Caress of Twilight--chapter 24

And a good time was had by all. My birthday has consisted of mostly writing, with Thai food for dinner and Fifth Element for dessert. And I do not give a fuck that the first thirty minutes is Mila Jojovitch running around in a white duct tape bikini. Take it. I don't need it! There will be a Fight Club chaser. Because birthdays mean you get to do whatever you want. (Including drinking B&B on the rocks. I have a nice collection of alcohol, and I don't break into the REAL good stuff very often. Birthdays count.)

...I have to read Merry Gentry now, don't I? What were they doing again?

...picking up Kitto. You know, there are a small collection of words that can put chills down my spine in short order. "Where'd the money go?" anything involving "sociopath" and a dilusional disorder, and anything involving Kitto are on that very short list.

Ah, well. It's standing between me and my date with Tyler Durden.

Kitto is apparently not thriving in the human city. Now, LKH wants me to read this as "Kitto can't deal with humanity and wide spaces and Cold Iron because he is a pretty delicate fairy boy and must be sheltered and protected." But given that he's a simulcrum of a twelve year old, I have a different theory. Kids don't do well when they are being abused. People don't do well when they are being abused. Even if that abuse is at a tollerable level, it uses up reserves better focused on actual living. And there is no way in hell that Merry's lifestyle is healthy for anybody involved. Not for Merry, not for her boys, and definately not for the fake child that she's keeping in a fucking dog bed. 

Frost says that if Kitto doesn't start to thrive, they need to send him back to the goblin king.

Not this one, sadly.

Merry says she knows, she knows, but she doesn't know what the goblin king will send in Kitto's place, and she'd rather be pandering to pedophiles than the tenticle hentai crowd.

Merry then discusses how her finances are stretched by trying to accomodate all her men. It seems that she's refusing to accept money from the Faerie courts (this is the only part of her skreed I can support her in) and how they can't find a bigger apartment because they can't afford it and even if they could most places don't want six adults living there and the longer it goes on, all I see is this:

I grew up with financial instability, and it taught me one thing really, really well. Checks do not equal money. If you cannot afford something, do not fucking buy the thing. If you cannot pay for something right now, in cash, don't fucking do it. This is why I don't own a car. When I got my first apartment I waited three months before I got internet so I could be sure my finances had stabalized. If you cannot afford to cram six people into one apartment you find other accomodations.

Also? All the guys, with the exception of Kitto, are working for Jeremy Gray. You are pulling six paychecks. DO NOT TELL ME YOU CANNOT AFFORD A REAL HOUSE. And...wait a fucking minute, didn't Rhys have his own place a couple pages back? He did. You said he did because that was how you "proved" that he was one of the younger Fae, even though he's actually older than half the court. How is it that suddenly he can't afford to contribute and/or move a couple of the guys in there on his off days?

And then we take time out for Merry to say, basically, "My mother never loved me."

I'd make a joke, but I know people for whom that is completely true, and all I feel is anger that LKH would minimize that kind of trauma into sad-apple backstory for her Mary Sue protagonist.

And then we get a description of Merry's altar.

I'm torn here. For one, I understand how altars can sometimes be important. I really need to put mine back together (I've got its layout written down somewhere) because a well-done altar can actually be a good tool against depression, if you put something on it to represent the good things God/spirituality/life has done for you. I had an altar for a couple of years for the same reasons that the Hebrews used to put up piles of stones; it made me remember moments and events that I would have otherwise glossed over due to depression fucking with my head. Sometimes it helped to sit down in front of it and go "This was the time that God came through for me" "this was the time that everything actually did work out" "This was the time I had an acutal, honest-to-god Miracle." I strongly believe that everybody ought to have one place in their house where they do keep a kind of symbolic record of the good things they go through, so that the memories will be there when we are most prone to forget them.

On the other hand, this is LKH going LOOK AT HOW PAGAN AND SWEET AND WONDERFUL THIS CHARACTER IS SHE HAS AN ALTAR TO GODDESS JUST LIKE I DO and that's where my understanding and patience dies a hard fucking death. I know that Christianity and paganism are often at odds, but I really hope that the one thing we both can agree on is spiritual stuff done for show has about as much significance as a peace sign on an armed atomic bomb. That's one reason why I do not talk about my spiritual stuff as much as I could, because it's not anybody's business but mine what God and I happen to be doing right now.

Merry goes on to say how all the sidhe were worshipped as Gods and how even they acknowledge greater powers than they, and Merry gives a long description of Goddess.

You know, even the Christian God has a name. We don't use it much, mostly because we have to guess at it's actual pronunciation (The direct hebrew translation is YHVH. We guess and pronounce it either Jehovah or Yahweh, depending on which branch you're talking to. It means "I am that I am".)  but he's not a nameless, formless catch-all God. Merry's Goddess? Yeah, she has no specific attributes mentioned. YHVH is very jealious. He has rules (most of which are good rules to live by) and He absolutely demands that you treat things dedicated to him very well. There's one account of him destroying an entire kingdom because somebody disrespected a cup dedicated to His temple (you know the saying "The Writing's on the Wall? that's the story it's from) You make a promise to Him? You keep it. Merry's Goddess has always struck me as the kind of thing Precious Moments was made for. (If you don't know what Precious Moments are, you're very lucky and you might not want to google that if you don't want to contract diabetes tonight)

Then Merry goes over to Kitto and discovers she's got a real live medical emergency on her hands. He's non responsive and his skin is cold and...fuck, this is going to get solved by sex, isn't it?

With the fake twelve year old.

This is my birthday. Could we please have a pedophilia-free chapter on my birthday? No? Fuck.

They call the goblin king (...wherever you may be, take this child of mine far away from me) (Seriously. Get Kitto out of this god-forsaken book) but he isn't in. So instead, Merry asks for Frost's knife, because that's another way of calling the Faerie, I think? He answers that. And we are reminded that Kurag's body is actually two people. The Goblin king has a fully sentient, voiceless paracitic twin attached to his body.

Because I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream is apparently somebody's fetish.

And yes. Kurag tells Merry that she and Kitto have to actually have intercourse to prevent Kitto from dying. Or as Kurag puts it:

Sinking teeth and dick into flesh, Merry girl, that’s the ticket.

Yeah. That doesn't exactly have the same ring as Love me, obey me, do as I say, and I will be your slave, does it?

They keep talking about the alliance and how Merry needs to fuck Kitto (this time, that's the book's words) and how if she does then Kitto has a chance to be King of the Unseelie Sidhe, and how Merry better get her finger out of his mouth before he bites it off, but at this point my brain is going please stop the chapter soon, please stop the chapter soon because I do not want to read fake pedophilia on my birthday.

And THANK GOD, after talking politics that won't kick in during this book, both Kurag and the chapter sign off well before Kitto is revived enough to do the dirty deed with Merry.

That's probably the next two chapters, if I know LKH's writing style right.

You may consider yourself warned.