked in somehow: http://popvssoda.com:2998/

I love the teacher speech there, and it seems plausible to me. Especially for a small town school kind of situation. I LOVED the idea of Netflix on demand being hooked up to the projectors. :D

Brin Bellway said...

You're one of only six people in high school in all of the United States who knows that thou is informal while you is formal.

Entering high school, certainly, but make it all the way to eighteen without knowing about Thou 101? I would've had to make an effort to avoid learning about the informality of “thou” and when to use “thou” as opposed to “thee”. (The secret: if you were saying it in first-person instead of second, would it be “I” or “me”? If it's “I”, use “thou”, if it's “me”, use “thee”. At least, that's what I was told.)

Succor: when was the last time you heard someone not-a-vampire say it?

If you count writing, Ana used it in the latest Narnia post. Before that, probably in Vicar of Dibley, but they were reading from the Bible so it doesn't count.
(Refreshing, I see Ana's already said she does.)

Ana: "she's queer"

Brother insists it's "don we now our grey apparel", because "gay" clearly makes no sense in that context. (I'm not sure if he's aware of the concept of drag.)

Will Wildman said...

"Heretofore is ok, hithertofore is-"

"Awesome. The word you're looking for is: awesome."


Burst out laughing at this part. I adore Edith's defensiveness about her pass-failing. It seems that in her view, the problem isn't that she's not matching the modern standard properly, it's that the modern standard is suboptimal.

Ana Mardoll said...

I adore Edith's defensiveness about her pass-failing. It seems that in her view, the problem isn't that she's not matching the modern standard properly, it's that the modern standard is suboptimal.

Which actually fits really well!! Chris, are you SURE you haven't read these books? :D

Lunch Meat said...

Are we a system of planets like the Federation in Star Trek? Can we make peace treaties with the rest of the internet?

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa! Don't tell me you're thinking of forming a One Internet Government.

chris the cynic said...

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa! Don't tell me you're thinking of forming a One Internet Government.

It'll never happen. Can you imagine how long it would take to say the name of every website in alphabetical order? And then to do it in all the languages of the internet?

Will Wildman said...

(The secret: if you were saying it in first-person instead of second, would it be “I” or “me”? If it's “I”, use “thou”, if it's “me”, use “thee”. At least, that's what I was told.)

This assumes that the hypothetical person will know when to use 'I' and when to use 'me', which in my experience is maybe 50/50.

chris the cynic said...

Even Shakespeare gets it wrong. "Between you and I," he wrote. Seriously Willy? You couldn't figure out that the object of a preposition was an object? What's next?

It isn't any less wrong than if he had written, "Man delights not I."

It suddenly occurs to me that it would potentially be hilarious to find a section of Shakespeare densely populated with Is and Mes and preform it with the two switched. You'd want to do the same for the other declinable words as well (he-him, she-her, who-whom, thou-thee, we-us, they-them, whatever else I'm leaving out.) On the other hand, it might also be completely boring and unfunny.

I find the concept amusing, but in practice it would probably fall flat.

Ana Mardoll said...

It'll never happen. Can you imagine how long it would take to say the name of every website in alphabetical order? And then to do it in all the languages of the internet?

That would be a problem, I grant you, but I do think I could manage to secretly declare my rulership over the Internet and then fail to tell anyone about it. That seems easy enough.

I can't wipe the memories of the people I told, but I could confine the telling to an audience of cats. They keep secrets like that well enough, especially since mine don't seem to know how to type.

Gelliebean said...

If you do, Ana, I'm going to be obligated to create a secret resistance on a hidden website completely dedicated to tracking your every move and then not doing anything about it. If I'm feeling really feisty, I may even declare opposition to someone who may-or-may-not actually be you and then apply for site moderator.....

Ana Mardoll said...

But will you carry my coat and cat? :P

chris the cynic said...

The ten kings of the earth will be cats?

For the love of all that is good and right in the world, do you have any idea what will happen if cats are given control of the world?

Don't get me wrong, I love my cat (who seems to see me largely as a source of food and someone to open doors for her and never returns my affection in any way) but the thought of her with massive political power is frightening. I don't know what she would do but I imagine that it would be either:
A) Evil
B) Nothing. Nothing at all. So somewhat like congress I suppose.

