New Moon Chapter 19 – Sorry about your saints!

Previously: International travel was THE ONLY WAY. Swearsies.
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Catherine: This chapter is TENSE. Or about as tense as Meyer’s writing ever gets. Which is kinda like a longer than normal shrug.

“We made our flight with seconds to spare, and then the true torture began.”

Um, the true torture began 424 pages ago, Bella. (A: Let’s be honest. The torture began almost two books ago.) (C: Was it ONLY two books?)

She’s referring to the fact that she has to sit and (K)stew on a plane while those bitch flight attendants ‘casually’ stroll up and down the aisles and do their normal jobs like some kind of fucking idiots.

Can’t they see that TRUE LOVE is on the line here? God!

Kirsti: This whole thing just served to prove that this book is set in a pre-9/11 world. Because buying an international plane ticket at the airport with not very much time before the flight and only carrying hand luggage and inevitably looking super shifty about it? Yeah, you’re gonna get stuck in security 5eva.

Marines: I’m amused by the thought process that went, “time to ratchet up the tension! HEY, HOW ABOUT A FOURTEEN HOUR INTERNATIONAL FLIGHT?”

Catherine: Alice tries to calm Bella by reminding her that flying there on a plane is faster than running. We’re always being teabagged by how much money the Cullens supposedly have, don’t they have enough to charter a private jet for one flight? How much could that possibly cost? Probably not that much in Civil War bonds.

As soon as they take off Alice ‘lifts’ the phone from the back of the seat in front of her and calls Jasper. I keep forgetting this is set in the 90’s/2006. If they’d all had cell phones, no spoilers but the end of this book would probably have been very different.

K: Agreed. This is also stupid because the cost of those phone calls Alice is making from her seat probably total the cost of a private jet.

Catherine: And in today’s dollars that’s a lot of money.

Alice tells Jasper that her vision of Edward keeps changing among the things she sees him doing to piss off the Volturi are ‘attacking a guard’ and going on ‘a killing spree throughout the city’.

So, what happened to him being a pacifist? He’s needs to convince the Volturi to kill him and he thinks the best way to do it is to murder a bunch of innocent people? Swoon. This is a throw away line, too. This is never brought up again as something that is very fucked up. But Meyer wants us to forget about it and move on so we shall! I guess?

K: I think the whole thing is meant to be “see how broken he is when he thinks that Bella’s dead? See how far he’s willing to go?”. But it’s just fucking stupid and WTF-worthy.

Mari: Alice says he’s thinking of things that would expose the Volturi, which includes lifting a car over his head, attacking a guard or and you know– GOING ON A KILLING SPREE. IDK how he makes it from lifting a car to killing lots of people. Your romantic hero, ladies and gentlemen.

Catherine: They’re pretty different things.

Apparently Emmett and Jasper and Rosalie and Liesl and Friedrich and whoever the fuck all went after Edward on their own but Alice tells Jasper to stop the other two because if Edward sees them he’ll just kill himself faster.

Flimsy reasoning, Meyer. Flimsy as an old rain gutter.

Alice hangs up with Jasper and then tells Bella that she hates lying to him. Bella asks what she lied to him about.

Basically, if Edward ‘hears’ (as in mind reading hears) any of the other vampires coming he’ll be spurred to act faster and they won’t get there in time to stop him. I guess he’s expecting them to stop him. Also, and this is what Alice was lying about to Jasper, if the Volturi do kill Edward (fingers crossed, ladies!) then the other Cullen’s will have no choice but to fight them and then they’ll all die.

Mari: But… they do have a choice? No? 

Okay.

Catherine: No because TENSION. 

Bella points out, finally, that if Edward did hear the other vampires he would also hear that Bella is alive and then he’d maybe not want to kill himself (and apparently a bunch of other people). But no, stupid! That’s obviously not the answer because it wouldn’t be a DRAMATIC true love scene that way. That would make too much sense. Obviously.

Alice tells her that Edward would obviously think they’re lying. With their thoughts. As one does.

Annie: These vampire powers work the way Stephenie needs them to in order for her plot to make sense. And the rules are constantly changing, and while there is so much in this book that is wrong, this is just one little detail that really pisses me off. These are powers of contrivance and I’m over them.

K: It’s worse than souls in the Buffy-verse, it really is. 

Catherine: Bella remembers back to before Edward left when they were watching Romeo and Juliet together and Edward told her that he would kill himself if she died and she failed to see what a red flag (for his own mental health) that was and just kept having her PG-rated orgasms over his arctic breath on her neck.

“I ground my teeth in mute frustration.”

We know. That’s what grinding your teeth means. You don’t need to add the part about—oh, fuck it. Let’s all just hope that they don’t get there quick enough and everyone dies.

Annie: My fingers are crossed.

K: Mine too.

Catherine: We can only hope, friends. Bella asks Alice why the Volturi are so scary in comparison to the Cullens, instead of just assuming it’s that there are more of them like any normal person would.

Alice answers her and guess what? It’s that there are more of them than the Cullens.

