Breaking Dawn Chapter 23 – We hardly ever promote violence.

Previously: There was extra room in Bella’s brain.
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Catherine: After the curbhanger of Bella lunging at Jacob because he gave her baby a stupid nickname last chapter, this chapter opens with Edward apologizing to Seth. I’m pretty sure this is the only point in four books that Edward apologizes to anyone and this time it’s not even his fault. GREAT.

Bella explains that she lunged at Jacob and that when Jacob didn’t phase to protect himself, wolf!Seth jumped in between them to stop Bella from killing him. So apparently Bella almost legit killed Jacob. But Seth had to stop her. I hate Seth now, too. He deprived us of a lot just now.

Annie: What the hell, Seth? No one would have blamed you for just stepping aside and let that murder happen. In fact, I would’ve taken Seth out for a drink to celebrate.

Marines: You know, a murder over a nickname instead of pedophilia would’ve felt a little cheatery, but I’d still take it.

Kirsti: When things get really terrible in this book, I like to imagine Deadpool strolling through the story, killing and sassing indiscriminately…

Catherine: Also, has the fact that Jacob is vulnerable enough to be killed in human form ever even come up before? I don’t remember that being discussed and, again, we are literally SO far into this shit now that it probably should have been. It feels a lot like Meyer thought she could just throw a bunch of extra stuff into this book that she had never bothered to explain before like a junk drawer made of words.

Anyway, after Bella lunges she realizes that nothing Jacob could have done would have justified her attempt to kill him.

UM. HOLD UP. Nothing? Not even him falling in love with your baby? Not even him basically becoming common law married to it in the three days you were, like dying? REALLY? I feel like Bella’s reaction to this “relationship” is the only one that makes sense. Until she dials it back and starts apologizing. Girl. Don’t apologize. Resume the murder.

Annie: PLEASE.

Mari: We hardly ever promote violence… 

K: I’ve got just the man for the job…

Catherine: Bella apologizes to Seth and he forgives her like “Haha, don’t worry about it, Bells. If someone fell in love with my baby I’d have the same reaction.” Edward seems to think that her reaction was funny like “Haha, this whole shituation where someone has fallen in love with our newborn baby is so funny.” Look, I’m not gonna get past this. This is too goddamn fucking weird.

Also, apparently, Seth is getting his arm set by Carlisle and Jacob is still outside, protecting Renesmee from Bella’s crazy newborn vampire antics. Just in case you need to put out an Amber Alert. That’s where they are.

Seth is just relieved that Bella didn’t bite him because—oh, by the way, vampire venom is basically poison to the werewolves. They’re telling her that now. After she’s already been in like a jillion vampire/werewolf fights.

THIS ISN’T HOW BOOKS WORK, STEPHENIE!

You were supposed to tell us this like, two books ago. Now it’s just clunky foreshadowing.

Annie: This is how her books work and apparently, that’s the way to make buckets and buckets of money at it. Scum of the Earth, impossible to like characters? Check. Racism? Check. Sexual assault and pedophilia? Check and check. No research? Check. No outline, no consistency? Check, check. 

The secret to making it rich by writing shitty, yet wildly popular, YA has finally been revealed! lolololololol KILL ME. 

Mari: OKAY SO MAYBE after we are done hate reading Breaking Dawn in another 25 years, or whatever, we can all combine our powers to make a terrible YA… ON PURPOSE. And then make millionties of dollars off of it. I mean, sure, we’d be perpetuating unhealthy ideals and we’d have to compromise our dignity, but these therapy bills ain’t gonna pay themselves. 

K: TRUUUUUUE. At this point, I feel like we could play Mad Libs to come up with a plot and STILL have it be less fucked up than this book.

Catherine: It’s gonna take a lot of recovery. It only gets worse. 

“Lucky thing Ness—Renesmee’s not venomous,” Seth said after a second of awkward silence. “Cause she bites Jake all the time.”

Mari: WHY.

K: UNACCEPTABLE, STEPH. THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU.

Catherine: Bella, of course, knew that Renesmee wasn’t venomous, because her dead uterus was the first thing the baby bit. Can’t believe that I used up my gagging gif so early in the chapter.

Mari: GIF WHIPLASH!

Catherine: Ah yes, that’s what we needed. 

Carlisle finishes setting Seth’s shoulder and tells him not to move it for a few hours while his wolf powers heal it. Seth falls asleep instantly on the couch and Bella, realizing that she can’t apologize again for a few hours, gets up to leave. No, really, those were her actual words.

She walks to the big window-wall where she sees Leah pacing outside and giving Bella go-to-hell looks. Outside, Bella can hear Rosalie and Jacob arguing over who gets to feed the baby. She says they are still as antagonistic as ever but that they both agree that Bella should be kept away from the baby until she recovered from her murder fit. Cool how they are making decisions about her baby for her. Great stuff. Where is Edward in all this? He’s with Bella but like… fuck, dude. Step up.

Annie: Ha, no way. Child-rearing is women’s work, and the work of the men who have fallen in love with said child. Just when you think there isn’t another horribly archaic, sexist thing Meyer can introduce… she goes ahead and finds something else. Another great message for your young audience. Good job, Steph.