Ana Mardoll said...

Ours are extremely affectionate... but as a form of passive aggressiveness. Auxiliary Backup Cat likes to sit on Husband's head and purr very loudly when he's trying to sleep, for example.

She hasn't smothered him to death yet, but it's not for lack of trying.

Primary Cat, in contrast, is fond of offering his tummy for pats and then latching onto the arm of the petter and biting the heck out of them. It has taken 7 years, but Grandma has learned not to fall for this.

Funny enough, both cats are reasonably deferential to me. Maybe I really am the anti- christ. Huh.

chris the cynic said...

My cat does do the, "Pet me - Ha! You fool! I've got you arm in my claws!" thing, which has led to me never petting her when she's looking cute and offering her belly to be pet.

If she ever seeks me out it means she wants something. Sometimes I forget this and assume she just likes my company and I pet her, then I remember who she is and I indicate that I'm ready let her lead me to whatever it is she wants (it will always be food or the door) and she sprint away as fast as she can in the direction of thing-she-wants-human-to-do.

Ana Mardoll said...

There is, somewhere on the internet, a webcomic (I think it's by The Oatmeal guy) that states that the "belly offer" is a trap 50% of the time, but it must be indulged anyway. :P

We, too, have the "lead the human to the thing". Well, I should say Auxiliary Backup Cat does. Primary Cat sometimes gets stuck in a loop where he just sits there and cries while Human says "What? What is it? What do you want me to do?" and instead of leading the human to the thing, he just keeps repeating himself in a language the human does not understand. If Primary Cat were a human, he'd be the kind that thinks that other humans who speak different languages CAN understand him, if only he speaks LOUDLY enough.

chris the cynic said...

I'm not sure I follow.

gay (adjective): brightly colored.

Mind you "gay apparel" could also be cheerful apparel or lighthearted apparel or merry apparel, or lively apparel or whatnot.

My point was that it's not just incorrect, it's basically the exact opposite. What could be further from brightly colored than grey?

Brin Bellway said...

What could be further from brightly colored than grey?

Silver's bright and kind of grey, but not usually Christmas-y.

I usually mentally render olden "gay" as "merry" ("merry apparel" does have a ring to it, come to think of it), though I know it has somewhat different connotations, but yeah. We did try to explain to him the concept of linguistic evolution. I don't know whether he accepted the explanation and consisted with "grey" because it amused him, or if he didn't believe us.

Brin Bellway said...

Odd thing is, I once looked up "troll" on my electronic dictionary* and singing was the first definition on the list.

*My dad used to work for a company that made them, and they often gave them out to the kids on Take Your Offspring To Work Day.

Randy Owens said...

@chris the cynic: Well, just great. Next time someone mistakes me for a vampire, and tries to stake me, at least I'll know who to blame: chris the cynic.

On another note, I do have an odd patch of albino skin on my ankle, and yes, the hairs there do grow in white, so that's how mosaic albinism (or albino mosaicism?) works, as far as that's concerned. And the term for someone with only one copy of an albino gene is carrier, though of course not in quite the same sense as Typhoid Mary.

chris the cynic said...

@chris the cynic: Well, just great. Next time someone mistakes me for a vampire, and tries to stake me, at least I'll know who to blame: chris the cynic.

You're going to have to be more specific, I've said so much that could result in misunderstandings. Some of them put me at risk of being staked.

chris the cynic said...

So just to be off topic, or perhaps on topic but six months late, I have a copy of Twilight now and opened it up to see it begins with a "Bella is about to die" teaser followed by a flashback to the actual beginning. I did not know this until I got the book because I came to this party late and still have yet to read through the archives. (Bad me. Bad. Bad!)

So first, I wrote Ben's version of the scene which, as with a couple other things I've written recently, is something I did with absolutely no understanding of what was going on in it. (I haven't read the book, I have no idea how Bella got to that point.) Then I read Ana's thoughts on the actual one.

Ben's intro:

When you're lying bleeding on the ground, realizing that the thing flowing from your body isn't so much blood as it is the hope that you'll live to see another day and trying desperately to control your heartbeat out of the silly belief that maybe, just maybe, if it weren't beating so hard and pushing the blood out of you so fast you'd live long enough to be rescued -because it might not be a realistic expectation but at times like these you grasp at whatever presents itself- you find that the situation is actually remarkably conducive to reflection.

