Spectrum of Madness

Eclipse Chapter 16 - Epoch

2012-03-05T12:45:00.004-06:00

1. “ ‘I have nothing to wear!’ I moaned to myself. ” What’s this? Is Bella actually taking an interest in her appearance? Is this character growth? Or does she just not want to deal with having Alice find out she can’t pick an outfit and the horrifying experience of shopping with her that’d be sure to follow?

She’s unable to find “Something that would make me look beautiful and grown up.” Since when has she thought anything but being a vampire could do that? I’m sorry, maybe Bella is supposed to be growing up a little, but with how flat the characters and shallow the books are anyway, it’s hard to be sure. Especially when the most visible changes to come over characters all seem to happen because of changes to their biology. And, well, that’s a pretty freaking lame excuse for character growth. At least, when it’s the only one you can tell’s there.

2. Alice actually does come by (through the window, how else) and give Bella something to wear, and Bella’s grateful, but again I’m not sure if she means that or she’s just grateful for the fact that Alice is throwing something at her and calling it done.

I do get a sense that Bella’s being sarcastic when Alice complains about feeling useless, “So…normal” because their, heh, “unknown” enemy knows how to avoid being spotted by her visions. With Bella following up with saying she can’t imagine how horrible it is to be normal. Boy, if only upgrading to a more powerful species was an actual option.

Yeah, yeah, it’s escapist fantasy, and wouldn’t I want to be an immortal creature possessed of inhuman power if I really got the chance? No, because I don’t think vampires are cool. And as a reader, it doesn’t help me get into this story because Bella NOT being a vampire is the source of a lot of her moaning, but also the cause of her not being around for all the action that attempts to provide tension for these books.

3. Somehow the book sinks even lower now, because Alice talking about not having seen the intruder makes Bella realize what’s really going on. The vampires in Seattle and whoever snuck into her room were part of the same group. Only took until the sixteenth chapter to connect the two vampire-related events, huh? And they still have no clue who the mastermind could be.

On the one hand, I find it annoying that Alice is around to kill most drama by giving so much forewarning with her visions, but on the other hand, it’s even more annoying that the characters are so dumb that even with the information they have in advance (from her and other sources) they end up getting blindsided, mistaking the information, or failing to come up with patently obvious conculsions so they can still have problems to deal with. It’s like a lesson in the worst ways to handle tension.

But seriously, this is a huge bomb Bella just dropped. Don’t take my word for it: “Alice wasn’t accustomed to being taken by surprise. She froze, and was still for so long that I started counting in my head as I waited. She didn’t move for two minutes straight. Then her eyes refocused on me.”

Boy, what a great friend Bella is for sitting there, timing how long it takes Alice to digest that tidbit of information.

4. “I was through expecting my emotions to make sense anymore.” If even she’s giving up…

As she realized that all the vampire intrigue was happening “for the express purpose of destroying me, I felt a spasm of relief.” Of course it’s all about her. It always has been. Also love how it’s “destroy,” like this is some stupid kid-friendly superhero show.

“Part of it was finally solving that irritating feeling that I was missing something vital.” Did I see it coming a mile away? You bet your ass I did. Did anyone else who’s ever read a book before? Them too.

“Well, everyone can relax. Nobody’s trying to exterminate the Cullens after all.” Sweetie, that hasn’t stopped them from literally going to the ends of the Earth for your benefit yet, why should it now? Plus, I still have no reason to care if she dies. Well, I’d be upset if she got killed by vampires because her father would be upset and he’s pretty much the only sympathetic character.

It goes without saying that “Edward would go berserk when he knew.”

Are you reading, Steph? Are you still sticking with this?

5. But enough about vampiric idiocy, let’s hear about Bella’s graduation ceremony neither she nor we care about. “Charlie had gotten stubborn” when Bella informed him she intended to ride to the ceremony with Edward like she does everything else. That’s not cute or romantic or healthy. “And I could see his point -- parents should have some rights come graduation day. I’d conceded with good grace…” Oh, how big of her. Edward suggested the three of them go together. “Charlie couldn’t come up with a compelling object; he’d agreed with poor grace.” There’s no telling her that her boyfriend’s a creep, I know, but at least think about what all this shit must look like to Charlie. I still stand by that “most giving fictional parent I’ve ever seen” thing I said about him in the first book.

Once they get there Edward asks if Bella’s all right, and she replies. “ ‘Nervous,’ I answered, and it wasn’t even a lie.” Look, if she’s even willing to lie to the guy she’s willing to throw away everything to be with, and over something he really needs to know to keep his girlfriend alive, why should I think she isn’t lying to me?

6. Bella notices Alice isn’t at the ceremony. “Skip graduation? What poor timing on my part. I should have waited to figure things out until after this was over with.” That could easily be the stupidest thought Bella’s had yet. She’s disappointed with herself for figuring something out that’ll let them come up with more comprehensive defense plans and keep anyone from having to die, and it’s because it means Alice is missing high school graduation. Which is probably something like her twelfth one anyway.

7. Jessica (remember her?) comes up to Bella and starts talking about all the good times and how she’ll miss Bella so much and blah blah blah. “I found that I was glad that things could end on a good note with Jessica.” And Bella gets out of yet another problem without having to do a damn thing.

“It went so quickly. I felt liked I’d hit the fast forward button.” I’d say she’s skipping the boring parts, but if that was so then the books wouldn’t exist in the first place.

Alice suddenly shows up and she and Edward make their way across the stage and get their diplomas. “Only the two of them could carry off the hideous yellow and still look the way they did. They stood out from the rest of the crowd, their beauty and grace otherworldly.” Thanks for that, it was a bit of information that I’d had to do without the entire way up to this point. And it certainly wasn’t hinted at at all by the first sentence.

“I wondered how I’d ever fallen for their human farce...” Maybe you’re a hopeless moron. Or maybe the author milks this bit way too much for the good of her opus’s believability.

8. Alice runs out as soon as she gets her stupid diploma, and then Bella “made an impulse decisions -- the kind I really should think twice about, but rarely did.” That’s sort of what an impulse decision is, genius. Not just for her, but for everybody.

What was that decision? She asks the confused-looking Edward if he’s worried about Alice. She asks what Alice was thinking and Edward replies she was thinking about something else very hard so he wouldn’t find out. “She was translating the Battle Hymn of the Republic into Arabic, actually. When she finished that, she moved onto Korean sign language.” I’m not even going to ask if Korean sign language is a thing, mainly because I don’t care, I’ll just say these books get more ridiculous every time they try to impress me.

Bella reveals her brainstorm from before to him then, and “His face turned so white that I had a hard time finishing.” He’s so pale already, how is that even possible? “But no one’s coming for you, don’t you see? This is good -- Esme and Alice and Carlisle, no one wants to hurt them!” Boy does she not know him; her protection is the mort important thing in his life, and that’s only partly because she has no ability to do so herself even within her abilities as a human. And I’m supposed to think they have this unassailable love?

9. Charlie comes up and congratulates his daughter (see how boring these books are when these are the events I’m reporting to you?), “ever so slyly shuffling Edward off to the side as he did so.” That and “He had his back to Edward -- probably an effort to exclude him.” I haven’t brought this up in a while, but given how Bella only really hangs around Edward and maybe Alice, I think I’ll bring it up again now. When did ultimate wallflower Bella learn thing one about reading somebody’s actions?

10. “Okay, so telling Edward had been a really bad idea.” Would somebody maybe remind me of one of hers that hasn’t been? “I should have waited till we were alone elsewhere, maybe with the rest of his family. And nothing breakable close by -- like windows…cars…school buildings.” You’re telling me vampires can wreck whole buildings? Did Steph pick “vampire” because she thought it would draw less Mary Sue flack than “demigod”?

11. Then it’s time for the after-ceremony festivities but Bella’s mind isn’t really on them because of you know, vampires marshalling their forces to kill her and stuff. For all the shit about savoring “human experiences,” the books sure do work hard at distracting her from doing so. What’s even lamer is the chapter title presumably refers to the end of an era in Bella’s life represented by the conclusion of her high school career, and how much attention’s she really paying to that versus the vampire murder plot?

“I did not particularly enjoy Charlie’s favorite restaurant,” but it’s not like we’ve heard much of what she does like besides kissing Edward, so that kind of talk is pretty innocuous by now.

Edward takes off quickly when they get to the eatery and Charlie asks if they’re fighting again. “Nobody’s fighting. Mind your own business,” Bella tells him. Boy she’s lovable. He rather logically replies “You are my business.” Especially with preservation skills like hers.

Over dinner Bella looked at the clock “more often than necessary.” Okay, that’s a little different than rereading a note that says “Be safe.”

12. They leave and Bella says she’s going over to the Cullens’ under the pretext of helping to set up for the graduation party. On the way out she sees a shadow approaching and almost freaks out until she sees it’s Edward. He has to know how panicky she is by now, maybe he shouldn’t sneak up on her, knowing that other vampires want to kill her (again). Then again that would require him to think. In the first place. Let alone over-think.

She tries to tell him she should’ve waited to tell him, but he gently counters “This is something I needed to know. I can’t believe I didn’t see it!” True on both counts. Oh, and Bella’s not extra-smart for making the connection, and the Cullens aren’t of average intelligence for not doing so. Especially considering they’re vampires themselves. We could say their veginess has dulled their edge, but that would imply they’re something less than totally awesome, and we can forget about Steph ever doing that.

Bella: “You’ve got a lot on your mind.”
Edward: “And you don’t?”
Me: “No, she doesn’t.”

It’s fine showing your writing to your friends, but I’ve found it’s actually productive to show it to the ones who aren’t afraid to tell you when you have a bad idea. Like maybe pretending your characters and world are deep when they so, so aren’t.

Charlie asks if Bella’s okay, probably in part because she’s not hiding her ordeals particularly well. “ ‘I feel fine,’ I lied.” Just because she calls attention to it in this chapter doesn’t mean she doesn’t do it any other times.

She even tells him he’s being a great dad. “I’m really glad I came to live with you, Dad. It was the best idea I ever had.” Because I met Edward here, and if you didn’t live here that never would’ve worked out. You’re the world’s best dad for living here, Dad.

I’m even more confused about Charlie’s actions in the last chapter when he tries to get her to stand up for herself. “No matter what side I’m on, if someone kisses you without your permission, you should be able to make your feelings clear without hurting yourself.” Yeah, she should. And she shouldn’t back down because the person she’s talking to is pretty.

13. This brings up the subject of Jacob and Bella says she isn’t sure what to do about him. Charlie sagely opines, “Yeah. The right thing isn’t always real obvious. Sometimes the right thing for one person is the wrong thing for someone else.” Don’t try to get so deep on your first time out, Steph. And I don’t care who we’re talking about, in an equal partnership things like breaking into another person’s living area and leaving them out of major decisions are never okay.

I know Steph’s said that she didn’t intend any morals with her writing, but people tend to think you do even if you don’t. Not to be nasty, but only complete amateurs don’t know that.

Zero culpability sounds like so much.

14. Charlie drives Bella out to the Cullens’ house and complains that their driveway’s impossible to find. Bella’s a little cheered at the thought that nobody will find the place, until she sees that Alice wrapped trees “all three miles of the way” there with Christmas lights. Was Alice a huge dork before she became a vampire? Or did the family’s unending wealth fuel this?

Bella’s displeased, of course. Can I have one relationship that’s at all believable? Do I use that word too much? If I do it’s only because I’m reading something like this.

“With a sigh, I marched up the stairs to endure my party.” Why does everybody hate Bella?…Besides the obvious, I mean.

Eclipse Chapter 15 - Wager

2012-02-21T15:37:00.003-06:00

1. Don’t know how Steph though last chapter ended on something shocking or unpredictable, because the way Bella responds to Jacob’s declaration sure isn’t. She doesn’t want to stop seeing him, but it’s not for the same reason he wants to keep seeing her. She loves him but she’s not in love with him, blah blah blah.

He agrees to stick around, but he’s not changing the way he is if she only wants to be friends (implicitly if that’s how things are, he’s not changing to be more agreeable to Edward). In one of the few semi-redeeming moments of the series, Bella admits she is indeed being unreasonable for wanting Jacob as a friend when it pains him to be just friends friend. If only I didn’t know Breaking Dawn was going to flush it straight down the toilet.

Not that she’s budging on Edward. “I love him, Jacob. He’s my whole life.” And personality. And interests. And goals. And self-image.

Jacob reminds her that Edward was her life once, but then he left and she tried to get on without him. And now she’s stuck with “the consequence of that choice -- me.”

He tries to tell she’s got options, she doesn’t want options, the author should start writing these books like it’s someone besides her reading it. Someone who might not just see how they’re the most perfect couple in the history of couple perfection.

2. Then, that happens. Jacob decides if he can’t convince Bella of the depth of his devotion with words, he’ll do it with his lips. He forces a kiss on her, despite her pitiful resistance. “I grabbed at his face, trying to push it away, failing again.” Story of her life, then. Eventually he stops, giving her the chance to punch him in the face and break something. Of hers.

She starts screaming he broke her hand, but Jacob points out that she broke her hand by punching something with supernatural toughness (ProTip: Your hands aren’t designed to punch things. And Bella’s the last fictional character in the world who would know how to make a fist correctly. To say nothing of the self-control to remember how in a tense situation). How is this not okay, but Edward breaking into her house and going through her shit for her keys is? Is it different because he broke in but never touched her?

“He wasn’t even rubbing his jaw like they did in the movies. How pathetic.” Hasn’t she learned how inaccurate movies usually are by now? And fighting tends to be where they’re at their most laughable.

3. He tries to get her to admit she enjoyed that. After all, “That had to be better than kissing a rock.” She denies it, but she’s never had a problem lying even in situations where it wasn’t to save somebody’s life, and even when it was somebody she professes to care about. And perhaps because we actually get to see so many of Bella’s interactions with him, with so many ending in a similar vein, Jacob might be the most questionable person on that very short list.

Oh, and when Bella insists she can’t be happy without Edward, he retorts she never tried. “When he left, you spent all your energy holding onto him.” Guess he does know why she went cliff diving.

And he makes a point. She doesn’t try. Either Bella or Smeyer. Edward and Bella are the perfect couple. Why? Because they are. Some of you may have noticed the link to Reasoning With Vampires in the right sidebar.

After some interviews I’ve read about Stephenie Meyer talking about readers finding the book that’s perfect for them, I get this image of her actually going there, reading some of the scathing observations on her prose, and writing in to Dana, “It sounds like my books weren’t the right ones for you. I hope you find one that is.” Just who is Meyer saying her books are for? People who don’t question what they read? Is that really kind of the crowd you want to cater to? If you’re the kind of author who’s afraid of being told they fucked something up, I suppose.

4. Jacob says Edward left her once, he could do it again. She retorts he left her once too, “thinking of the weeks he’d hidden from me, the words he’d said to me in the woods behind his home…” Excuse me, but Edward left because of Edward. Jacob left because of Bella. She left to save Edward from killing himself over a hideously moronic understanding, and if she’s anywhere near as smart as people in the books say she’d have to know he’d probably take that as being considered second best.

Besides, like I just said, it sounds like Jacob might know the real reason for the cycling and cliff diving. Is he supposed to appreciate that?

5. Bella’s inexplicable attraction prevails, because he offers to drive her to the hospital to get her hand looked at. But, “I don’t want to go to the hospital. It’s embarrassing and unnecessary.” Just a reminder, she said that about wearing a helmet while riding a motorcycle and when she was almost smashed flat by a van, too.

She announces her plan to have Edward drive her to his place to have Carlisle fix her hand. Because it’s not like he has anyone else’s injuries or illnesses to worry about, I guess. Because it’s not like he’s the only Cullen to have a day job. I’m sorry, yeah, he’s a doctor and that’s what doctors do. But it sounds like he can drop everything to wait on Bella.

6. Jacob drops her off at her house and that scene everybody thinks ruins Charlie’s character happens. He greets them with a “Nice to see you Jake,” and he laughs when Jacob explains how Bella got hurt, and congratulates Jacob for kissing his daughter.

I certainly don’t condone sexual assault, and Bella had every right to resist what Jacob did to her, but this also doesn’t make me hate her any less. I'm not wild about the way Charlie's acting in this chapter, what with how he's about the only character I find to have any redeeming qualities at all, but mostly I'm just confused. First he's congratulating Jake for assaulting his daughter, then according to the narration we're meant to think things are uncomfortable between Charlie and Jake, then Charlie's congratulating Bella for punching Jacob. Hooo-wah???

7. Bella calls Edward, and in the meantime “It had gone quiet in the front room, and I wondered when Jacob would bolt. I smiled a grim smile, imagining his discomfort.” At what? He just earned her father’s approval, and Charlie prefers him to Edward to begin with.

When Edward gets there, Bella evidently didn’t explain she broke her hand punching Jacob. “ ‘Good,’ Edward said bleakly. ‘Though I’m sorry you’re hurt.’ I laughed once, because he sounded as pleased as Charlie had.” He sounded bleakly pleased?

She claims she didn’t do any damage at all (was she honestly expecting to? Her?), and Edward adds “I can fix that.” That might have flown if the competition started earlier in the series, but at this point I don’t prefer Edward just because of what Jacob did.

Charlie comes out and praises Bella for really giving that punch her all (just where does he stand on this, huh??). Edward says he isn’t going to kill Jacob now because it would upset Bella, but if she ever comes back “damaged” again, all bets are off. An instance like this here and there doesn’t make up for the characters being lame and unlikable the rest of the time. Particularly not when all this shit’s over Bella.

8. Remember the title of the chapter? It turns out Jasper and Emmett like making bets, and they’ve made one about how many times Bella will “slip up” in her first year as a vampire. They’re betting on how many innocent people the girl they’re welcoming into their family will kill out of predatory instinct. You see what I’m talking about? And am I wrong or is this the same habit Meyer gave the werewolves to make them seem more like a group?

9. Carlisle does check Bella out an and it’s “just a tiny fissure in one knuckle. I didn’t want a cast, and Carlisle said I’d be fine in a brace if I promised to keep it on.” She also didn’t want a helmet, and the story calls so much attention to her being a “danger magnet.” On top of that, ooooh, one little fracture. And she’ll have to wear a brace for a while. And it won’t matter anyway because she isn’t asked to do anything physical again for the rest of the book.

Reminds me of this other book I’m reading, Small Favor, and how early in Harry gets a broken nose and two black eyes. And gets made fun of for it. By his friends and family. And still has to save the world anyway. Oh, it’s so tough to be Bella.

10. The real reason for the bet is as Carlisle get her fixed up, Bella starts to think, seemingly for the first time, about what becoming a vampire will really mean. “[C]ould I possibly be me? And if all I wanted was to kill people, what would happen to the things I wanted now?” Well, before I answer that, who exactly is she supposed to be now? And what exactly are the things she wants now, besides Edward and being eternally young and pretty? Meyer left Bella vague to make it easier for readers to step into her shoes, but it made questions like this hard to answer in ways that don’t make her sound shallow, too. It doesn’t help that she follows up with “As long as I got to be with Edward, what else could I ask for?”

“Was there a human experience that I was not willing to give up?” Would you please illustrate some kind of difference? Besides the immortality and the sparkles? Don’t make a fuss about something that’s not there, Meyer.

Eclipse Chapter 14 - Declaration

2012-02-18T10:09:00.001-06:00

1. “You can’t be serious!” Bella exclaims as we open. What can’t who be serious about? Alice has no plans to call off her big graduation party, because her entire “personality” seems to consist of super-girly things like throwing parties, or exasperating Bella by doing super-girly things like throwing parties.

“There’s no reason not to go through with it,” sayeth Alice. I guess not. Certainly it’s not as if someone’s raising a newborn vampire army nearby, one they think is probably intended to attack them, and against which they have no allies, no plan of action and quite possibly no forewarning. Let’s remember there’s another vampire or two in the area, one out to get Bella, and one who seems to be aware of Alice’s visions and how to get around them. Even if they aren’t avoiding Alice, it sounded like she’s watching for so much stuff, things are starting to slip past her anyway. Yeah, no big deal.

Alice is unmoved. Thinking that “a party is so appropriate it’s almost passe.” Why does Alice want to do it, then? I get the feeling Meyer thinks “passe” means something else. I always thought it was a fancy-pants way of saying “so five minutes ago,” and all my checking bears that out.

Another part of Alice not changing her plans is this is the only time Bella will get to graduate from high school for the first time. And as a human. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime shot.” It would matter if you enjoyed high school and passing from it meant something to you, or you had something after it you were looking forward to. Bella is looking forward to Edward, and hardly seemed to notice anything else about her academic career at Forks High. Speaking personally, I hated high school, and the only reason I cared when I got my diploma was it meant I was freed from that awful place and the awful people I knew there. I’m not planning on attending any reunions. I refuse to believe Bella doesn’t have similar thoughts.

You can’t force somebody to enjoy something. It sounds like Alice is throwing this party because she wants to, and using a line of bull to try to make it sound like she’s trying to do a friend a favor to justify not changing her mind. Boy I’m believing in this thing between the two of them.

And all this “human experience” crap might add up to anything if it wasn’t snatched away as soon as Bella started thinking there might be something to it, by her having to become a vampire in order to be not-dead. For all this talk, you’d hope Meyer could at least have done something with it.

2. Edward comes in and mentions other attempts to gather reinforcements, but I’m not going to dignify this book by acting as if the names he mentions belong to anyone. Although it is worth mentioning that most of the other vampires the Cullens are friends with don’t share their dietary habits.

Rather than do something moronic like explain who these people are and why the Cullens respect them in spite of their decision to feed as they always have, Alice just says “They’re friends,” and that’s apparently that.

Bella gets worried about losing any of the Cullens to their nameless enemy. “I couldn’t stand this -- the idea that someone might not come back.” She’s such a wimp she can’t even say “die” in her head. I know that’s the point, but it’s yet another sign Bella hasn’t grown one bit this far in the story. “What if it was Emmett, so brave and thoughtless that he was never the last bit cautious? Or Esme, so sweet and motherly that I couldn’t even imagine her in a fight?” Don’t say that like I’ve gotten to know them and have any good reason to care about the possibility of losing them (which there isn’t. A possibility of losing them). Are these sound bites supposed to count as characterization?

“It’s going to be fine, Bella. Trust me,” Edward tries to reassure her. “Sure, I thought to myself. Trust him.” Feel the love! “He wasn’t the one who was going to have to sit behind and wonder whether or not the core of his existence was going to come home.” You’re right, he’s the one who’s actually going to do something, being out there fighting tooth and nail against enemies stronger and more numerous than his group for the sake of his whiny true love. Who’s useless at literally anything and is just soooooooo tempting to vampires, and as such will have no chance if any bad guys get anywhere near her. Plus there’s no assurance that help is coming or that they’ll have any advance warning when or from where the attack comes. He’s got no fucking idea what real worry is.

3. Bella tries to take advantage of the occasion to get vamped, only to be given the obvious reminder that there isn’t enough time to teach her to helpful and not just another problem. You’d think she’d be so used to losing arguments she wouldn’t even bother anymore.

4. But who cares about vampires fighting, you must be saying, how many people are coming to Alice’s party? 65. “My eyes bulged. I didn’t have that many friends” I bet you don’t, smiley. Turns out one of them isn’t her mom, though. “She was going to surprise you for graduation, but something went wrong. You’ll have a message when you get home.” Bella’s relieved because if mom paid a visit, “I didn’t want to think about it. My head would explode.” I know I’m sounding like a broken record here, but I don’t care about the fate of someone we’ve seen two whole times up to now, once of which was in a fucking flashback.

“The message light was flashing when I got home.” Thanks for having the faith in me to not remember something you said a paragraph ago.

Mom’s baller husband broke something and she just can’t get away with him in that condition. Bella calls to talk to her mom about the incident, or rather, to listen to mom talk about the incident and not say much herself, because you can tell she’s really mature and stuff because she doesn’t have to hog the conversation. Or that her life is so damn empty she wouldn’t have anything to talk about if she ever wanted to.

Except for how pretty Edward is, of course. “He was so beautiful that it made it hard sometimes to think about anything else, hard to concentrate oh Phil’s troubles or Renee’s apologies or hostile vampire armies. I was only human.” For being so not entrapped by teenage hormones, Bella only seems to notice Edward’s outside.

They kiss, which Edward breaks after a while. “I know you think that I have some kind of perfect, unyielding self-control, but that’s not actually the case.” You can say it as much as you want, that won’t make it untrue. You can show it just a few times, and that will.

5. Edward announces they’re going to be going out hunting, because having fed recently makes them a little stronger. Human blood even more so, but even though that would help, “It doesn’t matter. We aren’t going to change who we are.” Pretty good statement on the series’s attitude toward character growth, really.

Which is sad because right then Bella has an appalling thought that could’ve actually been milked for some interesting situations if it hadn’t been immediately dropped; Bella realizes she’d be okay with Edward killing somebody to make him strong enough to survive the upcoming fight. On the other hand, if she can’t deny she’d be willing to trade the life of a stranger for better odds on Edward’s survival, I’m not really sure why the books ask me to hope a bunch of characters I hardly know as anything more than a set of recurring names don’t die. Here and elsewhere. (Actually, I kind of do, but that’s for later).

That’s something to do with why newborns are stronger; because they haven’t learned to rein in their instincts and drink so much blood. I’m not going to try to follow Meyer’s explanation. The crap about what makes vampire skin refract and doesn’t is bad enough. Bella asks how strong she’ll be as a vampire, though, and Edward asks her to challenge Emmett to arm-wrestling if and when she ever gets her own sparkles.

6. Edward helps our lovable protagonist cram for finals “since he knew absolutely everything.” I get there’s a sensible explanation for this, what with the Cullens going to school multiple times for some reason, but this perfection isn’t helping me doubt their chances in the upcoming fight.

Later Bella calls Jacob to hang out, and he agrees. “I was pleased to have an option besides being babysat.” And she’s eager to spend eternity with those people?

When Bella and Edward talk after tests and she’s unsure about how well she did on some, he laughingly talks about bribing the teachers into giving her A’s. We already know he’s bribing college officials to overlook late applications for her, how unbelievable is it that he would? And what, exactly, is the point of going to school over and over if you’re not going to socialize or join activities, and you pay people to give you good grades?

7. Edward drives Bella out to La Push and gets upset (oh, there’s a change-up) over some of the things Jacob’s thinking. “That’s impolite,” he can’t resist saying out loud. So’s kidnapping your girlfriend and taking away her say in any decisions. If Bella actually were the character she’s supposed to be, it’d look even worse on Edward.

As she gets into Jacob’s car she looks back at Edward, “and, from that distance, it looked like he was truly upset about the honking thing…or whatever Jacob was thinking about. But my eyes were weak and made mistakes all the time.”

Despite thinking she was just imagining things, Bella goes back on her kick of wanting the two to be able to make friends and see each other as Jacob and Edward instead of the werewolf and the vampire. Maybe that would work if that wasn’t exactly what they were. Edward’s the (basically) civil monster, and Jacob’s the crass, barely-contained monster. Those are exactly the stereotypes I think of when I think “vampire” and “werewolf.” Even in this stupid series that does its best to venture from the regular depictions of those creatures, that’s still what I see. And that in and of itself isn’t a bad thing, but when you’re trying to argue that they should see beyond that when there’s nothing beyond that to see…

8. “Jacob’s house was vacant, and that felt strange. I realized that I thought of Billy as a nearly permanent fixture over there.” Why? Because he’s nothing but Jacob’s dad? Because he doesn’t get out and do anything because he’s in a wheelchair? No, Billy Black isn’t a deep character, nobody in the Twilight series is, but Bella’s not helping with the way she seems to think of him as an object. Just because she has no life outside of the two boys in her life, that doesn’t mean nobody else has nothing going on.

Turns out he’s “Over at the Clearwaters’. He’s been hanging out there a lot since Harry died. Sue gets lonely.” Poor Sue. Who’s she, again? See what I mean? No, “That’s nice. Poor Sue,” and, “Sure, it’s got to be hard on Seth and Leah, losing their dad….,” don’t make me care any more. Maybe if we actually met these characters and saw how it's hard on them...naaaaaah.

9. Bella notices that Jacob’s acting really tired (and before anyone says anything, no, that’s not really something it would take a genius to notice). “Sam’s being difficult. He doesn’t trust your bloodsuckers.” And when the guy representing the group is Edward, why would he? Consequently, Jacob’s running double patrols for Bella’s sake and hasn’t had much of a chance to sleep.

She asks why he’d run himself ragged to look out for her. He reminds her of his joking promise of eternal servitude, but she replies she doesn’t want a slave. He, rather understandably, asks what she does want from him, and she replies she wants her best friend Jacob. Because she’s so worth all of her crap, he agrees.

He asks about current events and she mentions the graduation party, and Jacob’s a little upset that he wasn’t invited. Bella then invites him because it’s her party, and she figures she should have some say as to who’s on the guest list. Oh, now she cares. “ ‘Thanks,’ he said sarcastically, his eyes slipping closed once more.” I’m curious as to why he’s being sarcastic; is it because he doesn’t think the family of vampires would really let him attend? That he’s supposed to enjoy a party thrown by Alice? That he finds the idea of Bella standing up for herself against them laughable and doomed to failure?

Or maybe it’s this bit: “ ‘I wish you would come,’ I said without any hope. ‘It would be more fun. For me, I mean.’ ” Oh, so the only reason she wants him around is so it would be more bearable for her? Is the guy she’s planning to spend eternity with no good for that? That, among the many, many deficiencies of her relationship with Edward, is the one that probably galls me the most. She can lean on Jacob to make trying times more bearable, but the guy she plans to forsake her species to be with, let alone marries and has a child with, seems to be no good for that.

Then again if he were, then at least one of the men in Bella’s life would be totally pointless. It’s kind of unsettling that, as things are, it’s the one we’re meant to hope our heroine gets together with. That’s all I’m saying.

10. Even when she’s hanging out with Jacob, Bella can’t keep her mind off Edward. Specifically, her wanting him to be the one to vamp her. She thinks things like “And I didn’t want to be practical,” and “It wasn’t a rational desire,” and “It was childish, but I liked the idea this his lips would be the last good thing I would feel,” and “It was hard to define, even to myself, why it mattered.” Well, it’s hard to define to me, who can’t understand what the hell the attraction is to either of them. Especially since like I just said, her twu wuv doesn’t seem like someone she can go to for emotional support. If she really does intend to spend forever with this guy because of she luuuuuuuuuuuuurves him so much, well, isn’t that the explanation for why she wants him to be the one to seal the deal?

Although this line has me scratching my head: “It would make me belong to him in a tangible, quantifiable way.” Okay, ignoring how she wants to “belong” to Edward, if she wants their relationship to exist in measurable terms than it kinda sorta hurts the defense for their “love” that love isn’t rational, love isn’t something that can be quantified, and that excuses the lapses in good sense on our protagonists’ parts.

11. Jacob falls asleep while Bella halfheartedly watches TV while really having the above mind trip. He wakes up when she’s thinking it’s time to go, but he has a major announcement to make. One he’d hoped to save for a properly dramatic occasion, but doesn’t feel it can wait.

What could it be? “I’m in love with you, Bella. Bella, I love you. And I want you to pick me instead of him. I know you don’t feel that way, but I need to get the truth out there so that you know your options. I wouldn’t want a miscommunication to stand in our way.”

The situation’s so dumb I have to skip ahead and couple it with Bella’s reaction from the next chapter: “I stared at him for a long minute, speechless. I could not think of one thing to say to him.”

Because we all thought Jacob’s interest in Bella was purely platonic, right? In a romance, when he only became a major character after Bella was left an incomplete person because her inamorato had run out on her. When pretty much every uncoupled guy in her age range expressed an interest in her at some point. Hell, remember the first chapter? “Friendship doesn’t always seem to be enough for Jake.” Anyone?

I don’t want to sound like some kind of literary rules Nazi who thinks there’s only one right way to tell a story, but guidelines are there to help us. Not straightjacket creativity. In general, a well-told story will surprise us by having us find things out at the same pace as the characters. If it’s a surprise for them, it’s also a surprise for us. Thing is, if we’re halfway through the next book and the revelation that Jacob making a play for Bella too is supposed to come as a shock, well, the question “how fucking stupid does the author think we are?” comes to mind.

Bad Medicine/News for Dr. Drugs

2012-02-10T13:41:00.005-06:00

***Normally I’d say only potential GMs should be reading this review, but in this case the most effective way to get the players into the adventure may be for them to see how goofy it is for themselves***

If there’s one thing I like out of an RPG, it’s an adventure that’s both fun and thoughtful.

