Breaking Dawn Chapter 21 – Vampire Obstacle Course

Previously: Everyone was HD pretty because that’s a vampire thing.
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Marines: Bella looks out the window, kind of hesitating about jumping from the second story. She says she isn’t afraid of heights, but with her HD vision, she can now see the sharpness of the rocks below even better… What kind of MF rocks do they have below this second story window, for goodness’s sake? I don’t care how good your vision is, HOW SHARP COULD THEY BE?

Catherine: Apparently the Cullen Cult moved to a damn lighthouse at some point when we weren’t paying attention. 

Mari: Which could’ve been mostly any point, to be honest.

Kirsti: Don’t be ridiculous, y’all. Even GRAVEL has ridiculously sharp edges when you have magic vampire eyes. Jeez. 

Mari: Edward has to explain to Bella that they are jumping out the window to keep Bella away from Renesmee and Jacob downstairs. You know, so Bella won’t kill them. Bella wonders if the baby will be okay with Jacob, seeing how as far as Bella knows, Jacob doesn’t like Renesmee. Edward pulls an odd face and says it’s fine because he knows exactly what Jacob is thinking.

Ew.

Annie: Can’t believe I’m saying this, but good on Edward for not ripping Jacob’s head clean off his body after reading Jacob’s thoughts about his NEWBORN daughter. Oh, wait. Maybe that should be “where the fuck is Edward’s parenting instinct that perhaps he shouldn’t leave his newborn child with a predator?” Yeah. That feels better.

Catherine: But like… what is he thinking, though? “Can’t wait till you’re a grown up so we can fuck?” Is he reading up on the age of consent laws in Washington? Like? What does that comment mean here if we’re supposed to think that their relationship is perfectly innocent? 

K: Excuse me while I vomit profusely. WHY, STEPH. WHYYYYYYYYYYYYY.

Mari: A question for the ages.

Bella is still not sure about jumping out of a window, especially because at some point while she was dead, Alice dressed her up in blue silk and stilettos. For real. Edward jumps first, showing her how to do it. Bella copies his movements and finds that she sails through the air so slowly, that it’s easy to land delicately. Edward compliments her graceful “even for a vampire” jump. Because have you gotten the memo that Bella is of course the super best new vampire that ever was? And that all her previous problems of clumsiness, plain Jane looks and aversion to blood are gone? Cured? GEDDIT?

Don’t worry if you don’t. I think we might talk about it again.

K: O RLY? I thought for SURE that would only be mentioned the once. 

Catherine: Bella being a vampire that fainted at the sight of blood would have made this shit interesting for at least a minute. 

Mari: So, obviously that isn’t what happened.

Bella takes off her heels and throws them back through the window. She takes off running along with Edward and their next challenge is jumping over a river. If this turns out to be a vampire obstacle course chapter with eating animals at the end…

Annie: Is this like my brother eating a cheeseburger after he completed his tough mudder run?

Mari: Yeah, but worse.

Edward demonstrates how to jump over a river. Bella gets nervous again, but this time about hurting the forest because she’s so strong. Everything is so fragile compared to her. Bella gets ready to jump, but her dress rips. She rips the other side to match and everyone watching her from the house laughs, including Jacob. Bella pauses to wonder yet again what Jacob is doing there. They are really building up this reveal to pedophilia, huh? Pedophilia is what he’s still doing there.

Annie: This is the fucking worst. How do people defend this trash?

K: So a month or so ago, I mentioned Twilight in a list of popular books I hated. The number of “Twilight is shit, but it’s not racist!” comments I get on that video is R.I.D.I.C.U.L.O.U.S. Apparently even people who don’t like this trash defend this trash. 

Mari: Wow, that kills my hope for humanity thank you.

Edward is finally like “…hello?” so Bella jumps. Of course, it’s super easy and actually she jumps too far and her new mental vampire stopwatch tells her it took an eighty-fourth of a second to cross the river. (C: This narrative device could not be more annoying.) (K: I suspect it probably could if it got all “It took me thirty nine eighty fourths of a second to roll my eyes.”) (M: So the only way to make it more annoying is to use it more, got it.)

Bella jumped twice as far as Edward, who has all this shock and surprise in his eyes. Bella wants to jump again, but Edward reminds her they are on a hunting trip and challenges her to a run as the next part of the vampire obstacle course.

Bella admits that Edward is faster than she is. PLOT TWIST! Wait, no, but she is stronger than he is so she actually keeps up perfectly fine because her strides are longer? Because of her strength? That doesn’t exactly make sense to me but it may in fact be because four pages into this chapter and I feel like my brain is already bleeding out of my ears.

