a-sporking-rat (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
a_sporking_rat) wrote2013-04-13 02:20 pm
a_sporking_rat) wrote2013-04-13 02:20 pm
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BULLET, CHAPTERS 16 & 17
This awesome chinchilla is cuter than Anita AND way more useful!
http://dailychinchilla.tumblr.com/post/47279700154/this-is-chester-he-has-trained-himself-to-be-a
And look at these babies!
http://stupidratosaurus.tumblr.com/post/47633616129/cuddletime
Oh my word
http://media.tumblr.com/926593a5659112528a5cab67f762ca2d/tumblr_inline_mgqixm5gCJ1rbaaj6.jpg
MY CHILDHOOD (OKAY STILL CURRENT) DREAM COME TRUE!
http://www.ponyparties.us/images/prince_unicorn_left_side_cute.jpg
Okay, hopefully that's enough cuteness to prepare you for...
BULLET, CHAPTERS 16 & 17
Enter Haven. "He was around six feet tall, a little narrower through the shoulders than I liked" well how dare he, doesn't he know that everyone only exists for Anita's enjoyment? "but what frame he had was muscled. He took his conditioning seriously, but lions are more prone to have fights for dominance at short notice. Staying in shape could be the difference between living and dying. Most lions took their exercise pretty seriously because of that."
So...with the way so many therians seem to fight to the death over things (Ulfrics can only become Ulfric by killing the previous Ulfric, this lion stuff, etc.) does normal law enforcement not NOTICE the doubtlessly high death rates for therians at the hands of other therians? It seems like someone would, at least, and word would get spread to avoid falling into 'traditional' therian groups if you can. Especially if you're small, disabled, elderly, etc. Speaking of that, it always bugged me how Marcus's disappearance never even seemed to be looked into. Especially since he wasn't 'out' as a werewolf and so the police wouldn't immediately just kick his case aside because 'monsters aren't worth it' or anything like that.
We get told about his hair and clothes in the requisite paragraph devoted to his appearance, of course. And then another paragraph about how Anita's lioness has always liked him even though she herself had always "known he was bad news" (yeah right, then why did you let him into your city? Retcon alert!) and how her body wants him and she wants to roll all over on top him naked "the way a cat will luxuriate while it's scent marking. He was mine and I was his the way that Micah and I had belonged to each other." Had belonged? Why the past tense? Also, this is untrue. It was EXPLICITLY stated in Flirt that her lioness is NOT mated to Haven's lion, that's how the whole mess with her lioness being "in heat" was able to happen.
Richard and Nathaniel and Jean-Claude and Damian all touch her so that "I was a little less victim of the lion inside me, and the one walking into the room" and "It helped me think". I like how the only weaknesses Anita seems to have are the ones that require hot men to paw her. Haven's energy is everywhere and for some reason it smells like "sun-burnt grass, dust" as well as lion. Again, I don't really get how that works. Either Haven or Anita growls, it's not clear, Anita tries to stand up, everybody else jerks her down back to her seat (wtf why?) and so she snarls at them instead. Haven comes towards her, he has lots of power, Anita stands up and...wants Haven to touch her, wtf. And he almost does but then Bram gets between them and Anita's lioness gets mad at him for being "between her and her Rex" and again I have to note how hammered down it was in Flirt that Haven, though a Rex, is not HER Rex. She yanks free of Nathaniel's hand, but JC's still stops her from attacking Bram. The vivid visual that pops into her head of what her lioness wants her to do to Bram (which she describes as an "almost-memory"...Anita, it's not a memory if it's something you're imagining, let alone imagining in the present) prompts her to push her lioness back and get herself under control.
Haven "felt my lion go cold" but "his energy was still there, still seeking lion" so it finds the lions he brought with him instead and makes all their energy flare in such a way that Anita can psychically see the animal forms around each person. "Jesse, tall, dark, and handsome, and Payne, tall, pale, and handsome. Payne was really his last name, not a nickname since he was an enforcer." I would have assumed that anyway, given that it's spelled with a 'y' the way that the surname commonly is. I had a gradeschool teacher by that name. Then again, taking a word like that and turning it into a nickname but EVEN COOLER AND EDGIER by spelling it with a Y is exactly the sort of think LKH (and middle school kids) would see as awesome and hardcore "I saw their lions around them like halos, one with a mane that was almost black, and the other so pale it was ghostlike." Um, didn't it just get established last chapter that the appearance of the animal form is NOT influenced by what the human form looks like? "A woman I didn't know, tall, strongly built, but all curves" with "short dark hair" whose lioness is "tawny with darker marks so that she looked almost spotted in places" and the another woman who is "much shorter, with long yellow hair" but despite her height "her lioness wasn't smaller." And then she sees Noel and Travis on the floor whose energy "didn't burn bright" but is instead like "a fire that was fading" and who have "shorter manes, ragged compared to the other men."
Anita also sees her own lion and "like the other short woman, wasn't a small lion. She was a great, dark, gold shape rearing over and around me." Okay, I fully admit I like the idea of short people being able to have big (even in comparison to the others) wereanimal forms.