Too bad Bad Medicine For Dr. Drugs is about as subtle and well-written as Avatar. The movie, not the show.

Gee, was this released at the height “Just Say No”? For that matter, you know you’re in good hands when they weren’t even sure what the title was.

And I wish I could say that’s where the competence on display stops being called into question. Despite the cover and front page both making a big deal about the heroes taking on drug dealers to avenge a dead friend, the setup for the adventure tells us that by the time he OD’d, he’d become just another face in the hall. Would seem to dull the effectiveness of his grieving mother grabbing one of the heroes and demanding they do something about the blight upon society that took her son. Which the designers make a point of being something that leaves such a profound impact on the players that they should feel they have no choice but to do as she asks.

Perhaps I’m jumping on the adventure’s faults a little too quickly, though. After all, there are some things about it that--at least conceptually--I like. The main thing is its emphasis on having the players run teenage characters, something I don’t know that had ever been done in the superhero genre of RPG’s back in 1983. Accordingly, the adventure’s meant to involve stopping the drug dealers as much as it is the characters having to deal with being unsure of where they fit in the big scheme of things, an activity which is of course only complicated by having superpowers.

The booklet even contains a team of precreated teenage supers known as the Grenades (it’s an acronym for what each of them brings to the table). They seem like a fairly interesting group bent on truly doing some good, but as a bunch of headstrong teenagers, each does things their own way, and one gets the feeling that the only thing keeping them from splitting up or killing each other is the fact that this group is the only bunch of people who understands them enough to be willing to have their back against the establishment.

Marvel at the efficacy of proofreading in the top right, too...

For that matter, the teens being somewhat awkward with their powers or the choices of their costumes and such show that they haven’t quite figured this all out yet. Which goes hand-in-hand with the booklet trying to give an idea of how to create teenage superheroes not just with tweaked rules, but through providing a list of unwritten laws they’re expected to observe. I like, I mean I really like, characters having to struggle to find their place in the world on top of other, temporary difficulties; can you tell my favorite version of X-Men is Evolution?

Which leads back to the booklet’s problems, though. As Doug Walker went off on the Breaking Dawn movie for, this seems like it was written by people who had strong feelings on the matter at hand, and thought that equated to strong knowledge on the matter at hand. I’m a little temped to disbelieve the seriousness of the material not just by the kick-you-in-the-face obviousness of the primary villain’s name, but by the name of the local street gang. The Monkey Thugs. Yeah, the Monkey. Thugs. Sounds like a gang that got laughed off the set of The Warriors.

For reference, some of the ones they kept.

Sort of doubt the authenticity of their unwritten rules for teenagers, if that what they think a self-respecting gang would call itself.

For that matter, the module seems kind of uncertain of its morality. Mainly, Dr. Drugs honestly thinks he’s performing a public service by furnishing the means to get high. He “may even honestly regret the ruined lives and dead kids that are a necessary side effect of the service he is offering.” That’s sort of the problem of trying to have a drug dealer character who isn’t thoroughly evil; drug addiction isn’t pretty and it’s hard to come up with someone who makes it possible, yet earnestly believes he’s doing a good deed for his clients. Unless you’re trying to say their connection to the real world has been damaged to the point they don’t realize what they’re doing anymore. Yet, that doesn’t seem to be how they intended Dr. Drugs, whose profile has him come across as a savvy if shady business operator with a healthy respect for worthy opponents. He’s even with it enough not to judge his semi-unstable gangster father, what with the man’s grim background.

Dr. Drugs comes off as kind of an idiot, then, when he tries to psych the heroes out by attacking their moral superiority in trying to save people from their own choices. Seemingly totally ignorant of how a lot of people get into drugs because of reasons like peer pressure or overestimating their ability to ween themselves off it. And how easily mind-altering substances can destroy lives, and how it usually is something that takes outside help to cope with. Sorry, having trouble seeing how easily this guy could be to like if only he’d stop selling mind-altering substances.

So the main villains don’t really work as intended, and so it’s hard to get behind the story’s anti-drug agenda. Is there anything about this adventure that’s good besides the pre-gen characters? Well, there’s the fact that it was meant to be compatible with two different superhero RPG’s, presumably to get its message out to a wider audience. One of them was Champions, the other was a game called Superworld with which I’m not too familiar and unlikely to become so. Especially when this is the first thing I see after opening the book.

And there’s how while the various character sheets were redone into Champions statistics, the adventure itself was written with Superworld rules in mind. Things like determining a player’s chances of overhearing something useful, or penalties for breaking The Code. Granted, these aren’t things that would be hard to replicate in Champions rules, but it seems kind of lazy all the same.

In the end, in spite of trying to cover new ground with teenage superheroes, Bad Medicine For Dr. Drugs is pretty much just another relic of its time. Something probably cranked out to generate some good PR from coming out against an issue gripping the nation. If you really want to see some quality 80’s anti-drug entertainment, there this show called BraveStarr that had this one episode…

Dino Squad - Fire and Ice

2012-02-04T14:47:00.006-06:00

Open on Veloci flying over disintegrating glaciers in yet another ludicrous dino-faced vehicle, a blimp this time. “I do so love global warming,” he croons. Boy this show makes me miss the nuanced characterizations of Captain Planet. He dusts the area with his mutation juice to see what kinds of reactions it produces with anything that might have been frozen inside. He turns his hands into lizard guy hands to pull the lever that does this, because…he can. Some defrosted plants grow into big spiky mushrooms.

Then cut to Kittery Point High where Max is pretty much playing for his entire team at a basketball game. Even though they win, Caruso, the other players and the coach are annoyed at him for hogging the ball for the whole game. Basketball’s a team sport, blah blah blah I bet you can figure out the moral this episode’s going to push already. The only thing on Max’s mind is that they won.

That's pretty much how I feel, coach.

After getting changed Max gets his official Dino Squad watch, complete with a face that looks like a dinosaur eye and has little dinosaur spikes sticking out too. And these guys are concerned about keeping their identities secret? He even says the “Mothersaurus” thing while he’s standing in the locker room. It signals the kids to meet Moynihan, and she tells them about mutant readings on an island near Greenland. She then tells them to go home and meet back there in the morning to deal with this. She had them come all the way out to the lighthouse to tell them that?

When they do come back to make the trip, Caruso’s wearing a tuxedo because he thinks it’d be cool to take pictures of him in that outfit next to actual penguins. That’s so moronic, even for the characters in this show, it almost doesn’t merit mentioning they tell him there are no penguins where they’re going, just walruses. How would he explain being side-by-side with penguins, anyway?

Moynihan says she’ll meet them at the island once she’s had a chance to pick something up. Why is she coming, what’s she picking up and why does she think they’ll need it? This is an unfortunate coincidence, but I’m noticing that the times she tags along on a mission the mutants they’re facing seem kind of lame. Last time it was puppies who only posed a danger of drowning the kids in slobber, now it’s a bunch of immobile mushrooms.

Once they get there Max divides up the work zones with really vague directions (“Fiona, take the southern end of the island. Caruso, you de-ooze to the east. Rodger, cover the spot closest to shore, and Buzz, you take that rocky cove over there.”) Fiona intuits that this leaves over half the island for Max to handle alone, which he confirms with enthusiasm.

Watch out for the Pirates of Pestulon, you guys.

A melting icicle drips onto Max and we see microorganisms spreading inside him as he complains about it getting hot. Uh oh, this episode’s going for more than one moral. Strap on your helmets, people.

Max then goes around to the others, giving advice on more effective ways to use their guns and telling Buzz to pick up the pace. Soon the island’s clear of mutant mushrooms, but the others are annoyed at Max for getting involved in them doing their part. “Are you sure weren’t operating under some kind of ‘if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself’ mentality?” Fiona asks.

Max retorts by pointing out some flakiness on his friends’ parts, like the time Caruso stopped in the middle of a fight to fix his hair, and Buzz wanted to take some giant spiders home BEFORE they weren’t giant anymore. Buzz protests that “your whole control-freakiness is kind of holding the rest of us back.” Caruso adds “Pass the ball once in a while. In life, not just in basketball.” Getting another “Attack of the Brain-a-Saurus” vibe off this one.

What it looked to me was going on back there was Max was making valid suggestions to improve efficiency within the group, with the show implying that was he was being overbearing but not really demonstrating that. The only thing the show did to bother establishing that everyone was doing fine and he was only stepping on their toes besides an annoyed grunt from Buzz. They appear to have cleared the island in a timely fashion even with Max covering over half of it by himself and still taking time to give the rest of them advice.

This isn’t the Girl Scouts, and it certainly isn’t a high school basketball game. Here, the outcome IS the most important thing, and everyone getting a chance to participate shouldn’t even be a consideration. These guys are the only people who’re doing anything about a madman creating murderous giant animals. You do the job quickly, you do it right and you don’t complain about hurt feelings when someone tells you how you can be doing better. Lives are presumably at stake; if you’re gonna complain when your performance is critiqued, go home and get out of the way.

If the point of the show’s existence was to tell an entertaining story and mix its messages in as part of that story instead of the other way around, these clashes of personality would be fine, even encouraged (it’s all about finding a balance between what makes a good story and what’s smart for the characters to do). But in a show as simplistic and preachy and unironic as this, the kids sound like a bunch of whiners who can’t stand it when someone tells them they need to do better at stopping people from dying at the claws of vicious mutants.

I know they were dealing with stationary mushrooms back there, but I’ve watched this show for a while. Yes they do sometimes make moronic decisions in the middle of situations where something’s at risk, like Max described. Remember when Caruso and Max turned stopping an entire GROUP of giant mutants into a contest? Or when Buzz flew off to help an online gaming buddy without checking in or even leaving a note? This kind of shit is not limited to when there’s no factor of time and lives (including their own) aren’t at risk. Max isn’t exempt from that kind of thing either (remember when he turned his back on King Kong to help Buzz up?), but I agree with what he comes across as saying. Get your shit together, Dino Squad.

Between Max going around giving out pointers and the other kids confronting him about it, we saw a fish eat a mushroom they missed and mutating, and then a walrus eating the mutant fish and mutating. Now a giant walrus shows up and attacks them (and Caruso “comically” thinks Buzz is reminding him walruses live around there, somehow failing to notice a fifteen-foot mutant right in front of them). They morph and Max tries to take it on, but suddenly starts feeling sick and shrinks back to normal. The others load him onto Rodger’s back and try to make a break for it, which doesn’t work until Buzz manages to lure the walrus into the water.

Here's your bucket back, just don't kill me!

Then…oh lord, Moynihan surfaces next to them in her private submarine. A private submarine. What happened to their equipment being limited to whatever puny surplus she had from being a high school science teacher? Is she borrowing this from a marine biologist friend? Has she been stockpiling cash for centuries thanks to her never-explained immortality? And she can run that thing all by herself? Don’t submarines usually have big crews? Damn, for a show ostensibly created to teach kids stuff, there’s an awful lot about it they don’t seem to want you to think about.

She advises hustling Max to sick bay (boy, good thing she just happened to think to bring a damn submarine), because she can tell he’s running “a high fever” just from looking at him. He protests he just got a little dizzy, but she down votes him. After all, “Mothersaurus knows best.” I can’t pin down what it is that bugs me about her acting like their mom, even to the point of calling herself “mothersaurus”…but it does.

Using what looks to be a primitive tricorder, she does indeed scan Max and finds out that he’s been infected by a defrosted virus amped up by some of Veloci’s mutant juice. Fortunately she really does have a friend in every field and uploads what she’s learned to get her friend’s help in coming up with an antivirus because it really is that easy. Oh, and in case it matters, everyone’s been infected too, Max is just further along because he got infected first.

Max is suffering from a mutated prehistoric virus. Obviously.

Moynihan has Buzz and Caruso disinfect everything Max has touched, which smacks of shutting the barn door after the horses run out if she knows they’re all infected already. Rodger gets to work tracking the walrus. “Piece of large-tusked blubber cake.” Is that supposed to be a joke?

Meanwhile, Veloci picks up the signal on the walrus and goes after it. In his dirigble, by the way. I noticed that the usual dinosaur eye scene transition was of his eye when it switched to him. Is that supposed to be like the one from Transformers? Where the logo would flip to whichever side they were showing in the new scene?

Cut back to the kids, where we find out “Dr. Pat calculated the vaccine and the dosage for each of us based on age and body weight.” That’s convenient. And quick. Oh, and turns out you can administer a vaccine with an aerosol spray.

Love how Rodger's pulling back his sleeve even though HE DOESN'T HAVE SLEEVES.

They pick up Veloci on their Veloci alert (seriously), and leave in the boat to deal with the walrus before he can capture it. In his blimp. In their boat, which is submersible. As they leave, the other kids realize Max stowed away because he can’t let them do this without him. Then the show just throws up its hands and says the school teacher can have the same level of technology as a supervillain with his private corporation, as the boat goes onto land with pop-out tank treads.

The kids see the walrus and morph to not so much “attack” as run at it, allowing Max to realize how sick he still is, keel over and be hauled up into Veloci’s blimp. Our villain speeds away (in his blimp), gloating at having finally captured a PERfect dinosaur.

Oh, and even though Max is still too weak from the virus to even stand up (the kids found him lying down in the boat, implying he dragged himself there and collapsed), he stays in dino form this time. Because before they needed him to fit into the sub, now they need to make sure he doesn’t reveal his secret identity to the bad guy. Because that would destroy the status quo.

The kids are torn between saving Max and stopping the walrus before it “goes and eats a ship or something.” See? The stakes are serious. Fiona mentions that she mounted underwater versions of the anti-mutant guns on the boat, so maybe they can do both at once. Rodger calls Moynihan on his watch (see? They didn’t have to go all the way to the lighthouse), he asks her to hack into the controls of Veloci’s blimp and send them to his “handheld.” *sigh* Can they beat Veloci without hacking his computers? Just for a change of pace?

The kids restore the walrus to normal with shots from the boat’s eye-headlights (those are “underwater” versions of their guns?), and Veloci’s conveniently so eager to dissect a dinosaur he tells his goons to put the blimp on autopilot so he can have them help him get started right away.

Pchew! Pchew! Pchew!

Rodger turns the blimp around (and none of the bad guys notice), and they lower the boat’s roof. I was thinking “if they have dino-ejector seats on that thing, I quit” when Buzz dinos up and flies to the blimp instead. Aboard, Max is trying not to fall asleep and turn back to normal even though he was still conscious when the virus weakened him into changing back before. Also, I’m reminded of that episode of Justice League Unlimited where the Flash and Lex Luthor switch bodies, and Lex takes advantage of the situation to find out the Flash really is, only to realize he has no idea who the face belongs to. Or hell, Mirageman, where in the part where he's getting beat down by the gangsters they pull his mask off, but they never show up at his house to set a trap or kidnap his little brother. Yeah, Veloci's the head of a private corporation with tons of resources, but if he can't even stop a couple of meddling kids from upsetting an entire scheme by hacking into his computers every two out of three episodes...

Buzz flies to the top of the blimp and pecks his way through the metal roof (if the top of the blimp is cargo space, what’s keeping it in the air?), and it isn’t long before the goons come in and report it to Veloci. Along with the fact that the pteranodon they keep running into might have done it. Rodger sends the blimp into a dive then, making all the bad guys slip and fall toward the front. Buzz rips out just the right wire to set Max free, and seeing this, Veloci decides to…oh man, he’s really gonna do it. He turns to his dino form too.

Admittedly, his chances are looking a little better than usual since Max is still too weak to do much, but we did just see Buzz tear through metal with his beak, too. Rodger can apparently see the “fight” with some kind of radar on his handheld control gadget with a ridiculously long name (thankfully, Fiona tells him to stop naming the stupid thing and do something useful with it). He makes the blimp turn at just the right second to slam Veloci against the wall, giving Buzz the chance to rip another opening for him and Max to escape through. They turn back to normal and are picked up by the other kids.

Big trouble on a blimp. Obviously.

Y’know, with how often the Dino Squad upsets Veloci’s plans by hacking his computers, you’d think he’d look into stopping it. Even if his power as a dinosaur is no match for any of theirs, the resources and manpower he has available sure as hell is.

The kids get away in the sub, and Max admits he shouldn’t have snuck out and he shouldn’t have bossed everybody around. One guy can only do so much. Yeah, but that doesn’t mean the group should resist input.

But one moral isn’t enough for this episode. Fiona’s freaked out by the existence of this prehistoric virus. If global warming unleashed that, what could be next? While global warming is a problem, well…I feel like a dingus using TVTropes as the basis of an argument, but this seems awfully close to what they call a “Space Whale Aesop.”

Basically, the example comes from the fourth Star Trek movie, where an alien probe’s going to destroy the world, and only whales speak the same language as this thing. But whales are extinct in the future or something, so they have to go back in time to collect whales and have them tell the thing not to destroy the world. So save the whales, because someday they might be the only thing that can tell some alien gadget not to exterminate us.

Here it’s prevent global warming because some frozen life form might be resurrected and destroy us all. Viruses might indeed work that way, but with all the trademark bullshit Saturday morning science this show relies on already, it comes across as operating under the grossly mistaken idea that if encased in ice, something will be frozen in time and perfectly healthy upon being thawed. There are plenty of valid reasons global warming’s a problem, but I don’t care how many kaiju movies use this as the origin of their creature, ancient defrosted horrors are probably not among them. Let alone mutation juices that make them even more threatening.

I’m fine with shows venturing into the fantastic. Honestly, I kind of prefer it. But if your story’s going to take a real problem and pontificate on why it’s a problem, generally it’s recommended you explain why it’s bad in fairly realistic terms. I enjoy movies like Godzilla and Them!, but I also consider them a pretty stupid warning about the dangers of atomic power. Even all these years later, Dino Squad’s taking the exact same tact. “What’s next? Stuff we haven’t even thought of!” Fiona moans. A good point, but it might be a better one if it wasn’t coming from a show where every bit of important science and technology is flown in straight from fantasyland.

Max tries to reassure her that people are trying to find ways to deal with the problem, but doesn’t say thing one about who those people are or how concerned citizens can get involved. To drive its stupid parable home even further (and it looks like I was right about the eye wipe), Veloci collects a sample of the virus and ruminates “Global warming has potentialities even I never dreamed of.” We close on a glacier falling apart.

If the virus is in the water, how come he doesn't get infected?

This episode is etched indelibly on my soul now. Or something.

Would it be unfair of me to point this is the second Dino Squad review in a row to end without resolving a fairly big hanging plot thread? This time, that there was that mushroom the fish ate? Most of which was still left last time we saw it?

Eclipse Chapter 13 - Newborn

2012-01-31T14:50:00.007-06:00

1. “Our venom is the only thing that leaves a scar,” Jasper explains of his own numerous collection of bite marks. What? If vampires break your bones or tear your flesh or rip off your limbs, that won’t leave a scar?

He goes on to explain that there are part of the vampire world where “the life span of the never-aging is measured in weeks, not centuries.” Not that we’ll ever really see that. He further explains that the more people there are around, the easier it is for vampires to feed off them unnoticed. “I shuddered at the image in my head, at the word feed. But Jasper wasn’t worried about frightening me, not overprotective like Edward always was. He went on without a pause.” It’d be nice if the books seemed to be less on Edward’s side about this.

“Not that the covens in the South care much for what the humans notice or not. It’s the Volturi that keep them in check. They are the only ones the southern covens fear. If not for the Volturi, the rest of us would be quickly exposed,” he says. Bella’s reaction? “I frowned at the way he pronounced the name--with respect, almost gratitude. The idea of the Volturi as the good guys in any sense was hard to accept.” Or for that matter, the Volturi as intimidating, or these books as having complex morality.

“The North is, by comparison, very civilized. Mostly we are nomads here who enjoy the day as well as the night, who allow humans to interact with us unsuspectingly--anonymity is important to us all.” Thought vampires living in permanent groups, let alone having permanent residences, let alone living in relatively close contact with humans, was super-rare. Would be hard to let humans interact with you if close contact set off every feeding instinct you had, which I thought was the reason the Cullens were so special; they were able to live among humans because they’d learned to resist that impulse. But then, this isn’t the first time I’m complaining about Meyer being unclear about the workings of her fantasy world.

2. Anyway, southern vampires. Very vicious. Fighting for territory. Only held in check by the Volturi.

Jasper explains how a vampire named Benito took on a much larger group of vampires in territory he wanted to control by creating a group of newborn vampires of his own. “Very young vampires are volatile, wild, and almost impossible to control.” So why would they kill the people he wanted to kill? “One newborn can be reasoned with, taught to restrain himself, but ten, fifteen together are a nightmare. They’ll turn on each other as easily as on the enemy you point them at.”

Why would you enlist newborn vampires to fight on your side? “They’re incredible powerful physically, for the first year or so, and if they’re allowed to bring strength to bear they can crush an older vampire with ease. But they are slaves to their instincts, and thus unpredictable. Usually, they have no skill at fighting, only muscle and ferocity. And in this case, overwhelming numbers.”

Anyway, “your histories blame a disease for the population slump.” I dunno, with the Cullens living so close to humans, and the story insisting on keeping the narrator as far from anything potentially exciting as possible, I never perceived much of a difference between the human and vampire worlds. There’s the Volturi, I guess, but humans have groups that keep them in line through fear of punishment too.

“The Volturi finally stepped in. The entire guard came together and sought out every newborn in the bottom half of North America.” Really? How many vampires were fighting for the Volturi? Have their numbers grown since then? I guess putting an entire vampire war might make them badass…if it ever really got to a comparison for how tough all these characters are relative to each other. Yeah the Volturi beat Edward around, but we’d only seen him be more impressive than awkward teenagers, not how he stacks up against his own kind. When he fought James, the villain was outnumbered five to one. "Here's these guys, they're scary" isn't a mark of good writing.

Meyer might have actually wanted to watch one of those martial arts movies she seems to look down on. She might have learned something about making and demonstrating a scale of power. As it is, we’re basically asked to take her word for all of this. It would make stuff like this carry more weight: “Jasper shuddered. I realized that I had never before seen him either afraid or horrified. This was a first.” Since we haven’t seen him be a badass, or the Volturi be badasses, then the fact that Jasper’s scared of them doesn’t add much to the experience.

3. Neither does the joke “there was a lot of bad blood.”

4. But to the point of this story. You’ve probably heard about how Jasper was a major in the Confederate Army and wished you were reading a book about that instead. If you guessed he lied about his age to be able to enlist, for God’s sake go read something less predictable.

If you also guessed that “I was promoted quickly through the ranks, over older, more experienced men” and “I was the youngest major in Texas, not even acknowledging my real age,” then you may know some of the warning signs of Mary Sues. Wish our author did.

Look, it’s one thing to be significant because they’re the characters who interact with the protagonist the most, but did all of them have to be super-capable, charismatic, beautiful people who could sell ice to Eskimos…before they ever got their attributes souped up by vampirism? Does this really serve any purpose besides fanning the author’s ego? You’d think so, based on later events, but…no, not really.

5. “I remember the night very clearly.” To make the telling of it more dramatic, you see.

One night he ran into three ladies. “They were, without question, the three most beautiful women I had ever seen.” Not to mention “ I knew they were not lost members of our party. I would have remembered seeing these three.” Because vampires being pretty is something you don’t know anything about yet, Bella. Or at the very least is something a simp like you never gets tired of talking about.

Also gotta love how Jasper says up until then he didn’t believe in “ghosts or any other such nonsense.” The way he says it, it’s like he still kind of doesn’t believe in the possibility of other supernatural creatures. Even though he’s a vampire, married to a vampire, and has an all-vampire family. And is a 15-minute drive from where werewolves live. I’m not saying that because vampires and werewolves exist, that proves all supernatural creatures exist. But doesn’t that at least make it possible? If the legends are to be believed, the Quileutes have werewolf powers because they used to have astral projection powers. What else could be out there? Am I the only one who’d be asking?

In any case, yes, they were vampires, and they converted him to serve in their newborn army against some other vampire faction. You know, calling them “newborns” isn’t making them any scarier either. As with the Quileute legend, there isn’t a whole lot worth mentioning in an article like this, but that shows Stephenie Meyer’s not necessarily a bad storyteller, she mainly needs to fix her idea of what merits the most attention and not have a protagonist whose main contribution to the story is facilitating everyone else’s actions by being there. And one who isn’t also insane and happy to be a victim, I suppose, but I digress.

6. Well there are a few things worth mentioning, like Jasper telling us their names were Maria, Nettie and Lucy because every single damn character in a Stephenie Meyer story needs to be identified.

A couple unclear bits like Jasper mentioning that in their little newborn unit “I was rewarded often, and that made me stronger.” Does that mean he was given carnal incentives by the beauties and thus was willing to work harder, or does it have something to do with vampiric powers? With Meyer I can never tell.

There was the time Jasper was put in charge of the other newborns “as if I were being promoted. It suited my nature exactly.” Gee, that sounds an awful lot like bragging. Not the Cullens as a whole come across as that modest, but based on what we see (and don’t see), Jasper’s about as believable a great military commander as Bella is an enthralling temptress.

“I pulled together an army of twenty-three in the end -- twenty-three unbelievably strong new vampires, organized and skilled as no others before.” Ya know, considering a lot of Breaking Dawn centers around how little even vampires know about parts of being a vampire, and the emphasis on secrecy and thus the presumed discouragement of noticeable inter-vampiric conflict, I find it unlikely Jasper would know that with any certainty. And if he can’t do that, then it doesn’t sound all that awesome.

7. Apparently, Jasper’s emotion control doesn’t just work outward, strong emotions kind of seep back into him, too. Eventually he walked away from all this fighting. “Yet I had to keep killing. What choice did I have?” Well, seeing as Carlisle got the whole “veggie vampire” thing started by just deciding not to take human life…

I know, Jasper says he was a killing machine for so long it’s been hard to learn to be something else, and that’s why he slipped and attacked Bella that time. But that goes back to all these things we’re told about, but almost never see. Like struggling to ignore the part of the vampire psyche that tells you to eat people, which we hardly ever see in action. When Bella becomes vampiric, she barely has to struggle with it either. They try to explain that away, but in the end it just seems like more “take my word for it” crap from an amateur writer.

In the end Jasper ran into Alice. “She was there -- expecting me, naturally.” Yeah, because of that power that’s as specific or non-specific as the author needs it to be. She’d seen Carlisle’s self-deprivation experiments and when they arrived at the Cullen household she “greets them all by name, knows everything about them, and wants to know which room she can move into.” It would be so funny, if not for the fact that it isn’t.

“Alice has made all the difference,” Jasper concludes. And that would be romantic, if not for how your significant other being the only thing holding you back from suicide was portrayed as being a good thing.

8. With the story out of the way, Jasper gives his expert military opinion on the situation and confirms that yes, he thinks someone’s raising an army of newborns for some nefarious purpose. “Whoever made them just set them loose.” What do you mean, whoever? You’re telling me you don’t suspect anyone, given the events of the last book and the proximity to your precious Forks?

“It will only get worse, and it won’t be much longer till the Volturi step in. Actually, I’m surprised they’ve let this go on so long.” Me too. They’re really kind of lame for the all-powerful enforcers of vampiric law, huh?

Edward chips in, “ ‘Does it occur to anyone else that the only possible threat in the area that would call for the creation of an army is…us?’ Jasper’s eyes narrowed; Carlisle’s widened, shocked.” They also mention the vampiric intruder in Bella’s room and his/her seeming knowledge of Alice’s blindspots. If Meyer had bothered to give some indication there truly exist important happenings in the vampire world that don’t have anything to do with our couple, and the Cullens having some involvement with them, then it might make sense to be mysterious about what’s going on. She hasn’t, and it doesn’t.

Edward tries to bring up some pointless crap about how the Volturi could be involved, because Aro wants him and Alice working for him. Because via their powers he’d have visions of the past and the future at his fingertips, and he’d like that so much he’d be willing to break the Volturi’s own rules to get it. “A double betrayal.” You probably already figured out it’s not them just like I did, so we need say no more about this part, except I’m still not worried about the Volturi.

9. They get around to thinking about calling in some of their vampire buddies, like the vaunted Alaskan coven. “Kate and Eleazar would be especially advantageous on our side.” They are after all “the closest friends the Cullens had in the vampire world, practically extended family.” I’m all for including interesting characters, but for fuck’s sake include them. These guys aren’t in this book, they’re hardly even in Breaking Dawn.

Why won’t the Alaskan vampires help them? Because one of them got to be buddy-buddy with Laurent (remember him?), and refuses to help unless the Cullens help her kill the Quileutes in revenge. I’m compelled to ask if this vampire who wants to avenge Laurent knows that he was killed because he was helping an evil vampire and was intent on killing Bella. Which at least in the books’ universe is a bad thing.

I bring it up because the book doesn’t address that, and from what ridiculously little we’ve been told about the Alaskan coven (pretty much all of which you just learned) you’d assume they’re like the Cullens in that they don’t believe in killing unless it’s absolutely necessary. Is this one vampire so important that the rest of the group won’t help their good buddies the Cullens if she says no? Because it wasn’t Tanya, who sounds like the leader, it was someone named Irina. Is her veto enough to get the entire group to deny their help? I might be able to find that out in the guidebook, but I shouldn't have to, so I won't.

The upshot is the Alaskan vampires aren’t coming.

10. Without the Alaskans as reinforcements, Jasper says that they can probably still win, but not without casualties. “I wanted to scream out loud as I grasped what Jasper meant. We would win, but we would lose. Someone wouldn’t survive. I looked around the room at their faces -- Jasper, Alice, Emmett, Rose, Esme, Carlise…Edward--the faces of my family.”

As I won’t shut up about, spouting this kind of crap is no substitute for letting us develop an attachment to the characters. We’ve only gotten the chance to know a little over half of the group (inasmuch as “obsessed with having a baby” is a personality). As I’ve probably implied, I can’t say that’s helped me worry about the possibility of losing them. Nor has the fact that the author’s shown herself to be kind of a wimp when it comes to creating real problems, let alone real menaces.

Eclipse Chapter 12 - Time

2012-01-25T14:44:00.013-06:00

1. …is something Meyer’s get plenty of to kill.

2. “ ‘I have foreseen…,’ Alice began in an ominous tone. Edward threw an elbow toward her ribs, which she neatly dodged.” It’s like even the characters know how tension-free these books are if Alice has to dramatize things. It might even be entertaining if the series took itself a hell of a lot less seriously. Instead I’m again left wondering if there’s any reason the characters put up with Alice besides the usefulness of her power.

Wonder whose elbow Edward chucked at her.

3. Alice hasn’t actually seen anything ominous, in case you thought Meyer might finally break her losing streak. She actually reports she’s throwing a graduation party, which Bella agrees to attend. “And I’ll hate every minute of it. Promise.” How does our hyperactive precog reply? “That’s the spirit!” Is this supposed to be humor? I honestly don’t know. Even at Bella's damn wedding, she acts the same way she always does at festive occasions, which is to say like she can’t wait for it to be over. I’d talk about the graduation party, but her mind’s elsewhere for other reasons.

4. It turns out that “in the middle of all my obsessing over the time, my time had disappeared.” In that graduation is only a week away. Oh, please! Isn’t graduation the prelude to the end of her human existence? You’re telling me she hasn’t been counting the minutes? Besides, what about that weeks ago thing from chapter 10? She must be paying some attention to the date. This “I was so obsessed with the time I forgot about the time” thing is just retarded.

I cannot believe Steph’s trying to get philosophical about this mess now, talking about how her, I mean Bella’s desire to become a vampire. “After all, it was the key to staying with Edward forever.” Not to mention “there was the fact that I was being hunted by known and unknown parties. I’d rather not sit around, helpless and delicious, waiting for one of them to catch up with me. In theory, that all made sense. In practice…being human was all I knew. The future beyond that was a big, dark abyss that I couldn’t know until I leaped into it.”

It would help all this talking about “vampire emotions” and how Bella can’t have “human experiences” as a vampire if she bothered to establish what would be different about going to college as a sparkly abomination rather than a fleshy one. After all this, the only differences I’ve picked up is a change in diet and not having to give up half your time for the sake of sleep. I have yet to see a single non-human emotion from any of the non-human characters, and the series is over.

