a-sporking-rat (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
a_sporking_rat) wrote2014-01-21 05:20 pm
a_sporking_rat) wrote2014-01-21 05:20 pm
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Fails (so far) in Kiss the Dead
Remember how I was doing the tallies in Hit List? I was keeping track of all the ways KtD fails up until now, planning to post them at the end to see how many...but it's too much work. I just...there's so much. So much fail, so much awful, I can't keep going. So basically this isn't "Fails in Kiss the Dead" it's "Fails in Kiss the Dead up to Ch. 18" and that's e-damn-enough. I give up keeping track of anything else (though feel free to take it up if you want to!)
WORLD-BUILDING FAIL
- The police station has metal tables in the interrogation rooms so that people can't scratch anything into them like with wood, but, according to Anita, failed to account for the fact that vampires and therians can easily use super-strength to fuck up metal with just their fingernails and some time. Considering that vamps/therians have always been around, law enforcement should well know what their limits are and aren't. This can, however, at least be explained by the idea that Anita is wrong and that the police know full well that supernaturals can damage/scratch metal tables, it's just that metal is the best they can do on their budget and at least it's better than wood.
- Apparently you can kill vamps for theft but not for attacking police officers, even when they were also using mental powers on a cop even though it's been previously stated that warrants a death sentence, and using non-lethal force to stop a vampire is never considered. It's either murder or nothing.
- A cop is shocked to learn how to kill a vampire to ensure its death (shooting the head and heart, removing the heart) even though HE FACES THEM IN THE FIELD LIKE TODAY, APPARENTLY, AND HUMANITY HASN'T BEEN COMBATTING THEM THROUGHOUT ALL OF HISTORY AND THEREFORE HAD AMPLE TIME TO LEARN THEIR WEAKNESSES AND THE MOST EFFECTIVE WAYS TO KILL THEM.
CANON & CONTINUITY ERRORS
-Anita was established as being as fast or faster than wereanimals in Hit List, and wereanimals were canonically stated in Skin Trade as being faster than vampires as a species. It was also hammered home that her touch makes her vampire powers more potent. Yet a regular low-level vampire is able to move fast enough to pin Anita to a table without her being able to stop him or fight him. She also makes prolonged skin-to-skin contact with him with no affects, and her touch-related abilities are never mentioned or brought up.
- Anita claims that it is the faith of the wielder that causes holy items (or any object the wielder has faith in) to ward off vampires, not the object in itself. She also says that non-believers may successfully wield these objects if said objects were previously blessed by someone of deep enough faith to make it stick, such as a priest blessing crosses and holy water. She then says that there are some priests she doesn't go to for holy water anymore because holy water blessed by them has failed to work for her in the past, suggesting their faith has faltered. However, this ignores the fact that even if the priest blessing the holy water was of insufficient faith, Anita's own faith should still, by canon rules, have been able make the holy water effective against vampires. This could indicate a flaw in Anita's own faith, but given that crosses still work just fine for her, it is more likely an oversight on LKH's part.
- She claims vampires are unique in their super-powers even though therians and fey share most of them.
- Claims in the second chapter that her use of necromancy on a vampire suspect in the first chapter was accidental, even though it explicitly wasn't. If you're going to lie like that, at least wait until some readers will have forgotten what really happened!
- Claims she has to make a real effort to keep the 'door' closed between she and JC lest they bleed over into one another's thoughts and feelings, yet there was no mention of her making any such efforts during the previous three books I sporked
- JC tells a pretty different tale of how he came to think up forming an American council than what actually happened in Bullet, but I count this less as a continuity/canon fail and more of him being deliberately sneaky
- Cynric and other Therian Servants falling in love with her instantly as a result of being bonded to her as said Therian Servant, despite this NOT being a feature of Human/Therian Servants. No explanation for why it happens with Anita is ever given.
MARY SUE-ISM
-The case and its villains turn out to be entirely focused on her, rather than her just being the cop working on the case. If this happened once or twice it'd be okay, even realistic when her level of involvement in the supernatural world starts getting deeper, but she's been the focus/goal/etc of every case and every villain in every book that I've sporked so far. LKH can no longer think of villains who aren't obsessed with Anita and supernatural cases that don't focus all around her.
- Despite having a range of potent supernatural abilities, she becomes a helpless damsel against a very low-level vampire so that she can 'accidentally' flash her sexy thong undies to the room full of policemen. She also, of course, chose to wear absurdly impractical clothing to the interrogation that ensured this would happen, even though she had no reason to do so and canonically knows better (as evident by the fact she's sneered in past books at other women for showing up to crime scenes in heels, etc....despite also having done it herself a few times in previous books too)
- She is not reprimanded for the above mistakes, despite the danger it placed other people in.
- She takes a nice long pause during the action to tell us all about how she is superior to all other animators and why. I am actually okay with her being a necromancer and thus a cut above all other animators. I really am. It's par for the course for the main character to have something special about them that sets them apart, and it was also a plot point that made Jean-Claude's interest in her make sense, and certainly a lot more interesting/bearable than if he'd just wanted her for being such a unique and sexy woman. However, when you add in her panwere status, living vampire powers, and being queen of several therian groups plus unique abilities not seen in ANY other person or creature before (namely, power-copying) and being the first female vampire executioner and the executioner with the highest kill count and everything else...yeah, that's too much. Way too much. Not to mention that even if it was just the necromancy, taking the time (especially interrupting everything else) to tell us all about just why she rules so much with it is Mary Sue masturbation. There's having power, and then there's wallowing around in it and flinging it in our faces.
- She feeds on another officer via energy vampirism (eats his anger) and mentally fucks him up in the process, but is not punished for it in any way
- Anita is not only one of the few vampire executioners to have been given a nickname/title by the vampires, she's also one of the top four who have been nicknamed after the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and the ONLY one to have earned two nicknames (War and The Executioner) and "she was the Executioner, years before the rest." ANITA: BEST *AND* FIRST AT EVERYTHING!