Travis reaches out to her because "injured, it was the closest he could come to the begging gesture that most of the lycanthropes had. It was a submissive's way of asking a dominant to forgive him, to help him." while Noel just lays still beside him as his lion's light is getting dimmer. Anita realizes that means he's dying. This makes her and her lioness pissed because "you didn't kill what was ours. In the wild, lionesses will band together" uh yes that's what a pride is "to keep a male intruder from taking over a pride. They'll fight beside their chosen males" because nothing can be done without guys, of course! "to keep their land, their cubs, safe." But you just said in this chapter that Haven was your lioness's chosen male, Rex, etc. Which is admittedly wrong/retcon, as I pointed out, but it still bugs me how she swings back and forth on it WITHIN A FREAKING PAGE.
She tries to go to Noel (I was going to ask "what can she even do?" and then remembered that healing-by-sex is canon in this series) but Haven grabs her and his touching her makes a bunch of golden power energy and he kisses her and she...kisses him back, wtfff. And he smiles at her and she smiles at him but then Travis calls out for her weakly and she's like O WAIT HAVEN LET'S SAVE THESE GUYS and that makes Haven jealous and she's like DUDE NOEL'S DYING and Haven says that "The weak die; it's the way of the lions" and she says that they can save him with that super special golden kissing energy they just got and he says he doesn't want Noel's life saved and she says she does and he says "Be with me and we can save him." Oh goddammit, she's gonna have to fuck Haven to save Noel, isn't she? PREDICTABLE.
He's got her arms pinned to her sides, but she can reach her wrist sheaths, so she pretends to "struggle ineffectually and knew Haven of all the men in my life would buy it. One of our problems was that he just couldn't see women as equal. Equally dangerous, that is." Oh, a problem you both have, considering you seems to see most women as ineffective sex-obsessed harpies or equally ineffective helpless victims. She uses the struggling to hide the fact she's drawing a silver blade out of one of the sheaths, then stabs him, and the blade "sinking home the way it had a hundred other times in big bad monsters." A hundred? Really? Dozens, I guess I'd buy, but I don't think Anita has even faced that many baddies, even counting the offscreen and pre-GP ones, let alone stabbed that many with that particular blade.
He stumbles back from her and his guards don't do a thing because they're "frozen, not knowing what to do." Wow, most useless guards ever. You could at least jump her after the fact, if only to make a point!
Anita tells her own guards to keep haven away from her until she's healed Noel (because no one can ever just call an ambulance). The guards circle him, and Anita goes to Noel. The taller werelioness is kneeling by him, and she tells Anita "You're too late."
DUN DUN DUN
Anita checks and doesn’t think Noel is breathing, and yells for Dr. Lillian and medics…which, really, shouldn’t she have done the second she saw him and Travis, not smooched with Haven? I guess make out first, tend to dying men later. The brunette lioness is crying, and Anita tells her not to cry “yet”. We learn that said brunette is also wearing a red dress. The blonde one has a ponytail and is “wearing almost as many weapons as I was.” Unlike you, she actually has a good reason, considering she was brought her on a rescue mission. The blonde tells Anita that “This wasn’t our choice.” I like to think she means it wasn’t her choice to come here just to save Anita’s stupid butt from the MOAD. Yeah, remember that? It’s been 40 pages since Belle Morte and Padma left, and a total of nothing has happened, either in general or in regards to dealing with the Big Bad. No, I don’t count Noel on his deathbed as anything happening, because Haven dragged him in there like that, no action occurred to get him there. Oh, and speaking of Haven, he is fighting the guards “trying to get to me, whether to hurt me back or try for another kiss” YOU JUST STABBED THIS GUY AND YOU THINK HE WANTS TO MAKE OUT WITH YOU? Anita’s ego-fail never ceases to amaze me.
The blonde says that “If we had a real Regina or Rex, we could delay it.” and Anita nods. So now Haven isn’t even a ‘real’ Rex…what’s the betting that Anita, however, turns out to totally be a ‘real’ Regina and that’s why she and Haven just aren’t right for each other and he can’t rule anymore but she can, never mind that her own Regina saw him as a Rex, her Rex, just last chapter? Anita tries to call the golden fire lion energy that appeared last chapter randomly, and the blonde werelioness shows her how, by which I mean she just says “Like this” and all of a sudden Anita can see her great big lioness form around her again as energy and all Anita has to do is get her hand near hers (just near, mind you, no actually touching the icky girls!) and then Anita’s lioness “blazed around us, golden, shining burning bright” because actually learning to do something is boring. Then she and the two women join hands (gasp!) and kneel over Noel. Oh, wait, they don’t, “we didn’t touch hands”, they just reach them out to each other. Yup, no touching icky girls.