Bella gets so wrapped up in all this thinking that she sort of freezes. “Edward seemed to realize that I was only there in body; he didn’t try to pull me out of my abstraction.” Her abstraction? Okay, that’s just giving the complexity of the issue way too much credit. Even in light of the fact that Bella’s “lips are white” and “I exhaled in a big gust. How long had I been holding my breath?” Making Bella a moron who forgets to breathe just makes Bella a moron who forgets to breathe, it doesn’t make the situation of vampires wanting to kill her more dramatic.

“What could I say to him? That I was a coward?” No, just an idiot.

5. She again tries to press him to move up her getting changed, and again he resists. “Not one of us had a choice. You’ve seen what it’s done…to Rosalie especially.” Infertility did that to her, and you don’t have to be a vampire to be like that. I’m sorry, I’m still failing to see how being a vampire inflicts an avalanche of psychological changes. They’re as shallow as anybody in these books, just prettier.

Edward continues to insist that “You aren’t going through with this because a sword is hanging over your head. We will take care of the problems, and I will take care of you.” Stop telling me to be impressed, Steph, that’s not how it works. In fact if anything Bella’s more impressive than Edward, since she was the one who saved him from the dumbassery that led him to provoke the Volturi. And with how Bella’s the lamest protagonist ever, that’s really not helping the idea that he’s this formidable being.

“ ‘Carlisle promised,’ I mumbled, contrary out of habit. ‘After graduation.’ ” That’s actually a really vague answer if you think about it, because “after graduation” pertains to her whole life. And once again, this sounds like a really shaky relationship if she’s being “contrary out of habit.” Though of course, “I didn’t have it in me to argue.”

6. God, all this from four and a half pages. I need to step this up. There’s a limp attempt at character development where Bella asks what she’s getting Alice as a graduation present, turns out knows the answer and it’s concert tickets (from one of her visions, I presume), but it doesn’t say who’s performing, so there was no point.

Why does Edward keep dragging his feet on changing Bella, by the way? Because he thinks taking away her humanity in order to have her to himself for eternity would be “the most selfish act I can imagine.” You know, Edward’s kind of an idiot. Wanting someone around is part of having a relationship with them. If they consent, which Bella obviously does, then it’s not really selfish because it’s what they want too. In fact, wanting things is inherently selfish too. So once again this whole thing’s kind of a blind alley.

Sure, he tries to add “But for you, I want so much more,” but I still don’t know what’d be all that different between going to Dartmouth as a human and as a vampire. “Edward thought he was being selfish. I felt the smile slowly spread across my face.” He’s so stupid it’s kind of cute, huh? That’s what it sounds like.

He on the other hand is amazed at the idea that Bella was afraid he wouldn’t like her anymore after she changed because she became a vampire. I’d talk about how I’ve still yet to see any evidence of that with the series having concluded, but instead I’ll say I’m not sure where there is about her to change. Kind of a downside to giving someone as little detail as possible to make them easier for the reader to insert themselves into the role. As if any of the other characters are any deeper, and I don’t think Meyer wants people projecting themselves on the characters who can’t stand the whiny codependent bitch girl.

Remember how Edward asked Bella to marry him before he’d agree to be the one to convert her? Well, Bella reveals the reason for her hesitance to accept his terms, and it’s because she doesn’t want to be “that girl…The one who gets married right out of high school like some small-town hick who got knocked up by her boyfriend! Do you know what people would think? Do you realize what century this is? People don’t just get married at eighteen! Not smart people, not responsible, mature people!”

None of which she is. For that matter, knowing what she really wants to do, forsake her species for the sake of a boy (and to stay in the same age bracket as him for eternity, at that), and how eager she’s been to do it, I don’t see much of a difference between that and marrying young. Certainly not with the way that having the other in their life is shown to be the only thing keeping either of them from jumping off a cliff. Get the feeling Meyer thought this was really sophisticated of her, too, and it might be if not for the fact that Bella’s shown herself to be everything but “smart, responsible, mature.”

Besides, with how he’s casually broken into her home and treated her like she has no ability to make her own decisions, I’m not sure he does realize what century this is. She’s the one who reacted positively to that crap, or at the very least permitted it, so she was only reinforcing it.

By the way, this whole discussion ends up going nowhere, as usual, since it later turns out Bella’s creating a problem where there isn’t one. Again.

7. While trying to buy those concert tickets for Alice (even though “trying to surprise Alice wasn’t the brightest plan to begin with.” Why break the habit of a lifetime?), Bella reads a news story that goes on for almost three pages. What’s it about? The fact that people are being murdered in Seattle and it’s getting worse. If you’ve been following along at home, you may have noticed that attention was called to this twice already and that the Cullens are sure it’s because of a newborn vampire. We already know about this, and why it’s important. I’ve seen Steph tread some serious water before, but this…wow.

“It took me three tries to read the last sentence.” What was that sentence? “Only one conclusion is indisputable: something hideous is stalking Seattle.” Is she so hung up on vampire beauty that sentence scares her? By the way, as the last line sort of implies, the article sounds like it was written by a pretentious English major who doesn’t know anything about connecting with mainstream readers. I’m pretty sure most crime articles don’t actually read like college essays. Using wording like “more gruesome yet” and “slayings” and “Not a fingerprint, not a tired tread mark nor a foreign hair is left behind,” I mean. Man, I can’t wait to see what Dana does with this part.

Edward comes in, and confirms that they’ll have to do something soon. I have to ask, where are the Volturi? They’re so hung up on their secrecy, but we won’t see them until after the dust settles on this fiasco. They were willing to kill Edward for doing something people don’t even connect with vampires, not even in the Meyerverse, but they wait weeks to deal with vampire killings that have been repeatedly showing up in the news. I don’t buy that, do you? Do you buy that somebody expected you to buy that? I don’t. Fnck, soon we hear Carlisle talking about the killings, and apparently “They’ve had two specialists debating that possibility [of a serial killer] on CNN all morning.” CNN! Where are the Volturi?!

And I’m sorry to keep making this comparison, but this might even work if we heard that there was something more important going on that was occupying their attention until they finally do show up. In the Dresden Files, the main character hardly ever leaves his hometown (and there’s enough things actually going on to keep him there), but we hear updates from time to time on how the wizard organization is fighting basically an entire species of vampire offscreen. It explains a number of things, like why Harry tends to stand more or less alone against the evil he faces, that important things are going on elsewhere in the supernatural world, that the powerful factions involved are powerful and as such a lot’s at stake.

Here we see and hear nothing, and by and large the problems with the Volturi’s reputation are just being compounded. Honestly, Steph trapped herself. If the Volturi actually did show up, they’d have to do all the work to live up to their reputation, and that would just make the Cullens look lame. I know this is supposed to be a romance, but the vampires are still supposed to be badasses and we still need to see evidence to support assertions like that. And the Volturi couldn’t do anything about Bella because the books would end on a bullshit anticlimax (not that they don’t anyway). At the same time, if it was explained that the Volturi were elsewhere putting down other vampires, that would’ve meant there are more important things in the world than Bella and Edward. Something I really, really don’t see Steph being willing to admit. Even with that crap explanation for the next book’s cover art.

I'm only saying that having a character be important for other reasons than because they're the main character is a good idea. The reason Harry Dresden's important, and the reason he's looked up to by a lot of the younger members of the magical community, is that despite the fact that there are plenty of wizards around he's one of the few taking an active approach to making a positive difference with his abilities. I don't think I have to say I still don't get the hoopla about Bella. Hell, by and large she's a spectator in her own story.

I’m sorry for thinking about your grown-up take on creatures of the night, Steph. I'm actually sorry for mentioning your books in another Twilight review, Jim.

8. As for why the Cullens aren’t moving in to end this yet, they’re waiting for Alice to see what’ll happen so they’ll know how to react. The thing is, since they haven’t decided to go yet, Alice hasn’t seen them going yet, and has nothing to report. Yeah, having no intelligence apparatus outside the inconsistent precog, especially when somebody’s after your girlfriend and you think it’s somebody as powerful as you who knows how to avoid being seen by the precog, is kind of stupid, isn’t it?

Oh, and Bella spends a little while telling us about how devoted Jasper is to Alice. “It was my unspoken assumption that he was only there for Alice. I had the sense that he would follow Alice anywhere, but that this lifestyle was not his first choice.” Don’t tell us this, give Jasper more screentime and let us see it for ourselves. Steph might say I’m taking this too seriously, but I’d say the fact that she doesn’t might be why all those people are saying those mean things about her books.

9. Edward picks up a thought from Jasper, which prompts him to decide it’s time to explain his history to Bella. “She’s one of us now,” after all.

“His words took me by surprise. As little as I’d had to do with Jasper, especially since my last birthday when he’d tried to kill me, I hadn’t realize [yes, no “d”] that he thought of me that way.” And why shouldn’t she be? She’s Bella fncking Swan!

For the first time Bella notices that Jasper has a scar just like the one James gave her, and he replies “I have a lot of scars like yours, Bella.”

He shows them to her, “And then I gasped, staring up at him. ‘Jasper, what happened to you?” Well gee, maybe some people have actual dangerous experiences instead of just worrying about having them all the time, Bells.

Eclipse Chapter 11 - Legend

2012-01-16T14:35:00.002-06:00

1. “ ‘Are you gonna eat that hot dog?’ Paul asked Jacob, his eyes locked on the last remnant of the huge meal the werewolves had just consumed.” We’re beginning at the aftermath of something again. I guess watching the werewolves eat dinner wouldn’t have been that interesting, but then that’s not saying much about Meyer’s priorities as to what is worthy of inclusion.

2. Speaking of the banquet, Jacob apparently went a little nuts. “He heaved a sigh and patted his stomach. It was somehow still flat, though I’d lost count of how many hot dogs he’d eaten after his tenth. Not to mention the super-sized bag of chips or the two-liter bottle of root beer.” Because weight gain is noticeable immediately after a meal? And it’s not like the previous book established that being a werewolf burns a ton of calories with the huge meals Emily was making for them. Something else our pro at weird seems to have forgotten.

Jacob also skewers a hotdog and tosses it to his buddy, and “Paul caught it neatly on the right end without difficulty. Hanging out with no one but extremely dexterous people all the time was going to give me a complex.” Love how she says that like this is the first we’re hearing about Bella’s discontent at being normal or something…

“Funny, I hadn’t noticed the sun had set yet.” I know this is another blog’s schtick, and she’ll probably get to it in time, but…LEAST. OBSERVANT. NARRATOR. EVER.

3. After apparently mentioning that Edward plans to go biking with her sometime to Jacob, “he had admitted ruefully that the helmet was a good idea that he should’ve thought of himself.” Wow, if that isn’t the lamest attempt at ass-covering I ever saw (and I mean the author, not Jacob), I don’t know what is. I know Bella doesn’t care about her safety, but don’t the super-powered guys vying for her affections? The ones we keep hearing are so volatile they could just as easily lash out at her? You’d think they’d want to take some steps. Then again, they never do.

Anyway, the bonfire part of the bonfire party gets started and Bella wonders about what the other wolves think. “Would they be angry with Jacob for inviting me? Would I ruin the party?” Were they angry with him for bringing her around before? I can think of plenty of reasons why they’d be mad at Jacob for associating with someone in so deep with the Cullens, but the books never address any of them.

Of course not, it’s Bella! “Embry greeted me loudly. Quil had jumped up to give me a high five and kiss me on the cheek. Emily had squeezed my hand when we’d sat on the cool stone ground beside her and Sam.” Yeah, having your Sue be wracked by insecurity doesn’t make her not a Sue. It also makes her views on danger seem fake. “I was treated like someone who belonged,” indeed.

4. There’s some crap about the tribal elders and the relationships of the tribe members, and all I’ll saying is what I’ve been saying: I don’t know who these characters are or why any of this matters. We have to get a chance to know these characters before you start talking about the status of their relationships and lots in life, or they’re just names and the things that are happening are just things that are happening, not to people. It ends up coming across as more boring filler pretending to be something thought-provoking.

5. Bella brings up that it’s getting late to Jacob, and he tells her the best part of the party’s coming. She asks “What’s the best part? You swallowing an entire cow whole?” Why did you come if you’re going to be an insulting little bitch? Jacob laughs it off so maybe it was joking banter, but with how nearly every meeting they have ends with them getting pissed at each other, well, after a while the playful barbs don’t sound so different from the real ones. Just sayin’.

6. We hear the legend of how the Quileutes gained their wolf-morphing powers. It’s not a bad story, I guess (and there really isn’t a lot to say about it, so my apologies for a short review), but if anything it just goes to show how poorly-etched the vampire-human romance thing that makes up the mainline story is.

The original Quileutes could separate their spirits from their bodies, and one of them found it necessary to inhabit the body of a wolf. His power was thus shifted to being able to assume a human or lupine form, which some of his sons also inherited. This is what I'm talking about when I say the Quileutes are probably the only werewolves.

Also, we find out that vampires’ amputated limbs are still alive and apparently they can put themselves back together unless immolated. It only took two and a half books to say that. Although I don’t see how healing works with that whole “forever unchanging” thing about them.

Bella pays special attention to mention of the first werewolf’s third wife, and how she sacrificed herself when a vampire threatened her family.

7. They wrap up the story by basically saying that the Cullens’ presence really is the cause of their young men wolfing out, although I still say the way it was presented in the actual story makes it seem more like it didn’t happen until after they left and Victoria was free to pursue her vendetta without the sparklepires’ interference.

Anyway, “And so the sons of our tribe again carry the burden and share the sacrifice their fathers endured before them.” Okay, so let’s roll with this based on the books tell us. The Cullens are the reason there are so many werewolves. Carlisle, the great, wise, beneficent Carlisle, forced this upon them with his insistence on staying in Forks. Sure, most of them seem to be okay with it, but as I said before, these aren’t characters we know, and it’s explored about as deeply as anything else. Meaning all we really see in regards to most of these characters is they’re all “Wolf powers are awesome and vampires suck!” What about the part about being forced to do whatever the pack leader tells you? To face the possibility that you’ll be forced to fight someone you consider a friend or something else you object to? He doesn’t have to threaten you or anything, you just do it. It’s part of being a werewolf.

The only time the intricacies of that are gotten into, it’s just to show that Jacob doesn’t have to take those orders and anymore, and the reason for that is he was supposed to be the leader but didn’t want it. When he claims his heritage, he stops having to take orders What about the wolves who might have objections and don’t have a chief somewhere down their family tree? Yeah if there turns out to be more than one leader the wolves can follow whichever one they want, but since only the wolves who go with him start getting development and even then it’s only about what they want to do after this is over, it’s as I said mainly just an excuse to get Jacob out from under the pack’s thumb.

But all that functional slavery, all that imprinting nonsense, the books are saying we’ve got Carlisle to thank for that. Carlisle who’s such a great guy he’s even got friends among the Volturi. Somehow I don’t think that occurred to the author. Or maybe it did, but based on how imprinting’s ultimately treated as a good thing, she thought it was just another saintly act on his part.

Then again, since his insistence on staying is based on Bella's insistence on staying, maybe we can thank her for that crap.

8. Bella thinks about the third wife and how she was able to make a huge contribution to a desperate battle, and spare the people she loved despite being an ordinary human. She’s in fact bummed that somebody who didn’t something that great didn’t have her name remembered by the legends. Yes, that’s set up, and what it’s setting up is just saaaaaad.

9. Turns out Jacob actually called Edward to come pick Bella up and take her home. “I figured if I played nice, I’d get more time with you.” I’m sorry, but with how they really don’t seem nearly as friendly as Bella insists, and with how she’s chosen Edward by this point, this really comes across as stringing Jacob along.

After Edward does get her (while pacing at the edge of Quileute territory, which might seem like a flaw if there was anything to him but), he says she’ll have to tell him the stories sometime. “I won’t get it right,” she replies. Fnck her. We’re almost halfway through the third of four books. Time for some character development to start showing.

In fact once she goes to bed she has another nightmare. I don’t care what, listening to her moaning while she’s awake is annoying enough. Thinking about it while Meyer’s trying to be symbolic would be giving these books a dignity they do not deserve.

10. She wakes up to find Edward was reading her copy of Wuthering Heights, even though he voiced distaste with it earlier in the book. This one, I mean. He thinks, “the more time I spend with you, the more human emotions seem comprehensible to me.” What’s the difference, may I ask? All I really know about Edward is he’s paranoid, reactionary, possessive, singleminded and hung up on opulence. Those are hardly traits unique to the undead. That implies vampires have different emotions, and we really never see that. The drive to feed, just because it’s on something different, isn’t a difference. Humans can do crazy desperate things when they get hungry enough too.

“I’m discovering that I can sympathize with Heathcliff in ways that I didn’t think possible before.”

11. “I dressed quickly, low on options. Whoever had ransacked my hamper had critically impaired my wardrobe. If it wasn’t so frightening, it would be seriously annoying.” If Bella didn’t seem like the kind of person who just throws on anything that’s clean, I might sympathize. Double that since the only people whose opinions matter to her wouldn’t care if she wore a potato sack. Double, double that since she’s always reminding us how she can never look anything but totally out of place next to somebody as perfectly perfect as Edward.

12. What part from the book was Edward talking about specifically? Well, the whole passage is copied onto the page, but the specific bit is where he says “The moment her regard ceased, I would have torn his heart out and drank his blood!” Edward’s supposed to be smart, right? Smart enough to know that wasn’t meant to be taken literally, right? Right?

I’m pretty sure that’s the part he was talking about in spite of the chapter closing on Bella assuring herself that’s not what Edward meant. The book could’ve fallen open to any page. She sucks so bad she can’t even lie to herself convincingly.

Eclipse Chapter 10 - Scent

2012-01-07T15:52:00.005-06:00

1. “It was all very childish. Why on Earth should Edward have to leave for Jacob to come over? Weren’t we past this kind of immaturity?” In these books? Are you kidding? I suppose it’s based on this kind of observation that we’re supposed to see Bella as all mature, but instead it reduces her to a forgetful idiot again in the name of reminding us of something spelled out very clearly in the last book. Which is that vampires and werewolves can’t stand the way the other smells (another thing that just goes away when it’s convenient). Not helped by how she trivializes the Quileutes’ longstanding distrust of vampires, or that the entire reason they rediscovered their lupine heritage was as an instinctual reaction to vampires being around. Or that she’s totally forgotten that Edward was effectively kidnapping her, because gosh darn it he’s pretty.

“ ‘I’ll be right back,’ he said, and then laughed aloud as if I’d just told a good joke.” No danger of that, her powers of humor are second only to her ability to live up to the praise she gets.

She asks what’s so funny but Edward just grins and disappears. Bella grumbles a little to herself. “It was hard to get used to how much faster Jacob was without his car. How everyone seemed to be so much faster than me…” Because she’s such a worthless human and can’t do anything of note without supernatural powers. In the mind of this author, anyway. Which gets me to thinking, what exactly is different about going to college as a human and as a vampire? Even the doors the Cullens’ money opens are the same either way. Yeah, yeah, there’s that whole grappling with her instinct to feed for the first while as a vampire, but I don’t want to shock you, that’s a false alarm too.

2. That’s when Jake appears (how come Edward’s name is never shortened one time in the entire series? It’s not like he actually acts like a proper gentleman whose image would be hurt by being called “Eddie”). “Should you really leave your door unlocked like that?” he asks. Would it really keep out anybody with supernatural powers? I know they’re lame, but they’re not that lame.

“I’m not worried about anyone who would be deterred by a locked door.” I guess that’s meant to contrast the people after Bella with ordinary criminals, but really think about what that says for a second. I’m not worried about anyone who would be deterred by a locked door either, and I’m pretty sure no vampires want to kill me.

“ ‘Is it really so impossible to wear clothes, Jacob?’ I asked. Once again, Jacob was bare-chested, wearing nothing but a pair of old cut-off jeans.” Oh like you’re complaining, queen of shallow relationships. Especially since she follows up with “I had to admit, they were impressive.”

3. But continuing on with the physics of changing to a creature of greater size, Bella doesn’t get how it’s a pain to carry a complete change of clothes whenever he wolfs out. “His expression was superior, like I was missing something obvious. “My clothes don’t just pop in and out of existence when I change -- I have to carry them with me while I run. Pardon me for keeping my burden light.’ ” And not wanting to carry his used undershorts in his mouth, one presumes.

“I changed color. ‘I guess I didn’t think about that.’ I muttered,” not to mention “I hoped he realized that my blush was left over from embarrassment at my own stupidity.” And not because he’s a half-naked hottie.

You know, Bella can have things explained to her without having to be a moron. Hell, if she’s so smart she could probably figure out for herself that your clothes don’t disappear to some convenient other dimension when you change to your super-powered form and conveniently come back totally unscathed when you change back. After all, Twilight’s so much more grown-up and realistic than other vampire fiction.

4. Because Stephenie Meyer has no other idea how to fill space, they start to talk. Specifically, Jacob asks her what it’s like going out with a vampire. “I rolled my eyes. ‘It’s the best.’ ” Really? Because with what she does before saying it, that sounded sarcastic in my head. He asks if it ever creeps her out, and she immediately replies “Never.” Which still doesn’t assure us why what she and Edward have going on is so solid. Even though Jake ragging on her boyfriend is a perfect opportunity to give us some idea of why they’re so right for each other and why in the hell we should be rooting for them.

Bella gets to prove she’s such a pro at weird again when Jacob asks if Bella’s set a date on when exactly she’s going to become a vampire and squeezes a knife. Resulting in him slicing his hand, resulting in Bella freaking out to the point that “The room started to shimmer a little around the edges.” Literally two pages go by before he casually reminds her werewolves heal fast and it’s no big deal. (“I told you this. You saw Paul’s scar.”) Just so we all know, this isn’t a human flaw. Bella’s still a panicky bitch after becoming a vampire.

“It’s a little different, seeing the action sequence firsthand.” Is that supposed to be an explanation or Bella covering her ass for forgetting?

5. He invites her to come out to a bonfire party at La Push. “ ‘Emily will be there, and you could meet Kim…And I know Quil wants to see you, too. He’s pretty peeved that you found out before he did.’ I grinned at that. I could just imagine how that would have irked Quil -- Jacob’s little human gal pal down with the werewolves while he was still clueless.” Imagine how effective this would be if we had any idea who these guys were and the kind of personalities they’ve got.

She reminds him vampires want to kill her, and he responds, “C’mon, you think somebody’s going to get past all -- all six of us?” Yes, that pause is really in the book. Bottom of 223. And with Bella even gets nervous about the idea about vampires fighting vampires, I’d imagine she can think of that very easily.

6. She goes to ask Superboyfriend if it’s okay, and as she does Jacob pipes up, “You know, I saw this story on the news last week about controlling, abusive teenage relationships and--” She cuts him off, but that only adds weight to his and the haters’ claims when the author herself brings it up and Bella has no response.

As soon as Jacob’s gone Edward’s back, “raindrops glistening like diamonds set into the bronze of his hair.” Shut up already.

Edward got the mail while he was out, including an acceptance letter from Dartmouth in response to an application she didn’t send. No, it’s still not cute. She thinks of her parents learning about this, Charlie specifically, “no one in the town of Forks would be able to escape the fallout from his excitement.” Because if she just said “in town” we’d think she meant some other town than the one she lives in. More to the point of these books sucking, it’d seriously help Bella’s “real” problems if she’d stop dramatizing things like getting accepted to college. Sure, it’s Dartmouth, but I didn’t know that was a super-prestigious college. Would a smalltown police chief unless somebody told him (she certainly wouldn’t, but Edward might just to see her squirm)? Kinda doubt it.

She tries to get Edward to focus on her desire to live through high school, and he assures her she’s got nothing to worry about. And it’s still just hot air, coming from this guy who we’ve never seen go up against somebody who’s a match for him, let alone anticipate a desire for revenge for all his higher education (and it’s even worse in the next book).

7. It turns out I got ahead of myself last review. Bella asks Edward to ask Alice to give back some of the stuff she got out of Bella’s room for the “slumber party,” and it’s now they realize that Alice didn’t take the stuff that’s missing, it was the other guy who invaded the house. It’s now they realize that it was to get her scent, and it’s now they realize it was probably another vampire. Although I’m not sure who else they thought would want to get at Bella.

See what I mean about Edward being such a formidable opponent? This is supposed to be a surprising revelation, and that fact alone says plenty about the idiot world we’re dealing with.

Also about Meyer’s choice of what merits chapter titles.

8. Edward runs out to get the paper and comes back a second later “new diamonds in his hair.” Love how the revelation that it’s not just a regular guy who broke into her house but an invincible vampire does nothing to detract from her appreciation of Edward’s good looks.

Why did he want the paper? Because it reports the killing spree going on in Seattle is still going on. No way, you mean that was important to the plot?! And the Cullens aren’t keeping up with that when they’re sure newborn vampires are behind it? What formidable creatures of the night…

“Altogether out of control. This can’t be the work of just one newborn vampire. What’s going on? It’s as if they’ve never heard of the Volturi. Which is possible, I guess. No one has explained the rules to them…so who is creating them, then?” Uh, the evil vampire who spent the entire last book trying to get at Bella? Who was never caught?

As for the Volturi, again, they’re not scary because the author says so. And how are newborns expected to hear about Volturi policy? I mean, if their rule, singular, is to keep the existence of vampires hidden, how do vampires usually learn the rules? I suppose if a vampire wants somebody else to be a vampire, they probably care about that person enough to tell them to stay out of sight or risk the Volturi’s wrath. What about cases like Carlisle’s, though, where the vampire bites the person but leaves before they change? These guys need a better network. Especially since this killing spree’s getting front page coverage and it’s obvious enough to the Cullens a newborn’s behind it. If the Volturi are so damn big on maintaining vampiric secrecy, when are they planning to do something about this? Where's the point where they decide it's not okay and they have to do something? To have the kind of reputation they do, they’d need to react faster. For pity’s sake, we first heard about the killing spree at the beginning of the book, and according to a line on this page (229) it’s been weeks since then.

In any case Edward suggests that maybe they can prevent the Volturi from deciding it’s necessary to step in (and while they’re in the area, probably check on Bella) by telling the new guy the rule. They’ll wait until Alice has an idea of what’s going on, though. How many things is she watching out for by now? She must have some kind of limit. Edward also cites it’s good that Jasper’s on their side because he’s “sort of an expert on young vampires.” Yes, he slipped and almost ate Bella. I’d imagine he is. Not that Edward’s going to explain what he means to his true love, as usual.

Then there’s this.

Edward: “It does feel that way, doesn’t it? Like it’s coming at us from all sides these days.” He sighed. “Do you ever think that your life might be easier if you weren’t in love with me?”
Bella: “Maybe. It wouldn’t be much of a life, though.”
Edward: “For me,” he amended quietly.
Starofjustice: “For him?”

9. Edward changes the subject to the “werewolf soiree,” because he was listening in, of course. He assures her that “You don’t have to ask my permission, Bella. I’m not your father -- thank heaven for that.” Up your sparkly bunghole, Mr. Cullen. Neither of you deserve any sympathy, and that’s knowing everything that’s going on. I can only imagine how much Charlie must hate him not being able to hear the whole story.

She does think about going. “I wanted to escape the death threats, just for a few hours…to be the less-mature, more-reckless Bella.” Excuse me? How’s that possible? Edward isn’t helping his image when he reminds her “I told you I was going to be reasonable and trust your judgment.”

10. Of course she does decide to go, because why not keep jerking Jacob around a while longer? “I had decided, after a short internal debate, that I would not sell my motorcycle. I would take it back to La Push where it belonged, and, when I no longer needed it anymore…” Where it belonged? And “when I no longer need it anymore…” Roundabout way of saying “when I could outrun it on foot.”

As for her decision to ride the motorcycle again, Edward buys a bike of his own just for the occasion. “I started at the beautiful machine. Beside it, my bike looked like a broken tricycle. I felt a sudden wave of sadness when I realized that this was not a bad analogy for the way I probably looked next to Edward.” No, but it is a bad way to make me care about anything bad happening to her…

He also gives her a helmet, which she resists wearing because “I’ll look stupid.” If she’s not going to care about her safety, why should I? Of course, since it’s Edward asking, one smile is all it takes to get her to acquiesce. Yep, care even less after that.

“You’re silly. I suppose that’s part of your charm,” our hero opines. It’s the only explanation.

11. So yeah, they ride out to the edge of werewolf country where Jacob’s waiting for them (they actually go in Edward’s Volvo, though). Jacob runs up and hugs her in sight of Edward, and it’s supposed to be symbolic or something that “I heard the Volvo’s engine growl” right afterward. She tries to get Jake to cut it out, but she’s the one who thought of the Quileutes as “big idiot wolf-boys” when she decided to come.

“He’s being pretty dang pleasant about this; you don’t need to push your luck,” she says. So pleasant he was revving the engine to voice his displeasure at Jake manhandling his girlfriend?

To that he replies, “Bella, you can’t push what you don’t have.” It’s not a bad exit line, but it kind of kills the question of will he or won't he end up with Bella. These books aren't exactly packed with surprises, and if even he knows he has no luck with Bella, well...

Eclipse Chapter 9 - Target

2011-12-31T15:36:00.005-06:00

1. “Alice dropped me off in the morning, in keeping with the slumber party charade. It wouldn’t be long until Edward showed up, officially returning from his ‘hiking’ trip. All of the pretenses were starting to wear on me. I wouldn’t miss this part of being human.”

Me too. Especially when what they’re working to conceal is this boring. In fact, I love Charlie just that much more for wanting to know as little as possible about his idiot daughter’s real life when they finally drop the bomb on him.

2. Charlie passes on a message from Jacob, who wants to apologize, and asks her to go easy on the boy. “I grimaced. Charlie didn’t usually editorialize on my messages.” Well sooooooooooooorry you dumb bimbo. He’s a concerned parent and Jacob’s her oldest friend. Plus the only reason he’s got to like Edward is his insane offspring’s say-so.

“Jacob could just go ahead and be upset. I didn’t want to talk to him. Last I’d heard, they weren’t big on allowing phone calls from the other side. If Jacob, preferred me dead, then maybe he should get used to the silence.” Show me why the Cullens are better. Show me why Edward’s a better match for her. Show me why I should give a crap about this girl. Don’t tell me, provide examples and don’t contradict them.

Charlie: “That’s not very attractive behavior, Bella. Forgiveness is divine.”
Bella: “Mind your own business.”
starofjustice: “You know, I think I might've judged Bella a little too harshly. Or maybe I'm just being sarcastic"

3. Once she’s up in her room, the brat realizes some of her laundry’s missing. “Was Charlie doing laundry? That was out of character.” What about all those years before she moved in, and he presumably had to get his own food and wash his own clothes? She remembers Alice sneaking into the house for some changes of clothes over the course of their “slumber party” and brushes it off. I’m hardly even bothered anymore about how nonchalant our relatable protagonist is about them doing stuff like that.

Of course it does matter, because Edward shows up a little later, somewhat on edge. He asks her to stay where she is for two seconds but because he’s an awesome vampire and blah blah blah he’s back before Bella actually counts to two. He explains that a vampire, but one whose scent he doesn’t recognize (meaning not Victoria), snuck into her house and stole her laundry to get her scent.

They surmise it’s probably one of the Volturi, but well, didn’t Edward have chances to get the scents of nearly all of them and their guards at the end of the last book? Assuming he’d never met them before then? And why bother to sneak into her house to sniff her panties? Why not just look wherever Edward is? Shouldn’t they be looking for him too? Yeah their leader’s supposed to be like bosom buddies with his dad, but what about their all-important secrecy and how Edward got all pouty and was willing to compromise it to force them to kill him? I don’t care what flimsy rationale Steph provides to keep him alive, if the Volturi are supposed to be the terrifying enforcers of vampire law, I need to see some assurance of that. Like not rolling over and letting this vampire kid who’s obviously willing to flout their authority if it suits his wants go free because it would complicate things for the author if they didn’t.

As well, am I really supposed to think the Volturi are really that badass when there’s like nine of them altogether, counting their guards? Speaking of the Volturi guard, how many of the group are actually involved in doing any enforcing? Do they have the manpower to enforce their law on the world’s entire vampire population and the ability to spot and react to threats in a timely manner? Given the ending to this book I’m tempted to doubt it.

Things aren’t exactly helped when Edward promises his brothers will sweep the woods for intruders. Aren’t the Volturi supposed to be older and better at stalking than the Cullens? That being their job and such? Emmett and Jasper will be able to find any vampiric intruders in the woods, even those far more experienced than they are, but remain undetected themselves? Sorry, don’t buy it.

Bella asks if he thinks Alice saw anything, and staring “at the road through narrowed eyes, ‘Maybe.’ ” His plan to keep Bella alive and not a vampire centered around Alice assuredly seeing the Volturi coming to look for them, right? Damn it, is anything consistent in these books? Could there be anything to those claims of bad writing?

