It was like being on a happy drunk. It was so bad that Micah suggested he drive us back to the Circus.Her emotions are so overwhelming she can't drive. Nice. So she decides to contact Jean Claude telepathically. Richard asks her not to because it bugs him, and she does it anyway. This would be fine and dandy but there's something awfully sadistic about the phrasing. Like "Let's rub this in MORE." IDK it could just be me.
They get back to the Circus and Auggie is sitting naked on a couch, wrapped in a lacy shawl. And he was alone in the room with Jean Claude. And LKH seriously expects us to believe they weren't fucking.
It's so dumb it's almost adorable.
What's not adorable is that Auggie did some sort of mind-fuckery when they were doing...well, him, and now Anita is in love with Auggie. And she doesn't care about this because consent is for losers, I guess.
Loving words are exchanged. Richard is the killjoy as usual. Something about watching an ex-girlfriend have sex with another guy just kills his buzz.
“I’m in love with him, Richard, that doesn’t mean we’re going to fuck. You, of all people, should know that just because someone has my heart doesn’t mean they have my body.”
Oh the irony. It's killer. Anita goes on about how good her self control is. It'd be really awesome if that control extended to not raping other people, but that would require Anita to stop being a self-centered waste of skin and actually develop a conscience and a sense of empathy. She stares at Auggie for a few minutes and then...we drop that plot thread completely so that we can go play with Haven.
Seriously. It's all Auggie Auggie Auggie Auggie Auggie...LION! and I spent a few minutes making sure my kindle app hadn't broken because WHAT THE HOLY HELL.
The two lions the local leader sent on over stop Anita and tell her that Joseph sent them over to distract her from Haven because Haven would probably take over the group. Anita, meanwhile, is distracted by Haven's pretty abs and her inner lion justifies this because she's choosing him as her werelion mate the way she...
...You've got to be kidding me. We're justifying the shower rape scene as being a moment of meeting her true soul mate and her soul overpowering everything and I just can't even.
And of course Anita touches Haven anyway and the match is made because tee hee having somebody pick a sane relationship in this fucking thing is IMPOSSIBLE. Richard then jumps Haven and the chapter ends with them rolling around and fighting.
We are seventy-two percent done with this book.
"Consent is for losers" that's the general attitude of the series, yeah
ReplyDelete"You, of all people, should know that just because someone has my heart doesn’t mean they have my body.”
ReplyDeleteThe sad irony here is that Anita doesn't even own her body. JC uses her to gain more power and people, Micah used her to gain power and protection, Nate has molded her into his own personal sex toy (notice how all the kinks and BDSM started after she began sleeping with Nate and were purely Nate's interests at first). Richard is like the only man in this series who wants Anita just for herself. I can't understand why he loves her, as she seems like the most horrible person in existence, but at least he loves her for herself and not for any power she can give him.
But since he's the only person in this Goddamn series with any boundaries, Richard has become a villain. God forbid we have boundaries, or even personal space, in these books, those are things only prudes/bigots enjoy.
Three points on the Anita/Richard part: The weird thing about abuse is that it's addictive. People in abusive situations will frequently fall into exactly the same sort of relationship they left, over and over and over again. Two people with co-dependant issues will look through a room full of healthy, well adjusted people and choose each other as potential partners because that relationship is something they understand and know. Rania and Marcus owned Richard and gave him to Jean Claude to get him off their backs. There's no way in fuck he got out of that situation unscathed.
DeleteSecond: Anita wasn't this bad when their relationship started. She had issues, but they weren't these massively unhealthy behavioral issues. No abused person enters a relationship with an abuser when the abuser is at their worst. They'll be a little closer to healthy and a little nearer to sane. The victim will believe that the little issues they see are something that can be handled, or weathered, and (99% of the time this is true) there's that little voice going "Yeah, but it's not as bad as the last one". The personality evolution is just slow enough that you have a frog in boiling water sort of effect. You simply do not realize how bad things have gotten. And if the abuser is good, they'll have forced the victim through degrading acts, making the emotional investment so huge that leaving triggers a literal emotional breakdown. It takes a lot of strength and a lot of integrity to make a clean break from an abuser, and it usually requires having outside help. It says nothing bad about a victim that they remain in abusive circumstances, any more than it's bad for someone to sit on the bottom of a pit with a broken leg. Abusive circumstances literally break who you are. Even if it's mild, like something at work or mild hazing at school, it does something to you, and the more prolonged it is, the longer it will take for you to heal (And you cannot heal in the presence of your abuser. EVER.)
Third point: LKH wants Richard to stay with Anita so that she can continue to write about him being miserable, unhappy and alone. So of course he loves her unconditionally. That's what LKH wants to appear on the page. To paraphrase Haymitch Abernathy, it makes her look desirable.