The blonde says that “We put energy into him, force his beast” and so all three of them touch Noel but it doesn’t work and the brunette again says that it’s too late. Anita asks Jean-Claude to help her, so he calls "Richard, Nathaniel, Damian, come." Only the latter two do come right immediately, probably because they, unlike Richard, have no objections to being owned and ordered around like dogs, so why be bothered when JC calls them like someone would call a dog? He tells them to "Touch your master" which rests my case, so they put a hand each on Anita's shoulders and "the moment they touched me, I felt my eyes go. Through the golden glow of the lions, I knew my eyes burned like dark brown stars." Her eyes glowed like "brown fire" in Flirt and "cognac diamonds" (NEVER FORGETTING THAT LINE LOL) in Skin Trade, is this going to become something that happens every book?
Damian and Nathaniel's eyes go green and purple too, she can see Nathaniel's leopard, and since Damian isn't a therian "he was just covered in the golden glow of the lions" and then JC touches their hands and his eyes glow too and then Richard asks what to do and Anita tells him to touch JC so he does even though Anita for some reason was not sure he'd do it (maybe he, like me, is disappointed at how stupidly easy and boring this problem is to solve---everybody just touch okay! it's only what you always do anyway!) and JC moves closer to Anita and "I moved my legs apart so he could press as much of himself against as of me as possible. I knew that Richard, still standing, was pressed against the back of Jean-Claude." Wow, silly me, for a second I thought that this sparklelicious glowy-eyed kumbayah circle would at least get us out of more sex.
Anita realizes that the five of them are taking power from the lions but not vice versa, so Anita grabs the hand of the blonde woman and just MAKES it go into them even as she's telling Anita that it doesn't work like that. FUCK THE RULES OF MAGIC AND METAPHYSICS, DON'T YOU KNOW WHO SHE IS? And then their energy goes into the lions and is of course described in pretty terms like "the black flame of my leopard" and "the emerald glow of Damian". This feels like one of the final battle scenes in Sailor Moon.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xhrOTBYyQ
Except Sailor Moon was actually good. And magical sparkly color-coded energy was what you were SUPPOSED to get, versus being promised a grimdark gory world that USED to be delivered. Man, remember how magic used to be gross and kinda scary? The gris gris crawling towards its owner, sacrificing chickens, or just sacrifice of some type in general? I bet there's no cost for this at all. Except maybe having to have another orgy, oh dear.
The brunette lioness touches Noel too, and then he shifts. His mane "was not very thick, not very impressive, but I didn't give a damn. I just wanted him to breathe." if you don't give a damn and neither should the readers, why mention it? Mane color and quality, by the way, is a sexual thing for lions in canon I think, so it's like her mentioning that his ass doesn't look so fine to her, if that helps you understand just how out of place this comment is for this situation. One of the lionesses checks and says he has a heartbeat but is still not breathing. Nicky comes in, still in lionman form, and Anita knows it's because he's attracted by the energy being raised and thinks there's a fight. Noel spits blood, and Anita thinks he has to be breathing to do that (I don't know if that's medically accurate or not, so I can't say) and Nicky comes in and Anita says she needs him. He asks "Where do I go?" rather than "What do I do?" which I find odd but I am quickly distracted by the facepalm factor of Anita's response: "Puppy pile, touch as much as you can."
I have never hated such a cute-sounding phrase so much.
"It was all I could think of; the kind of vampire we were worked better with touch, and more touch couldn't hurt." So Nicky just kind of lays all over Noel and grabs Travis and Anita too and Anita realizes that Nicky has what they missed until now: "Willingness without will of its own." Meaning Nicky having no choice but to be willing. And this is being shown as a wonderful, useful thing. Goddammit, why did I just eat before sporking this part?
And then this paragraph. THIS PARAGRAPH:
"Barriers broke that I hadn't even know were still there. Richard stopped holding back, Damian stopped being afraid, Jean-Claude stopped being so careful, the blond woman let go of some deep anger, the dark haired one let go of love searching for love, there wasn't enough left of Travis to give up anything else, Nathaniel gave up the last of his fear that I'd grow tired of him, Micah gave up that hard deep rage that I'd never even known was there, and I gave up my control."
BECAUSE GOD FORBID THAT CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT HAPPEN
WE CAN'T HAVE THAT
WE CAN'T HAVE CHARACTERS ACTUALLY WORKING THROUGH THESE ISSUES
OR COMING TO TERMS WITH THEM AND ACCEPTING THEM
Like, what the fuck? These character traits, flaws, and blocks, they all just vanish, including ones that were never even known about like Micah's rage, and so no one grows or evolves in any way, no one gets any struggle or exploration (I guess that might take the spotlight off Anita!), it's all just wiped away like a mark on a dry erase board! THIS IS TERRIBLE WRITING, PEOPLE. I JUST...CAN'T EVEN BEGIN. The only minorly interesting (versus just frustrating) bit of this is finding stuff out about the two lion ladies...but their characters will probably never be explored any beyond this, and it would have been INFINITELY better if these issues of theirs were found out through natural character exploration versus magically brought up (and solved) before we EVEN KNOW THEIR NAMES.
The incredible laziness and sheer waste here just makes me so, so angry on principal as a writer (okay, aspiring/wannabe writer, but still!)