It might not be the cleanest type of reflection ever, there are tangents and subordinate clauses that takeover entire paragraphs, the thinking might not always be strictly linear, and the leaps might not always make sense, but what else are you going to when lying bleeding on the ground if not think about how you got there? It's certainly more pleasant than thinking about the killer in the corner, ready to finish the job she so expertly started.

And so I found myself faced with a simple question: if I had known, if I had somehow impossibly known, what was going to happen going in, would I have gone to Forks? If just had a general idea, if it had been explained to me in the simplest terms and most convenient definitions, then of course I wouldn't. There's no chance in Hell, Dante's or otherwise.

But if I had understanding of what would go in Forks -if I knew what would happen to me and who I would meet and how I would feel- if I knew, in detail,
how I would end up here, dying on this floor, then the answer is equally clear and completely opposite: I wouldn't have missed it for the world.

-

I'm not sure how I fare with the criticism leveled at the original. I definitely kept the original's, "It was totally worth death," but I wasn't seeing it so much as, "Dating a vampire for a little while was worth dying for," so much as, "A world in which I never knew this person/these people* is inconceivable." I see Ben as focusing much more on being Edith's friend than on being her boyfriend in his "Oh crap, I'm about to die," moments.

And if I could have found a way to fit the word confute into it, I absolutely would have.

-

*Depending on the nature of his relationships with the other Cullens which I don't know yet.

Ana Mardoll said...

I love it! There's something about the seriousness of the first paragraph that reminds me (in a good way) of the opening of Fight Club when whats-his-face narrates that when you have a gun in your mouth, everything sounds garbled. It's very deep and yet plain scared-to-die at the same time.

I think it's delightful that you're gender swapping everybody. I'm just wondering how this is going to translate when we get to the parts where Jacob is shirtless every five minutes*. o.O

*Or is that just in the movies? His role in the first book is so abbreviated that I can definitely believe he was meant to be a one-off character. And isn't it so sad that the ONE source of tension in this series -- the love triangle -- was apparently a last minute addition.

Randy Owens said...

Pretty much all the stuff about anachronistic language. Heck, knowing my 'thee's from my 'thou's wasn't good enough for me (although I must admit, the 'thine' before a vowel was new to me); I had to go and learn 'ye' from 'you' way back when, too.
Though there was one other thing new to me: I must now go look up 'confute'. I think I have a vague sense of what it means, but I don't know whether that's actually knowing it from the past, or just context plus etymology making an educated guess.

Ana Mardoll said...

@Inquisitive Raven, please have an internet. :D This is all kinds of awesome -- I am tickled pink at how much I just learned about ambulances and emergency response. I feel like there should be, like, a SchoolHouse Rock about this. Or something. :)

Randy Owens said...

*grit my teeth* I may have to defend Meyer slightly here. I had very little idea of the devices you mentioned in your discussion of stretchers, boards, and KEDs. I kinda knew there was the wheeled thing, and the flat thing, but I didn't know one of them wasn't called a stretcher; that's what I would likely have called any of those. So, it seems reasonable to me that a high school student, in a rather distracted moment, might have seen one of those boards, and mistaken it for a stretcher.

chris the cynic said...

I feel like there should be, like, a SchoolHouse Rock about this. Or something. :)

At the very least there should a resource for those who create fiction:
This is my job; don't get it wrong.

Of course such a resource, when extended to forensic science, would likely kill CSI in it's sleep.

Will Wildman said...

Of course such a resource, when extended to forensic science, would likely kill CSI in its sleep.

but at least we would be able to determine who did it, and how!

I'm in favour of a website, in a wiki or DYAC style, where people could submit a fictional example they had seen/read of their job and then explain how wrong it was. By appealing to the basic drive to explain how other people are wrong on the internet, I assume it would melt servers within days.

chris the cynic said...

Whether Bella fails at terminology is probably less of an issue than the other details. If she's feeling all embarrassed about them bracing her neck she should probably have thoughts of some kind when she's tied to a plank of wood*.

For that matter, wouldn't they have things on either side of her head to restrict movement? That ought to merit some sort of mention as well.