4. They do indeed go to check with Alice, who has no idea what happened, which has Edward hissing “How is that possible?” If we had a stable definition of how her power worked, then maybe there could be an answer to that question. For Bella’s part, she gives him “a quiet reproof. I didn’t like him talking to Alice this way.” Really? Because every time she and Alice spend time together Alice seems to be doing something that annoys her. In Breaking Dawn they even start saying out loud how annoying Alice can be. Quit telling, start showing. Damn.

Alice defends herself saying “It’s not an exact science” and “if I try to do too much, things are going to start slipping through the cracks.” In any case she doesn’t think it’s the Volturi. “I would have seen that.” Oh would you now? What exactly is the difference, again?

“Who else would leave Charlie alive?” Edward asks. Somebody with no beef with him, but a much more understandable beef with his daughter? Somebody looking to remain inconspicuous, which would seem difficult if you were to say kill the police chief in a small town? Especially the only small town in the world that’s a 15-minute drive from the home of a pack of their species’s natural enemies? Edward needs to read more fantasy. He might learn something useful, and lord knows he’s got nothing better to fill his free time.

5. Anyway the idiots then, *sigh* sit down and talk about what could be going on. Alice is sure the Volturi haven’t sent anybody to check on Bella yet. “Aro hasn’t asked anyone to look for her yet. I will see that. I’m waiting for it.” And “If whoever it was meant to wait for Bella, Alice would have seen that. He -- or she -- had no intention of hurting Bella. Or Charlie, for that matter.” Even after she’d been writing about these characters and for a while and had hopefully hit her stride by now, I still get the feeling Steph didn’t want to set anything too concrete down for Alice’s power.

Edward suggests this could be “Caius’s idea,” and I once again must irritably point out that if you’re going to throw these names around we should know who they mean. I sort of remember Caius as one of the Volturi leaders, but he was overshadowed by Aro and I was distracted by how those guys didn’t live up to their rep at all. Although when they bring up Jane I do remember her, because of how much fun I had reading about her torturing Edward and thereby Bella. Although that’s a bad sign too.

6. They get Carlisle to check the scent of the vampire in Bella’s house and he says it’s nobody he ever met either. Alice also says the timing of this was a little too perfect, like the intruder knew about her precognition and was deliberately taking steps to avoid it. I’m not looking forward to relaying how Meyer tries to explain how that works with such a poorly-described ability in the first place.

Bella, of course, tries to seize this opportunity to convince the Cullens to change her, but Edward says “quickly, ‘It’s not that bad. If you’re really in danger, we’ll know.’ ” Forgive me if I fail to be reassured with their rather unimpressive track record so far. Oh, I’m sorry for wanting to see how capable these characters are with my own eyes.

She pleads with them. “As long as I’m around Charlie, he’s a target too. If anything happened to him, it would be all my fault!” And not because he’s in charge of law enforcement in the area and has to make things like murderers and burglars his business because of reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with his daughter. And besides, if that’s the case, once again it seems to me the simpler solution is to just leave. Yeah it might seem suspicious, but just before this Bella was talking about how big the vampire world really is and how many murders and disappearances happen thanks to hungry vampires (not to harp on this but again that's something the Dresden Files did better, by incorporating the discussion in what a significant character was going through rather than just a random thought by the narrator). As a species it isn’t something that seems to give them many problems unless they’re attracting attention on purpose. And with how quickly and completely the Cullens vanished from Forks without warning in New Moon, that doesn’t sound like something that would stop them if they had a good reason to not be there anymore.

But it would be even harder on the author to pretend there’s any drama if she acknowledged that possibility, so forget it. Indeed, “And I could see, looking at all of their beautiful faces, that nothing I could say was going to change their minds.” We’ve still got a protagonist who isn’t good for anything, and an author who doesn’t think readers are getting a little sick of casually hearing how beautiful vampires are. Encouraging, yes?

7. “It was a quiet ride home. I was frustrated. Against my better judgment, I was still human.” Judgment as in “I’m still getting older than my boyfriend, I’m still useless because I don’t have superpowers, and I don’t trust the family I want to join to live up to their promises to keep me safe.” Adorable.

She further gripes that the Cullen watching her at all times will get bored and have to kill her themselves to break the monotony. “Edward gave me a sour look. ‘Hilarious, Bella.’ ” I know, wasn’t it? Maybe she’s not so hopeless after all.

These books are so frigging stupid. “Charlie was in a good mood when we got back. He could see the tension between me and Edward, and was misinterpreting it.” It’s not like he knows any better, and as I can’t stop saying the only reason Bella and Edward are a good match is everybody keeps saying so. I wouldn’t let my daughter date a guy like him, especially not when she semi-frequently comes back from time spent with him with serious injuries.

Anyway, Jacob’s called again, and again Charlie entreats his bitch daughter on the lycanthrope’s behalf. “Don’t be petty, Bella. He sounded really low.” She fires back, “Is Jacob paying you for all the P.R., or are you a volunteer?” Are you and Edward really meant for each other, or is it a hack author hoping that if she says so often enough, that’ll make up for the actual writing?

Bella does express some envy at Jacob’s dad knowing about his supernatural activities, though. “How easy it must be when you had no secrets from the person you lived with.” As I just implied, Bella would probably only have more problems with her dad if he knew what was really going on. At least during the period where she’s still living under his roof. This narrator is not a very thoughtful narrator. But I knew that.

8. “In the morning, Charlie left to go fishing with Deputy Mark before I was up.” Who? “I decided to use this lack of supervision to be divine.” That sounds kind of pompous…

Upon calling Jacob (with Edward over her shoulder), the wolf-boy notes “Holding grudges is not one of your many talents.” Again, she’s not forgiving, she has no spine. He promises endless favors in exchange for forgiveness for his behavior, and when she of course gives it, “I can’t believe I was such a jerk.” You weren’t, Jake. You were speaking for hundreds of thousands of readers who dared to use their brains while following Bella’s travails.

Then Edward gets on the phone and briefly explains that somebody appears to be stalking Bella and “I won’t be letting Bella out of my sight till I get this taken care of.” You mean like all the rest of the time, too?

Jacob fires back with some suggestions of his own, and Edward promises to think them over “As objectively as I’m capable of.” Good not to promise more than you can deliver. How does Bella react? “I knew it was juvenile, but I felt excluded.” No sweetie, that’s not juvenile, and admitting it doesn’t mean you’re mature. Since she’s the cause of all the crap that goes on, it’d be nice if the two supernatural groups she’s involved with bothered to tell her their plans for her so she might be able to, I don’t know, participate in the plot or something retarded like that.

9. Bella gets to talk to Jacob and he tries to get her to convince “the bloodsucker” that the safest place for her is on the reservation. After all, the whole reason the Quileutes regained their power to wolf out is because of evil vampires being around, right? “We’re well able to handle anything.” He even mentions Charlie would be safer there because he doesn’t see the people there are weirdoes who do things with his daughter he isn’t allowed to know about. “I hated that I was putting Charlie within the range of the crosshairs that always seemed to be centered on me.” So don’t. Ask the Cullens to leave. If they’re intelligent at all they’ll probably agree the safest place for Charlie is far away from his daughter.

The talk between the two men involved “rearranging some boundaries, so we can catch anyone who gets too near Forks.” He then says he’s going to come over and get the scent of the intruder so he can track them. Bella’s not so keen on that idea.

Bella: “Jake, I really don’t like the idea of you tracking -- ”
Jacob: “Oh please, Bella,” he interrupted, Jacob laughed, and then hung up.

Maybe that’s meant to show Bella worrying about the people she likes getting hurt, or how Jacob doesn’t take the threat of vampires seriously enough. I will address those in turn.

What exactly does Bella expect to do about the evil vampires after her, especially if she’s not willing to leave to spare people unaware of the danger? She’s pretty clearly assured herself that only another supernatural creature could kill a meyerpire. Yet she’s scared to death of any of the ones she knows actually fighting one. Even when they outnumber the intruder about eight to one. Plus if they’re sneaking into Bella’s house to get things with her scent, they probably want to kill her enough to know about her supernatural bodyguards too. This is probably going to be solved through force of arms, whether she likes it or not. Why not show some of that intelligence and maturity that her mom keeps going on about and accept that some of these creatures she’s so fond of for some reason are probably going to have to put themselves in harm’s way to resolve this?

On the second point, Jacob not taking the threat of vampires as seriously as he should, well, who exactly does Steph think she's kidding? She’s dropped the ball at pretty much every opportunity to either make someone a believable threat, or to actually deliver on something being a problem. I’ll just tell you right now, we don’t lose a single Cullen or Quileute to the vampire army you already know they’re going to end up fighting. Like you were worried.

Happy new year, everybody!

The Adventures of the Little Prince - The Greatest Gift

2011-12-24T16:04:00.004-06:00

Penned by Antoine de Saint-Expurey, “Le Petit Prince” was about a nameless boy living on a small asteroid called B-612. He travels to Earth and makes all kinds of profound observations about the status of life there, and I’d like to tell you about it in more detail but while I owned the book as a child I never read it.

However it was adapted into an anime that aired on Nickelodeon from the mid-to-late 80’s, which I did see occasionally on trips to Grandma’s house. By catching passing shooting stars with a butterfly net the prince could travel to other planets and make profound observations on the state of being of the people he found there. And maybe, just maybe, we learned a little something about ourselves in the process. And in this particular one, the true meaning of Christmas or something like that.

The opening sequence informs us the show’s “Based on the character THE LITTLE PRINCE……conceived by ANTOINE de SAINT-EXPUREY and not directly on the book itself.” Since the end of the book would seem to preclude any further stories about him, yeah you’d think so. Although for the curious, there was a live-action movie based on the book.

Then a guy with a terrible French accent presumably meant to be the author basically explains the premise I just did, and how the prince heard from his buddy Swifty the space bird about Christmas and all its material manifestations like presents and snow and tree decorations and blah de blah, and wanted to check it out. Let’s see how the episode tackles this, shall we?

We see Swifty and the prince after they land on a tropical island (which doesn’t look very tropical and which seems merely a handy insert to explain why there’s no snow), and Swifty tries to wake up his companion. Not that he matters, since he immediately flies off to check in on some people on Jupiter.

That looks like a landing a small boy would survive, yeah.

The prince makes his way into town, marvels at the decorations, and is just in time to nearly be run down by a horse and buggy (incidentally, all the episodes I can remember appear to be set in the 1800’s or something, but I distinctly remember the prince talking about going to Disneyland. Not actually going there, of course, but talking about it). The passenger, an old man called the major, has his huge manservant bodily drag a young boy out of his house in order to adopt him. The prince protests that the major shouldn’t separate people from their families, even if it is to save the boy from a life of miserable poverty. Why’s the major so interested in adopting a young boy, you ask? Well, because he takes one look at the prince and recognizes the kid as the spitting image of his dear departed son. Really? We’re doing one of those?

The nostalgic among us might be interested to know both Swifty and the major are voiced by Hal Smith, who people my age probably know best as Gyro and Flintheart Glomgold from DuckTales (or if you're really nerdy the evil wizard from Dragon's Lair II). He does well as an eccentric inventor, but not so much as a stern old man. At least one without a Scottish accent and any apparent underworld ties.

The very accommodating prince is brought back to the major’s mansion, where more marveling over how he’s the very model of a modern major general…I mean, the major’s son, is done. The servants, by the way, appear to be indigenous, and talk in this frankly rather patronizing pidgin English that would probably get this show sent back these days. (crap like “Don’t make filler, plenty roast goose in tomorrow dinner”)

Shown his new room, the prince is amazed that it’s painted to look like the night sky and spots where B-612 is. This gets him thinking of home and a rose girl he takes care of, and that gets him thinking of sneaking out and seeing what Christmas is like for non-rich people. Conveniently there’s a ladder outside his window and a whole in the mansion wall, which seem like something a guy who’d previously been about to basically kidnap a boy to have someone to fill the void his son left would’ve taken care of beforehand.

Once back in town he catches the kid the major was trying to carry off before (Robby, since this cartoon apparently has a problem with naming people) running form a policeman with a stolen cake. The prince promises the major will take care of everything, but it’s not just the baker who’d like recompense since apparently the kid has a history of this kind of thing. The major refuses to pay back Robby’s victims, which makes the prince sad.

He plays to the major’s sympathies since the old man has everything and wants a son, while lots of boys have nothing and want a father. I suppose I’d be a little more sympathetic if this show didn’t seem to be saying the boy should be forgiven for stealing a luxurious cake (and released from police custody, yet) because it’s Christmas. My personal favorite Christmas stories are the ones that showed the people are capable of celebrating the holiday and their loved ones without needing tons of gifts and fancy food (even if they end up getting those things as a reward anyway). The prince even explains how the major’s maid is making up gift baskets full of nice things to give out to the less fortunate. Sure generosity’s something we ought to promote, but what about humility and the deeper meaning of the holiday?

Hiding out in a playground the prince finds a foster kitten abandoned under a bench and takes it to find someplace with a ceiling as it starts to know. “I guess they found homes for all your brothers and sisters and nobody wanted you. It happens with people sometimes too.” Oh I’m sorry, this does have a completely valid moral after all. It has a poor homeless kitten, it must.

The major’s maid tells him she’s wrapping Christmas presents but he’s not in a festive spirit; with the prince gone the gift that mattered most is gone too. The major even goes on about how the prince brought snow, it hasn’t done that in any time in the major’s memory. Okay, maybe we shouldn’t be asking the major to help people out. Seriously? The prince made it snow? I don’t think I conveyed this but as far as I can tell he doesn’t have any magic powers or anything other than an uncomplicated view of the world.

The major realizes he was just looking out for what he wanted when he abducted children back to his mansion, and sets out into the snowy night to find the prince. He finds the boy under a bridge talking to the kitten about how it’s not right to lock up a living creature. “If you love something you can try to help it but you don’t have to own it.” Amazing how childhood innocence cuts right through all those issues like "real world logistics," huh?

Mr. Major admits he was wrong in only thinking about his own wants in seeking a new son and ignoring all the good he could do for the local downtrodden. He agrees to take in the little sneak thief and try to make a respectable lad out of him, even though the episode barely shows the kid at all and doesn’t really get into why he had to steal such a fancy cake for Christmas. I’m sorry, when I was five I probably would’ve bought this without thinking about the root causes. Of course when I was five I would’ve forgotten all about this when the next show started and I got to see Autobots wail on Decepticon tucus.

And the major throws a big Christmas party for the whole town and hands out gifts to all the kids. And the prince catches a comet back to his own little asteroid. No idea what happened to the cat. All in all a quick and inoffensive little Christmas episode. Although I don’t mind saying the Darkwing Duck one was deeper and more memorable.

Joyeux noel, everyone.

Villains and Vigilantes - Always Outnumbered

2011-12-21T10:09:00.009-06:00

***This review of an RPG adventure is for GMs’ eyes only***

Continuing the not exactly proud tradition of Alone Into the Night and The Power of One, Always Outnumbered is another collection of mini-adventures for one player and a GM. Personally I’ve never been in a situation where these might have been used as intended; generally if only a single player or two can make it, the thinking usually seems to be “why don’t I save on gas and read Appointment with F.E.A.R. instead?” Still, for somebody looking to learn how the game works without getting in the way of the fun for a more experienced group, the adventures herein work well enough, and explore some pretty interesting story ideas too. Satter seems to be hitting his stride after his previous fun, but not terribly remarkable adventures.

The first mini-adventure’s mostly interesting because of the NPC’s involved and the emphasis being more on the interactions between them and the player rather than simply stopping the bad guys. Who, it should be noted, are a fairly comical pair, and it’s nice to see more villains like that. Saving the world from Satan and Dr. Apocalypse is nice and all, but shouldn’t putting on tights and shooting energy bolts be fun, after all? And the goofy villains, with the push to get the player to interact with some fairly vivid civilian NPC’s (even if they aren’t the type to show up more than this once), add up to an adventure that I at least would probably have fun playing. If I felt like burning the gas to make it to such a tiny game session, that is.

The second one’s a little more generic, revolving around a hunt for a murderous monster on a golf course. It does show an encouraging behavior with the author that I noted liking about Ken Cliffe’s work too; linking his different releases. The monster being a soldier from his module Escape From the Microverse, you see, who tried to go back in time to alter history to get rid of his people’s enemies and ended up on Earth somehow. It’s kind of a shame that the text states he’s from somewhere too far away for the success of his mission to make any difference on running that module, although that’s probably just because of space limitations in this module. I suppose the real hook of the module is having a super-powered merc trying to take advantage of the panic caused by an alien attacking a golf course to make a name for herself by defeating it (and the player, too, if she gets the chance). Not bad, but nothing to write home about.

The last adventure proper (and the most interesting), takes an idea I’ve seen done a few times, but makes a fun-seeming adventure out of it. That idea being the superhero who’s actually a covert criminal, acting as a smokescreen for other villains and helping them escape custody for a modest fee. And because he’s got the cooperation of the villains he’s supposedly clashing with, probably starts earning more accolades than legit heroes. It’s a nice idea especially suited to lighting a fire under a player to find out the story behind a new foe, particularly because at the same time he can’t just fly up to this guy and start pounding the bejeebers out of him if the player cares anything about his reputation.

In addition to the three main adventures there’s a fourth loose encounter contained within that can be easily worked into any of the others. The antagonist is kind of a villain, kind of, although really he’s just a super-powered troll, content to use his powers to jerk with people he doesn’t like rather than try to beat them into the ground. Although he does have schizophrenic episodes where he becomes a proper villain, which seems included to justify the player beating the snot out of him at some point. Which would probably be satisfying to the player, but I felt it cheapened an interesting character.

To talk about one last thing, while the villains in Satter’s early stuff, Enter the Gene Pool and Escape From the Microverse were good if not particularly outstanding, the ones in Always Outnumbered just seem kind of…off. Maybe it’s because I just don’t get how the name connects to the concept. I don’t see where “Pioneer” comes from, or why a villain who can turn himself into an 8-foot juggernaut calls himself “Scrimmage.” You probably think he fights like a football player or something, right? Except doing so cuts into his agility so much he does it mainly to be able to carry more loot and soak more damage, and relies on non-physical attacks. And speaking as a pompous English major, “Magnanimous” is a huge stretch for a villain with magnetic powers.

While the villains may not be interesting enough to make into my players’ version of the Crushers, the scenario ideas are good. And at the end of the day, that’s probably more important.

Eclipse Chapter 8 - Temper

2011-12-18T16:01:00.011-06:00

1. “We ended up on the beach again, wandering aimlessly.” Boy that Jake sure knows how to party, dunnee? If Forks and the surrounding area are this boring, though, you really do have to wonder why the Cullens are so insistent on staying there (other than because if they left most of the story’s problems would be left behind). They could literally move anywhere, and even here, one of the best places around for a bunch of sparkly people to lay low, they play the part of a weirdo recluse family. I’d hardly say they’re taking advantage of the opportunities the weather affords them.

“Jacob was still full of himself for engineering my escape.” He took advantage of the fact that he’s invisible to her babysitter’s poorly-described precognition. You da man, Jake! How did this sneak past Alice, though? It’s been established already if Bella interacts with werewolves, even plans to, Alice will still see it in a way because Bella disappears from her visions. Remember when Edward sabotaged Bella’s truck? Did she stop watching for Bella during school when they’d have to split up? Did Alice think Bella would stop after trying to slip their authority to be with Jacob already (and more than once), and after voicing discontent with being kidnapped by her own future family besides?

“They’re going to be furious with me tonight, though,” Bella notes. You know, Bells (and Meyer), it can be done for the purest of reasons, but kidnapping is still kidnapping. And Bella’s still resentful, which would be nice if it went anywhere. That’s a good little prize pet, Bells.

We do get this amusing and probably truthful follow-up exchange.

Jacob: “Don’t go back, then.”
Bella: “Charlie would love that,” I said sarcastically.
Jacob: “I bet he wouldn’t mind.”

2. To that, “I didn’t answer. Jacob was probably right, and that made me grind my teeth together. Charlie’s blatant preference for my Quileute friends was so unfair.” Yeah, just imagine how much he’d prefer them if he had any idea how Bella really sliced her arm at her birthday party, and why she really hopped a plane to Italy. I’m sorry, but that’s such a monumentally stupid thing for somebody to think considering what Charlie sees and can’t know the real causes for it.

Frankly, knowing what happens beyond the veil makes the Cullens look even less preferable. Jacob might be kind of a crass dick since he got his fur, but he doesn’t spy on Bella or make major decisions for her, let alone get his supernatural compatriots in on doing so.

3. Jacob mentions that a third pack member’s imprinted, and then stares at Bella as if he’s trying to get it to happen between him and her (try the daycare center, buddy). As they start walking again, “I thought of how we must looking walking hand and hand down the beach -- like a couple, certainly -- wondered if I should object.” Pretty sure that’s hand IN hand, and really, maybe this kind of thinking indicates she and Jacob are a better match (not that I think Bella deserves to end up with anybody)? With him she actually thinks about how she depends on him, how they connect, how he’s such a great friend despite all the crap she puts him through in her pursuit of Edward. With Edward all she seems to think about is how beautiful he is and how unworthy she is of being with him. Doesn’t exactly sound like a solid foundation for everlasting love. Sure, love isn’t rational and blah blah blah but there still has to be something positive there. I’m sure Bella sees it, and Meyer may have even thought of it, but when we see Edward he’s either being a possessive dick or doing whatever Bella wants because he’s so in love with her. That’s not a personality.

Ya know, it occurs that if Meyer would get past this idea that people who kidnap and spy on their loved ones are people we should be supporting, we’d be left with a much more convincing couple. Bella and Jacob would get along better because she wouldn’t keep insisting that the Cullens are so great, and the baby he imprints on never would’ve been born. Instead the romance that drives these books is between two blank slates with no evident reason to be interested in each other besides hormones.

Hasn’t Meyer said she never intended Jacob to be such a major character?

4. Jacob’s partially upset with how often the imprinting’s taking place, but also at the fact that it exists at all. “It’s another one of those legend things. I wonder when we’re going to be stop being surprised that they’re all true.” Am I the only one who thinks the characters in these books are stupid for not questioning anything else when it turns out supernatural creatures really exist? Is that really not something that would change the whole way you look at the world?

Before explaining the latest imprinting further, Jacob asks Bella to “Try not to be judgmental.” Why? Because I wasn’t just talking about the next book when I made my daycare crack. The girl who was imprinted on is two years old. “I…don’t know what to say,” Bella replies. How about “ick,” or “child grooming is not romantic, Steph”? Oh sure, Jacob tries to explain it (“There’s nothing romantic about it at all”), but what’s at the core of everything that goes on in these books? Bella’s feelings for the various men in her life. And what exactly is the neat and tidy resolution for Bella and Jacob’s relationship that can never be? Imprinting on her newborn daughter.

“And nothing matters more than her. And you would do anything for her, be anything for her…You become whatever she needs to be, whether it’s a protector, or a lover, or a friend, or a brother. Quil will be the best, kindest big brother any kid ever had. This isn’t a toddler on the planet that will be more carefully looked after than that little girl will be. And then, when she’s older and needs a friend, he’ll be more understanding, trustworthy, and reliable then anyone else she knows. And then, when she’s grown up, they’ll be as happy as Emily and Sam.” I don’t see how that’s better (or in fact “not romantic at all” with that last part). And since this was made up by a human being and not nature, I feel just fine judging it.

I don’t really have opinions on some big issues, but my big thing is on the right to make one’s own choices. On those grounds I find this imprinting business of Meyer’s rather disgusting. The wolf’s basically brainwashed into becoming obsessed with a girl and grooming her to be his wife, from infancy until adulthood. And this is portrayed as heart-warming. Yeah, it is. Or at least, as something positive. After all, that level of attention and devotion’s hard to resist. I mean, look at Sam and Emily. And Jacob and the demonspawn. Oops, spoilers. I don’t know if I find that more disgusting, or the idea that the woman’s supposed to grow up to want to breed with this fawning monomaniac. She can refuse, but “Why wouldn’t she choose him, in the end? He’ll be her perfect match. Like he was designed for her alone.” Good point, Jake. I forgot obsessive devotion’s charming in this universe. Then again, this is also a universe where not one relationship seems to be based on more than good looks and a gut feeling that this is the one.

5. They have lunch and Jacob reminisces some about the time when it was just them and no sparkly shitheads. “Another era. A happier one.” Bella, though, “couldn’t agree with him. This was my happy era now.” Oh, you mean where Edward decides who you can and can’t be friends with and gets his sister to help enforce his edicts? And what’s so great about her time with him that makes up for this kind of treatment?

In a one-off story that ends just as the two couple up, you can usually forgo asking what they do together. Twilight goes on for several gigantic books and thinks it has drama and heightening danger in each one. If the story’s going to last this long and Bella’s going to insist Edward’s the only one for her in the face of a ton of shitty treatment, I’d like to have some idea of what their relationship consists of. Watching Edward and Alice not play chess?

Bella notes it’s been a long time since it seemed like he ever had a chance, too. “Charlie used to like me,” she moans. I never did, and the only way these books would have a truly happy ending is if the Volturi really did come to town and pulled off Bella’s head and the heads of everyone lame enough to think she’s worth fighting for. And Charlie gets all the Cullens’ money as a reward for putting up with her and all her unreasonable bullshit. Can I go? Have I made my point yet?

I love how stupid these books are that they try to portray Charlie as being overly reactive. When Bella voices her worry that Jacob’s dad might report that she and Jake went for a ride on their motorcycles, Jacob assures her “He won’t. He doesn’t get worked up about things the way Charlie does.” See the above link.

6. Their conversation turns to Bella becoming a vampire and how that would invalidate their agreement with the Quileutes, and how the treaty doesn’t actually mention any limits on territory. Meaning they’d be free to pursue the Cullens all over the world to punish them for breaking the agreement. That sounds kind of like an attempt to justify the Cullens staying in Forks even with the various unfriendly/watchful parties knowing that’s where they live, but if they moved to someplace like say, Europe or Africa, am I supposed to think a couple guys from a backwoods reservation would really pursue them there? Especially with all the other vampires around who aren’t out in the open, the Quileutes don't think worthy of having peace with, and don’t have any scruples about using innocent people as feeding stock?

Besides, I think the closest thing we get to a real explanation for the Cullens not leaving is it would hurt Bella's feelings to just disappear on Charlie like that, and because she's so darn special, that's the end of the discussion.

7. The conversation turns nasty again when Bella says she plans to become a vampire anyway. Why is she telling him this even though he just said if the Cullens turned her, his pack would hunt them across the globe? Predictably Jacob starts to get mad when she mentions it’s probably just a matter of weeks.

Why is she willing to turn two groups she has friends among against each other in open warfare? “He’s seventeen, Jacob. And I get closer to nineteen every day. Besides, what’s the point in waiting? He’s all I want. What else can I do?” Oh, I see. Yeah, that sounds like the reasoning of somebody wise beyond their tender years, who’s put a lot of thought up against this. And who, sarcasm aside, has been in two whole relationships in her entire life.

“You’d be better off dead. I’d rather you were,” he says. “I recoiled like he’d slapped me.” Somebody should. Dumb bimbo.

8. Bella drives off in a huff, hoping she splatters mud on him, and ends up back at the Cullens where Alice is morosely looking over the car Edward got her, afraid he’ll take it back because Alice hasn’t been kidnapping Bella well enough. “I’ll stay if it makes things easier for you,” Bella conscientiously offers. Ah…fnck this entire series.

No, seriously, when Edward comes back “I didn’t care that I was supposed to be angry with him. I didn’t care that I was supposed to be angry with everyone.” That’s not being forgiving, that’s being a damn doormat.

Speaking of Edward coming back, Bella’s still in bed when he does and they start cuddling. They stop before they can get carried away, though, because he’d break her because he’s super-strong remember. Bella remarks the bed’s unnecessary. “If we’re not going to get carried away, what’s the point?” Yeah that sure sounds like a wise old soul and not somebody caught in the grip of hormones and the rush of their first crush, boy howdy.

“You’re not the only one who gets carried away,” he tells her. “Yes, I am,” she fires back. And, well, yeah. Kind of still waiting to see any substantial evidence at all of Edward’s lack of control when it comes to his desires. He can overreact like any boy his age, but as I once said I never believed being a vampmeyer was as hard as he says. Whereas Bella gets so carried away by her teenagerly hormones the only reason I know she’s supposed to be as mature as a 35-year-old at all is other characters say so.

9. Edward apologizes for the kidnapping thing then and promises not to do it again. He may feel sorry for it, but he still did it, and Alice still helped him. Accepted payment for it, even. Bella’s already forgiven him, of course. Because hey, Edward. He’s not mad at her for slipping through Alice’s fingers, either. He’s not even planning to take back the car. It was a gift, he claims. “His voice sounded as if I’d insulted him.” I’d be glad they’re not insisting they’re in love amidst all their bickering, but Bella really should be annoyed with him for dictating who she is and isn’t allowed to associate with, and especially for putting her under house arrest to make sure it happens that way.

About changing his mind about the kidnapping thing, “I decided that you were right. My problem before was more about my…prejudice against werewolves than anything else. I’m going to try to be more reasonable and trust your judgment. If you say it’s safe, then I’ll believe you.” It’s nice to see somebody trying to use their head for once, but we are after all talking about BELLA’s judgment. Which has yet to be shown to exist. And I know, is there no pleasing this guy, but this is another example of what would seem to be a fairly sizable problem (Edward loving Bella so much he feels justified in restricting her freedom if he thinks it's for her safety) going away with no real work or difficulty. You can’t do that. You can’t have a dramatic story when every problem ends up being a false alarm.

And he's still not overthinking problems. Please. This is just "I'm going to do whatever Bella wants because my only character trait is wanting to keep her safe and happy."

Things don’t get any more sophisticated when she relays that mean old Jacob said he’d rather she was dead than a vampire, and that she thought Edward would be glad. “Glad over something that’s hurt you? I don’t think so, Bella.” Damn dude, have an emotion. You don’t have to like everything and everyone your girlfriend likes. This is why this relationship fails, because it’s between two mannequins who only recite prerecorded soppy lines.

10. More pointless conversation. Rosalie’s chat with Bella. “She gave you quite a lot to consider, didn’t she?” Like I noted then, it ends up mattering for naught. More time and effort well-spent, Steph.

Bella turns the conversation toward what she heard about Edward hanging around that group of all-female vampires, and even though he didn’t show preference for any of them, asks if any of them showed preference for him. She wonders who her “immortal rival I’d never realized I had” could be, but for someone to be a rival for another affections, wouldn’t the person they’re both interested in have to be interested in both of them, too? Because Edward certainly has the means to go to Alaska whenever he wants, but he doesn’t, he goes to her bedroom. Although I can believe she doesn’t notice that. Bella hasn’t got a rival, as interesting as that might have been, and once again I fail to see how this relationship is really so solid when she gets insecure despite all the evidence he’s as interested as she is.

And that’s pretty much where we go out, with Edward assuring his nervous nancy girlfriend that yes, for the 1,000,975th time, she’ll be the only one to ever have a hold on his heart. For some reason.

Eclipse Chapter 7 - Unhappy Ending

2011-12-05T19:55:00.008-06:00

1. Don’t get my hopes up.

2. As you’ll remember the last chapter ended with Rosalie coming in to have a private chat with Bella. “My stomach twisted nervously as the one Cullen who did not like me moved silently to sit down in the open space.” The only vampire in the whole bunch not to like Bella, boy she’s got it so rough. And we’re about to find out why. Fasten your seatbelts and secure your helmets.

Sayeth Rosalie, “I’m sure I’ve hurt your feelings enough in the past, and I don’t want to do that again.” Gee, despite being the only Cullen not to like Bella, Rosalie’s being awfully nice to Bella. Who of course brushes it right off because she doesn’t want to inconvenience anyone.

3. Rosalie then explains how she became a vampire, and this really goes to show how messed up Meyer’s priorities as a writer are. In that this is more interesting than anything and everything centering around Bella.

Not that you can’t still tell it was written by a first-time author too sure of themselves to bother with research. See, one of the first things Rosalie says is she was around during the Great Depression, which she hardly even noticed because “my father had a stable job in a bank.” Yeah, Meyer’s saying Rosalie’s family could pretend the Great Depression wasn’t happening because their breadwinner had a job in a BANK.