Anita talks about how as an animator she'd been trained to work in groups with other animators in order to share power so as to raise a lot of corpses or particularly old ones, and how "one magic is surprisingly like another". Er, I think you mean that the idea of sharing the magic and how you share it is similar, not the magic itself. There's a big difference between raising the dead and saving a life, and dead chickens and circles of power versus hand-holding and pretty auras.
And we get more creepy with Nicky about how "he gave everything to me, no holding back" and "he let me have anything, everything" BECAUSE HE DOESN'T HAVE A CHOICE. YOU WANT NOEL HEALED WITH HIS ENERGY? HE'S GONNA GIVE HIM ENERGY. THAT'S HOW IT WORKS. NO. FREE. WILL. It works though because Noel starts breathing and Anita talks about hearing his heartbeat and the rush of blood in his veins and yadda yadda and then she has "the desire to bite him." because "I realized we'd given up our control, all of it. I was kneeling in a pile of wereanimals and vampires who'd given up their controls. We wanted flesh and blood." Well damn, someone didn't think this through, did they? Seriously, every time Anita does something that costs energy, she needs to fuck or wants to attack or the like. This can't be a surprise for her, and frankly I think it'd serve her right to have to live with killing the man she saved with her own teeth to pay for her lack of foresight, albeit unfair to Noel. Sure, this was a situation where she had to act fast and maybe didn't have time to think...but she had time to make out with Haven, didn't she? If you had time for face-sucking, you had time to order the guards (remember, they're still in the room!) to get something set up for you to pounce on after you fix Noel so he doesn't become your dinner. It was stated in Chapter 15 that farther underground in the Circus there is "the area where the wereanimals kept food for fresh changes. Food was livestock, most of it pretty small, or fresh meat." The guards are busy with Haven, yes, but couldn't one just put a gun to his head to make him stay still while another radioed someone to bring up some chow? Or all of them just dogpile on him to hold him down except one who runs down to the larder to lead up a sacrificial goat? I really want it to be a goat, see. Nothing against them, it would just tickle me because Anita is clearly a very stunted T-rex (she can't cross her arms over her knockers, remember?)
Oh, but then there wouldn't be an excuse for sex! Which this becomes? Who here is surprised? Anyone? Anyone? Yeah, that's what I thought. Richard and JC ask Anita to change the urge to kill/attack/literally feed for once into a different kind of urge AND GUESS WHAT URGE THAT TURNS OUT TO BE?
Yup, the fucking ardeur. Pun not intended.
Though of course during the process Anita waxes on about how much she wants to "sink fangs and claws into that soft, breathing form" and I actually kind of want her to try and be totally ineffectual at doing anything to Noel at all because Ms. Super Special Not-Shifting Panwere Princess doesn't HAVE fangs or claws for real. Also, she had the whole 'RRR WANT TO KILL AND EAT PPL FOR REALS' urges in Skin Trade and Flirt, and I will again predict, as I did in the sporkings of those books, that this will never actually happen. My belief in this increases with each book in which said urge rises and then comes to nothing. The only way it will ever happen is if it ends up being against a bad guy or a similar situation where it will not be a bad thing, cost Anita, have her screw up in a way that doesn't actually benefit her/get her sex/get her new powers/etc., you get the idea.
But what's this! Someone has other ideas! The scent of jasmine is in the air and Anita hears a voice in her head--but not the voice of the MOAD. This voice is male and says "Feed and I will feast" followed by insane laughter. According to Jean-Claude, it's Morte D'Amour, who we are informed, in case anyone here didn't know, "fed on death the way that Belle fed on lust" and is the creator of the rotter vampires who are "the hardest to kill of all. He would feed on the energy of every life we took. He was the ultimate carrion crow, a psychic vulture." Okay, props to LKH for the "psychic vulture" bit. It's apt, makes sense, and has a definite chill to it for me. I'm ready to be scared of this guy, to be horrified of whatever he's about to do...
...and I am let down within the very page he appears on. In the very next line, Jean-Claude instantly turns the killing urge into the ardeur. Morte D'Amour wails that he cannot feed on that, and Anita smells the "disappointment" (how is that a scent) of the MOAD, because she "could only feed on what her host could feed on" and since "Belle had escaped somehow" (we had better get an explanation how by the end of this novel, dammit) she can't just bring Belle here and feed on this through her.
...you know what, why doesn't the MOAD just psychically take Morte D'Amour to a war zone or a plague-stricken area or something? Or the emergency room of any major hospital? She seems able to go wherever the fuck she wants spiritually now, and there are loads of vampires and therians all over the globe, not to mention humans (maybe she can't posses them, but surely she can feed on them?) Why just keep trying to feed only on whatever Anita & Co are doing at that moment?
Oh right, that'd make sense and acknowledge there's anything else in existence worth thinking about besides Anita and whoever is currently revolving around her like satellites around a particularly smug sun.
"And then there was nothing but hands and bodies and things to do with teeth that didn't kill, but would leave a mark."