-

"Confute" I found by picking up my Herodotus textbook (copyright 1929) and looking through the vocabulary in the back until something jumped out at me. Confute jumped out. It just felt right.

The reason that I think it would have been nice to have it in the intro would be that it sort of gives the word its own arc, first Ben uses it in the open, flashback to find out how he got there. Edith uses the word and Ben as to look it up, possibly with a reaction of, "Who talks like that?" Ben teases Edith for using the word, as time goes on Ben starts talking in more Edith-like ways, when we reach the time of the intro he uses the word confute without a second thought.

-

*Yeah, I know, the wood ones have been on the way out for a long time. The only ones I've ever encountered are wood. I think of them as wood.

Ana Mardoll said...

I like the word arc idea. As much as I HATE opening "future" scenes, if it's done in service of a "see how the character changed?", it can be well-done. :)

I'm in favour of a website, in a wiki or DYAC style, where people could submit a fictional example they had seen/read of their job and then explain how wrong it was. By appealing to the basic drive to explain how other people are wrong on the internet, I assume it would melt servers within days.

Heh. I would be very MUCH in favor of this, as both an author and a software programmer. On the one hand, I frequently sit down to write a scene only to be faced with some insurmountable detail -- what kind of fruits were common in Italy in the 1400s? -- and having a "writer's resource" at hand would be so nice.

On the other hand, belonging to a frequently stereotyped profession like programming is so frustrating. (My heart bleeds for the real CSI people. :() I remember the first Transformer movie had me wanting to pull my hair out in the theater, and it's not helped when Mom begs me to watch certain TV shows because IT'S JUST LIKE ACTUAL ENGINEERS! *groan* :P

Brin Bellway said...

"Ye" is the plural of "thou", right? Unless it's the kind where the "y" is actually a misinterpreted thorn, in which case it's "the" (as in "ye olde").
(Did I mention I'm probably going to a Ren Faire today? It'd make a nice excuse to wear that medieval wench costume Mom felt compelled to make after watching Merlin. (She couldn't find patterns for her size, so I was her vicarious model.))

Inquisitive Raven, thank you for being so informative!

Will: I'm in favour of a website, in a wiki or DYAC style, where people could submit a fictional example they had seen/read of their job and then explain how wrong it was.

Yes please! There are other things besides jobs that cause similar "you're getting it wrong" reactions*, but jobs would make a good start.
What's DYAC stand for?

*Sometimes it turns out I'm wrong about them being wrong, though. I stopped complaining about fictional portrayals of nitrous oxide intoxication after reading Kit Whitfield's description of what it was like for her, because clearly there's a wide variety of reactions with that.

Brin Bellway said...

Hey, where'd my comment go?

Ana Mardoll said...

Good thing you said something -- Disqus had marked it as spam. I approved it and you have been "Whitelisted" so it shouldn't happen again. Thank you for the heads-up. :)

hapax said...

"Ye" is the second person plural nominative in Middle (and Early Modern) English. It is actually still used (correctly) as the second person plural vocative and (revealingly) as the second person singular pretentious.

chris the cynic said...

Yes please! There are other things besides jobs that cause similar "you're getting it wrong" reactions*, but jobs would make a good start.

Ok, how about, "This is my life; stop doing it wrong"?

Inquisitive Raven said...

Well, in all honesty, I wouldn't necessarily expect Bella to know what the long board was called, but I would expect her to notice that she was strapped to a board and then put on the stretcher. I doubt she'd even see the EMTs/Rescue techs using the KED to extricate the driver of the van, but I included it for completeness' sake.

And there still should've been a fire response. If nothing else, an engine on standby in case of fuel tank rupture, and it should be able do double duty as a rescue vehicle.

BTW, I first made the acquaintance of the long spine board in summer camp during a first aid course where the instructors called it a "back board." I think it's called a "long board" by EMS providers primarily to distinguish it from the never used "short board" that we had to have on the rig anyway. At any rate, it would not have surprised me if Bella had a name for the board and knew what it was used for, but even if she didn't, she should've noticed the extra step before being put on the stretcher. She was remarkably coherent for someone who'd banged her head after all.

Brin Bellway said...