Rosalie explains to Bella that it was like that time when Edward saved her from the thugs in the first book, except Rosalie didn’t have a super-powered dude on hand in case of trouble because he was stalking her anyway. Guess we’re still saying that’s a positive.

4. “Would you like to hear my story, Bella? It doesn’t have a happy ending -- but which of ours does?” Bella’s, I notice.

In regards to Rosalie’s…*snort, snicker* middle-class parents, “My beauty was like a gift to them. They saw so much more potential in it than I did.” Oh she’s so modest! That’s likable, right?? But of course she was breathtakingly beautiful too, because being born with a pretty face matters so much in this stupid world I’m so glad I don’t have to live in. Sorry, Bella never really seems to learn that has nothing to do with what the Cullens are like on the inside. As usual, until somebody spells it out for her Bella has no ideas at all for how someone as beautiful as Rosalie could be jealous of someone as plain as her.

“I was silly and shallow, but I was content.” Boy, good thing for Roz she lucked into this family. “As I said, shallow. Young and very shallow.” Doesn’t that mean she’s still shallow? One of the things about becoming a vampire in the Meyerverse is you’re stuck exactly the way you were when you became a vampire. Forever. Although I’m not sure Meyer thought through what that would mean in regards to issues like falling in love and learning new things.

5. Anyway Roz’s parents were hoping to marry her off to somebody influential, but she tells Bella about how her best friend married a blue collar stiff (at 17), and Roz wanted more than anything to have a perfect little baby like her friend.

As for the family Roz’s family was hoping to impress, “In Rochester, there was one royal family -- the Kings, ironically enough.” More like insipid writingly-enough. A royal family, the Kings. That sounds like something you’d read in a 60’s Batman comic. She did end up marrying the oldest son, Royce. In fact, “We were engaged before I’d known him for two months.” That’s probably meant to be Roz looking back on a huge mistake, that of marrying someone because he seemed like Prince Charming on a white charger carrying her away to a life of eternal opulence and not because she really loved him, but yeah, I’m going to bring up Bella and Edward’s artificial love. Where they were obsessed with each other before they had any good reason to be. And the books treating that like a good thing.

Bella “wondered if this was why she had so much more bitterness in her than the rest of them -- because she’d been within reach of everything she’d wanted when her human life was cut short.” How does that explain her jealousy of Bella, though? The list of things Roz wanted out of life wasn’t much longer than Bella’s, but Bella’s only has one thing on it, and it was pretty much hers to take at her whim as soon as she had any interest in it at all. Anything else is ancillary to “Edward”. At least Roz wanted “nice house and happy children” too. If Bella thinks Roz is jealous of her for wanting even less out of life…well, that’s pretty pathetic. Nothing new for Bella, though.

You know, if vampires are frozen in time from the moment they get all sparkly, how do they even get over things bothering them? Lot of little things to ask about that state of affairs that the author apparently didn’t (or didn’t want to) think about.

6. Then Roz talks about how Royce (Royce and Rosalie. Sheesh, she’s probably glad now that didn’t happen) and some of his drunk friends raped her. After she gets to the part where she was attacked, she goes “I won’t make you listen to the rest. They left me in the street, still laughing as they stumbled away.” This is sort of like how Meyer thinks teenagers shouldn’t be reading about sex and she was keeping her books clean by not actually writing in the sex scenes in Breaking Dawn. Just because she didn’t write that scene in doesn’t mean Bella and Edward didn’t do the nasty (especially not when the “threat” of the book is various people wanting their child dead), any less than Rosalie sparing us the details doesn’t mean she wasn’t raped. These books are in no way “clean”.

7. That’s when the Cullens found her and brought her over. Because Carlisle’s such a great guy it apparently never occurs to him that maybe just letting someone die and letting their suffering end might be the merciful thing to do sometimes. I know he's a doctor, but which is crueler? Rosalie’s family hearing that their beautiful daughter died a horribly untimely death, or them thinking that and her being unable to tell them she didn’t? Maybe I’d feel better about Carlisle’s decisions to surround himself with other vampires if it seemed like anybody but him was actually taking advantage of their immortality to do something besides eat mountain lions and drive conspicuous cars.

I really start to question Carlisle’s procedures when Roz goes on to say how she killed Royce and his friends and their bodyguards (in a wedding dress [a stolen one, at that], because being undead makes you melodramatic). He saved her, because it would’ve been such a waste to let her die, and the first thing she does is goes out and kill a bunch of other people. Yeah, they were rapists, but as I keep saying no matter how much the book tries to insist otherwise the Cullens are hardly lily-white themselves. Especially when the stuff they do is for the sake of Bella.

“I’m surprised Edward didn’t tell you more about it,” Roz finishes up. “He doesn’t like to tell other people’s stories -- he feels like he’s betraying confidences, because he hears so much more than just the parts they mean for him to hear,” Bella explains. Let’s ignore the mind-reading because it sounds like he can’t turn that off, but Edward’s okay with casually invading other people’s privacy, like sneaking into someone’s bedroom without their knowledge, but sharing whatever he might learn, that’s what gives him pangs of conscience.

“He’s really quite decent, isn’t he?” indeed.

8. Initially, the reason Roz disliked Bella was jealousy of Edward being interested in Bella but not Roz. Even though that was way after she’d found happiness with Emmett. Wait, what?

Even when Edward was hanging out with the all-female coven in Alaska, he never expressed any interest. Seriously, “Tanya’s clan in Denali -- and all those females!” And none got a rise out of him at all. Ah yes, the legendary Tanya. I’d say it’d help the contrast if we actually got to see her and some of her buddies and see what’s so awesome about them before this, but we are after all talking about Bella Swan. Any woman is automatically more impressive than her.

But again, I have to ask what it is about Bella that makes her worth all the shit they go through to keep her safe. Most people would find all the whining and self-deprecating to be a turnoff after a while. And it’s hard to see her as brave when you consider either the reasons for her taking a risk (it makes her see Edward and lets her remain codependent even when he’s gone from her life), or the fact that when she does try to help it usually just makes things worse, like a certain instance later in this book or when she tried to spare the others facing James. Not only was she dumb to fall for his trick, she should’ve known better than to think he’d do what he said after he had what he wanted. I’ve talked about how it kind of seems like she’s twisting the story to badmouth the people she doesn’t like, I almost wonder if she’s making herself sound bad to make the Cullens sound better, but in the process making them sound like idiots for bending over backwards for her sake.

Kind of puts it in perspective when Bella notes, “But you still don’t like me.”

9. The punch line to Rosalie’s whole story, of course, is that if Bella becomes a vampire her uterus will stop working and she’ll never be able to have those beautiful babies Roz dreamed of. “You have the choice that I didn’t have, and you’re choosing wrong!” While I do think Bella wants to become a vampire for a stupid reason she hasn’t thought through, not everybody wants the same things out of life. And frankly, Roz doesn’t strike me as somebody who would’ve made a suitable mother even if she’d gotten the chance. In fact she’s starting to seem as demented as Bella, because the reason she fell for Emmett is he looked just like her friend’s baby. I mean holy shit, how far can you take one bit?

“In some ways, you are much more mature than I was at eighteen,” Roz goes on. Oh yeah? Care to name a few? I’d probably just laugh at them, but at least I’d have some idea of what I’m supposed to think. The sad thing is that even though Roz tries to get Bella to think about what exactly she’s sacrificing to get to keep her youthful looks, nothing ever comes of it. Right when Bella’s starting to think there really are some things she might want to experience as a human, she gets pregnant with a demon and ends up needing to be converted to stay alive. It presents the carrot and then snatches it away, right when it seems like she might actually grow a little.

God, I need another Gold Digger fix. I don’t know how a comic with pirate ninja leprechauns piloting battle mecha’s more mature than a parable on the folly of rashly sacrificing your humanity, but it is. At least it’s more mature than this one.

Even if it is kind of heavy-handed with the nerd humor sometimes...

10. After Roz assures Bella that Edward loves her more than she (presumably Bella) can possibly imagine, Bella gets to sleep. “When I did sleep, I had a nightmare.” Shocker! It’s not even worth saying what it was about, suffice it to say Meyer’s not as artsy as I think she was trying for.

Later Alice tells her they’ll go out somewhere, “That would be fun, right?” But Bella asks why they don’t just lock her in the basement. Alice starts to angst, “He’s going to take the Porsche back. I’m not doing a very good job. You’re supposed to be having fun.” Because Barbie dolls have fun when you bend them to your whim, right? That’s all either she or Edward seems to think Bella is. All the same, “Without Edward, the day was guaranteed to be unbearable.” That’s a good little victim.

11. But wouldn’t you know it, Jacob roars up, totally unforeseen by Alice’s precognition, and whisks an exuberant Bella away to do something non-victimy.

You know, I just realized that Bella cost the Cullens possibly their biggest advantage over the Quileutes by telling them the early warning system the Cullens put the most faith in doesn’t work on them. Look, I know she wants them to be friends and everything, but the peace between the groups isn’t an easy one. If they wanted to the Quileutes could launch a sneak attack and the Cullens would never see it coming. All thanks to Bella. And despite all that "Switzerland" crap, as I said she clearly does favor one side. The one she's left vulnerable.

It sure is a good thing there’s something I can’t see about Bella that makes the Cullens forgive her every stupid call. It sure is a good thing the author didn’t think of that, too.

Loonatics Unleashed - Weathering Heights

2011-12-02T18:20:00.011-06:00

Here I am again, venturing once more into the most laughably controversial review series I’ve ever done. And no, you’re not going crazy, I didn’t put mistakenly “Loonatics Unleashed” instead of “Eclipse.” Although with the way Stephenie Meyer loves to misappropriate other literature you could well be forgiven for thinking so.

Just for the record, yes I’m skipping the third episode, “The Cloak of Black Velvet.” It’s for the same reason you haven’t been seeing more Generation Z reviews. The futuristic rendering of Zorro was pretty bad, no doubt about it, but honestly the worst thing you can say about most of the episodes is they’re just plain boring (one could argue leaving no impression at all is even worse than being able to pick it to pieces, but that’s a whole other thing). Same thing with the third episode of this cartoon. It was dull, but after watching it three times I couldn’t find anything else to focus on. And even though Loonatics Unleashed does have something of an ongoing story, that particular episode was pretty much disposable.

So. Here we are again at a premise I’m still amazed was ever approved. Open on weather reporting celebrity Misty Breeze. It’s kind of cute the way this cartoon’s trying to act as if that job wasn’t only pretty much outmoded when this episode was made, but that it’ll still be going strong nearly eight centuries later. And when I said “celebrity,” I meant it. Misty actually has her own merchandise. A weather lady with merchandise. Somehow I can buy the talking cartoon animals but I get stuck on that.

Misty’s gofer suggests doing a piece on barometric pressure, which sounds painfully like something a writer with no knowledge of what meteorology involves ripped from the dictionary to make the character sound down with it. Never mind how you’d do a “piece” when you work on the weather report. They kind of only have one segment. Misty turns her down anyway, because she’s a pompous bitch who dumps coffee over the gofer when it turns out to be cold.

Oh, and Misty’s voiced by Candi Milo, who also voices the team’s dickish mentor. It’s almost like she was being punished for working on this show by being given characters who were bigger assholes than the villains. At least here she’s kind of justified, since the gofer’s not too good at her job if she’s not back with the coffee before it gets cold.

This indignity makes gofer so mad a tiny rain cloud appears over Misty that makes her, well, storm off in a huff (and which nobody reacts to as if it's at all unusual). The camera crew decides to let gofer host the weather shoot, because apparently this job is so not-outmoded in the future they actually go out and shoot it in the field. During the shoot a storm picks up as she talks about it, and a lightning bolt strikes her. She then starts talking like a villain and whips up a tornado that blows Misty away. I’m not sure what the lightning really did, because she was already altering the weather by talking about it and making it rain on people she didn’t like. With a boss she hated and an interest in meteorology already, I don’t see how this could only be coming up now.

And think about what it says about this show that someone becomes a supervillain over their intense desire to host the weather forecast.

After the theme song we return to the Loonatics not saving people from the chaos created by the storm, but by fixing their satellite dish which was apparently knocked over by the high winds. I don’t know, the broadcasting equipment on a superhero base seems like something it would take more than a heavy wind to knock over, so you’d think there are people they could be helping.

They’re fixing the dish so Danger Duck can watch Misty deliver the weather (News flash! It’s stormy!). I’m sorry, weather forecasters with fans. Yeesh. And Duck flips Taz off the roof when he comes up to check on their progress, but is that his fault or the guy who stood on the hatch’s fault? Because when the others catch Taz and bring him back up, Taz is all mad like it was the guy who opened the hatch somebody was standing on’s fault.

Look, I know how being a superhero is about doing things regardless of the danger, but superheroes who don’t bother to be smart about it tend to stop being superheroes rather quickly because they’ve been turned into a smoking blemish on the floor. And before you say Taz isn’t that smart, Tech E. Coyote, the team’s resident genius is up there with him. Then again, he’s the same resident genius who was working on a laser cannon in the same room another character was having mock combat with flying saucers. Kind of makes you glad you won’t be around in 2772, depending on these guys to save you from villains, doesn’t it?

In fact, now that I think about it are we sure it's still 2772? That's what the DVD case says, and there's this counter that rises up during the opening sequence implying that's the year, but according to the opening narration that's when the asteroid hit. When they show the planet from space, there's this big chunk missing from it, presumably from the asteroid. It's a cool touch, sure, but the thing is it's obviously been built over. Building takes a while.

Anyway, right then Misty lands on their satellite dish, and after a cutaway the Loonatics are jetting out to look into her claims of an angry intern blowing her away. Danger Duck wonders aloud who could ever want to hurt Misty Breeze, to which Lexi replies “Anyone who’s ever met her?” Hey, maybe she’s a bitch, but that puts her three steps beyond any other character we’ve seen (or haven’t) up to this point in terms of sophistication. I think Lexi herself might get two lines in the entire series that reveal even the tiniest details about her as a character. The ones in the ice age episode about winter coats making her look fat, and finding out she was trying out to be a cheerleader before she got her powers.

Their mentor, the mysterious Zadavia appears to them in giant TV screens they happen to be flying past, and helpfully informs them that strange weather’s appearing “all over the planet.” Because a woman flying through the air and coming to rest on their roof didn’t indicate that, I guess. That’s pretty much all she says before signing off. Wow, good thing she’s around.

The Loonatics arrive at the scene of the weather forecast and are confronted by the angered gofer, now going by Weather Vane. That’s really the name you’re going with? I'm even more disappointed in gofer because as someone who knows more about the weather than her stuck-up boss, you'd think she'd know weather vanes have nothing to do with weather. It sounds plenty stupid anyway. It’s not even Weather Vain, which would make some sense with her flipping out over wanting the spotlight.

She whips up some cloud monsters to attack the Loonatics (just so you know, “kick their butts” isn’t a strategy), which fails because it turns out getting the monsters wet disperses them. Wow that’s a lame weakness. The show isn’t helped when Danger Duck, in the clutches of one of the creatures, pleads for a “water egg” when he whips up one of his power balls and jams it into the monster’s mouth. Are the effects of his only offensive power random? That’s a crappy deal. Oh, and he doesn’t get a water egg, he gets an orange juice egg. How exactly did he get picked for this team with a power like that? The show never explains that, even in the episode where flashbacks show what everybody was doing before getting their powers.

Oh, and writers? When you have a character who can shoot lightning bolts, please don’t ever have them make “shocking” puns ever again, okay? It sure isn’t doing an already limp show like this any favors.

WV whips up a tornado then, and Taz attacks it as a tornado and destroys it. Which kind of makes you wonder why he doesn’t destroy the entire nearby landscape by using that power if he’s stronger than a full-fledged tornado. Yeah he’s a superhero now, but he still shows practically zip in terms of restraint. Hell, Coyote had to invent capture devices to keep him from eating all their food.

With the Loonatics having withstood all of her powers, WV decides to use all of them at once, demanding that Misty Breeze be brought to her or she’ll destroy the entire city. Maybe she shouldn’t have blown Misty away in the first place if that’s what she wants.

God, this show’s stupid.

The Loonatics save a train whose tracks were destroyed by a lightning strike, and after doing so Bugs, or rather Ace, pops the doors open and asks “Who ordered the Acme heroes,” prompting a round of cheering from the people they just saved. Wow, modest. Especially since the Loonatics don’t even do anything to evacuate the people they just saved. Having said that they fly away on their jetpacks. An old lady claims to have known his great-great-great-grandfather, but unless they’re saying people live 200 years in this universe, I think somebody’s math is off because there’s no way she could be talking about Bugs. Is she supposed to be Granny or somebody? Because, well…there's another Granny analogue in the second season.

Once again, voiced by Candi Milo.

With the train safe the Loonatics return their attention to Weather Vane. Ace orders them to box her in, “one of us from each side.” Instead it looks like everybody approaches from the same side.

Ace tries to deliver a withering bon mot, but it ends with an extremely artificial silence that hangs in the air for a second before the cameraman’s line is heard and interrupts him. Weather Vane split already. Zadavia appears then and tells them that she’s detected weird energy 35 miles off the coast and “all efforts to contain Weather Vane have failed.” What efforts? Their efforts? Because they stopped trying to contain her to save the train, and probably could’ve taken her if given a chance to do so based on what we saw. Are other people trying to contain her? Who are they?

That whole “nobody’s been able to contain Weather Vane” stuff doesn’t get any easier to swallow when Danger Duck personally chases her down over the ocean to defend Misty’s honor. He sends her spinning out of control with a kick. Gee, getting close enough to hit her seems pretty easy and looks like it works pretty well.

WV responds to this by whipping up a cloud-dragon. Um, don’t her cloud monsters explode when they get wet? I notice the animators aren’t showing it’s raining anymore after coming back from the commercials. Besides, it’s flying in from the ocean, where there’s tons of water they could use to attack it. Hell, by now the city streets are flooded so there’s water they could use against it pretty much everywhere it could possibly go.

Before commercial...

...after commercial.

The Loonatics even mention “a busted fire hydrant isn’t going to take that thing out.” No, but what about the standing water everywhere you look? I find it pretty hard to believe Taz couldn’t whip up a waterspout to take that thing out. But no, for some reason they think it makes sense to instead go the exact opposite route and instead dry the dragon out. So they lure it to a volcanic island, with Danger Duck being towed behind the Roadrunner as bait.

Anyway, while they’re distracting the dragon, the others set up machines to make the volcano erupt. This destroys the dragon, and makes everything all better because when the Loonatics get back their view screen lady tells them all traces of weird weather are gone. Even the flooded streets have been cleared. She's not sure what happened to WV (“We can only assume she escaped”), and neither am I. Was she supposed to be inside the dragon or something? Kind of hard to imagine her surviving a volcano going off in her face If she wasn’t, well, why exactly didn’t she just whip up another dragon, considering the trouble they had to go through to get rid of that one? And why would she just leave? Oh, because they’ve run out of runtime. As a matter of fact Weather Vane does show up again later. When she does it's because another villain's breaking her out of jail. Yet here they're saying they don't know what happened to her.

Danger Duck finally gets his chance to hang with Misty (who turns off the monitor Zadavia’s on, claiming “I’m the only pretty face on this channel!” How self-serving can you get? I don’t mean her, I mean the writers) and get the short-tempered weather starlet to autograph some of that merchandise of hers I mentioned. He even rented a dump truck to bring it all over. Kind of trite, but when everyone else on the team is so much more boring than this guy, well he tends to kind of become your favorite by default.

Eclipse Chapter 6 - Switzerland

2011-11-24T15:21:00.007-06:00

1. Oh man, she actually named the chapter after that part.

2. “As I drove home, I wasn’t paying much attention to the road that shimmered wetly in the sun.” Oh, please tell us what Bella was thinking! I’ll just die if I don’t know!

Oh, thank you Steph! Despite all the arguing, Bella’s feeling lighter because of her chat with Jacob. Because of the way the universe bends over backwards to cater to her whim. Yes, a lot of favorite characters in fiction change the world. That’s because they actually work hard to do so, not because everything goes their way because a bad author says so. With the way Bella obsesses over the guys in her life, and the level of attention most characters who aren’t potential boyfriends get, it seems like Bella wants the Cullens and Quileutes to stop fighting not because she’s worried about the numerous deaths that would result if things got ugly, but because she doesn’t want to have to give up either Jacob or Edward. That’s a laudable motivation to seek an end to conflict, isn’t it?

3. As she’s thinking that a familiar silver Volvo drives up behind her. Again, Edward’s stalking Bella to make sure she doesn’t do anything that he, a guy who hasn’t matured a bit in nearly a century, doesn’t think is in her best interests.

With all the trouble Bella creates, I have to ask something I’ve asked before: why are the Cullens so attached to this particular piece of ground? They own a private tropical island, fer chrissakes. They give each other cars as presents. I understand a place like Forks helps them hide their sparkles, but things have gotten even more uncomfortable than ever with the other supernatural creatures in the area.

The Cullens don’t have to work, they don’t socialize outside the family, and when they do try to blend in they do a pretty piss-poor job of it. It’s only through the author’s will that anybody in the story buys it. What keeps them in Forks? I know, Bella, but would she really elect to stay, to spare Charlie the separation anxiety, if Edward told her things were getting too dangerous for them and the family had to move? Since he’s the entire reason for her existence, I’m leaning toward no.

Let me give you budding authors out there a tip that I shouldn’t have to give: really think about your characters’ problems, and think about their options for dealing with them. If the most sensible option is the one that would result in an abrupt and lame ending, like the Cullens and Bella moving away from Forks so the werewolves will stop being bothered by their antics, then you might want to address it.

4. Edward actually doesn’t try to stop her, probably saving it for when he can do it without anyone around to hear what he thinks a healthy relationship is, and Bella stops at the house of one her “friends.” A girl named Angela whose only distinguishing trait is not treating our heroine as if she’s a total psycho.

Angela thanks Bella for saving her from watching “two long hours of a plot-less, badly dubbed martial arts film.” Glass houses, Steph.

Bella and Angela do senior prom stuff as they…*sigh* sit around and talk. How about some lines of particular note? “Angela’s easy human dramas were oddly reassuring.” Don’t try to make Bella’s problems seem bigger by comparing them to a normal person’s, make them seem bigger by making them bigger.

“But, like Charlie, she was also too observant sometimes.” Steph, you’re not making your characters look more observant, you’re making your universe look stupider if the kinds of things that are considered big revelations in there are really supposed to be things most people wouldn’t think of or notice.

“I wanted to moan a little bit, like any other teenage girl. I wanted my problems to be that simple.” If you want Bella’s problems to look big, how about you not only actually make them big, you make her save her angsting and whining for the things that merit it. After a while they all start sounding the same, and that while was a long, long, long time ago.

“ ‘What’s wrong?’ It was so easy to talk to Angela. When she had a question like that, I could tell that she wasn’t just morbidly curious or looking for gossip, like Jessica would have been. She cared that I was upset.” Stop telling us what to think. These books aren’t so tightly-plotted there’s nothing that couldn’t have gone to make room for us to actually see this stuff she’s talking about. Plus, this has me thinking of the contrast of the “Bella and Jessica going to the movies” scenes in the book and movie versions of New Moon again. Which is to say I got the feeling she was twisting the story to make people she didn’t like for whatever reason sound bad.

“I hadn’t realized I was so starved for human conversation.” That’s the thing, isn’t it? These books were written for human readers. Who are going to want characters they can relate to. If you’re going to have lots of characters who AREN’T human, and don’t think or act like them, then maybe you ought to show us what it is about those characters that makes it so we should like them. And yes, that goes for our heroine too.

There, I just summed up what’s wrong with this whole series. Goodnight.

5. …fine. Damn it. Bella thinks about the vampire menace going on in Seattle, because Angela’s attending college there I guess. “Would it be safe then? Would the wild young vampire menace have moved elsewhere?” Would those (not) terrifying vampires who all the others vampires fear, the ones who don’t tolerate any threat to the secrecy of their existence, have not done anything about it by then? Or, more to the point, with Bella thinking of herself as the source of all the problems in the universe, why does she not think that’s got anything to do with her? Because you know what, if you don’t think it does, congratulations, you’ve never experienced fiction before.

6. “A swell of quiet sadness crashed over me; maybe it was a mistake to get closer to Angela now.” It’s certainly too late to try to get us to care. Bella starts thinking about maybe she really is missing out on “human experiences” by having Edward vamp her as soon as possible, which is actually a step toward that “character growth” thing. Too bad it’s totally snatched away right when she starts thinking seriously about it next book by her vampire pregnancy.

7. Bella goes home and guess who’s waiting in her bedroom for her. Edward talks about how close he almost came to violating the treaty and going into Quileute territory after her. Pardon my poor memory, but wasn’t this exact guy thanking Jacob at the end of New Moon for keeping an eye on Bella while he was gone? Does that enter his thought process at all? Or is it yet another thing changed to suit the current situation?

Edward also tells Bella he was having Alice watch for her, and she retorts that she trusts Jacob and next time Edward’s not going to overreact because of how trustworthy Jacob is. And because, despite the sexuality on display in the last bit of the book, this was written with the moral complexity of something for 8-year-olds.

Edward at least has no delusions about the mind of the author. “This is only about you. All I care is that you’re safe.”

Oh, boy. “Jacob is family. You are…well, not exactly the love of my life, because I expect to love you for much longer than that. The love of my existence. I don’t care who’s a werewolf and who’s a vampire. If Angela turns out to be a witch, she can join the party, too.” This party already has a witch. But really, show us why these two are the greatest match ever. I’m sure it’s perfectly clear why in Stephenie Meyer’s head, but, thank God, I’M NOT STEPHENIE MEYER! You cannot assume we see what you see, that we instinctively know what you know. You have to make it clear to someone who’s never heard of your stuff before. SDT!

That resolves that (“For now”), but Bella intends to continue seeing Jacob. After all. “Forks was neutral, just like Switzerland -- just like me.” What makes me really sad is that the way that thought was worked into the movie was even more idiotic than it is in the book.

And is she really neutral? I mean, she’s picked Edward and intends to become a vampire like him at some point. How is that neutrality?

8. Edward hasn’t given up, though. In fact, he’s upped the ante. Since Bella’s visit to La Push interrupted his hunting trip, he’s going again. But he’s sent Alice to not just use the precognition, he’s having her full-on kidnap Bella under the guise of a slumber party so there’s no way she can do anything Edward wouldn’t allow. He’s even bribed Alice with a car “exactly like the one I stole in Italy.” Wow that’s amazingly endearing. Not just the having his girlfriend kidnapped thing, but with their casual crimes. Not clearly legal or illegal, huh?

9. Bella: “Alice, don’t you think this is just a little bit controlling? Just a tiny bit psychotic, maybe?”
Alice: “Not really. You don’t seem to grasp how dangerous a young werewolf can be.”
Starofjustice: “Wouldn’t be the first thing she’s failed to grasp…”
Alice: “Especially when I can’t see them. Edward has no way to know if you’re safe. You shouldn’t be so reckless.”
Starofjustice: “Could the author please actually show them to be a fncking danger to our heroine at some point? Maybe? To maybe justify some of this tension? She spent a big part of the last book around these guys, NEVER ONCE did I feel like she might end up like Emily. I know we’ve got a living example of this ‘werewolves are unstable’ thing, but Meyer hasn’t made good on one single chance to show how Bella’s threatened by any threat in these books. Tension? What’s that??”
Bella: “Yes, because a vampire slumber party is the pinnacle of safety conscious behavior.”
Starofjustice: “And if I can have my cake and eat it too, since when has their desire to eat her gone away? These books don’t work no matter which way you think about ‘em!”

10. Bella does go along with it, of course, because for a heroine capable of bringing about such sweeping change to the entire supernatural world, she doesn’t need to be able to do anything stupid like stand up for herself.

“Alice did insist on the pedicure, and I wondered if she was working from a list -- maybe something she’d compiled from watching bad sitcoms.” So how exactly vampires fill eternity if they’re awake 24/7? I mean, hunting for wild animals seems to take awhile, but they also only seem to have to do that once every couple weeks. What do the Cullens do with all their time? What does Bella plan to do with hers?

11. Bella calls Jacob once she gets to the Cullens’, and he spouts off “Can’t you have a life when he’s gone?” That sort of implies she has one while he’s around.

In spite of this, she tells him to relax because “their hearts are in the right place.” Would I seem petty if I said these books would be fifty pages long if somebody’s BRAIN was ever in the right place?

To further smash any hope I might have of ever liking Alice, “ She grinned. ‘This hostage stuff is fun.’ ”

12. Bella finds out Edward got her a bed for while she’s under house arrest in another family’s house, and about a third of a page goes into describing it. Because you know, the Cullens are rich and their stuff is really elaborate.

Alice asks, “You didn’t really think he would make you sleep on the couch, did you?” I really couldn’t be sure with all the other things he’s done to her. And if they’re just plonking down bucks for all these beds and cars on spur of the moment, I have to ask again why the Cullens insist on digging in their feet and staying where there’s another supernatural clique that’s starting to eye them inhospitably. Hell, from the legend we hear about how the Quileute werewolves came to be in a couple chapters, it sounds like there probably aren’t any other werewolves anywhere.

“I’ll give you some privacy,” Alice says as she leaves to let Bella get changed into her pj’s. They have to consciously do that, don’t you want in on this family?

The chapter ends as Rosalie comes in and asks to talk with Bella. Oh, boy…

Zork 3 - The Cavern of Doom

2011-11-17T12:02:00.002-06:00

Despite their promise not to stay away quite so long at the end of their last quest to save Zork, it’s been two months since Bill and June smashed the wicked ambitions of Malifestro. They end up in Zork again by accident when trying to save their magic ring from rolling off a cliff, where they learn from their “uncle” that numerous brave adventurers have gone missing in a recently discovered network of caverns.

And no, the first decision of the book isn’t whether to accept the quest or not. That’s the first decision that has any bearing on the plot. The first decision is what the kids want to do on their first day back in Zork, but they end up listening to Syovar’s stories no matter what you pick. Because they feel bad for not doing what poor old uncle Syovar wanted to do. I’m sorry, I just don’t get how Bill and June become people with lives and relatives in Zork whenever they put on the ring, and why I should act as if Syovar’s related to my avatar(s). Even the book describes him as “uncle” in quotations when mentioning him before they travel to Zork.

Oh yeah, the plot. After not deciding to put the book away before the adventure even starts, Bivotar and Juranda are allowed to enter the caverns to go looking for all the missing explorers. And Max and Fred from the last book, because they were such funny and endearing companions, right? (No, they weren’t)

What this means is even more than in the first book, the adventure is devoted to the kids bumping around in caves, interacting with random things they come across and occasionally finding something that will help them on their quest. Not to mention often meeting one of numerous grisly deaths.

Slide 1 of 67

I know this is based on an ancient computer game, but I really must protest that I don’t enjoy games where I’m just wandering around in a nondescript cave where things happen with no rhyme or reason. That The Cavern of Doom puts even more emphasis on this than The Forces of Krill is the book’s first major problem.

For all the book's faults, this is a pretty darn impressive picture.

Then there’s the grisly deaths. Looking back, I have no idea how I didn’t have nightmares reading this book as a kid. Besides the various endings where the kids are eaten alive by Grues for wandering around menacing caves without light, there’s the one where they accidentally enter a crematorium and are charred to death by insane robots. Let’s have an ending where a pair of adolescents are jammed in an incinerator. That’s okay for young readers, right?

Instead of being required to find just one item like other books in the series, getting through The Cavern of Doom requires several. I personally liked this, as I thought it helped this feel more like an actual quest game, and made the puzzles feel less like a constant stream of “which tunnel’s less likely to have something that’ll kill me?” This doesn’t change the fact that most of the stuff down there doesn’t make much sense (if the dragon’s been guarding that tunnel for hundreds of years, how did all the explorers get past him?). Also the puzzles feel inconsistent at times. One requires finding several gems to bribe someone, and so an ending where you’re killed for trying to claim a treasure chest feels like a cop-out. Oh, you wanted me to do that before but not now, huh? Okay.

I will say this about the book, unlike the two preceding it the kids don’t go through hell and back just to have Syovar fight the main bad guy for them. Still, it’s too little, too late.

Eclipse Chapter 5 - Imprint

2011-11-11T13:47:00.008-06:00

1. Continuing where we left off last chapter, Bella’s trying to console Jacob with the pain of choosing Edward over him. “Isn’t it getting any better?” No, it’s not, because people don’t get completely over other people in these books. With some of them it’s even used to demonstrate their devotion.