We are not even to Chapter 20 yet and already "have an orgy!" has been the solution to a problem TWICE. I bet some people who haven't read it think I'm exaggerating when I say everything gets solved with sex, but seriously, THAT REALLY IS THE CASE. Although to be fair, I don't think I could believe this shit either if I weren't reading it. It's just beyond the levels of my own imagination. And no, LKH, I do NOT mean that in a good way.
http://dailychinchilla.tumblr.com/post/47279700154/this-is-chester-he-has-trained-himself-to-be-a
And look at these babies!
http://stupidratosaurus.tumblr.com/post/47633616129/cuddletime
Oh my word
http://media.tumblr.com/926593a5659112528a5cab67f762ca2d/tumblr_inline_mgqixm5gCJ1rbaaj6.jpg
MY CHILDHOOD (OKAY STILL CURRENT) DREAM COME TRUE!
http://www.ponyparties.us/images/prince_unicorn_left_side_cute.jpg
Okay, hopefully that's enough cuteness to prepare you for...
BULLET, CHAPTERS 16 & 17
Enter Haven. "He was around six feet tall, a little narrower through the shoulders than I liked" well how dare he, doesn't he know that everyone only exists for Anita's enjoyment? "but what frame he had was muscled. He took his conditioning seriously, but lions are more prone to have fights for dominance at short notice. Staying in shape could be the difference between living and dying. Most lions took their exercise pretty seriously because of that."
So...with the way so many therians seem to fight to the death over things (Ulfrics can only become Ulfric by killing the previous Ulfric, this lion stuff, etc.) does normal law enforcement not NOTICE the doubtlessly high death rates for therians at the hands of other therians? It seems like someone would, at least, and word would get spread to avoid falling into 'traditional' therian groups if you can. Especially if you're small, disabled, elderly, etc. Speaking of that, it always bugged me how Marcus's disappearance never even seemed to be looked into. Especially since he wasn't 'out' as a werewolf and so the police wouldn't immediately just kick his case aside because 'monsters aren't worth it' or anything like that.
We get told about his hair and clothes in the requisite paragraph devoted to his appearance, of course. And then another paragraph about how Anita's lioness has always liked him even though she herself had always "known he was bad news" (yeah right, then why did you let him into your city? Retcon alert!) and how her body wants him and she wants to roll all over on top him naked "the way a cat will luxuriate while it's scent marking. He was mine and I was his the way that Micah and I had belonged to each other." Had belonged? Why the past tense? Also, this is untrue. It was EXPLICITLY stated in Flirt that her lioness is NOT mated to Haven's lion, that's how the whole mess with her lioness being "in heat" was able to happen.
Richard and Nathaniel and Jean-Claude and Damian all touch her so that "I was a little less victim of the lion inside me, and the one walking into the room" and "It helped me think". I like how the only weaknesses Anita seems to have are the ones that require hot men to paw her. Haven's energy is everywhere and for some reason it smells like "sun-burnt grass, dust" as well as lion. Again, I don't really get how that works. Either Haven or Anita growls, it's not clear, Anita tries to stand up, everybody else jerks her down back to her seat (wtf why?) and so she snarls at them instead. Haven comes towards her, he has lots of power, Anita stands up and...wants Haven to touch her, wtf. And he almost does but then Bram gets between them and Anita's lioness gets mad at him for being "between her and her Rex" and again I have to note how hammered down it was in Flirt that Haven, though a Rex, is not HER Rex. She yanks free of Nathaniel's hand, but JC's still stops her from attacking Bram. The vivid visual that pops into her head of what her lioness wants her to do to Bram (which she describes as an "almost-memory"...Anita, it's not a memory if it's something you're imagining, let alone imagining in the present) prompts her to push her lioness back and get herself under control.
Haven "felt my lion go cold" but "his energy was still there, still seeking lion" so it finds the lions he brought with him instead and makes all their energy flare in such a way that Anita can psychically see the animal forms around each person. "Jesse, tall, dark, and handsome, and Payne, tall, pale, and handsome. Payne was really his last name, not a nickname since he was an enforcer." I would have assumed that anyway, given that it's spelled with a 'y' the way that the surname commonly is. I had a gradeschool teacher by that name. Then again, taking a word like that and turning it into a nickname but EVEN COOLER AND EDGIER by spelling it with a Y is exactly the sort of think LKH (and middle school kids) would see as awesome and hardcore "I saw their lions around them like halos, one with a mane that was almost black, and the other so pale it was ghostlike." Um, didn't it just get established last chapter that the appearance of the animal form is NOT influenced by what the human form looks like? "A woman I didn't know, tall, strongly built, but all curves" with "short dark hair" whose lioness is "tawny with darker marks so that she looked almost spotted in places" and the another woman who is "much shorter, with long yellow hair" but despite her height "her lioness wasn't smaller." And then she sees Noel and Travis on the floor whose energy "didn't burn bright" but is instead like "a fire that was fading" and who have "shorter manes, ragged compared to the other men."
Anita also sees her own lion and "like the other short woman, wasn't a small lion. She was a great, dark, gold shape rearing over and around me." Okay, I fully admit I like the idea of short people being able to have big (even in comparison to the others) wereanimal forms.