Relevant to the "My job; don't get it wrong" bit.

chris the cynic said...

Thank you.

Randy Owens said...

I guess the site is called "Ana Mardoll's Ramblings" for a reason....
It wouldn't happen to be the case that your real last name is Nash, would it?

@DarcyPennell: I believe there was a point made a couple of months ago or so (in the post here, it hasn't been in the book yet) that they get the bags or dark circles under the eyes depending on how they've been feeding recently. So it makes sense up to a point, although I doubt that there's a good justification for why they get those.

Randy Owens said...

And, of course, the money in the FOOD MONEY jar would see a mysterious jump.
OK, I don't think I'm getting this? Unless it's just the idea of the Cullens fattening them up before feeding?

Inquisitive Raven said...

First, aren't the vampires supposed to have flesh that's cold and hard as stone? Am I remembering that right? Wouldn't it be incredibly uncomfortable to be touched by a doctor who feels like a stone statue? (not to mention obvious that something really weird is up.) Why would a vampire choose a career that requires touching people on a daily basis?

Well, first of all, I have the impression that he's a surgeon which makes him unlikely to be touching a conscious patient. This has me wondering what the heck he's doing in the Forks Community Hospital ER looking at X-Rays, btw. Also, I suspect that AIDS was a major boon from his point of view, since it provides a justification for him to be always wearing exam gloves when he's likely to come in physical contact with anyone at work. I suspect that the cold and hard is less evident when there's a layer of latex or Nitrile between him and whomever he's examining.

Ana Mardoll said...

I have mixed feelings on Luna. On the one hand, it's great that she's not "I'ma stay at home 'cause I'ma girl." And her tissue-thin motivation of "There's something off about me, maybe traveling will clue me in on what it is" isn't MUCH more flimsy than Alex's "I'ma be a Dragonmaster" (yeah, right, kid) and Ramen's (sp?) "I'ma be a big shot merchant" (double yeah, right, kid).

So it's hard for me to critique her for following you as opposed to a better third option ("I'ma go to COLLEGE") because the world hasn't given her much to hang her hat on in terms of goals. (You can stay home and be a farm boy... or journey to be a legendary warrior. No middle ground. Huh.) And she is a healer and I will happily throw away all my characterization principles for the healer of the party because OMG HEALS. I'm a hypocrite that way. :P

But, yes, I have to admit that her motivation is pretty flimsy and a third option would have been much better. We need to remake it so that she explicitly wants to go to Vale to explain how she can do IMPOSSIBLE HEALING MAGIC WITH HER VOICE. (Which is a clue that she's actually the goddess.)

Possibly for SSS they cut down on his other motivations so they could work the double agent aspect to a greater degree?

I think so. The remake focuses a LOT on the Redemptive Power Of Love, and the three triple couples (Alex/Luna, who is redeemed from Dark Goddess via Alex's ocarina; Nash/Mia, who is redeemed from assholism by Mia's sudden and uncharacteristic badassitude; Jessica/Kyle, who is...um....... Well, that one is complicated.). I'm not usually a big fan of Love Conquers All plots, but the characters are so delightful that I forgave all. And you're right: Jessica is the bestest healer/Staff Chick ever.

Brin Bellway said...

I was thinking of that post of Deird's, though I'd forgotten who wrote it (sorry Deird). The things you learn in our conspiracy to create a One Internet Government Federation of Blogs corner of the Web.

As a soda speaker let me tell you, it can be damn confusing when someone uses the word "coke" to describe Pepsi.

I moved from a "soda" area to a "pop" area. It was a bit odd. Same with "the States", which I gather is a common term for America in many places, none of which are themselves in America. (There might be Statesians I don't know about.)

Your brother insists its "grey apparel" when the song clearly indicates that it's "brightly colored apparel"? Genius.

I'm not sure I follow. It appears to be some sort of joke that may or may not be at my brother's expense.

Will: This assumes that the hypothetical person will know when to use 'I' and when to use 'me', which in my experience is maybe 50/50.

It is tricky sometimes. It helps (me) to ignore the first part of the compound subject/object and focus on the pronoun. (In writing, anyway. In speech I'm generally too busy trying to make sure I get the number of negatives right to bother with correct pronoun usage. I have quite enough to worry about already.)

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