2. We find out Quil (whoever that is) joined the werewolf pack too, and rather than being emo about it, “he’s jazzed. Totally thrilled.” After all, “Shouldn’t be surprised, I guess. It’s so Quil.” I’m supposed to know what they’re talking about right? Because I do know the character, but I don’t know the character, if you get what I’m saying.

Then again I do know some of the characters Meyer brings into focus next, but still don’t know what it is about them I’m meant to like. Namely, Bella says Edward might come looking for her, even if he thinks she’s on the Quileutes’ land, if he thinks she’s doing something “he considers…risky.”

Like I’ve said, I’m not entirely against Edward wanting to protect his girlfriend. If he didn’t we’d be calling him something else. It’s just the way he goes about it is as if she’s his pet rather than his soul mate. If she wants to do something he doesn’t want her to do, she won’t, because he’s the big strong vampire with a precognitive sister and money he’ll still be trying to burn through when the sun’s going dark, and she’s the pitiful little human who still shares a bathroom with her dad. My condolences to the Twihards who haven’t grown out of thinking that’s a model for a lasting relationship.

My mind isn’t changed any when Bella asks why their two groups can’t just be “civilized” to each other. Hey, most vampires really are remorseless killers, and the way Edward tries to confine Bella and all the other crimes his family has committed, most of them over this whiny little sadsack, don’t really make them look like the angels Bella and middle-aged real Bella would have us believe. Let alone the the way Alice, Bella’s supposed best friend among the family, treats her a lot like Edward does but as a life-sized Barbie rather than a dog. I can almost forgive a first-time author for not knowing that readers won’t necessarily like the protagonist just for being the protagonist, but with all the reading she’s claimed to have done that helped inspire this, I don’t think I should. Even if I can.

Also, in reference to Edward, “At least he can be a grown-up about this.” Is that why he disabled your truck so you couldn’t visit your friend he doesn’t trust?

“He knows that hurting you would hurt me -- and so he never would. You don’t seem to care about that at all!” Me me me me me me me me me! I didn’t like Kamen Rider Kabuto much, but at least it was honest enough to come out and say its protagonist was the center of the universe.

3. After Meyer tries to convince me she understands character development and the dynamics of loving relationships more and fails, Bella tries to defend the Cullens to Jacob more. “The Cullens had no idea. They didn’t think that werewolves still existed here. They didn’t know that coming here would change you.”

Didn’t they? They brokered a truce with werewolves in this territory, and she had more contact than the Cullens did with someone who took that agreement very seriously. Remember Billy trying to warn her off going out with Edward? What, exactly, was it that made the Cullens think that there were no more werewolves around if the tribe they belonged to was still around?

And maybe I’m missing something, but it seemed like none of the pack forming and teenagers wolfing out happened until Victoria came back and started gunning for Bella. She, after all, presumably didn’t know about the Cullens’ agreement with the Quileutes and didn’t know vampires were supposed to stay off their land. It seemed to me they were wolfing out in response to the threat she posed. To the extent the concept of “threat” exists in this universe at all.

“You think I should be as forgiving as you are? We can’t all be saints and martyrs.” Yeah, some of us have personalities.

“Grow up, Jacob.” Get some perspective, Bella.

4. We find out perhaps how much growing up Bella herself really has to do when Jacob replies that he can’t grow up, because if he changes into a wolf on a regular basis, he, like the others, won’t age.

“Am I the only one who has to get old? I get older every stinking day! Damn it! What kind of world is this? Where’s the justice?…Shut, Jacob. Just shut up! This is so unfair!” Boy she gets more and more relatable all the time, doesn’t she? This isn’t making a good character flawed, it’s making a flawed character insufferable.

He calms her down by saying that it’s not really that simple. The reason he got so much bigger in between the last time she saw him as a human and when he joined Sam’s pack is he’s in his mid-20’s, physically, thanks to the change. Which, as usual, our super-aware protagonist never really thought about until somebody shoved her face in it.

Jacob: “So, did you want to hear more about Sam, or did you want to scream at me some more for things that are out of my control?”
Bella: “Sorry. Age is a touchy subject for me. That hit a nerve.”
Starofjustice: “She was never a teenager, huh?”

5. They talk about some boring stuff about when Sam first became a werewolf, and then Jacob tells her about the really weird part about being a werewolf. “I’m a pro at weird,” Bella replies, which is why she’s always in the dark.

Jacob’s talking about one of Meyer’s most dubious inclusions, imprinting. “ ‘Imprinting?’ I repeated the unfamiliar word. ‘No. What’s that mean?’ ” Because a smart, well-read person who’s nearly out of high school wouldn’t have heard that word before.

Imprinting, at least in regard to Meyer’s werewolves, involves them falling permanently, obsessively in love with someone out of the blue (not stated here but in the next book is it doesn’t matter if that person’s a toddler). Bella asks if it’s like love at first sight, but told “It’s a little bit more powerful than that. More absolute.” You know, according to the guidebook Meyerpires fall in love once and then that’s it for the rest of their eternities. For a romance novel a lot of the couplings seem biologically motivated.

Sam fell for Emily that way, even though he was going out with her cousin Leah. This is why Sam hates vampires, evidently. Because their presence made him change into a werewolf, which made him imprint on Emily, which made him break up with Leah. Because he and Emily are…extremely happy…together. Even though Emily really had no interest in Sam before she got imprinted on. But hey, “it’s hard to resist that level of commitment and adoration,” sayeth Jacob. In this universe where the concept of being creeped out by guys doesn’t seem to exist, that’s probably true. Then again this is also a universe where moving on with your life is treated like cutting off your arm, because Leah’s still pissed about it. Even after she wolfs out herself she still acts like it was something he could’ve controlled.

Anyway Sam slipped that time and mauled his soul mate (what kind of system is this?). He was really devastated by what he’d done, but then, “somehow, she was the one comforting him, and after that….” That’s all we’re going to hear about that, I guess. Way to explain yourself, Meyer.

Bella expresses gratitude (inwardly) that Jacob’s not saying there’s anything like that between him and her. “I didn’t need any more of the supernatural that I already had to deal with.” Which is why she wants to immerse herself deeper in the supernatural world by becoming a vampire.

Wait, what?

6. Jacob goes quiet, and “My intuition told me that I didn’t want to hear what he was thinking.” Bella has intuition? And fine, don’t tell us.

By the way, Bella’s such a pro at weird that when Jacob tells a “funny” story about another werewolf imprinting, Bella says it’s not something the other werewolf should’ve shared and Jacob has to remind her werewolves can hear each other’s thoughts whether any of them want to or not. It’s nice to be reminded of that, but Meyer could’ve found a way to have Bella tell us that as an aside. Or maybe Meyer couldn’t, and that’s a bigger problem.

7. Bella tells Jacob Edward’s mind-reading doesn’t work on her.

Bella: “It probably means there’s something wrong with my brain.”
Starofjustice: “Sweetie, plenty of things you’ve done mean there’s probably something wrong with your brain.”
Jacob: “I already knew there was something wrong with your brain.”
Bella: “Thanks.”
Starofjustice: “You’re welcome!”

8. Jacob brings up the nature of something Edward picked from his mind when they met two chapters ago that “bothered” Edward, which is the image from Sam’s head of how messed up and totally destroyed Bella was that night Sam found her in the woods after Edward dumped her.

Bella’s mad at Jacob for this, but I’m kind of on Jacob’s side here. Maybe it’d actually teach Edward to think through problems like he doesn’t no matter what his creator says. I can hardly remember any character getting smart about anything we’ve seen happen in these books. And from that I kind of get this sense that the author thinks “it’s fiction” and “love isn’t reasonable” are defenses against most of the criticism leveled against her characters and books as a whole.

“If you can’t be nice, I won’t come back at all!” Bella threatens. Is that what Edward’s doing by using his inhuman resources to try to keep her from seeing her friends? Is that what Edward’s doing by having her hang around his family, when her blood smells just so much more delish than anybody else’s? He says fear of losing her wiped out any urge he might’ve had to feed on her, yeah, but what about the other six vampires he lives with? Was it him or one of them that lost control around her? What's being done about that? Or is it being ignored because Meyer doesn't need it anymore?

I get really disgusted with these books when Bella insists that things like the entire reason the Quileutes regained their lupine heritage was because of the Cullens being in the area don’t matter (I still say it makes more sense that it was because of Victoria). “You are Jacob, and he is Edward, and I am Bella. And nothing else matters.” I’m not trying to sound racist or anything, and I’m not trying to deny that we need to make an effort to focus less on racial boundaries. But I am sick of this being how complex the books’ morality gets; yes everybody can get over issues they've had for generations, and all it took was Bella to get it to happen.

To prove it, eventually Jacob agrees to try to just see Edward as Edward and not Edward the bloodsucker. Because gosh darn it Bella’s special and it would be a shame not to have her around even though they seem to argue every time they meet.

Dino Squad - The Trojan Dinosaur

2011-11-06T19:23:00.010-06:00

Been a while since I did a Dino Squad review, and since that’s apparently the second-most popular series of reviews I do, how about another one? The last one they ever did, to be exact.

Max is upset that the group is inside the lighthouse studying on a beautiful day. I mean, who cares about subjects like Greek Mythology? More importantly, what high school teaches that?

Moynihan tries to sympathize with him, saying it seems like some things you learn in school are irrelevant, but a well-rounded education is the key to succeeding later in life. Rodger credits all the fancy-shmancy gadgets he’s invented to all he’s learned in science and math, and that’s great, but he probably excels in science and math because he likes science and math so much they’re what he does for fun, too. I paid more attention in my literature classes because that’s what I do for fun. Besides, does their equipment actually serve any purpose besides fighting tank-sized mutants?

Moynihan tries to rationalize the frustration from their studies as being part of all their obligations. Midterms, extracurricular activities, family obligations, and saving the world from a “super” villain who wouldn’t make the cut for the Legion of Doom. I notice nobody mentions social lives, because that would imply they had friends outside this little group the like of which doesn’t exist without the aid of central casting.

Or maybe it just is the knowledge setting in that most of the things they’re learning in school are pointless for most people. I’ve hardly used algebra or any of the foreign language stuff those two fat bitches in middle school tried to make me learn. That’s nothing compared to high school, though, because at least people still speak Spanish and French. I went to a high school where you had to take a certain amount of foreign language classes, and you could satisfy that requirement by taking Latin. Although it would’ve been handy that time I fell through a wormhole and landed in an Asterix the Gaul comic.

Anyway, checking in on Dr. Ignoramus, I mean Veloci, he’s launching a scheme to capture those perfect dinosaurs the kids turn into once and for all. He feels so good about this he even quotes “veni, vidi, vici.” He blames previous failures on a lack of manpower (despite this, he’s still only bringing his normal two flunkies with him), and this time plans to mutate a creature “known for its wildly uncontrollable behavior.”

Yes, he’s pulling up outside someplace having a dog show. You know, a pet you can train. And the ones being entered in a dog show will have been trained even more than most.

The kids are still grousing about the worthlessness of their educations, and the subject comes about Sir Isaac Newton and his discovery of gravity, and how they might never have flown to the moon if he hadn’t. Because it’s not like gravity was always there, keeping us from flying off into space.

Fortunately we’re spared more of this drivel when the mutant alarm goes off, picking up multiple contacts in Manchster, NH (which is only 46 miles away this time). Moynihan thinks this one might be difficult, and decides she’s coming too this time. Why? What about that time where Max and Caruso had to fight like 20 giant chickens? What makes this different? She even says the signals are weak, meaning the animals have been contaminated but haven’t actually mutated yet.

The group actually takes a sea plane to New Hampshire where they leave it with one of Moynihan’s many friends (do these people know she’s actually an immortal velociraptor?). Why? Remember that time where they took motorcycles to a place over 400 miles away and got there within like an hour? Why bother setting the episodes in real locations if you’re not going to address the distances? And then turn around and address the distances? I’m pretty sure “Scents and Scents-a-bility” was the first episode I did that Jeffrey Scott didn’t write.

All I’m asking for’s a little consistency.

While Moynihan and Caruso stand watch outside (with both of them in the same place. Doesn’t that sort of defeat the purpose of having two lookouts?), the others go inside and track the signal to a box. Which is full of chocolate lab puppies. Which immediately scamper out without the kids doing a thing to stop them. Let’s ignore why these puppies are at a dog show, and just say way to contain the threat you dipshits. And I think I brought this up before, but when they call Moynihan on their walkie talkies she goes by the handle “Mothersaurus.” I’m not sure I want to know why they call her “mother,” but why the “saurus”? If Veloci intercepts their transmissions he’s going to know they’re those dinosaurs that keep getting in his way, and quite possibly the other raptor who spent the millennia in the same cave as him. It’s just with how they’re supposed to be trying to keep a low profile, yet drive all those dinosaur-faced vehicles and do nothing to hide who they are…

The puppies do mutate and Max decides it’s a good time to do the same, even though the puppy-mutants appear to be, well, not hostile at all.

After they change for a non-fight, Veloci’s goons show up and trap them with tar guns, and it seems like he really has decided to hire more than two thugs to capture five dinosaurs at long last. It’s kind of funny, really, when Rodger notes “These guys have been doing their homework! They’ve never been this well-organized!” No, they just thought to send more than two guys. Only took two entire seasons.

Seeing another guy running inside, Moynihan follows and sees that the kids have been captured. Couldn’t they have called her and told her about Veloci’s guys being around with that telepathy they have in dinosaur form? I mean, that’s how she told them her and Veloci’s story in the pilot. With dino telepathy.

She goes dino herself to save the kids, because remember, she’s a raptor who gained telepathic powers, immortality and the ability to change into a human by hiding in a cave. Her surprise attack is helped by the goons forgetting they have weapons capable of bringing down dinosaurs. Much larger ones than velociraptors, even the Jurassic Park ones adopted by popular culture. Then again, the animation’s so bad it might be showing her to be the size of a spinosaurus like this.

The stupidity continues when she explains to Fiona that she’s not Veloci. No shit, he’s red. They’ve run into him like that several times. I know I've said this show doesn't have much cross-episode continuity, but you can't say they've never met the villain face-to-face and don't know what he looks like. Not by the second season, and not in the last episode of the second season. And as a matter of fact Veloci himself comes in, recognizes her color scheme and morphs into a raptor for another non-fight. They circle around a couple times until it occurs to one of the goons those nets that worked on the other, bigger dinosaurs might work on this one too. Although forgive me for doubting the goons can drag the dinosaurs away with their bare hands. The episode itself keeps mentioning the dinos weigh about two tons apiece.

Moynihan uses her dino telepathy on the puppy mutants to have them run up and start licking the goon (so why couldn’t the kids call her with their own dino telepathy to report it was an ambush?). This allows the kids to escape, but Veloci manages to get away with his old nemesis in tow. The puppies get in the kids’ way when they try to follow (as kids, brilliant), but are quickly zapped back to normal.

Back at the lighthouse, the kids use their dino radar to determine Moynihan’s being held at Veloci’s corporate headquarters. Okay, how does “dino radar” work? I guess they have to actually be in dinosaur form to show up on it, but the puppies hadn’t mutated yet and they did. And remember, the kids had to go 46 miles to get there. That probably took a while where the puppies weren’t mutating. Plus the kids turn into dinosaurs because of Veloci’s mutant juice, but Moynihan’s actually a raptor who turns into a human, not the other way around. And she still shows up on dino radar.

Max agonizes over how a bunch of kids, even with dino-morphing powers, can get into a super villain’s home base since it’s probably crawling with guards and booby traps. It all depends on how competent the guards need to be at the moment. If they get caught and then have to fight their way out, it’d be no problem because the villains in this show always get more incompetent the more “dramatic” the situation is.

All their middle class education hasn’t taught them anything about rescuing velociraptors from corporate super villains, but Rodger pipes up with this little pearl of wisdom, “Everything’s useless, until we put it to use.”

Wow, man. You just blew my mind.

Fiona’s inspired by them talking about Robin Hood before, specifically the part about the sheriff putting a bounty on his head. Like Veloci offering a reward to anyone with information leading to the capture of a dinosaur. And he didn’t become the laughingstock of the corporate world, you’re telling me? I just want to know what people think of this little gesture of his, considering the media firestorm that would erupt if a real live dinosaur was discovered.

Anyway, it seems like the plan is something like this: they build a cage with a trap door, so that Fiona can be inside in dinosaur mode, but once they haul her inside the building the other will hop out of the trap door and they can rescue Moynihan. Caruso comes out wearing a fake beard in case Veloci’s ever seen him before, but Max points out there’s no mistaking Caruso’s stupid haircut. Which makes their security look even more pathetic. Although this does get him to flatten that stupid pompadour or whatever down.

Incredibly, Veloci buys their story about a guy bringing his dinosaur out of his garage, and planning to take it to the zoo if they don’t want it. They could probably sneak in by pretending to be the pizza guy.

Or maybe not, because when Caruso starts trying to schmooze Veloci for the reward money for delivering a real life dinosaur, our villain voices skepticism about how an airhead like him managed to trap a dinosaur. He catches Caruso flat-footed by asking to hear the gripping story of how he trapped this prehistoric beastie. So…they were banking on Veloci to be an idiot who’d just buy this without employing any of his vaunted brainpower as to how this all happened. Caruso adapts the story of that guy who made friends with the lion by pulling the thorn out of its paw, and Veloci buys it. He buys it. Come on, Veloci was around when people made those stories up....

Clunky writing continues to favor our heroes as the cage is wheeled into the same room where Moynihan’s being held with nothing but a pair of leg cuffs. Via dino telepathy Fiona tells her they’re here to bust her out, and she replies to work fast because she can’t stay as a raptor much longer. Why not? I mean, that’s her real form. The raptor one. In most shows (that is, ones that make any effort to make any kind of sense) when your strength runs out or your control slips, you usually turn back to your true form. This episode was written by the same guy who wrote the pilot, after all, so it’s not like he wouldn’t know that. Plus, couldn’t Veloci possibly hear them using dino telepathy, since his natural form’s a dinosaur as well? Again referring to the pilot, Moynihan was a human when she used her dino telepathy to tell the kids the back story.

Before I move on, I love the clunky terminology of the series. Whenever Veloci talks about the kids in their dino forms, he always, always calls them “PERFECT dinosaurs.” And when Rodger starts to get antsy sitting in the compartment, Max tells him “hold your horseasauruses!” To think I praised the feature film this guy wrote.

Evidently seeing the kids don’t have a plan beyond this, Moynihan shrinks back to human form, where she can just step out of the cuffs and run for it. Anyway, with the bad guys distracted, the kids sneak out through the bottom of the cage, open it to let Fiona out (they didn’t give themselves a way to open it from the inside?), and go dino themselves.

Luckily none of the guards appear to have any of those anti-dinosaur weapons they did back at the dog show, despite keeping a dinosaur captive even before they brought Fiona in. Unluckily the dimwits walk right into a circle of diodes on the floor while trying to force their way out, which turn out to generate a laser cage that Veloci turns on. Schools may not offer courses on getting around villain hideouts safely, but haven’t these guys even seen a sci-fi movie in their lives? Luckily the buttons have been labeled in Latin, which Veloci uses because “he’s been around for ages.“ This might explain his lack of success as a villain if he’s labeling the controls to his hardware in a dead language there’s no indication his guards know.

Rodger turns out to know Latin, enough to know that the first two buttons on the control panel are “warning” and “cage,” but it takes all of them thinking together on English words with similar roots to figure out that the third and final button opens the cage. And…that’s not something they could’ve just figured out through process of elimination?

Oh, and to get them out, Rodger actually pushes the same button Veloci used to turn the cage on to turn it off again, rendering the whole thing pointless thanks to animator inattentiveness.

They end up trapping Veloci in his own cage, and despite Fiona pointing out that this is a perfect chance to destroy his operation, Rodger replies that he’s “too strong and too clever” to stay trapped long. Oh, please! He hasn’t won a single non-fight he’s entered in this show, and they tricked him to get into his lab. Obviously he doesn’t have as many practical smarts as they do, and that’s not saying a lot. They don’t even show Veloci getting on his cell phone to call a red alert, and if they’re underground, would that even work? Even if we’re prepared to buy Rodger’s story, and I’m not saying I am, they should be able and willing to do some damage as long as they’re there.

But if the kids did that, there couldn’t be more episodes (which there weren't anyway. Maybe this kind of writing’s why), so they all go along with Rodger’s plan and just walk back out. Moynihan praises the kids for their brilliant strategy, prompting Max to say “Who’d have thought Greek mythology could be so useful?” Who’d have though a Ph.D.-holder would fall for a tactic that’s been around so long it’s become a cliché?

Or Latin for that matter. Buzz suddenly knows how to say “knowledge is power” in Latin, making me wish I could be watching A.J.’s Time Travelers instead. That show was funnier.

They drive home that point of theirs that everything you learn has some use, and to demonstrate its effectiveness I’d like to tell you a little story. One Thanksgiving not all that long ago, my family spent the occasion with one of my mom’s friends and her family. Because I’m such a big kid at heart, I got put in charge of entertaining mom’s friend’s grandson. He was huge into dinosaurs, so I decided to let him watch some Dino Squad. Little Will retained absolutely nothing about it besides all the cool dinosaurs running around. He also thought Veloci turned into a deinonychus.

And the show doesn’t do anything to say whether that check for 200 grand Caruso conned out of Veloci’s good or not.

Eclipse Chapter 4 - Nature

2011-11-02T18:52:00.012-05:00

1. “I was having a bad week.” When don’t you?

Bella’s freaked out to hear Victoria’s still after her, although I don’t see why she’d suddenly make up her mind to stop. Yeah, maybe she’d think twice with having to get past the Cullens too, but that would’ve been really pitiful from a dramatic standpoint, when she’s yet to get any appreciable “screen time”. Which I’m not sure I’m willing to overlook in Bella’s thought process with the way she and Edward compare themselves to people in other books.

“Not panicking was easier said than done.” Even though she’s got an entire family of vampires and a pack of werewolves looking out for her and the one person in the area whose welfare she’s shown any interest in. The two groups aren’t working together yet, but it hasn’t occurred to anybody that with the Cullens upping the ante with their very presence, that Victoria might too. As far as any of them are aware, it’s just her. Am I really supposed to be worried that Victoria’s a threat to Bella when her guardians outnumber Victoria seven to one and have the power to see the future, read minds and control moods? Not to mention have resources totaling something like $36 billion? When Victoria has, what, the same powers as any one of them and the clothes on her back?

I know Bella couldn’t protect herself from a vampire, but isn’t she supposed to be really smart? Observant? Can’t she see how badly the deck’s stacked against the threat she’s totally losing it over based on what she knows at the moment? Then again, if she actually was smart it might occur to her to link Victoria’s continued quest for revenge with the vampire killings nearby.

2. The Cullens try to assure her that with Alice around they’re not likely to be caught blindsided, but I still feel like Meyer’s writing her precognition as whatever works best at the moment. The reason for this assurance is Bella wants them to make her a vampire so she can defend herself. Even though she knows it’s taken them ages to learn to control their urges and they’d probably have to protect people from her.

To close the matter, they ask if she’s ever noticed that “Edward is just the teeniest bit prone to overreaction?” Overthinks everything, huh? And I could believe Bella hasn’t noticed that with the way she goes on and on about his sparkly countenance.

3. Edward goes to chow down on some endangered species, and while he’s away Alice promises to be around at all times if Bella needs anything. Which Bella immediately figures out is code that Alice is making sure Bella doesn’t do anything that Edward wouldn’t let her while he’s gone. I understand him wanting to keep her safe (even if I don’t believe in their relationship), but what kind of life does he think he’s giving her if every single thing she wants to do is subject to his approval? And don’t say it pains Edward to have to do this. If their love’s supposed to be everlasting they should be able to come to a compromise once in a while.

4. While Bella’s at home cleaning up and not going out because her future family won’t let her, she starts messing around with fridge magnets and starts comparing them to the Cullens and the Quileutes. That is, how the magnetism pushes them apart. “Why couldn’t they just play nicer?” She’s even complaining that the laws of science don’t play her way now. “I could have flipped one over, but that felt like losing.” It also makes this metaphor even more moronic because you know how magnets work, right? Opposites attract. Alike repel. If the Cullens and the Quileutes realized how ALIKE they are and made friends, then they wouldn’t be acting like magnets. Currently they’re opposed, or OPPOSITES, and they certainly aren’t attracted.

Then she seems to realize what she’s doing. “I stood there like an idiot for a second.” How would anyone tell? “not quite able to admit that I wasn’t having any lasting effect against scientific principles.” If she fixated on it long enough she probably could. Sues are like that.

5. Later she goes to her job at the local sporting goods store and notes that her classmate’s mom who owns the place has professionally done nails “visible through the strappy high heels that didn’t resemble anything Newton’s offered on the long row of hiking boots.” Because to run a business you have to be a client, too. Or you have to wear hiking boots in town. Or something.

Meyer, you write like a moron. I work for a pool supply company, but neither I nor anyone I work with has one.

6. Mom and classmate are arguing because classmate wants to visit Seattle but she’s having none of it while the killings are going on. Bella excuses herself because “I didn’t want to be a source of familial discord when they were already arguing.” STOP TAKING THE BLAME FOR EVERYTHING. Her lack of super-powers when surrounded by people with them doesn’t need to comprise her entire character.

7. Bella sees a poster that says “SAVE THE OLYMPIC WOLF” and rather than thinking about saving endangered wildlife or how she’s friends with people who kill wild animals, this makes her desperately want to see Jacob. She drives down to La Push without the Cullens interfering, and when Jacob greets her “the way he said the words made it sound like welcome home.” That does draw a contrast, doesn’t it? Of how the Cullens are plenty civil and everything to Bella, but sterile and controlling.

I’m really not sure why Bella considers Jacob her BFF, though, considering he starts going off on what a selfish monster Edward is and how Bella says “There’s nothing to forgive” and crap like that. Because she and Edward are in love. Shut up, don’t question it.

She thinks some about how mad Edward’s going to be for this meeting that doesn’t even seem very friendly, and I have to ask, does Carlisle know his son’s having his daughter make sure Bella doesn’t visit her friends his son doesn’t like?

8. Bella accidentally mentions to Jacob that Alice can see things, and tells him what happened when she ran out on him in the last book. “I kept it as succinct as possible -- leaving out anything that wasn’t essential.” I don’t know whether to be flattered or disgusted that Bella thinks I deserve to hear every last little detail.

Jacob’s ecstatic to hear that Alice’s powers don’t work on him and the pack. “I glared at him until he realized his mistake.” His only mistake was doing it right in front of her. The Cullens may not kill people but most of them seem to have no scruples about breaking any other laws or standards of decency.

9. Jacob in turn tells her about their run-in with Victoria, and Paul almost got rammed and “well, you know Paul.” Vaguely. In fact this part kind of calls attention to how bad Meyer is at using all her space to actually flesh out her characters when Jacob can’t remember Carlisle and Jasper’s names. It’s almost like Jacob’s channeling my reaction when Bella tells him and he answers “You know I don’t really care.”

10. Jacob brings up Bella’s little attempt at cliff diving, and how if she’d (just had the brains to) waited for him, the Cullens never would’ve come back and nothing between them would’ve changed. “It was disconcerting the way he said this, like it would be a good thing ot have no vampires in Forks.” I repeat what I said earlier about their scruples. And not everybody’s as shallow as her, you know. You know Steph, maybe there is something to what all the haters are saying, about the way you have a girl marrying a guy right out of high school mainly because he’s good-looking. She claims to see other things, but all she actually seems to notice is how perfectly perfect his outside is.

I just looooooooove the part where Jacob brings up her “jumping off cliffs,” and Bella “made a face. No one was ever going to let me forget that.” Can I hear one good reason why I should? I know what she saw and why she was happy as she was pulled under. People have every reason to bring that up every day for the rest of her idiot life. Edward's the only thing in her life keeping her sane. That's not something to be proud of.

11. I get even more dubious about Jacob and Bella’s friendship when he mentions that “you don’t see the fish trying to plant a kiss on the eagle,” Bella retorts that maybe the fish was trying, and Jacob affirms that eagles are good-looking birds. She’s insulted that he insinuates she’s so shallow, and when he asks if it’s all the Cullens’ money she comes back with “I’m flattered that you think so much of me.” Sweetie, I’m not gonna like you just because somebody says I should. You’re a moron, you fixate on these creatures’ impossible good looks, you sound resentful when people try to be nice to you, and you make every problem in your life, even the ones perfectly ordinary teenagers have, sound like the sky’s falling. Tell me now and tell me true, what about you makes up for that? Because I’m still not sure four chapters into the third book.

What are those things she sees in Edward? He’s “the most loving and unselfish and brilliant and decent person I’ve ever met. Of course I love him. How hard is that to understand?” Oh. My. Lord. I’ve been over how you can’t be unselfish when you have no self so many times, and Edward’s just as guilty of that as Bella. More, because he has a loving foster family.

Brilliant? In what way? In the way that he’d immediately assume some stranger in was talking about Bella’s funeral and decide he had to go out and piss off the Volturi to kill him (after asking nicely, at that)? Or maybe it was failing to anticipate an evil vampire wanting to get even. As I’ve said, not only does Edward not overthink everything, there’s practically nothing indicating he thinks through anything.

Decent?! When did we see that?!! Oh, I know, it was when he broke up with her and did nothing to explain himself or try to find a middle ground with her! Or no, when he came back to her and did absolutely fnck all about the danger that made him break up with her in the first place! Or no, it was when he had his sister spy on his girlfriend to make sure she didn’t hang out with people he doesn’t approve of! Wait, wait, wait! It was when he broke into her house and went through her dirty laundry to get her car keys even though she didn’t want him to!

Look, I know I may draw some fire for this, but I see some validity in Edward’s not wanting his girlfriend to hang around a bunch of crass, uncouth and volatile werewolves that she honestly doesn’t act as if she likes at all anyway. Not even Jacob. But it’s not his right to force his judgment on her. We haven’t even gotten to the part where Alice kidnaps Bella and calls it a slumber party. Because Edward bribed her with a sports car to do it. Gee, Edward almost sounds like a big bully exploiting the fact that Bella’s not as strong as him.

12. Jacob points out that he’s still human, unlike Edward. “I didn’t choose this.” Bella fires back “Do you think Edward did? He didn’t know what was happening to him any more than you did. He didn’t exactly sign up for this.” Does it impact anything that she does want to sign up for that, and she’s enticed by the power and getting to stay young and pretty with her Edward forever? With no acknowledgement at all of the desire to kill people that’ll supposedly come with it until she can learn to restrain herself? She certainly has no ability to restrain herself now, Edward even has to do that for her. What about cutting herself off from her loved ones? Oh right, she doesn’t have anyone that it would believably pain her to lose, Edward’s her entire existence. Plus there’s this apparent belief on the author’s part that protagonists shouldn’t have to work or sacrifice to gain things…

“You have no idea how truly good they are -- to the core, Jacob.” Yes, I’m sure all those people whose cars they stole and whose businesses they immolated would just love to shake the Cullens’ sparkly hands. I repeat, murder is their only reluctance.

13. Why does she put up with all this bile-slinging between her and Jacob? “Because, underneath all the anger and the sarcasm, Jacob was in pain.” You’re certainly helping him through it, Bells. “I didn’t know how to help him, but I knew I had to try. It was more than that I owed him. It was because his pain hurt me, too. Jacob had become a part of me, and there was no changing that now.”

Can I just remind everybody that Bella left the sporting goods store earlier this very chapter so as not to make things any worse between the family? Everything’s her damn fault or would be better without her. That doesn’t make her more likable, it makes her look like she’s got no concept of scale. All the problems she describes sound equally dire.

Damn it, it’s because of these books. They’re why I’ve been writing so many things with female protagonists lately, and why so much of my leisure reading’s been stuff like Gold Digger and The Courageous Princess. So I can prove to myself main characters with XX-chromosomes don't have to suck.

Captain N The Game Master - Return to Castlevania

2011-10-31T09:04:00.008-05:00

While the late 80’s into the early 90’s saw DiC producing a number of awful (and one surprisingly watchable) cartoon shows based on videogames on both sides of the console war, few are reviled in quite the same way as Captain N. Unlike the other shows that focused on one particular franchise, it attempted to be the point where all the well-known games of the era (that didn’t already have their own show) met.