Travis reaches out to her because "injured, it was the closest he could come to the begging gesture that most of the lycanthropes had. It was a submissive's way of asking a dominant to forgive him, to help him." while Noel just lays still beside him as his lion's light is getting dimmer. Anita realizes that means he's dying. This makes her and her lioness pissed because "you didn't kill what was ours. In the wild, lionesses will band together" uh yes that's what a pride is "to keep a male intruder from taking over a pride. They'll fight beside their chosen males" because nothing can be done without guys, of course! "to keep their land, their cubs, safe." But you just said in this chapter that Haven was your lioness's chosen male, Rex, etc. Which is admittedly wrong/retcon, as I pointed out, but it still bugs me how she swings back and forth on it WITHIN A FREAKING PAGE.
She tries to go to Noel (I was going to ask "what can she even do?" and then remembered that healing-by-sex is canon in this series) but Haven grabs her and his touching her makes a bunch of golden power energy and he kisses her and she...kisses him back, wtfff. And he smiles at her and she smiles at him but then Travis calls out for her weakly and she's like O WAIT HAVEN LET'S SAVE THESE GUYS and that makes Haven jealous and she's like DUDE NOEL'S DYING and Haven says that "The weak die; it's the way of the lions" and she says that they can save him with that super special golden kissing energy they just got and he says he doesn't want Noel's life saved and she says she does and he says "Be with me and we can save him." Oh goddammit, she's gonna have to fuck Haven to save Noel, isn't she? PREDICTABLE.
He's got her arms pinned to her sides, but she can reach her wrist sheaths, so she pretends to "struggle ineffectually and knew Haven of all the men in my life would buy it. One of our problems was that he just couldn't see women as equal. Equally dangerous, that is." Oh, a problem you both have, considering you seems to see most women as ineffective sex-obsessed harpies or equally ineffective helpless victims. She uses the struggling to hide the fact she's drawing a silver blade out of one of the sheaths, then stabs him, and the blade "sinking home the way it had a hundred other times in big bad monsters." A hundred? Really? Dozens, I guess I'd buy, but I don't think Anita has even faced that many baddies, even counting the offscreen and pre-GP ones, let alone stabbed that many with that particular blade.
He stumbles back from her and his guards don't do a thing because they're "frozen, not knowing what to do." Wow, most useless guards ever. You could at least jump her after the fact, if only to make a point!
Anita tells her own guards to keep haven away from her until she's healed Noel (because no one can ever just call an ambulance). The guards circle him, and Anita goes to Noel. The taller werelioness is kneeling by him, and she tells Anita "You're too late."
DUN DUN DUN
Anita checks and doesn’t think Noel is breathing, and yells for Dr. Lillian and medics…which, really, shouldn’t she have done the second she saw him and Travis, not smooched with Haven? I guess make out first, tend to dying men later. The brunette lioness is crying, and Anita tells her not to cry “yet”. We learn that said brunette is also wearing a red dress. The blonde one has a ponytail and is “wearing almost as many weapons as I was.” Unlike you, she actually has a good reason, considering she was brought her on a rescue mission. The blonde tells Anita that “This wasn’t our choice.” I like to think she means it wasn’t her choice to come here just to save Anita’s stupid butt from the MOAD. Yeah, remember that? It’s been 40 pages since Belle Morte and Padma left, and a total of nothing has happened, either in general or in regards to dealing with the Big Bad. No, I don’t count Noel on his deathbed as anything happening, because Haven dragged him in there like that, no action occurred to get him there. Oh, and speaking of Haven, he is fighting the guards “trying to get to me, whether to hurt me back or try for another kiss” YOU JUST STABBED THIS GUY AND YOU THINK HE WANTS TO MAKE OUT WITH YOU? Anita’s ego-fail never ceases to amaze me.
The blonde says that “If we had a real Regina or Rex, we could delay it.” and Anita nods. So now Haven isn’t even a ‘real’ Rex…what’s the betting that Anita, however, turns out to totally be a ‘real’ Regina and that’s why she and Haven just aren’t right for each other and he can’t rule anymore but she can, never mind that her own Regina saw him as a Rex, her Rex, just last chapter? Anita tries to call the golden fire lion energy that appeared last chapter randomly, and the blonde werelioness shows her how, by which I mean she just says “Like this” and all of a sudden Anita can see her great big lioness form around her again as energy and all Anita has to do is get her hand near hers (just near, mind you, no actually touching the icky girls!) and then Anita’s lioness “blazed around us, golden, shining burning bright” because actually learning to do something is boring. Then she and the two women join hands (gasp!) and kneel over Noel. Oh, wait, they don’t, “we didn’t touch hands”, they just reach them out to each other. Yup, no touching icky girls.
The blonde says that “We put energy into him, force his beast” and so all three of them touch Noel but it doesn’t work and the brunette again says that it’s too late. Anita asks Jean-Claude to help her, so he calls "Richard, Nathaniel, Damian, come." Only the latter two do come right immediately, probably because they, unlike Richard, have no objections to being owned and ordered around like dogs, so why be bothered when JC calls them like someone would call a dog? He tells them to "Touch your master" which rests my case, so they put a hand each on Anita's shoulders and "the moment they touched me, I felt my eyes go. Through the golden glow of the lions, I knew my eyes burned like dark brown stars." Her eyes glowed like "brown fire" in Flirt and "cognac diamonds" (NEVER FORGETTING THAT LINE LOL) in Skin Trade, is this going to become something that happens every book?