Apparently, due to vampires’ bitchy nature, covens are usually kept very small. Even James’ coven of 3 was huge by vampire standards. So really, not so much ‘covens’ as ‘pairs’, but okay.

The Volturi are the only bigger coven in the world than the Cullens. The only one in the entire world? Even if we assume that the only reason vampires can’t get along in this scenario is because they drink human blood and Carlisle’s hippie cult just found a new way to be chill, man, this means that no other vampires IN THE WORLD abstain from human blood like the Cullens. I guess we’re also discounting the Denali clan. And every vampire that shows up in Breaking Dawn to *SPOILER REDACTED* everyone up.

I feel like Meyer may not have a lot of faith in the basic decency of people here.

Or, she just really wanted her sparkly imaginary friends to be super special.

Annie: You forget that Meyer is anti-human.

K: All of this is A+ stuff, but I have to interject here to say that before Bella and Alice start talking about the Volturi, Bella decides that a businessman sitting near them is super shifty looking and he’s clearly going to eavesdrop on their super secret conversation (maybe don’t have it on a plane?!?!) and she glares at him until “he opened his computer and very conspicuously put headphones on.” How do you CONSPICUOUSLY put headphones on?!

Annie: 

Mari: This stuff is so riveting, we’re talking about headphones.

Catherine: That is such a specific gif.

Anyway, there are 5 vampires in the Volturi clan as well as at least 9 permanent guards and more that come and go. The main Volturi guys all have special gifts like Edward’s mind reading or Alice’s visions, and most of their guard does too. The Volturi specifically recruit people with like, +10 Strength, Dexterity and Charisma for their D&D game. So no one is dumb enough to fuck with them and they stay in their walled city and only leave ‘as duty calls’.

Sounds like a really shitty way to spend eternity but okay, I guess.

Bella asks what she means by ‘duty’ and Alice is whispering to her at this point so no one on the plane will overhear. I bring this up because Alice’s lips are described as ‘wintry’ on Bella’s ear and I just…

K: YUP.

Catherine: Alice says that the Volturi are like the vampire royal family because they just sort of decided they were one day and everyone just went along with it. (M: Sounds like how royalty usually goes.) She tells her that they enforce the rules.

Bella’s like ‘rules?’ and she freaks out because she wanted to be a vampire last year but no one told her there were rules???

And Alice tells her that there’s really only one rule and it’s pretty obvious, Bella can probably figure it out for herself.

But, haha, she doesn’t know Bella.

“I thought about it. “Nope, I have no idea.”
She shook her head, disappointed. “Maybe it’s too obvious. We just have to keep our existence a secret.”
“Oh,” I mumbled. It was obvious.”

So the Volturi are basically the vampire police. They kill anyone who goes to public with the vampire thing. I’m guessing this does not include Bill Compton.

Edward’s plan is to somehow publicly out himself as a vampire in their home city, Volterra so that they will kill him spit spot.

Bella asks Alice how the Volturi eat if they don’t leave their city and they don’t allow vampire shit to go down within it’s walls. Alice tells her the guards go out and get take out from other cities. People take out. Meals in heels.

K: A+. I also had a small rage blackout here because Alice says that they’ve held the city for 3000 years, “since the time of the Etruscans”, and this is a total archaeologist nerd rant but ETRUSCAN CIVILISATION ROSE IN AROUND 750BCE, THEREFORE IT’S ONLY 2750 YEARS, ALICE. I know 250 years is nothing to a vampire, but FFS. 

Mari: That’s more years than the U.S. is old.

Catherine: I love that you not only knew that but also got mad about the inaccuracy.

Alice says that that gives the guards something to do when they’re not killing rogue vampires or protecting the city. Then Bella says this:

“From situations like this one, like Edward,” I finished her sentence. It was amazingly easy to say his name now. I wasn’t sure what the difference was. Maybe because I wasn’t really planning on living much longer without seeing him. Or at all, if we were too late. It was comforting to know that I would have an easy out.”

Look, all jokes aside, suicide and depression are dealt with REALLY POORLY in this book. This is a book marketed to teenagers and the main character just mentioned in passing that she plans to kill herself if her boyfriend dies and it’s thrown out as almost an aside. Like whatever, if he dies I’ll just kill myself. That’s not okay. We’ve been laughing at Bella’s other attempts to hurt herself because she wasn’t really trying to kill herself and also the laughter is mostly disbelief. This is a YA book where the main character self harms multiple times and contemplates suicide because her boyfriend left her. This is not treated with the attention and gravity it deserves in the book and Bella is never taken to see a therapist or even a normal doctor. She doesn’t talk to ANYONE about this shit and that’s seen as okay because in the end (SPOILER) she gets her boyfriend back so obviously she’s magically healed and everything’s fine now.

Annie: Absolutely. The cavalier attitude towards suicide is awful and reckless, the way they talk about depression is stigmatizing, and I’m so done with it. Granted, this book is set in the 90s, where we had an even worse relationship with and understanding of mental health than we do now, but come ooooon. This is just lazy writing, too. This is the best Meyer could come up with for creating conflict? COME ON.