K: I’m currently in Romania, about 15,200 kilometres from my copy of Breaking Dawn and I still feel like my brain is bleeding out of my ears.

Mari: As Bella runs, she can see everything clearly and everything feels warm and soft and also she can hear all the fear of all the animals in the forest. She expects to be winded, but breath comes easily. Which is different than “vampires don’t need to breathe” but we can’t actually expect Meyer to keep details like that straight, even in her own thing. Which she wrote.

Edward stops because Bella’s taken to like super jumping all the way to Canada, or something. Bella BIG SIGHS and runs back to where Edward is. He tells her that they are hunting elk because it’s easy enough for her first time. She bristles at that, but she’s hungry, so it’s whatever. She’s also briefly distracted by Edward’s lips, but then the bloodlust sets in and we all definitely don’t know because we aren’t awful what a mood killer bloodlust is.

K: Pretty sure 90% of the vampires in Buffy would disagree, but whatever.

Mari: Bella is like ELK NOW, but Edward wants to teach her. He makes her close her eyes and listen to sounds, so we get a paragraph list of forest sounds ending in blood rushing. Then he makes her smell things and we get a paragraph of forest smells, ending with animal blood.

Super Bella gets all in tune with her inner hunter and things are going easily until she gets a big whiff of something more appealing than elk. Bella starts running for it and growling, even going so far as… growling at Edward OMG. That makes her snap out of her blood lust and she high tails it out of human blood smelling distance. She even stops breathing, which is weird, because I guess she isn’t tasting the dust in the air, or whatever.

Catherine: Does this bitch need to breath or not, Meyer? MAKE UP YOUR MIND. 

K: Apparently it’s an optional extra, except stupid?

Mari: Edward follows her and catches up very quickly. This makes Bella stop dead in her tracks because did Edward really let her win when she was super jumping to Canada? RUDE. They don’t actually discuss that because Edward wants to know how Bella was able to not murder someone. She doesn’t have an explanation that satisfies Edward so he just laughs and goes on and on about how special Bella is with her ability to not be a blood hungry monster. Wow. How convenient. Wouldn’t have been a good look if your MC started draining people of blood, right? Wouldn’t want to pay off on 3.5 books of build-up about how dangerous new born vamps, would you? Conflict, schmonflict.

Bella briefly gets flirty with Edward, but he redirects her attention to drinking blood again. She listens very intently until she finds another animal and takes off hunting again. This time, it’s a lion. NO EASY ELK FOR HER. SHE’S SPECIAL.

Annie: A lion. Is she so fucking special she jumped across the ocean to Africa? Why the fuck is there a lion in the woods in Washington? And if she means mountain lion, why doesn’t Meyer, who loves to use too many words, choose to exclude that word here? If I ask enough questions will this book disappear?

K: We can but hope. FRIENDS, ASK ALL YOUR QUESTIONS IN THE COMMENTS SO WE CAN SEE IF THE BOOK VANISHES.

Mari: I’ll start: Why, God? Why?

She tackles the (mountain) lion and drinks it dry. She stands up, seeing she’s kind of a mess. She thinks Edward disapproves, but really he says it was just difficult for him to stand by and watch her wrestle a mountain lion. They briefly flirt over Bella’s torn dress and then go hunt some deer.

I really don’t want to be reading about flirting over exposed skin next to a sentence where they are sucking deer blood together. I REALLY DON’T WANT THIS. (C: It truly is a whole new kind of awful.) 

Bella watches Edward to see how he hunts neatly. Oh shit, I spoke too soon because the sexy hunting thing gets more explicit: it was a surprising sensual experience to observe Edward hunting. She goes into detail about his sexy sexy body as he darts for deer to drink, but I will spare you but mostly myself. I skimmed it.

K: It merely serves to confirm my suspicions that SMeyer wants to fuck Edward. 

Mari: Thankfully, Bella is finally full. She’s ready to go back home and see Renesmee. But first, she strokes Edward’s face for a long time and they make-out. She tells us about how much more she can love Edward with her upgraded brain and upgraded heart. (For real.) She figures if Alice and Jasper and whoever all have special powers, maybe hers is loving Edward a lot. Dear god. Is this bitch serious? (C: I guess we should just be glad that Meyer didn’t actually go with that.) 

Their kissing gets so intense that she pushes Edward over, but he doesn’t mind. Alas, they are going to stop making out and go visit Renesmee now. Is there no other sex scene in this book besides the one that got Bella pregnant? Are they just gonna be like “hungry?” or “wanna go see our child?” or “smell something?” every time they start making out with tongue?

Annie: Yes. Because the moral of this story is, even if you’re married: 

 

Next time on Breaking Dawn: Wanna go see our child? in Chapter 22.