On the one hand, this is going to be monotonous, awful, boring, pointless, and completely without impact on plot or character development, and will simply serve as filler to make the book longer. On the other hand, it's delaying the actual sleeping with Thea's sons, so let's hope Richard pulls a puppy and pukes on Anita's shoes while he's at it.
“And if we were talking about me having sex with three new women, two of them seventeen years old, wouldn’t you be angry?”THIS IS WHY YOU DO NOT INVOLVE EX LOVERS IN NEW RELATIONSHIPS. ALSO: If we were talking about you taking three new lovers and two of them are underage, I would be calling the fucking cops.
Samuel and his son try to leave, because this is the kind of dirty laundry you're supposed to bury under the basement concrete. Jean Claude tells Sam that he needs to stay and help JC figure out if taking Anita to the City Masters Conclave or whatever it is he'll be taking Anita to, will turn the business party into more of an orgy. Sam is willing, but Sampson, his son, has a more pressing issue.
“Are these questions that only a vampire can answer?” Sampson asked.
“It is from a master like your father that I need advice,” Jean-Claude said.
“Then, I could go back to the hotel and check on Mother and the twins.”There is no way anybody could read that line having read the preceeding chapter and not immediately think that Sampson is more concerned about the twins than his mother.
Richard realizes that Sampson is trying to be helpful and thanks him. Sampson then drops this lovely bombshell on us.
“You obviously don’t like sharing Anita, and now here I am asking you to share her again. We need her to help us. I don’t want to lose my mother and one, or both, of my little brothers.”Sampson: CALL. THE. POLICE. I am sure that there is SOME unit, SOMEWHERE, that is set up to intervene in senarios like this. If nothing else, go get therapy. Go get massive, massive amounts of therapy so you'll stop accepting responsibilities that are not yours. REAL therapy, not LKH lobotomy therapy. The kind where a councelor will spend about ten minutes listening to your family woes, stop you and say "I'm very sorry, but I need to notify the police that this situation exists. Otherwise I'm the one breaking the law."
And he says it over and over and over again: He's not on Anita's fuck list because he wants to have sex with her. He's doing it to save his family. This is not his choice. His dad is literally saying "Fuck the nice lady, or your mother will rape your brothers and I'll have to kill all of them." This is emotional blackmail.
And then the fight begins, and it's beautiful. Richard is calling Anita on all her shit. He gets shot down immediately with the convoluted arguements that make no sense at all, and I swear to god these books are reading like a republican comic strip on acid, but shit is being called.
He waved his hands around the room. “This is not where I want to be, Anita. I don’t want to live where my choices are sharing you with other men, or having people die. I don’t want those choices.”Then leave. Let Jean Claude and Anita hang themselves. Let the whole fucking world burn if that's what happens. You cannot and should not be obligated to stay in a relationship to protect yourself, your partner, or a third party. And if you are being guilted into staying, or outright blackmailed? LEAVE. GET OUT. RUN. Make your plan, and the second it is safe bolt like there's no tomorrow. THIS SITUATION IS NOT OKAY. DO NOT STAY IN THIS NOT OKAY SITUATION.
“I think we could have made it, our version of the white picket fence, without him,” and he pointed at Jean-Claude.
YES. YES YOU COULD HAVE.
So at the end of the arguement Richard lets his sheilds down and reveals that (like about ten thousand battered, slightly obsessed ex partners before him) he hopes when Anita gets her addiction/Ardeur under control she'll dump Nate and Micah and move back in with him. Anita lets her sheilds down and thinks "OH NO FUCKING WAY and oh yeah I might be pregnant."
Which Richard repeats to the entire room and then that's the end of the chapter. YES. WE MADE IT WITH NO SEX SCENE.
I'm going to cross my fingers and hope that LKH gets distracted by a random bunny or something and the whole Anita/Sampson thing never actually happens. PLEASE let it never happen. PLEASE.
Regarding the Anita/Dexter comparison from the last post: Yeah, I could actually happily read the same things happening if Anita were not presented as right, if her POV was clearly meant to be that of an unreliable (and evil) narrator, etc. I'd enjoy it, actually, I think, it'd be an amazing story of a downward spiral and absolute power corrupting and all that.
ReplyDeleteMerfolk, like vampires, have presumably been around just as long as humanity, and since there's no mention of them being a secret race, I assume they're as well-known as vampires, shifters, fey, etc. So yes, there should damn well be people whose job it is to intervene in supernatural family situations that they can go to and not have them be all WHAAAT MERFOLK EXIST?! on them. LKH seems to forget in general that everyone knowing about supernaturals and them being citizens mean that they're able to contact the police and tell them about the terrible abuses going on within their cultures, groups, families, etc. Sure, there are plenty who won't because they're afraid or indoctrinated to accept it, but some will, and yet that NEVER HAPPENS in this series despite almost everyone involved going "wow, this is wrong" and don't seem afraid or indoctrinated.
The Anita/Sampson thing does not happen! It just....ends as a dangling plot point and has yet to ever come up again in the series.
I think that, more than anything, is what's so repellant about these books. It's not just the disgusting moral choices, it's that these moral choices are being presented as THE ONE TRUE WAY and PURE GLEAMING GOLD, when our brains go "That's bullshit" and disconnect. (For the record, I have the same issue with Christian fiction, and that's my freaking team.) Looking back at the series, that's the only enjoyment I can get out of it; as far as character studies go, it's a really good descent into evil. But it's UNINTENTIONAL, it's CLEARLY unintentional, and that's where it goes from being entertaining to being page after page of squick.
DeleteI kind of have a lot of fun with that with the Exiles. Faeries are technically a secret--there's enough big powers Earthside to keep the lid more or less screwed down--but cops, first responders and social services know about them. Most of the supervisors know who to call, and most social workers in most large cities (and some of the smaller ones) have one or two case files on some kind of supernatural. Because if our social safety net has any way of working, it's gonna catch a mermaid or two.
And you know, humans not being equipped to deal with, say, intervention on a mermaid/vampire family ought to make human/supernatural relations a little tighter, because human social services would be constantly calling the local leaders and going "Look, we really need to intervene on this situation, it's really bad, can I borrow your wizard and a couple orcs so my case worker doesn't get creamed?" (Or in the Anitaverse, it'd be a vampire and a couple werewolves. Or something) And you'd have the reverse: leaders calling social services to drop off orphans, or connect a depressed supernatural to a counselor who can get them stabilized (And thus head off a city-and-secret destroying meltdown).
And in the cities where the leadership is bad news, you'd probably have an underground doing the same exact thing, while running ops against the bad leaders because fuck that shit.
17 is legal in Canada. But this shit with Thea's kids? Still creepy and wrong.
ReplyDeleteIt is in MO where they book is set also. So nothing to report if Anita were to do anything with them.
ReplyDelete