However, the reason it’s infamous among gamers is the writers appear to have played the games they were writing into the show for ten minutes and called their research complete. The Super Mario Bros. Super Show took some liberties with where its stories were set, but the enemies and the power-ups and Mario being able to breathe underwater were pretty much accurate. Not here. The hero of Kid Icarus is actually named Pit, for instance, and it’s anybody’s guess why Jeffrey Scott thought adding “acus” to the end of half his dialogue would be endearing. Mega Man wears green instead of blue. And Samus Aran from Metroid didn’t appear in the show because Scott “never heard of her,” heavily implying he never played the game at all because all you have to do is hit Start and there she is. Not to mention the villain of her game was the main villain for this entire show. For what it’s worth, Samus was a regular in the tie-in comic.

Truth be told…I kind of like the show. There’s something endearing about the cheesiness and only occasionally-accurate research. For all its faults, there’s one thing I can say about Captain N that I can’t about the other cartoons I’ve reviewed: it’s hardly ever boring. And let’s be fair, they were adapting games from an era where not a whole lot of emphasis was put on characterization or plot, forcing the writers to wing it on those fronts. I’m not saying most or even a lot of their choices for characterization were good ones, but the developers didn’t give them much to work with.

Anyway, the basic story of Captain N was that Kevin, the most bodacious gamer to ever pick up a controller, is pulled into the universe where the characters of his favorite games are real. Or some of them, anyway, or goofier likenesses of them, anyway, and he becomes the superhero Captain N to save it from the forces of evil. The show ran for two and a half seasons.

I say two and a half because this episode comes from the third, where the episodes where shortened to run in a half-hour block with the cartoon based on Super Mario World (which took a few too many of its story cues from The Flintstones for my taste, but whatever). The animation budget was noticeably lower, the scripts were lamer, and well I think we all knew this was probably the last roundup for both shows.

"Return to Castlevania" opens on Simon Belmont, whip-cracking, vampire-slaying hero of the Castlevania games where you kill all the movie monsters of old. In this show he was probably the most loathed of all the characters, being a narcissistic clod who’s also such a fraidycat you wonder how he ever managed to acquire a reputation as a master vampire hunter. The smarmy voice of his didn’t help (although believe it or not, the actor made a decent King Arthur).

Anyway, Simon’s attending a ceremony where he’ll be bequeathed the weapons used by his ancestor, Trevor Belmont (from Castlevania III, actually a prequel which some people apparently don’t realize), who used them to defeat Count Dracula who can only be called “the Count” for legal reasons. There to present the weapons is the Poltergeist King, the unseen benefactor who supposedly puts all those weapons in candles for heroes to find. Rather than congratulate Simon for the bravery of his ancestor, though, the Poltergeist King says Trevor was a coward and HE was the one who defeated the Count. The crowd at the ceremony appears to have been expecting this, as they always do, and starts pelting the stage with produce.

Elsewhere it turns out the Poltergeist King wasn’t really the Poltergeist King, he was the Count himself disguised as the Poltergeist King thanks to the kidnapped Poltergeist King’s stolen magic staff. Which he uses to make his captive think twice about escaping captivity by setting the rope on fire. And I just noticed Dracula’s wearing a bowtie. To think people get mad at Twilight for making vampires look sissy. Not to say it doesn’t, of course…

The Poltergeist King was able to attempt an escape in the first place because the Count put his deadbeat son on guard duty (Ian Corlett doing an embarrassing surfer dude voice, which feels a little weird to my mind because Matt Hill, who did Captain N, tended to have a hard time sounding like someone who wasn’t from SoCal. He made for a weird-sounding samurai, at least to my ears). Incidentally, said son’s also from Castlevania III, Alucard. So you can’t say “Dracula” but you can say it backward. The Count kicks him out of the castle for being worthless.

Captain N tracks Simon down to a graveyard where Trevor’s buried, and where Simon accidentally wakes up an absent-minded old wizard who helped Trevor stomp the Count before and says Castlevania never produced a braver man. This character’s never named, but it’s probably meant to be Sypha Belnades, one of three sidekicks you could pick up in the game. Fans loved this one because if you actually do beat the Count with Sypha as your sidekick, it turns out he’s actually a woman. At least they got that right when Samus appeared at all.

Sypha immediately proves his worth by accidentally animating a skeleton that tries to kill Simon, and Captain N proves his worth by trying to shoot it and only clipping off one of its horns, which prompts Sypha to remember the magic words for freezing monsters.

The Barely Competent Brigade end up in a tunnel somewhere and the Poltergeist King appears and promises to make them pay for invading his domain, but Captain N shoots the ceiling, which he somehow knows will dump water on the King. This serves to make his disguise go poof and turn him back into the Count. Huh? I thought the magic staff was supposed to be pretty badass, but you can cancel it out with water?

Anyway the Count creates some descending spiked chandeliers (what? Things from the actual game?), and after Sypha “accidentally” teleports himself away from these other idiots, Alucard shows up and offers to help the others defeat his dad. The Count watches and voices disappointment that his own son’s turned traitor. Even though Alucard’s another sidekick in the game because he disagrees with his father’s evil ways and will help you once you prove yourself worthy. And that game’s set a century before Simon was around.

Alucard leads them to his dad’s tomb, but immediately switches sides back, and shoots fireballs from his cape to wake up mummies to attack Simon and Captain N. During this Simon whips a candle that turns it into a boomerang that goes flying at the Count. Is that supposed to be like how you can get boomerangs from candles in the game?

He has the one gun, but can shoot them at the same time.

Simon swings on his whip, yelling like Tarzan for some reason even though he’s from a horror game, and defeats the Count by knocking him into his coffin. Which if I’m not mistaken is where he sleeps anyway, so what exactly did that accomplish? Captain N then remarks it’s time to “wrap things up,” which makes no sense because he beats the mummies by un-wrapping them. Then he knocks Alucard into a coffin too.

That’s treated like a victory, because next thing we know we’re at the ceremony from the beginning, take two. Captain N gets tired of Simon’s long-winded speech, and they apparently picked Sypha up again because he uses a spell to wrap Simon up like a mummy. Which I didn’t think was funny even when I was a kid and this episode was brand new.

House II: The Second Story (Duh)

2011-10-23T12:27:00.004-05:00

Normally I’m loathe to do things out of order here at Spectrum of Madness. Sure, I picked my Dino Squad reviews willy-nilly from the list, but that’s because it’s one of those shows where every episode stands on its own except in relation to the pilot. About the only thing I noticed that ever changed was Fiona’s kid sister being let in on her secret.

On those rare occasions where I’m not going to bother with an entire series to get to one thing, I try to give you enough background to understand what I’m talking about. Bearing that in mind, I could tell you about how House is the story of William Katt battling his undead ‘nam buddy Richard Moll for the life of his son, but I don’t have to. Because House II has nothing whatsoever to do with House.

After the opening credits a husband and wife pair in what looks like the 50’s (but by the movie’s dates would be 1961) see someone’s shadow in the upper floor of their house. The wife wonders if it could be “him,” but the husband replies it’s probably just some punks who broke into a neighbor’s house. Nonetheless he grabs his shootin’ iron before they go to look, and one supposes their doubts have to do with handing off their baby to a couple that drove away with all haste before this. That they appear to have hired a decorator with a fondness for Meso-American temple themes for their house doesn’t help ease the tension either.

Upstairs they look for the intruder, and probably not to their relief, find him: a zombie cowboy Dr. Claw. I’m not even kidding. But then, Frank Welker was kind of the go-to guy for evil voice roles in the 80’s. He demands “the skull,” and when they fail to produce it he pumps ‘em fulla lead.

Two and a half decades later, we find out the baby was Jesse McLaughlin when he and his musical talent scout girlfriend move back into the house where his parents were killed. Something that seems to barely register in his mind. Of course, within hours of taking up residence in the old place his obnoxious man-ho friend Charlie shows up with his latest floozie in tow (you can tell Charlie’s wild because he wears high-tops with a suit), so who can blame Jesse for being distracted.

While the inconsequential girlfriends are off discussing a musical career for Charlie’s latest acquisition (based on some of the lamest of lame 80’s rock I’ve ever heard), Jesse tells his buddy about some research he’s done about his great-great-grandfather (his namesake), who discovered a crystal skull supposedly possessed of mind-bending magical powers. But even if there’s no such thing as magic, the crystal skull has to be worth a fortune. So they do what any responsible guys would do and drive up to the cemetery to disinter Jesse the Elder.

Except the crystal skull really does have magic powers, and he’s still alive.

This movie doesn’t seem to care for you thinking about goes on, like when Jesse the Elder (or “Gramps” as he asks to be called for the sake of convenience) puts the skull in a little altar above the fireplace and tells the boys he needs them to help him protect it from the forces of evil. It even lights up at being put there, and might as well have a huge neon sign flashing “Hey bad guys, steal me” next to it.

Like a caveman (one with a metal sword, yet) tries to do the following night. And because it’s Halloween and Charlie invited everybody he knows over for a costume party, nobody notices except Jesse. He and Charlie follow Alley-Oop upstairs and find out the attic’s turned into a prehistoric jungle. And that’s just for starters.

House II takes itself less seriously than its predecessor, which is both a good, but mostly a bad thing. It seems like they wanted people watching the movie years from then to gag on the 80’s-ness of the whole thing. Like when Gramps is figuring out TV and they’re playing commercials for Toys R Us and Oreos. And of course, the fact that at the end of the movie you’re expecting to hear the villain growl “Next time, Jesse, next tiiiiiiime!”

The biggest problem, though, is the movie never gets into why the guys are willing to keep the skull in the house if evildoers who want it can appear from any time or any place via any door in the house. At least not when they seem to have no interest in figuring out how to use it for themselves. I mean, come on, you’ve got to have some kind of reason for dropping everything and grabbing the nearest sword when a bunch of balding Aztecs grab a knicknack of yours and run off. Plus, when they do, what kind of jerk do you have to be to give yourself an uzi and your buddy a gun that’s actually a cigarette lighter that looks like a gun?

For that matter, the movie has a young Bill Maher in a supporting role, who fortunately isn’t given much to do besides steal Jesse’s girlfriend. But she’s so wound up and career-focused you know as soon as you see her at the Halloween party that they’ll never end up together.

The good sadly isn’t as prevalent. John Ratzenberger turns in an amusing performance as an electrician who turns up in the second act and probably actually does see portals into other time periods on most jobs. Plus his cameo doubles as a hip in-joke to George Wendt playing a nosy neighbor in the first House. And the puppy-caterpillar thing they pick up from the prehistoric jungle is pretty cute. But for all that, the cheesiness ends up being more annoying than charming. I’m saying that as someone who can appreciate some cheese as part of a fun end product, but it’s easy to make something so silly it’s just silly, too.

This movie makes me want to upchuck in my shorts, all right.

Eclipse Chapter 3 - Motives

2011-10-17T12:56:00.003-05:00

1. You remember Edward bringing up the plane tickets he bought so he and Bella could visit her mom in front of her dad so she’d be forced to go. Well, this chapter opens on that visit. The end of it. When they’re on the plane back to Forks.

Here I was hoping to see Edward interact with Bella’s mom, who we hear so much about but as for the times we’ve actually seen her…well, you can leave your shoes on to count those. I mean, you can’t have a character keep going on and on about a relative of theirs without ever seeing them unless it’s supposed to be some kind of gag. And you couldn’t have a gag like that in something that takes itself as seriously as this series. Plus, I wanted to see how he’d socialize with this woman who knows nothing about the real him and why he can’t do things outside the house with them.

Apparently I somehow forgot that Stephenie Meyer’s a total wimp when it comes to giving her characters actual problems. Because we get one flashback of one conversation Bella had with her mom, while Edward made up some BS about having a term paper to avoid going outside and bringing the Volturi down on his future mother-in-law.

In fact it seems like he only did all this so Bella’s mom could tell us how in love he and Bella are.

2. Or maybe it was to give a chance to see how stupid people in the Meyerverse really are. You see, “I’d forgotten how much my mother saw,” and Bella’s surprised to hear her mother point out how Bella instinctively makes sure she’s always close to Edward. Because it’s not Bella’s plans for her future consist only of surgically grafting herself to Edward’s side or anything.

Yes, I’m pretty sure Bella’s supposed to be unusually perceptive for noticing something strange about the Cullens in the first book, but I’ve already been over that. That her mom’s supposed to share that heightened awareness because she noticed Bella making a point to stay close to her boyfriend is pretty darn stupid in its own right. I almost want to say this was to set the stage for a couple even dumber non-surprise reveals later in the book.

3. They get back, and for some reason Jacob’s extremely eager to chat with Bella. He’s been calling nonstop, you see, leading to this little exchange.

Bella: “Now why are you harassing Charlie?”
Jacob: “I need to talk to you.”
Bella: “Yea, I figured that part all by myself.”
Starofjustice: “Then why did you ask, smart perceptive protagonist person?”

He asks if she’s going to be at school the following day, and after getting an answer in the affirmative, hangs up. She tries to figure why it matters to him, and “I tried to think about it logically.” Probably for the first time ever. However “My brain refused to come up with any brilliant insights.” Oh how I’ve lost faith in you, Bella! I thought you’d never let me down!

His sudden concern after being quiet so long disturbs Bella a little. After all, “What difference could three days make?” Fair point, I mean, that’s only about how long it would take her to become a vampire. Hmmm, wait a sec…plus she knows a killer newborn vampire’s on the loose not all that faraway, and if the law of the universe is upheld it’ll eventually come straight for Bella. And there was that time Jacob dropped out of sight for a few days and then next thing you know he’s a werewolf. Not to mention she’s pretty close to ending her high school career. Yeah, a lot can change in a short amount of time.

At least she realizes that a couple paragraphs down too.

4. The next day at school, Edward asks for Bella to do something for him, and it’s to stay in the car while he confronts Jacob who’s waiting for her out front. She tells us she doesn’t hate Sam the way she used to, she’d learned “to like him, even” (gee, would’ve been nice if we could’ve seen that). But when she sees Jacob trying to hold back his emotions, he looks too much like Sam for her tastes. “I’d never been able to completely shake the resentment I felt when Jacob mimicked Sam’s expression. It was a stranger’s face. He wasn’t my Jacob when he wore it.”

Everything has to cater to her wants, huh? He has to be “her” Jacob, huh? This is why that malarkey from the illustrated guide about Bella becoming more important as the series progresses annoys me. It’s always been about her, what she wants, who wants her, who’s jealous of her, and who’s out to get her. I know she’s the main character, but every single thing that happens ties back to her. Maybe it would seem less like that if she actually reached out to other people other times than when they had something she wanted. And spending forever with Edward or having Jacob there as an emotional crutch count as something she wants.

5. Edward does indeed confront Jacob but Bella’s still close enough to hear. We hear about some people named Tyler Crowley and Austin Marks, and I’d be prepared to say those were just names to give us a sense that a crowd’s forming as Jacob and Edward argue if Meyer didn’t think nearly every single person in her books needs an identity of their own.

Jacob’s not happy because apparently Emmett crossed into the Quileutes’ territory the night before, and Bella realizes something’s up that Edward doesn’t want her to know about (but which Jacob wouldn’t try to hide from her). I’d say maybe Edward should let his girlfriend know when something dangerous is around, since we’ve hardly seen anything to prove they’re as competent fighters as the book would have us believe, but on the other hand the slightest flicker of unpleasantness immediately takes over Bella’s mind. Sort of makes you wonder why Edward puts up with her, really.

In any case, Bella realizes Victoria’s still after her, and having to listen to Jacob’s complaints makes Edward look “like…like a vampire.” Meaning what? That he looks like a bloodthirsty monster? That his sparkles have started to show? The books have put so much effort into portraying vampires as these inhumanly pretty creatures, not terrifying creatures of the dark, that it competes with Bella's moaning and groaning to be the most annoying thing about the books. It doesn’t go along with the idea that Edward’s supposed to look scary by saying he looks like a vampire.

6. The boys argue over the merits of the their policy of informing Bella of danger, with Jacob saying “She’s tougher than you think.” Which was proved when she went insane from losing her boyfriend and started playing suicidal games to hang onto his memory. Then again, does Jacob know why she was doing that? If not, and I find that pretty easy to believe, nice to know she’s being so honest and open with the boy she wants to keep as a best friend.

And perhaps the principle failing of the Twilight series strikes again. She remembers Dakota Fanning using her fiendish power to torture Edward and, “I’d rather Victoria kill me a hundred times over than watch Edward suffer that way again.” Not really sure what one has to do with the other, but again Bella doesn’t sound selfless when she’s never placed any value on herself or anything she’s achieved. Maybe because she has yet to achieve anything.

7. Another deadly sin of these books appears when it appears Bella might be too physically ill to attend class because of the argument between the two major men in her life and/or the threat of Victoria hanging over her head. It’s kind of justified that everybody tries to keep her as far from the action as possible if she’s such a flake, but it also means she's almost never around when the exciting stuff happens. Why bother trying to have exciting stuff at all if that’s the case?

8. She gets Edward to admit that Victoria is in fact on the loose and they have in fact been trying to protect Bella without her knowledge. “All of them had been in on it - Emmett, Jasper, Alice, Rosalie and Carlisle. Maybe even Esme, though he hadn’t mentioned her.” Reminding us of all the lesser characters with weird names, huh? “And then Paul and the rest of the Quileute pack. It might so easily have turned into a fight, pitting my future family and my old friends against each other.” Is she so sure she wants to sign up for a group that’ll think nothing of withholding vital information from her? I mean, yes, obviously she is, but they’re certainly not making much of an effort to make her part of the group.

You know what book I want to read sometime? The story of a human and a vampire falling in love, but the woman’s the powerful, beautiful, ageless vampire.

9. The chapter closes out on the various unimportant students placing bets on the outcome almost fight between our male leads. Another of the series’ deadly sins rears because it’s trying to pretend it's not nearly as predictable as it actually is. In this case, the outcome of a fight between what's-his-face and who's-his-name.

Edward would win. Not because he’s necessarily a better fighter or anything, but because we all know he and Bella are going to end up together. Meaning he’s ultimately safe from any possible danger he might encounter, especially with how consistently phony-baloney Meyer’s been about the “terrifying” “threats” she puts up against our “heroes”.

Even more so because she ups the ante in this book. The villains this time are a group with equal powers but the advantage of numbers, so the only way they’ll get through this is to make nice and forget about fighting each other.

Eclipse Chapter 2 - Evasion

2011-10-09T13:20:00.012-05:00

1. Bella’s actually feeling pretty good as she goes to lunch, “and it wasn’t just because I was holding hands with the most perfect person on the planet” yeah it is. Who tossed herself off a cliff and would’ve happily drowned having Edward’s voice ringing in her ears as she did? Who was willing to endanger herself to keep Edward around, before she “went” crazy?

She goes on to add that it was because her “sentence was served and I was a free woman again.” Since we never saw her having to suffer through the horrible isolation of being able to see Edward every day at school and every single night, it feels like she’s getting out of another problem without having to actually deal with it. In fact, as my sarcasm indicates it sounds like it wasn’t really a problem for her in the first place, she just couldn’t be as open about her time with Edward. Since almost nothing about their relationship’s something the rest of the world can know about anyway, that doesn’t sound like much of a change of pace.

2. Bella runs into some of her “friends,” somebody named Ben and somebody named Angela who I think might have appeared once or twice. Alice is there too, and the newbies get to hear about her fixation with fashion. “If I’d allow it, she’d love to dress me every day - perhaps several times a day - like some oversized three-dimensional paper doll.” Ha! Bella! Three-dimensional! Couldn’t you just die?!

Besides, sounds like even Bella’s best friend among the Cullens sees her more as a toy than as a friend. You have to wonder if it’s because Rosalie’s too bitchy to put up with that and strong enough to stop Alice if she tries.

3. Anyway, they ask Bella about sending out graduation announcements, and Alice suggests going out and doing something to celebrate. Bella isn’t sure she’s “free” enough yet even with Charlie loosening his strictures, like “I’m sure I still have boundaries -- like the continental U.S., for example.” Is that some kind of hip in-joke? I almost want to say it is, because “Alice grimaced in real disappointment.” Like she can’t really take Bella to Milan to try on the newest styles from Giancomo Madeupguy.

4. Right on cue, Bella’s suddenly not getting into the spirit of being free, either from school or Charlie. “I’d been plagued by a persistent, uncomfortable intrusion of a specific mental picture. It popped into my thoughts at regular intervals like some annoying alarm clock set to sound every half hour, filling my head with the image of Jacob’s face crumpled in pain.” It’s just so sad that she hurt Jacob by picking Edward, isn’t it? Maybe if there’d ever been any room for doubt over who she’d pick, like sparing a moment’s thought for what she was doing by dropping everything to fly to Italy to save Edward, I might have more sympathy. But one guy or the other wasn’t gonna get picked, and that guy was going to feel hurt by her, and we all knew that guy wasn’t gonna be Edward.

Plus, it’s not even like Bella’s got a track record of actually doing things that make some kind of impact on the plot, and thus creating some sympathy for her when she wonders what she could’ve done differently to make Jacob happy too. The only fairly major thing Bella’s actually done in these books, with her own two hands, was to run through Volterra to stop Edward from looking like an idiot covered in body glitter in front of tourists. Which was stupid both because of how big an idiot Edward had to be to decide to kill himself over talking to Jacob on the phone, and because the official series compendium says nobody knows about vampires sparkling except vampires. No it’s not a big, brave thing she did, and it’s annoying listening to her trying to take responsibility for everything when she’s just a spectator for most of the series.

“Sure, I was free to go anywhere I wanted - except La Push; free to do anything I wanted - except see Jacob. I frowned at the table. There had to be some kind of middle ground.” Free to do whatever she wants - as long as Edward allows it. I know a lot of people get mad about this, and I do too, but I believe Dave Barry once said something in regards to being in favor of gender equality along the lines of “If a woman makes a mistake, she should be ridiculed just like a man would.” Which is to say that while the way Edward treats his girlfriend is deplorable, that doesn't make Bella any less of a stupid little whiner-bitch. Remember what she started doing with her free time without Edward around? Yeah, you do. Eclipse doesn’t try to pretend that didn’t happen, either. In fact it uses that to justify Edward being with her while his family fights the evil vampires.

For that matter, Bella’s such a dim bulb she continues to consider Jacob her best friend and wish for his happiness despite him being far more jerky and abusive to her than Edward ever was. She even realizes she’s still in love with him at the end of it all. As degrading to women as Edward’s treatment is, I’m tempted to call Bella the exception that proves the rule. She sure comes across as dangerously stupid to me.

Bella’s ruminations of her lame problems are interrupted when she realizes Alice has zoned out, which means she’s having one of her visions. Is that how it works again?

5. Some guy named Mike’s car breaks down, and Edward offers to fix it for him. Alice reminds him he’s really not that good with cars and suggests he get Rosalie to help him. Oh look, Meyer’s not sexist. One of her female characters is good with cars!

Except Rosalie’s supposedly away at college and it wouldn’t do for her to be seen in town taking some nobody character’s car apart. She hasn’t even left? Then what exactly do the Cullens do with their time, if the ones who supposedly aren’t there don’t leave? What about the treaty with the Quileutes, since that obviously happened more than at least one generation ago and the Cullens are still here? Do they rotate through a series of properties and identities every time they’ve been in one place too long? I mean, they can’t have stayed in Forks pretending to be a doctor and his teenage kids that whole time, right? Their act is supposed to be really tight. How does it work? Or is this a case of “you’re thinking again, Dave”?

6. Bella lets this discussion filter in the background by settling into “my patient mode,” then when she gets home she gets anxious about what Alice saw and what Edward’s not telling her, drumming her fingers frantically until he remarks “Are we a little impatient today?” Love how these books are so lame they can contradict themselves in just over a page.

She’s about to make a biting comeback, but his perfect face totally disarms her. “If I had my way, I would spend the majority of my time kissing. Edward. There wasn’t anything I’d experienced in my life that compared to the feeling of his cool lips…” What exactly has she experienced in life, anyway? Edward’s the first boy she ever took an interest in ever. She’s got no experience with romance. Yeah there was Jacob, but things were just getting started with them as a couple rather than friends when she chucked it in the trash to run back to Edward. She doesn’t know he’s the best, it’s the hormones talking.

Further showing why she’s so well-loved by readers the world over, Bella reads an e-mail from her mom talking about doing some stupid thing or other and “I felt a little frustrated with Phil, her husband of almost two years, for allowing that one.” Because it’s the man’s responsibility to keep the woman on a tight leash. And wait, wasn’t she indignant about Edward not letting her see Jacob? Even if it was for her own safety?

“I was a very different person from my mother. Someone thoughtful and cautious. The responsible one, the grown-up. That’s how I saw myself. That was the person I knew.” I have nothing to add to that.

We finally find out why Bella’s reluctant to tie the knot with Edward despite him being her whole life, and it’s because she’s afraid of her mom’s disapproval. Marriage isn’t something smart people don’t rush into, sayeth Bella’s mom, and you know what, she’s right. Then again, this is a series with no credible problems no matter how many evil vampires the author sends after her narrator.

7. Edward reveals that Alice saw Jasper off somewhere, doing something. She thinks he’s meeting with some of his old vampire buddies from before he joined the family, but she doesn’t think he plans on rejoining them. It just goes to show how not-ready-for-primetime Meyer is that you’re more interested in that than you are about what goes on with Bella and Edward. I know I said I didn't care about the secondary characters' backstories before, but that was partly from how forced it felt when Meyer tried to tell us Alice's life story. In this book, she manages it better. And yes, it shows how thinly-etched the characters we spend the most time with are in comparison.

Edward finds the plane tickets he’d meant for Bella and him to visit her mom with, and they’re still good for a little while. Yeah, the guy who can’t go outside on sunny days thinks it’s a good idea to visit his girlfriend’s mom who doesn’t know he can’t go outside on sunny days. I guess I’m not surprised Meyer ends up handling that the way she does, but I’m still surprised she thought it was a good idea in the first place. Edward even mentions the tickets to Charlie to force Bella to go. That Edward, what a great guy. Although I’m surprised that Charlie’s surprised that Bella forgot she got plane tickets for her birthday. Remember how four months went by in her journal or whatever without Bella mentioning anything? She was that destroyed by Edward leaving her. The angst is the most pervasive thing about these books and Meyer forgot about that?

Again Bella contradicts herself by threatening to move out when Charlie tries to ground her, because she’s a legal (if not mental or emotional) adult now. She then goes on to say about mom that “She’s just as much my parental authority as you are.” Who was just saying her father wasn’t her parental authority anymore? “Naturally, as soon as I’d won the fight, I began to feel guilty.” And I began to care less about her. She feels guilty for standing up for herself.

Even if it's Charlie, who I like a lot more than her, she can at least have the gumption to stick to her decisions. Just because she doesn’t have supernatural powers doesn’t mean she has to lack a backbone. Edward compounds this last problem by noting Bella’s been talking about her mom in her sleep, “But, clearly, you were too much of a coward to deal with Charlie, so I interceded on your behalf.” That Edward, what a great guy. Not that I feel any sympathy for Princess Whiner-Pants. “It was just like with Charlie before - just like being treated like a misbehaving child.” Then stop being one.

8. They go to hang out with the rest of Edward’s family, where Edward plays Alice at chess. Apparently to Bella, “it was one of the funniest things I’d ever seen.” He was reading her mind to figure out her moves and she was seeing the future to see his, you see, and so they were just sitting there. “I think they’d each moved two of their pawns when Alice suddenly flicked her king over and surrendered. It took all of three minutes.” Gee, that sounds like one of the most boring things I’d ever see, even if you enjoy watching people play chess. But then, Bella’s not hard to entertain if the Cullens are involved. They’re just soooo perfect you know.

9. Afterward Charlie decides now’s the time to have The Talk with Bella, and responds to her horror that “I’m just as embarrassed as you.” She doubts that’s “humanly possible,” because nobody in the history of the world’s ever had to go through what she has. And for some of the vampire stuff that might be true, but when she keeps acting like a typical teenager that’s another one of the many things making her obsession with Edward seem less like undying love and more like a high school crush.

What’s worse is Edward knew this was coming, from the mind-reading. “No wonder he’d seemed so smug in the car.” That Edward, what a great guy.

For all that, when he mentions Jacob to his daughter Charlie’s sure she’ll do the right thing. “You’re a good person.” Quit sayin’ and start showin’, Meyer.

“Nice. So if I didn’t figure out some way to make things right with Jacob, then I was a bad person?” Does everything have to be completely one way or completely the other in these books! Darlin’ I don’t know why I go to extremes! Too high or too low, there ain’t no in-betweens!

10. Anyway, thinking about Jacob gets Bella to thinking she needs to talk the problem over with one of her human “friends,” someone with no perspective on Jacob or his secret identity whatsoever. Look, as much sense as it sounds like it might make to discuss this with someone who isn’t prejudiced against werewolves, Jacob has gotten a lot more crass and volatile as a result of his wolfing out. We haven’t even seen how much yet. Personally I don’t find it so hard to agree with Edward that he or one of his friends might slip around Bella and make her the new Emily (that doesn't mean I approve of how Edward handles the situation, though). It won’t, of course (even Bella, as if she can read the author’s mind [yeah, yeah], is all like “I knew that there was really no problem on that count”), but we have actually seen someone who carries the scars of that happening.

11. It’s time for THAT part. She figures she can sneak out to La Push to see Jacob “and be back before Edward realized I had gone.” I really don’t know why she thinks Edward doesn’t spy on her anymore now that they’re a couple, especially when he’s shown he’s clearly willing to override what she wants if he thinks it’s for her own good. Plus he knows full-well that she wants to keep being friends with Jacob.

Bella gets to her car, but it won’t start. The next thing she knows Edward’s sitting next to her, since Alice saw Bella disappearing off her radar, meaning our narrator went to hang with some wolf-dudes. Yeah, Edward’s not even above bribing his precognitive sister to make sure his girlfriend doesn’t overstep his authority. Maybe if they like, talked about their problems instead of Edward just deciding he’s right and using every superhuman resource at his disposal to make sure Bella does what he wants? He does admit he was wrong later, but like everything else in this series there’s no shades of gray and he agrees to totally go along with whatever Bella thinks is right. And, well, she's been a remarkably bad judge of that up to now.

12. As usual, Bella can’t even stay mad at what’s-his-face. After closing the window so hard “it crashed shut and the glass trembled,” she “sighed, and opened the window as wide as it would go.” The author seriously can’t understand why people complain about her books. And she’s the one saying they’re for “children”.

Villains & Vigilantes - The Power of One

2011-10-07T13:30:00.001-05:00

***This review of an RPG adventure is for GMs’ eyes only***

One of the more unique V&V products to be released back in the day was a module called Alone Into the Night. It was called that because if you were a player in one of the three mini-adventures contained within, you were the only one. The only other person you’d be gaming with that night was the GM. The first two adventures in it were okay, but my favorite was always Dominion Day, where the lone hero was fighting for the future of Canada against a new team of villains. Although I’m not spoiling anything by telling you that angry, asocial Charles Malevolent is actually the mastermind behind the plot.

In that vein we now have The Power of One, a collection of six brisk adventures for those nights where only one guy can show up, or more likely as a way to introduce new players to the game. All of them can easily be gamed out in half an hour, tops.

As with just about any anthology work, the components are something of a mixed bag in terms of quality, even if they were all by the same guy. My least favorite was Old School, about a female gangster. Not because it’s about a female gangster, but because she’s got the most cliched origin comic book characters can have, which is that they were so passionate about one silly thing they threw away a promising future and made that silly thing their entire life. In her case, gangster movies. Plus it’s not exactly new territory for the game; plot seed no. 18 from Opponents Unlimited was about the heroes showing up to thwart a bank robbery and finding themselves facing a bunch of 30’s-style gangsters.

Two of the other adventures are just straight-up fights (one with a gang of thugs and another one with a disenfranchised pro wrestler), and as such as are pretty bland. The one about a vampire locating victims at a coffee shop was slightly more interesting, although the most memorable thing about it to me was suggesting the proprietor brew the lattes with holy water as a means of smoking out the perp. My favorite one was the light-hearted one about a militant, super-powered vegan who robs fast food joints and meat markets.

Although as far as I can tell, being vegan has nothing to do with her having powers.

Which brings us to the final adventure, one which touts having “a villainess with a strange new power.” Which I guess she does. Unless you’ve heard of Read or Die. Considering the guy who wrote this also wrote Great Bridge, I see no reason to assume he hasn’t.