Mari: Plus, Bella and Eddie can’t parent now because ownership passed directly to Jacob. ‘Member? 

K: Honestly, this whole “keep the baby away from Bella thing” is even worse than I remembered from reading this trashfire back in January, because “the only thing they agreed on now was that I should be kept away from my baby until I was one hundred percent recovered from my temper tantrum.” TEMPER TANTRUM. I don’t think discovering that your best friend has imprinted on your newborn daughter is a temper tantrum. Fucking toddlers have temper tantrums, Steph. Stop it.

Catherine: Jasper is in the room too, since he was left behind while the others went hunting to watch Bella. He is now standing by the newel post just…. staring at them. He doesn’t have any lines for, like another 10 pages. Meyer could have easily put him in another room. But no, he’s just:

Bella goes over all of the loose plot ends that were neatly tied up while she was in a death coma. Among the contrivances that Meyer didn’t think it was necessary to let us see resolved: the whole feud with Sam and Jake is over now. Apparently Jacob imprinting on Renesmee means that the other wolves can’t kill her, because the highest of pack laws is that you can’t kill the baby that one of the other pedos is grooming. Because then he has to start over right? And what a hassle that would be.

Also, Sam can’t get mad over Bella’s transformation because Jacob allowed it and he’s an alpha too now.

“It rankled to realize over and over again how much I owed Jacob when I just wanted to be mad at him.”

JFC.

Bella also reveals that Jacob and Sam figured out that they can still speak to each other in their minds in wolf form.

When. The Hell. Did Bella come by all this information, exactly? I mean, yeah, it’s all pretty important stuff that they would tell her but we’ve been in this bitches head 24/7 for what feels like years and in the past 2-3 chapters, the only time we WEREN’T in her head was when she attacked Jacob. Did he tell her all this then? “Ow! Stop murdering me! By the way…”

Annie: This info dump is wild because Smeyer loves to give us too many details and narrate EVERYTHING. I mean, Bella narrated what was going on when she’s been asleep, unconscious, passing out because she’s dying, passing out during child-birth, while dead. Yet suddenly, it seems like we’ve missed so much and it’s all just shoehorned in to the story in such an awkward way. What even.

K: Can’t miss an opportunity for Bella to know things she shouldn’t possibly know! God forbid this happen in an actual conversation.

Catherine: She thinks a bit about Charlie and asks Edward and Jasper if they’re going to have to leave town for a while or whatever to avoid Charlie so that he won’t see that she looks all freaky and red-eyed now.She realizes that she is going to miss Jacob even though she’s still mad at him.

“I thought about what Jacob had said, pleading with me before I’d attacked him. “You said we belonged in each other’s lives, right? That we were family. You said that was how you and I were supposed to be. So… now we are. It’s what you wanted.” But it didn’t feel like how I’d wanted it.”

YA DON’T SAY?

Annie: Shocking that when Bella was saying she wanted Jake to be her family it was more in a weird, husband-brothers kind of way, where Jacob just followed her around and met all her needs acting as a personal heating blanket or whatever, NOT as a son-in-law and especially NOT to her infant child. For fuck’s sake.

Catherine: Somehow, this is worse. Bella thinks back to her week long New Moon depression and remembered that she wondered who Jacob would end up with. So clearly this is her fault. She wanted Jacob to be her family and “she never factored a daughter into the equation.”

Mari: Yeah, NORMAL. I’m sure NONE OF US are thinking of if our ex-boyfriends we are still friendly with WILL WANT TO MARRY OUR UNBORN DAUGHTERS. NO ONE FACTORS THAT INTO THE EQUATION, BELLA.

K: AND NO ONE EVER SHOULD.

Catherine: Bella wonders if Renesmee moving away from Jacob will cause him a lot of pain and she thinks that she’s just petty enough to enjoy the thought of getting Renesmee away from him. That’s not petty. That’s smart. For fuck’s sake. What IS this fucking book? (A: Trash. Absolute rubbish.)

Carlisle comes back into the room with a scale and it’s time to measure the baby. Apparently they have to measure her four times a day because she’s growing super quick like Clifford the Big Red Dog and shit.

Bella realizes that Renesmee has grown slightly in the hour since she’s been awake. Not enough for human eyes to detect, but Bella’s new fraction-loving vampire eyes are super good at measurements, remember. Anyway, this crazy rate of growth is making everyone worry. Jacob practically threatens Carlisle to make sure his measurements are perfect. Renesmee gets fed up with this shit and uses her freaky touch power to show Rosalie that she wants Bella to hold her.

“I’m in control,” I promised. Thirstiness was way down the list right now. Besides, Renesmee smelled good in a very non-food way.”

You don’t currently want to eat your baby. Check.

K: Awwww. It’s just like all those times when Edward had to fight not to rip Bella’s throat out because he luuuuurved her.

Catherine: Gross! 

Bella takes the baby. Please do enjoy this creepy CGI baby gif from the movie. I’ve been waiting for the right time to insert it into your fucking eyeballs:

Annie: Well, that’s fucking terrifying.  Can’t wait for the movies of this. (Yep, that’s right. There are TWO movies for Breaking Dawn.)