Damian and Nathaniel's eyes go green and purple too, she can see Nathaniel's leopard, and since Damian isn't a therian "he was just covered in the golden glow of the lions" and then JC touches their hands and his eyes glow too and then Richard asks what to do and Anita tells him to touch JC so he does even though Anita for some reason was not sure he'd do it (maybe he, like me, is disappointed at how stupidly easy and boring this problem is to solve---everybody just touch okay! it's only what you always do anyway!) and JC moves closer to Anita and "I moved my legs apart so he could press as much of himself against as of me as possible. I knew that Richard, still standing, was pressed against the back of Jean-Claude." Wow, silly me, for a second I thought that this sparklelicious glowy-eyed kumbayah circle would at least get us out of more sex.
Anita realizes that the five of them are taking power from the lions but not vice versa, so Anita grabs the hand of the blonde woman and just MAKES it go into them even as she's telling Anita that it doesn't work like that. FUCK THE RULES OF MAGIC AND METAPHYSICS, DON'T YOU KNOW WHO SHE IS? And then their energy goes into the lions and is of course described in pretty terms like "the black flame of my leopard" and "the emerald glow of Damian". This feels like one of the final battle scenes in Sailor Moon.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xhrOTBYyQ
Except Sailor Moon was actually good. And magical sparkly color-coded energy was what you were SUPPOSED to get, versus being promised a grimdark gory world that USED to be delivered. Man, remember how magic used to be gross and kinda scary? The gris gris crawling towards its owner, sacrificing chickens, or just sacrifice of some type in general? I bet there's no cost for this at all. Except maybe having to have another orgy, oh dear.
The brunette lioness touches Noel too, and then he shifts. His mane "was not very thick, not very impressive, but I didn't give a damn. I just wanted him to breathe." if you don't give a damn and neither should the readers, why mention it? Mane color and quality, by the way, is a sexual thing for lions in canon I think, so it's like her mentioning that his ass doesn't look so fine to her, if that helps you understand just how out of place this comment is for this situation. One of the lionesses checks and says he has a heartbeat but is still not breathing. Nicky comes in, still in lionman form, and Anita knows it's because he's attracted by the energy being raised and thinks there's a fight. Noel spits blood, and Anita thinks he has to be breathing to do that (I don't know if that's medically accurate or not, so I can't say) and Nicky comes in and Anita says she needs him. He asks "Where do I go?" rather than "What do I do?" which I find odd but I am quickly distracted by the facepalm factor of Anita's response: "Puppy pile, touch as much as you can."
I have never hated such a cute-sounding phrase so much.
"It was all I could think of; the kind of vampire we were worked better with touch, and more touch couldn't hurt." So Nicky just kind of lays all over Noel and grabs Travis and Anita too and Anita realizes that Nicky has what they missed until now: "Willingness without will of its own." Meaning Nicky having no choice but to be willing. And this is being shown as a wonderful, useful thing. Goddammit, why did I just eat before sporking this part?
And then this paragraph. THIS PARAGRAPH:
"Barriers broke that I hadn't even know were still there. Richard stopped holding back, Damian stopped being afraid, Jean-Claude stopped being so careful, the blond woman let go of some deep anger, the dark haired one let go of love searching for love, there wasn't enough left of Travis to give up anything else, Nathaniel gave up the last of his fear that I'd grow tired of him, Micah gave up that hard deep rage that I'd never even known was there, and I gave up my control."
BECAUSE GOD FORBID THAT CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT HAPPEN
WE CAN'T HAVE THAT
WE CAN'T HAVE CHARACTERS ACTUALLY WORKING THROUGH THESE ISSUES
OR COMING TO TERMS WITH THEM AND ACCEPTING THEM
Like, what the fuck? These character traits, flaws, and blocks, they all just vanish, including ones that were never even known about like Micah's rage, and so no one grows or evolves in any way, no one gets any struggle or exploration (I guess that might take the spotlight off Anita!), it's all just wiped away like a mark on a dry erase board! THIS IS TERRIBLE WRITING, PEOPLE. I JUST...CAN'T EVEN BEGIN. The only minorly interesting (versus just frustrating) bit of this is finding stuff out about the two lion ladies...but their characters will probably never be explored any beyond this, and it would have been INFINITELY better if these issues of theirs were found out through natural character exploration versus magically brought up (and solved) before we EVEN KNOW THEIR NAMES.
The incredible laziness and sheer waste here just makes me so, so angry on principal as a writer (okay, aspiring/wannabe writer, but still!)
Anita talks about how as an animator she'd been trained to work in groups with other animators in order to share power so as to raise a lot of corpses or particularly old ones, and how "one magic is surprisingly like another". Er, I think you mean that the idea of sharing the magic and how you share it is similar, not the magic itself. There's a big difference between raising the dead and saving a life, and dead chickens and circles of power versus hand-holding and pretty auras.