Villains & Vigilantes - Ancient Evil

2011-10-04T10:40:00.003-05:00

***This review of an RPG adventure is for GMs’ eyes only***

With Villains & Vigilantes’s resurgence, seems like a lot of the old talent’s getting back into things. This combination of comic books and Lovecraft comes to us from Stephen Dedman, author of the ‘eh’ Pre-Emptive Strike and its more imaginative semi-sequel The Great Iridium Con (get this! People at a comic convention dressed like superheroes who actually ARE superheroes! Sure, Assassin did that first, but breezed right over it).

Now, having the players take on some absurdly powerful evildoer capable of decimating the entire campaign world if not stopped is a fun thing to do. If handled carefully. The problem I’ve found with a lot of these “monstrous horror from beyond” storylines, however, is that you just look at most of them and think “Lovecraft” right away. Which in my estimation tends to work to the detriment of people who aren’t Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Automatically, people are generally going to see it as borrowed ideas and that can weaken the perception of what might indeed be some pretty clever ideas.

Sadly, I didn’t think Ancient Evil had a lot in the way of pretty clever ideas in the body of its main plot. Profundis is really nothing special as ancient, all-powerful monstrosities go. Plus, that’s not exactly a name that inspires terror in the hearts of men. From a statistical standpoint he’s scary, sure, but he just looks like a big purple lump with a big lavender eye. Not very scary or memorable for an aesthetics standpoint.

I also wasn’t too crazy about the source of the only weapon that can destroy him, the Spear of Daedalus, since Greek mythology’s an even lazier source of inspiration than Lovecraft. If done well, mythological touches can be a lot of fun, but it seems like a lot of authors are quick to turn to the days of Zeus when they need a source of gods, monsters and mayhem (think about it like this: the Ninja Turtles were named after Renaissance painters. What were the Cheetahmen named after?). It’s more significant because should the players fail to recognize the spear’s use and let the villains destroy it, they have to actually go back in time and get Daedalus to make a new one. That part was done fairly well, though, as it mentions that Daedalus’s neighbors are scared of him (after all, the guy did scald the dreaded King Minos to death when he wouldn’t leave Daedalus alone), and that it gives a brief outline on other adventures they could go on while back in time. What heroes and monsters are around during that time, and what major quests have and haven’t happened yet.

I just wish the meat of the adventure was as interesting. A lot of the villains have no backgrounds. They’re just demonic androids in wetsuits created directly by the eldritch horror the heroes have to defeat. One’s a crazed fire-and-brimstone preacher, which might not be so bad, but he reminded me a little too much of Cardinal Rule from For the Greater Good for me to be really impressed with the character concept. I suppose that isn’t an archetype with a lot of wiggle room, though. And maybe I’m being unfair, but it feels like the other villains hired rat-controlling superthug Gutter more because he fits in with the motif of death/decay than anything else.

The adventure doesn’t really go anywhere interesting either, unless your players need to get the spear replaced, since the only other locations in it are an isolated town and the villains’ spaceship. Ancient Evil isn’t a bad adventure. I don’t wish to imply that, but there were only a couple things that made me sit up and take notice, among them the author providing a GIANT scientist (the agency that enlists the PC’s in his other adventures) as a scientific advisor if the players don’t have one. I don’t know, I just like it when I see the authors of these adventures creating a little world, instead of just cranking out a product for the bucks.

Eclipse Chapter 1 - Ultimatum

2011-09-27T20:00:00.006-05:00

Heeeeeeeeeuuuuuuuuuurggh....

Fine.

When I finished the first book in this series, I genuinely felt like I’d accomplished something big. I didn’t feel like that when I wrote my last review for New Moon. I complained about how it seemed like nothing was happening in Twilight, but boy did I have no idea how far down there was to go. New Moon makes Dragonball Z look well-paced (Twilight does too, but New Moon’s worse). While the other books have to a one failed to live up to their promises, New Moon was worse because it didn’t even bother to promise anything. It was about was Bella not being with Edward. If Meyer had bothered to portray the questionable stuff in their relationship as problems, we might have doubted they’d end up together. But she didn’t.

Fortunately, as I noted in the review of the illustrated guide, Eclipse is a little better. Mind you, I’m not saying it’s good. Anything would’ve been a step up after that. It’s less like Meyer starts getting it right, and gets it a little less wrong this time around. Perhaps due to the stakes being higher, or the fact that there’s just one more book in the series, it seems even more like Bella gets everything without having to do anything. As helpless and weepy as Bella is, that’s still a prime Mary Sue trait.

1. Instead of the moronic teaser for the climax, why don’t we start with the summary on the copyright page this time?

“Bella must choose between her friendship with Jacob and her relationship with Edward, but when Seattle is ravaged by a mysterious string of killings, the three of them need to decide whether their personal lives are more important than the well-being of an entire city.”

Would it be unfair of me to say that sounds like something our “heroes” would have to actually think about?

Didn’t think so.

2. As for said moronic teaser, as usual it’s about a period late in the book where Bella, and really all her allies, suck: “All our attempts at subterfuge had been in vain.” She’s distraught about some kind of battle.

I’m worried about that too. After all, the only people with names I remember dying up to this point were James (a villain), Laurent (another villain), and Harry Clearwater (a faceless side character who died to set up the most idiotic, unnecessary climax I may have ever seen).

You know why Rob’s character died in The Goblet of Fire? A big part of it was so we’d believe in the increasing danger facing the characters. He was a good guy, and he still got killed. A lot of time’s gone into (and will continue to go into) telling us how much so-and-so’s a threat, but how much do you really want to bet we might lose a Cullen or two by the end of the series? Can you really believe Stephenie Meyer’s the kind of author who’d be willing to let that happen?

I can’t. Not so much because no “good guys” have died yet, but simply because nothing’s happened to lend any of the menaces any weight or make me think the author’s willing to let something unpleasant happen to a favored character. James only trapped Bella because she’s a moron. Victoria spent the entire last book offscreen because she couldn’t get past Jacob and his buddies. And the Volturi…well damn, did you see anything proving how implacable they are in dealing with rule-breakers? Who also happen to be anything more than a no-development background character? Then again, how may major characters do these books really have?

That more anything is the problem with Meyer’s books: she seems to think that because she says someone’s scary, or that whoever’s a jerk to our narrator who doesn’t deserve it, they are. Without having to actually let us see that for ourselves.

SDT. Learn it. Use it.

3. Things open on a note from Jacob where a bunch of angry stuff he wrote and crossed out is still rather legible. Bella, of course, feels guilty about putting him through this, since “behind each angry beginning lurked a vast pool of hurt; Jacob’s pain cut me deeper than my own.” Pardon me for not finding her very empathic when she takes the blame for everything she can, no matter how much sense it doesn’t make. You’ve got to have some sense of self before you can be selfless.

4. Meanwhile, Charlie’s trying to cook and failing, and isn’t too happy. “I was mystified. Charlie cooking? And what was with the surly attitude?” Because he’s wondering what he did to be punished with being her farther? I spent the last two books inside her head, but Charlie has to live with her. I doubt he has it any easier.

Then there’s some stuff for new readers about how Charlie’s a cop and Bella’s going out with a telepathic vampire and how Jacob deliberately got her in trouble to limit her contact with Edward. And how Charlie doesn’t like Edward much either.

“Of course, I still saw Edward at school, because there wasn’t anything Charlie could do about that.” Besides ship her off to live with her mom again or put a restraining order on Edward, so maybe it’s because he really does love his daughter somehow after all.

Confusing is this little thought, about Bella putting up with Charlie limiting her time with Edward: “I couldn’t bear to hurt my dad by moving out now, when a much more permanent separation hovered, invisible to Charlie, so close on my horizon. My dad sat down at the table with a grunt and unfolded the damp newspaper there…”

This is about the only time in the book she doesn’t think of Charlie as Charlie. Did something not get caught in copy editing?

Speaking of damp newspapers, “Seattle’s making a run for murder capital of the country. Five unsolved homicides in the last two weeks. Can you imagine living like that?” Can you imagine living in a world where the author doesn’t slap you in the face with the plot like that?

5. Bella’s reading her copy of Wuthering Heights when Charlie says he’s got something to ask her, but if you guessed that was setup so Meyer could make some more shaky comparisons between her sparkly vampire wank dream and a piece of classic literature, give yourself a cookie. And go read a less predictable book.

6. What’s Papa Swan got to talk about, you ask? He asks her not to be mad at Jacob, and try to have contact with people besides Edward. Although I have to politely disgree with the claim that “For a teenager, you’re amazingly non-whiney.” Maybe he doesn’t actually live with her.

Bella’s surprised that Charlie’s loosening his strictures on her going out with Edward as an incentive for his entreaties, since “Edward hadn’t picked up any wavering in Charlie’s thoughts”. Even if there’s no such thing as psychic powers, even if it’s not something he can really control, I’m pretty sure eavesdropping like that’s another crime. At the very least, it’s something nobody wants happening to them. I mean, Jacob’s talked about how embarrassing it is for the other wolves to know every single thing he thinks. And when one of those things is being attracted to Bella Swan, you’ve gotta feel for the guy.

As for Bella’s “friends,” well, “Before Edward’s return, my school friends had polarized into two groups. I liked to think of those groups as good vs. evil. Us vs. them worked too. The good guys were Angela, her steady boyfriend Ben Cheney, and Mike Newton; these three had all very generously forgiven me for going crazy when Edward left.” Very generously. Unhealthily so. “Lauren Mallory was the evil core of the them side, and almost everyone else, including my first friend in Forks, Jessica Stanley, seemed content to go along with her anti-Bella agenda.” Wow, sign me up, Lauren! Do we get team jackets and have a secret handshake? I’ll join up either way.

In all seriousness, am I really supposed to think Bella’s mature beyond her years? Good vs. evil, are you fncking kidding me? In any case, it’s a little late to say Bella cared about any of them as anything but an outlet for favors. Which includes an excuse to get Charlie off her back. As much as she may care about him deep down, I’ve yet to see that for anyone in her circle of “friends.” Saying something’s so doesn’t make it so.

Bella gently tries to explain that “Friendship doesn’t always seem to be enough for Jake.” Why, I don’t think I’ll ever understand.

7. The subject of where Bella’s going to college is mentioned, and Bella mentions “I’m shocked, Sheriff. That’s a federal crime” when she finds out Charlie opened one of her acceptance letters already. Like she’s one to talk, especially considering Charlie has no idea what she and Edward really do together. Like steal cars and immolate ballet studios. Although I can believe the author doesn’t realize that.

When Bella drags her feet, dad asks what Edward’s got planned after graduation. However, “Three quick raps on the door saved me.” Bella’s not smart. Otherwise she would’ve already asked Edward what his story is. That’s no guarantee she’d know it, though, since the perfect boyfriend still seems to enjoy watching his twu luv squirm.

Anyway, yeah, it’s Edward, and about two thirds of the following page go into talking about how “Time had not made me immune to the perfection of his face, and I was sure that I would never take any aspect of it for granted.” Yeah, that’s probably mostly for the newcomers (mostly, because Bella’s gushing over the Cullens’ pretty is only a little subdued compared to what it’s been), but sheesh. You can take praising someone’s hotness too far, even in a romance novel. Which I’m still not sure these are.

It’s not just his body, but his manners that are perfect. “Edward was always flawlessly polite, though Charlie didn’t deserve it.” Screw you. Imagine what he’d think of Edward if he knew what Edward was really like, or what the real reasons were behind Bella suddenly going to Phoenix or Italy. Charlie’s not the one who would’ve never recovered from their first time being dumped without a new perfect partner entering his life, either.

“He was taking the idea of parental supervision to extremes lately, indeed.” If you don’t want people to treat you like a baby, don’t act like one. Furthermore, didn’t Edward make a point of having parental supervision in his cover story of following Bella to Phoenix during their fracas with James?

8. But back to college, Bella’s amazed at how she gets accepted to so many places, especially so late in the year. Except not really. “I could just imagine the motivations behind such exceptions. And the dollar amounts involved.” Because rules are for poor mortal people.

Edward’s so awesome that when he says he’s been accepted to Syracuse, Harvard and Dartmouth, he probably means sixty years ago. Sorry, it’s going to take more than that to make me forget how he failed to anticipate an evil vampire wanting revenge after getting diplomas at every Ivy League school you can name.

9. Edward tries to run the idea of taking Bella to Seattle past her dad, and is flatly turned down because of the killing spree going on there (why does he even suggest it, what with how manically protective he is of Bella? He knows what’s really going on there, and he even forbids her to see Jacob). She tries to protest, “Dad, there’s a better chance that I’ll get struck by lightning than that the one day I’m in Seattle--” Stop right there. The books have endlessly tried to say all that shit happens to Bella because she’s some kind of “danger magnet.” She’s also taken every opportunity to say how worthless she is as a person. Don’t try to say how unlikely it is something bad will happen to her. Not even with vampire chaperones, since we've seen more than once that Bella can be prompted to ditch whichever supernatural bodyguards she has at the time and do something pointless and suicidal. Unless we’re dropping that charade and admitting she’s a magnet for trouble at least in (large) part to her own apocalyptically bad judgement.

Oh, and even though Bella’s not in the mood to apply to a bunch of hoity toity colleges since all she wants out of the future is to be grafted to Edward’s hip, it turns out he’s mastered forging her signature and has already written her admission essays for her. Oh yes, true love, when your partner’s signing you up for things without your consent or even knowledge. I want Bella to do things besides sit around and whine, of course, but they don’t mean anything if the only reason she’d be interested is to humor Edward so he’ll give her what she wants.

Edward tries to persuade her to try college under the pretense of enjoying “human experiences” while she’s still properly human, but the only thing on her mind are the dangers staying human poses, namely being at the mercy of Victoria and the Volturi. Neither of whom, as I pointed out, is at all intimidating. Bella’s still worried even with Alice keeping an eye on the both of them with her “uncannily accurate visions of the future”. What happened to “strange, imperfect” visions? Suited the story for her to be more reliable all of a sudden, huh?

10. Edward confirms that the murders going on in Seattle are being committed by a newborn vampire, but “it’s not our problem. We wouldn’t even pay attention to the situation if it wasn’t going on so close to home.” Nice hero. Also, this means that when the Cullens do get involved, you have to wonder if they really care about saving anyone besides Bella despite what they say. Not to mention how it puts the lie to Bella claiming that the Cullens were "all committed to protecting human life." What's even worse is the part before that is "He and his 'vegetarian' family," implying that by not eating people, they're protecting human life. Just because you're not making a point to kill people, that doesn't make you their protector.

Not that I really care if anybody else gets killed. When Bella reads the names of the victims, “People who’d had parents and children and friends and pets and jobs and hopes and plans and memories and futures…” well, I’m not saying I don’t care when I hear someone I don’t know dies. I’m saying I don’t care when a made-up person I don’t know dies.

Michelle O’Connell and Ronald Albrook aren’t people who had lives, they’re a couple letters Meyer typed on a page. That’s why I didn’t care when Harry Clearwater died. All I knew was he was one of Charlie’s friends. He has some relatives on the reservation, but they’re barely more than names floating in limbo themselves. You can use the death of unknowns to establish something/someone as dangerous, that said something/someone is a heartless killer. Because if they kill people without a qualm, it means they probably won’t have any scruples about killing a character we’ve gotten to know and, hopefully, care about. But it’s hard to use that to make something tragic. Not impossible, but hard.

Think about it like this: when the Death Star blew up Alderaan, what did you think? “Everyone on that planet’s dead, how sad,” or “uh oh, the bad guys can destroy a whole planet”? Star Wars was trying to make the same point Eclipse is, after all.

To draw another comparison to The Dresden Files, I just finished the fourth one, Summer Knight. The plot involved saving a young woman I didn’t think we ever got to know that well, but we did meet her family, saw how close they were and how far they’d go to protect each other. We saw that family and their memories and their devotion. It wasn’t a stellar example, but it was an example. Or Kim from Fool Moon. We didn’t learn much about her before she died, but she had an honest to God meaningful conversation with the main character before she did. We found after she died that she was tied into the plot as more than just a statistic. We didn’t see that with secondary characters in New Moon. We’re not going to see it in Eclipse either.

I will say this: while Meyer doesn’t seem to understand that it helps to give us reasons to care about a character before you try to tell us it’s sad they’re gone, Bella is at least bothered by the fact that rampant loss of human life is occurring. In the last book it sometimes sounded like she only cared if someone she personally was attached to was endangered.

11. Edward starts to talk to Bella about Wuthering Heights and how “it’s not a love story, it’s a hate story,” but since I’ve never seen a movie version of it and I’m not reading a whole book to respond to one point (which knowing the author is off-base anyway), I’m going to step back from this one (anyone who knows is welcome to fill me in). Except for the part where Edward says “I still think it would be a better story if either of them had one redeeming quality.” If people were saying the things about my writing that they do about Steph’s, I don’t think I’d leave myself open like that.

12. The conversation turns to the Quileutes and how Edward doesn’t want her hanging around them. “Werewolves are unstable. Sometimes, the people near them get hurt. Sometimes, they get killed.” He used to say the same things about vampires, making his family’s attempts to blend into human society a bit puzzling since we’re supposed to think of them as good people.

“You don’t know them,” Bella whispers, but he assures her he does. “I was here the last time.” “The last time?” she asks, meaning that I guess she’s forgotten about the story Jacob told her that mattered, about the Cullens being vampires and the werewolves brokering a truce with them.

This…damn. It’s hard to justify Bella not knowing what Edward means even for the benefit of new readers. She’s a total moron if she doesn’t know what he’s talking about by now, with everything she’s seen. Meyer could’ve avoided that by changing Bella’s question to “You mean when Carlisle made the treaty?” and then having her remind us about that.

Edward places the blame for the reemergence of the werewolves on Bella: “Your bad luck seems to get more potent every day. Do you realize that your insatiable pull for all things deadly was strong enough to recover a pack of mutant canines from extinction? If we could bottle your luck, we’d have a weapon of mass destruction on our hands.” I thought they reemerged to protect their land from a vampire (Victoria). Yeah, whose fault is it James's girlfriend is still around, again?

Besides, look! They’re saying she’s a danger magnet after all!

In any case, Edward refuses to let Bella go anywhere near La Push because of his distrust of werewolves. “Do you really have any idea of how important you are to me? Any concept at all of how much I love you?” Show it sometime in a way that doesn't involve treating her like a brainless doll and I’ll consider it. Show it by them doing something besides risking their lives (which are defined by their relationship with the other). They compare how much they love each other, but that’s no substitute.

14. Considering the nature of the posts that prompt them, does anyone else think the Twilight ads on my blog are hilarious?

Super Awesome North Shore Ninjas

2011-09-21T10:36:00.005-05:00

Before I moved to Texas, I sometimes made extra money pet sitting. One of my regular clients was a very nice Danish lady with a psychotic cat. She did know, though. The cat’s name was Hissy.

Anyway, one of the last times I watched her place it turned out she’d downgraded her cable package and among the few channels she still got was the one run by the local high school. This was mostly a continuous loop of informational videos on their sports teams, little movies showing the school mascot (Tommy the Titan) crushing enemies of school spirit, and telecomm projects.

What’s most amazing of all is some of them were even worth watching.

After our opening credits (and a sound byte that probably came from the old Ninja Turtles arcade game) the movie opens on hotshot reporter May O’Reilly reporting on a series of thefts thought to be run by some evilnik calling himself “the Dicer.” Her boss comes in looking for someone in the newsroom willing to look more closely into the thefts, and over the objections of her cameraman, May volunteers. Is that a picture of Ernie Kovacs over the boss’s door?

At the mall where the next robbery’s supposed to be going down, the camera’s still grousing over May having to volunteer for dangerous assignments. As she’s telling him not to be such a wimp, they run into a couple of toughs who see them, grab wiffle bats and chase May around the building.

She runs into an air conditioner and knocks herself out. As she’s fading in and out of consciousness, suddenly action music plays and four brightly-colored blobs beat up the thugs.

May comes around in a basement where four weirdoes in colorful pajamas are sitting around playing Goldeneye. They’re the Super Awesome North Shore Ninjas, it turns out (the North Shore meaning the north suburbs of Chicago), mentored by Master Sliver, who appears to be somebody’s kid brother.

He explains their origin from the beginning as we cut away to a darkened room where a guy with a distorted voice finds out a bunch of weirdoes in pajamas beat up his underlings. Gotta say, I was pleasantly surprised when our villain didn’t break into a coughing fit after his evil laugh.

We return to the basement, having missed the story of the ninjas’ secret origin. When May tries to leave, the red guy stops her, prompting an argument with the blue guy, prompting the red guy to declare he’s had enough and storm out. I love how they play this thing. The hothead storming out’s played exactly like the cliché it is, with almost laughably underplayed anger on the red guy’s part.

However, then the movie commits its only real stumble, in my opinion. As the remaining ninjas swear May to secrecy, Sliver hits a button that makes the old Ninja Turtles theme song play. Yeah, thanks, we got it.

The movie bounces back fast, though. After that we goofy little profiles of each of the ninjas. And for a high school telecomm project, the blue guy’s staff-twirling before his was actually pretty good.

After the ninjas drop May off at her place, she apologizes for freaking out on them. They shrug it off. “Yeah, I mean, look at us.”

As soon as they’re out of sight one of Dicer’s thugs shows up and grabs May, and the blue guy senses something’s wrong…he forgot to tell May when they’d be showing up so she could interview them. They find a note from the thugs, but realize it’s in Japanese and they don’t know Japanese, until the orange guy shows them it’s just in a cartoony Asian font. The thugs taped it upside down. Probably to troll the ninjas.

Anyway, the Dicer challenges them to a battle to the death on the parking garage of a mall. The blue guy tells the others to be ready for anything (“yes, anything!”) as they head up, and come face-to-face (or…mask) with the Dicer himself. And about a gabillion of his thugs.

Including a black-clad girl with a whip.

The battle begins, but blue guy’s staff doesn’t work on Dicer and the thugs’ superior numbers soon wear down the other two ninjas. All seems lost…until the red guy shows up to make a timely rescue, taking down the bad guys with his CD throwing stars.

Except for the femme fatale. She bats aside their projectiles with her whip, but she runs for her life when the orange guy uses the ancient ninja art of turning girls off.

Dicer breaks the blue guy’s staff, who flashes back to his mom warning him that if he breaks he’s ground, Grounded, GROUNDED!!! This proves to be his Super Saiyan moment, and his hair goes neon blue.

When Dicer refuses to surrender even in the face of this corny special effect, the blue guy shoots an energy ball at him that turns Dicer into a fire extinguisher.

And yeah, that’s pretty much it. They save May and we cruise out to the strains of Vanilla Ice’s “Ninja Rap”.

Watch the silly spectacle yourself here.

Starchaser - The Legend of Orin

2011-09-13T11:08:00.004-05:00

Once upon a time, there was a very stupid child named David Anderson. David thought there were clearly defined periods in every person’s life and stark boundaries on anything and everything. Girls liked My Little Pony, boys liked G.I. Joe. Once you hit a certain age you gave up things like comic books and cartoons. As you grew up you would automatically attain perfect knowledge of the world and how to live in it.

Then one day in 1985, David’s parents took him to see a movie that was his first step in breaking those nice little orderly lines.

That movie was Starchaser.

After opening credits on a star field backed by gloriously cheesy 80’s synth, the movie opens on a bleak underground mine where humans mine powerful crystals under the watchful eyes of robots. Zygon, the speaker for their pitiless gods, goads them on with threats of the furnace that powers their awful world going out if they don’t provide ever more crystals.

Until, that is, the miners discover a sword that projects an image of an old man who speaks of a magnificent universe beyond the mine, and exhorts them to “find the blade, and you will find your freedom.” The blade and the man fade away, leaving just the hilt and the promise of something better.

Most of the miners are dubious, except a boy named Orin who looks like an 80’s rock star and isn’t quite old enough to have had his spirit completely broken by the years of unceasing toil. He and girlfriend Elan make a plan to sneak into the next load of crystals to see what lies beyond, and learn it’s all a sham; there are no heartless gods, Zygon’s planning to use the crystals to launch a bid for galactic domination. We find out how serious he is when he strangles Elan. And she’s dead. Forever.

Elan’s grandfather had been killed previous to this trying to keep the robots from finding the sword, but he was old and infirm anyway. Considering the kind of life they lead it’s a miracle he lasted that long. The hero’s girlfriend didn’t get killed, anymore than the hero didn’t always win. It just didn’t happen.

Zygon seems to recognizes the bladeless sword Orin carries, and it suddenly starts to glow, giving him a chance to run for it. He flees into a tunnel, which promptly caves in. Like all would-be conquerors, Zygon presumes Orin died. Like all would-be heroes, Orin survives the disaster without a scratch.

A montage shows him digging upward for the first time in his life (“Never dig up. Up is hell”), until, his food exhausted and his hope almost spent as well, Orin emerges into a swamp. You and I wouldn’t be too excited by this, but Orin’s elated to find out the universe really is bigger than his people’s cave.

That is, until he runs into a pack of deranged “man-droids” who want to cut him up and use his body parts to replace their own. This was the moment when I started to realize cartoons were just another medium. These guys were scary, especially this one.

But once again the hilt saves Orin when it suddenly generates a blade of energy and kills two of his captors, letting Orin bluff the third into cutting him loose. While fleeing from the vivisected freaks’ vivisected freak buddies, Orin literally runs into a cigar-chomping space smuggler who he promptly saves from a giant swamp bug.

Orin tags along when they’re detected by the guard-bots of the crystal storage base Orin just escaped from. From there Orin learns he’s a chosen one destined to save the universe from robot enslavement, and along the way things are made interesting by a prissy ship’s computer, a sleazy gynoid, and a politician’s beautiful daughter (voiced by Noelle North!) who’s charmed by Orin’s macho headband.

Oh no!

Now, some of the movie’s influences are kind of obvious. Like the two main characters. Orin’s got a sword that only creates an energized blade when he’s going into combat. Dag (the cigar-chomping smuggler) is more than a little reminiscent of another hard-bitten space dog whose trilogy had wrapped up a couple years earlier.

But Starchaser's still a solid movie and it earns that PG rating, too. Besides the death, cursing, death, and scary patchwork robot people, it can be kind of crude. Like when Dag captures a secretarial robot in the process of escaping the crystal base, he later reprograms her by opening the access hatch on her butt. And looking at it with adult eyes, there’s one scene that sure looks like it takes place in an alien whorehouse.

Bite THAT shiny metal ass...

So not only for pushing the limits of what was and wasn’t done in animation back then, but also for telling a pretty good story and having some great animation, Starchaser’s a movie that easily earns my recommendation. This movie isn’t good in a silly way, it’s good in a good way. Even if the story’s a little predictable at times, the pacing’s solid, the characters are likable enough, and the villains are both credible and kind of scary. It’s also not afraid to take the occasional stab at levity, like with where Silica’s attitude adjustment takes place.

Even if it's not a good idea to look too close at the scenery sometimes.

Having listened to me heap praise on this movie, would you believe it was actually written by the same Jeffrey Scott who was my semi-regular whipping boy for his work on Dino Squad?

I’m not sure I do either.

Villains & Vigilantes - Attack on the Poseidon Line

2011-09-10T15:24:00.002-05:00

***This review of an RPG adventure is for GMs’ eyes only***

An adventure that starts as a working vacation on a cruise ship. Have to agree, yeah, that’s a first for superhero role-playing. Things sort of started like that in For the Greater Good, but even Jack Herman admitted the whole reason that got published was thanks to its envelope-pushing villains.

Anyway, things get started with a Greek shipping magnate (is there any other kind?) appealing for help when his cruise lines keep getting raided by modern pirates. Seems Manta-Man hasn't been discouraging this kind of thing too effectively. What to do but send a bunch of superheroes undercover on the next cruise and hope they can do something about it next time.

Gotta say, that’s not quite investigating the disappearance of a supermodel after a bungee, but it’s one of the more unique hooks I’ve heard for this kind of thing. The chance to role-play against the rich and famous of your campaign world, or the handy list of thinly-veiled parodies of the rich and famous if you haven’t bothered to establish any, is a nice touch too. In my opinion, the best adventures always give you something more than just a new group of villains to pound.

Not the villains in this module are just another bunch of thugs with a couple of garish powers thrown in. I could definitely see involving most of the villains in further scenarios after wrapping this adventure, particularly the likes of Delphi with her mysterious awareness and Ajax with his power to melt and come back in a new body to menace our heroes anew. My favorite little tidbit about the villains was finding out they get more use out of Midas’s golden touch than just some interesting statuary. Nobody ever thinks of doing more with a power like that than just changing something into another substance, and then maybe throwing it at a character they don’t like because now it’s heavier.

I suppose this review’s shorter than other ones I’ve done for V&V material, but that’s mainly because so much space and effort’s devoted to laying out the floor plan of the cruise ship, plus the mansion that conceals a villain base, that the actual adventure sometimes seems a little brief. The floor plans are amazingly intricate, though, and could easily survive this adventure to see use in others. Plus, with all the role-playing possibilities between the PC’s while patrolling the ship and the celebrities and their varying degrees of sanity, though, a good GM can make rubbing shoulders with celebrities last as long as it’s entertaining.

If I have to complain about anything, it’s that it’s kind of trite that this happens around Greece, so the villains all have a Greek mythology motif.

Foe Files

2011-09-01T12:55:00.006-05:00

As I noted back in my In Broad Daylight review, with the revival of Villains and Vigilantes, Jeff Dee and Jack Herman have been getting back into the game, as it were. Lately, by going ahead with a rather strange idea for a product line. That idea being that for a buck apiece, you can buy a villain for your superhero RPG.

So far the line consists of three villains, and the first to be released was Omni-Primus. He was the villain seen fighting the Indestructibles from In Broad Daylight on the cover of the revised rulebook for the old version of the game (the one Fantasy Games Unlimited’s still using).

He’s meant to be a galactic overlord capable of threatening the entire world and fighting entire teams of player characters, the kind every superhero campaign needs every once in a while. He’s properly powerful and leaves a lot of room open for a resourceful GM to use him, but given how the Foe Files clock in at five pages counting the cover, no space at all is given to detailing the resources at his command. I’m not sure that was really wise, seeing as how in my experience villains like Omni-Primus are ones the players might never actually fight, let alone be in any shape to fight after getting past all of his flunkies. I guess I’m mainly thinking of Island of Dr. Apocalypse, which suggests to the GM that the PC’s might need some kind of miraculous healing treatment to be in any shape for the adventure if it’s run after Death Duel With the Destroyers (as it’s meant to be). Mine did.

The second pack consists of Rune, an exiled alien meant to be something of an ultimate assassin. Rune’s formidable enough, I guess, but I didn’t find the meaning of the name and thought the bird-like long nose on the suit to be pretty stupid. Particularly for this terrifying master assassin. Worse, Rune has that most reprehensibly cliched of villain quirks: pausing in pursuit of their evil plans to chat with their enemies. I could never see myself using Rune, at least not as-is.

Last for now is easily the most bizarre idea to come of this product line, the Jackal Jester, sort of a cross between the Joker and the wolfman. Yes, he combines the lycanthrope schtick with the killer toys schtick. He even shows some of the silliness of the real names used by characters in Dee and Herman’s earlier work (like Dreamweaver’s name is Donna Weston, Bull is “Big” Bill Buckford) in that his real name’s Eric Gagnard. The more I think about him, though, the more I think the two gimmicks are just a little too weird to use when combined.

It warrants mentioning that the characters in the Foe Files are, like everything else Dee and Herman have been releasing, meant to be compatible both with the new version of the V&V rules they released, but also Dee’s Living Legends game. Which he released a while back after splitting from FGU and still wanting to release superhero-themed role-playing material. Warrants mentioning because Living Legends never did that well, releasing only a rulebook and a pair of modules before dropping off the radar. Until Fantasy Games Unlimited started releasing new products for V&V, that is, and Dee and Herman got back into the game. Far be it from me to talk, because I actually do respect these guys and the work they do, but I get the feeling that’s the game they’d rather be known for nowadays, and releasing an updated set of V&V rules was done to attract some buyers from that game's longstanding fanbase.

The Foe Files are something of an interesting idea, but while they’re certainly affordable, the characters they contain just aren’t as fun as I’ve gotten used to seeing in these guys’ older work. I don’t think they’ve lost it or anything. Like I said, I really liked In Broad Daylight. I just don’t know that the Foe Files are the best way they could be applying themselves. Assuming these characters haven't all been sitting around for ages.

By the way, if that's supposed to be a display of the Crusaders' computer, which Crusader's mask is that?

Just asking.