K: YES. Total agreement with all of this. It’s also terrible because it paints a very “your parents won’t care” picture of mental illness. Like, Charlie knows that Bella’s having problems, and yet he does nothing. Which is yet another awful message to send to teenagers. 

Catherine: Those overbearing Christian moms that protested this book were right that it was damaging to young girls but they were wrong about the reason.

Anyway, back to the garbage heap.

Another 7 PAGES are devoted to Bella and Alice’s conversation on the plane in this very tense, thrilling scene of them racing daylight across the world. (M: BUT WILL THEY GET FREE PRETZELS?) (C: I can confirm that they didn’t because there wasn’t any extraneous detail about Bella chewing.)

No new information is given to us in this endless plane scene other than the fact that Alice sees that the Volturi decided to tell Edward that they wouldn’t kill him without reason. They’re too interested in him joining them because of his power.

Also we get to hear again about how Alice had a vision of Bella as a vampire and then Bella basically begs her to change her right then and there on the plane so that she will be more helpful. Alice reminds her that she’s a dumb asshole and they don’t have 3 fucking days for her to shiver in a pool of her own vomit before she resurrects. Also you’re on a plane surrounded by people, you fucking walnut.

K: I know we’ve said before that Bella’s an idiot, but SERIOUSLY?! BELLA. GIRL. STOP AND LOOK AROUND YOU. 

Catherine: She’s so beside herself with TENSION that she is actually turning into even more of an idiot. But Alice sort of maybe says that she might be into just turning Bella into a vampire herself and Bella acts like she’s a toddler that was promised McDonald’s after church. She’s determined to make Alice turn her at some point so that she can get Edward back.

“Maybe, when I was beautiful and strong, he wouldn’t want a distraction.”

And lastly, we find out that Edward settles on a plan to walk out into the sun right in the middle of the main plaza of the town at noon. So your dreamy boyfriend isn’t gonna murder an innocent humans like he’s planned! Phew! That was a close one.

K: Edward’s going to walk into the middle of a crowded square and sparkle at people. How is this a plot.

Mari: ESPECIALLY when Alice tells us/Stephenie reveals that there were other options LIKE WEIGHT LIFTING WITH A CAR OR A VAMP ON VAMP FIGHT.

AND SHE GOES WITH WALKING INTO THE SUN TO SPARKLE.

WALKING. INTO THE SUN.
TO SPARKLE.

Catherine: This is a real thing. This is happening. 

Once they get to Florence they have to drive to Volterra and Alice’s decides to steal a car. It’s the least damaging thing to growing teenage mind that happens in this chapter.

Alice steals a yellow Porsche and Bella jumps in but complains because it’s too conspicuous. Alice is like, yeah but it’s super fast so we got lucky.

This is also the point at which Alice says:

“How strongly are you opposed to grand theft auto?”

And it’s a very famous quote from the series, notable for being the only joke in all four books. (K: Oh, please. The whole series is a joke…) (M: The kind that makes you cry!) (C: Well I sure the fuck ain’t laughing!)

They drive up to Volterra and some kind of celebration is going on. The streets are all packed with people waving red flags. Alice says that it’s for Saint Marcus Day, which is a fake festival in the book that is a celebration of the day a priest drove all of the vampires out of Volterra.

Wow, shitty job, Father Marcus. Sub par excorsising.

I wanted to know if this was a real holiday in Italy and after like, 2 seconds of google searching it turns out that it isn’t. However, there is a real holiday called St. Mark’s Day which is a feast day near Easter. So Meyer stole that and added vampires. Sorry about your saints, Italy!

Obviously, the Volturi are gonna be twice as pissed at Edward if he vampires around the city on this day of all days. Alice says that it’s ironic but it’s not, Meyer. It’s coincidental. Did you know there are dictionaries online now? You should check it out, it’s pretty cool.

Bella asks Alice what she’s supposed to do when they get to the clock tower and Alice tells her all she has to do is let Edward see her. Alice is gonna drive up as close as she can and then point Bella in the right direction. Bella has to get there in like now seconds because it’s almost noon.

She also instructs Bella not to trip which is funny because she won’t. Bella is only clumsy when it’s convenient to the plot.

“I groaned. That would be just like me—ruin everything, destroy the world, in a moment of klutziness.”

Um, Bella? Your boyfriend dying wouldn’t destroy the world. I mean, I get that it would be upsetting to you but your weird love isn’t the glue that’s holding the universe together, it turns out.

K: Shocking news to everyone ever.

Catherine: They get into the city and Bella realizes that, aside from being scared of losing Edward she’s also happy that she’s gonna see him again. She calls it a ‘new kind of fear’ for some reason.

“I felt another, more selfish kind of dread thrill through me.”

Meyer may just straight up not understand emotions. Fear and thrill are… different things. She’s like a robot that wrote this book as part of a human studies class in college. (A: That would explain so much.)

Alice announces that they are in Volterra now, which I thought they already were and the chapter ends.

 

Next time on New Moon: We’re in Volterra now! For real. No, for real this time in Chapter 20.