And we get more creepy with Nicky about how "he gave everything to me, no holding back" and "he let me have anything, everything" BECAUSE HE DOESN'T HAVE A CHOICE. YOU WANT NOEL HEALED WITH HIS ENERGY? HE'S GONNA GIVE HIM ENERGY. THAT'S HOW IT WORKS. NO. FREE. WILL. It works though because Noel starts breathing and Anita talks about hearing his heartbeat and the rush of blood in his veins and yadda yadda and then she has "the desire to bite him." because "I realized we'd given up our control, all of it. I was kneeling in a pile of wereanimals and vampires who'd given up their controls. We wanted flesh and blood." Well damn, someone didn't think this through, did they? Seriously, every time Anita does something that costs energy, she needs to fuck or wants to attack or the like. This can't be a surprise for her, and frankly I think it'd serve her right to have to live with killing the man she saved with her own teeth to pay for her lack of foresight, albeit unfair to Noel. Sure, this was a situation where she had to act fast and maybe didn't have time to think...but she had time to make out with Haven, didn't she? If you had time for face-sucking, you had time to order the guards (remember, they're still in the room!) to get something set up for you to pounce on after you fix Noel so he doesn't become your dinner. It was stated in Chapter 15 that farther underground in the Circus there is "the area where the wereanimals kept food for fresh changes. Food was livestock, most of it pretty small, or fresh meat." The guards are busy with Haven, yes, but couldn't one just put a gun to his head to make him stay still while another radioed someone to bring up some chow? Or all of them just dogpile on him to hold him down except one who runs down to the larder to lead up a sacrificial goat? I really want it to be a goat, see. Nothing against them, it would just tickle me because Anita is clearly a very stunted T-rex (she can't cross her arms over her knockers, remember?)
Oh, but then there wouldn't be an excuse for sex! Which this becomes? Who here is surprised? Anyone? Anyone? Yeah, that's what I thought. Richard and JC ask Anita to change the urge to kill/attack/literally feed for once into a different kind of urge AND GUESS WHAT URGE THAT TURNS OUT TO BE?
Yup, the fucking ardeur. Pun not intended.
Though of course during the process Anita waxes on about how much she wants to "sink fangs and claws into that soft, breathing form" and I actually kind of want her to try and be totally ineffectual at doing anything to Noel at all because Ms. Super Special Not-Shifting Panwere Princess doesn't HAVE fangs or claws for real. Also, she had the whole 'RRR WANT TO KILL AND EAT PPL FOR REALS' urges in Skin Trade and Flirt, and I will again predict, as I did in the sporkings of those books, that this will never actually happen. My belief in this increases with each book in which said urge rises and then comes to nothing. The only way it will ever happen is if it ends up being against a bad guy or a similar situation where it will not be a bad thing, cost Anita, have her screw up in a way that doesn't actually benefit her/get her sex/get her new powers/etc., you get the idea.
But what's this! Someone has other ideas! The scent of jasmine is in the air and Anita hears a voice in her head--but not the voice of the MOAD. This voice is male and says "Feed and I will feast" followed by insane laughter. According to Jean-Claude, it's Morte D'Amour, who we are informed, in case anyone here didn't know, "fed on death the way that Belle fed on lust" and is the creator of the rotter vampires who are "the hardest to kill of all. He would feed on the energy of every life we took. He was the ultimate carrion crow, a psychic vulture." Okay, props to LKH for the "psychic vulture" bit. It's apt, makes sense, and has a definite chill to it for me. I'm ready to be scared of this guy, to be horrified of whatever he's about to do...
...and I am let down within the very page he appears on. In the very next line, Jean-Claude instantly turns the killing urge into the ardeur. Morte D'Amour wails that he cannot feed on that, and Anita smells the "disappointment" (how is that a scent) of the MOAD, because she "could only feed on what her host could feed on" and since "Belle had escaped somehow" (we had better get an explanation how by the end of this novel, dammit) she can't just bring Belle here and feed on this through her.
...you know what, why doesn't the MOAD just psychically take Morte D'Amour to a war zone or a plague-stricken area or something? Or the emergency room of any major hospital? She seems able to go wherever the fuck she wants spiritually now, and there are loads of vampires and therians all over the globe, not to mention humans (maybe she can't posses them, but surely she can feed on them?) Why just keep trying to feed only on whatever Anita & Co are doing at that moment?
Oh right, that'd make sense and acknowledge there's anything else in existence worth thinking about besides Anita and whoever is currently revolving around her like satellites around a particularly smug sun.
"And then there was nothing but hands and bodies and things to do with teeth that didn't kill, but would leave a mark."
We are not even to Chapter 20 yet and already "have an orgy!" has been the solution to a problem TWICE. I bet some people who haven't read it think I'm exaggerating when I say everything gets solved with sex, but seriously, THAT REALLY IS THE CASE. Although to be fair, I don't think I could believe this shit either if I weren't reading it. It's just beyond the levels of my own imagination. And no, LKH, I do NOT mean that in a good way.