So, uhhh. Thanks?

Mari: Oh, shit we gotta do 2 #snarkathons for this??? Can we say this gif was enough?

K: I refused to spend money on this abomination after seeing Eclipse at the movies, soooooo I’ve never seen the Breaking Dawn movies. Based on that godawful gif, I kind of want to keep it that way.

Catherine: Oh, it’s so much worse than the ones before it. So much worse.

Renesmee shows her a memory of Bella attacking Jacob. Bella and the baby laugh about it and I do, too. But Bella realizes that Renesmee feels possessive when she looks at Jacob. I guess Meyer is trying to force in that this imprinting thing goes both ways, even though that is literally the opposite of what she said when she introduced it? She said that the other person has a choice but that they usually get stalked into marrying the wolf that imprinted on them. Now it’s not a choice. The tagline for this book should be “It’s not a fucking choice, bitch.”

Mari: The tagline for Stephenie Meyer should be, “I made some choices.”

Catherine: Edward tells Bella that Renesmee only likes Jacob cause “he tastes better than the rest of us.” Meyer. Can you… can you not? For, like a minute? (M: WHY.) (C: Can’t stop screaming.)

Renesmee gives Bella some more memories including one where she drank blood and all of the sudden the baby is pulled from Bella’s arms and Jasper holds her back. Bella wonders why they’d reacted like that. Edward, who is also watching the memories ’cause of his power, saw that Renesmee was remembering drinking blood and panicked that Bella was going to suddenly turn the baby into a Capri Sun.

Of course, perfect!Bella doesn’t have normal vampire cravings or whatever, so she didn’t feel tempted to drink the baby at all. When she tells them this, Jasper gets upset and storms out of the house.

Edward tells them that Jasper is pissed because he’s had a super hard time adjusting to not eating humans and perfect!Bella did it in like a day.

Mari: Wow even the supporting characters are like, “is this real right now?” It is, supporting characters. It is.

Catherine: That is Meyer’s concession to critics (us) asking how the hell Bella managed to adjust so quickly. Because. The answer is because. Aren’t we satisfied? 

Anyway, they all think that Bella is having such an easy time adjusting because she was prepared to turn into a vampire. I think it’s because she’s such an idiot that killing people hasn’t even occurred to her yet. Either way, Carlisle dads about how everyone is different and maybe Bella’s ability to resist blood already is her power. IT’S NOT. Bad writing is not a super power.

Bella hears this and tenses up. Renesmee uses her power to ask Bella why she tensed up. Basically, Rensmee “asks” things by remembering them with a kind of… questioning air? Which sounds like it would get real annoying, real quick. Bella says that she’s already used to it ’cause it’s been 8 seconds and she gets used to stuff ridiculously fast, apparently.

K: I just like to imagine that she shows them pictures of stuff and then there are a bunch of question marks floating around in the air around the stuff. Like something out of Sesame Street or Blue’s Clues.

Catherine: That would be so much better. For a second, Bella is relatable and disappointed that she didn’t get a cooler power. But it quickly vanishes and she realizes that not killing people is the coolest power of all. Booooooo. I would want some X-Men level shit.

Mari: To probably kill people with?

K: I’d want to be able to teleport because a) free overseas holidays and b) I wouldn’t have to get up at 5.30am to get to work by 8am. But I’d also want Deadpool on speed dial. To kill people with.

Catherine: Bella thinks that this might mean that she can see Charlie soon. Carlisle and the others start talking about the possibly of this being her power and how another vampire friend of Carlisle’s has the power to kind of picture a goal and then will it into existence. I can’t decide if that’s a cool power or not.

Bella drifts away from the others and watches Renesmee as she falls asleep in her arms. She touches the baby’s hand after she falls asleep and watches her dreams. Yes, this is a real thing that happens. It seems pretty invasive but whatever. Bella gets happy when she sees her own face in Renesmee’s dream but she’s sad to see that sometimes it’s the ‘hideous human’ version of her face. Yeah. Hideous. I know I’d consider myself hideous if 10 dudes were chasing after me. Super uggo.

Pretty soon, the sun goes down and the other vamps return from hunting. Bella turns around to realize that everyone is staring at her and smiling, silently. Not creepy at all then. The cult is finally going to sacrifice her to Satan. (A: Wooo, that would make this book so much better.) (K: Let’s be real: ANYTHING but what’s actually going to happen would make this book better at this point.)

Alice hands her a key with a bow on it and says ‘Happy Birthday’. Bella rolls her eyes and tells her that it’s not her birthday because it’s only been a couple days since she was turned so she has to wait a year. Alice reminds her that no, idiot, it’s your actual birthday. Bella is nineteen now. Sort of.

K: Lemme guess. In the next chapter, Bella has a nervous breakdown because OMG AGING NOOOOOO. (I should remember because I’ve already recapped it but LOL NOPE self preservation, yo.)

Catherine: I think that’s a safe guess. Sorry, past Kirsti.

 

Next time on Breaking Dawn: We don’t know because we already forgot in Chapter 24.