-Speaking of being first and best and only...she says "a necromancer, the first real one allowed to live and mature into their power in over a thousand years. The vampires had killed people like me for centuries" I'm okay with the idea of this in itself, but we saw other necromancers in this series, like Dominic Dumare and Nicky Baco. What about them? I guess Dominic could be over a thousand since he was a human servant, but Nicky was a regular mortal guy. Were neither of them truly mature in their powers, then? But how could the vampires be sure they wouldn't mature? Were there magical blocks against them becoming "real" necromancers like Anita, or did they deliberately hold themselves back from maturing because of threats from the Council, or does LKH just not fucking care about her canon when it comes to making Anita first, best, and only at everything?
- Somehow all those vampires getting shot in Ch. 5 & Ch. 6 isn't her fault
- Anita is a hugely special person for still finding JC sexy after seven years of dating him...despite the fact that neither his appearance nor her standards for being attractive have changed
- Her boyfriend is the "sexisest vampire in St. Louis" and everyone wants to see him naked on stage but they don't get to because he doesn't strip all the way, so only Anita gets the full monty but everyone else gets to know what they're missing, nah nah nah!
- She totally doesn't want to be fucking Cynric. Really. As she'll tell you at length. And yet there is nothing actually making her!
- Anita freaking out over how she can't dump Cynric, but this was never presented as a problem before with any of her other men, whom she also can't dump because of metaphysical bonds (well, she could dump them as lovers, but she'd still be stuck with them forever as Therian Servants). It's only a problem now that *she* might want to dump a guy; it was never considered bad at all before back when it was just *their* choice to be with her that was being taken away. BAD THINGS ARE ONLY BAD IF THEY UPSET ANITA!
- On the entire RPIT squad, only Anita and the people she likes (Dolph and Zerbrowski) have not been divorced.
- Zebrowski putting her on the same threat level as Dolph even though SHE'S A GIRL and how flattering a testament this is to how ~dangerous and badass~ Anita is
- Yadda yadda Anita is so scary even the monsters are afraid of her yadda yadda
- Shelby just happens to make criticisms of Anita and Jean-Claude (too powerful, enslave others, etc.) that us "haters" have as well. Naturally, she is portrayed as in the wrong for it and is bullied by Anita for "justified" reasons
- Zerbrowski becomes a pod person so he can not only think up the fucked up shit with Shelby, but also assure Anita how right she is and how wrong Larry is and also ANITA CAN FIGHT AND LARRY CAN'T SO NYEAH NYEAH NYEAH also Larry is the haterz and Anita is so great
- In retribution for Larry speaking up against Anita, a new character, Brice, is introduced to be immediately established as popular so that he can then publicly shit all over Larry and talk about how great and cool Anita is and how much better she is than Larry
- The constant harping on how ANITA IS A COP AND KNOWS WHAT COPS DO AND HOW COPS THINK CUZ SHE'S A COP ISN'T SHE COOL
- Because Anita is such an Exceptional Woman for not chasing after him like that slut Jessica Arnet he confides to her that he's gay despite the fact they just met and he's not out in general yet
- Anita has a whole host of hot men who make her meals for her, and is praised as being "reasonable" for not complaining about this. She is also praised for being "reasonable" for the fact that her lovers, being strippers, don't eat food that will make them bloat before performances, despite the fact she has nothing to do with that
- Zerbrowski proclaims that the only reason other cops call Anita unreasonable is because they're jealous
- Brice, Zerbrowski, and Anita have a five page conversation about how awesome Anita is, all her super-powers, how great she is at killing, how this isn't bragging because it's true, and how anyone who has a problem with her is just jealous
- Brice's problems somehow become all about Anita and how she knows how it is
- Brice basically exists as a tool not only to sing her praises and insult her detractors, he's also there as a tool to get women to keep away from her mens...by dating those women, just for her. And he's only just met her but he volunteers to do this.
JUST PLAIN STUPIDITY & WTF
- Anita goes on and on about how vampires can't just be allowed to run around doing as they please and that's why the MotC system is required...even though vampires becoming legal citizen makes them beholden to human law and gives them reason to obey said law, and lacks the corruption, abuses, and hierarchy of the MotC system.
- A cop asks Anita about the basics of why and how crosses glow in response to vampires. Anita assumes from this that he must be having a crisis of faith, which is ridiculous enough on her part, but what's more she also says that if he is he has to be re-assigned to a different unit because he won't be able to use faith against vampires...even though she told us in this very chapter that non-believers can still successfully wield holy objects against vampires if those objects have been blessed by a priest or someone else "holy enough to make it stick"
- Anita tells some criminals to put their hands on their heads. They are confused by the request until reminded they have seen this on TV.
- The psychic abilities of one police officer includes being able to tell when a therian is shifting, because apparently you gotta be psychic to know that someone is PHYSICALLY MORPHING INTO A GIANT ANIMAL
- Anita is sent to find out what happened to some cops who went radio silent. At the scene, she deduces, based on the number of cars there, that there are two or three officers she is searching for. However, shouldn't she have been informed before leaving how many went missing? Why did she have to estimate like that?
- "His throat was savaged on one side so there was no way to check for a pulse; it was gone, torn out." Um, if the throat is torn out, it's true there's no way to check for a pulse, but that's a non-issue because you OBVIOUSLY DON'T NEED TO AT THAT POINT.
- Smith is shocked when Anita reveals the teenagers she just gunned down were vampires...despite Anita finding them with her necromancy, the fact they threw a grown man across the room in front of him, and didn't go down even when she shot them in the heads and chests.
- Anita changes into full vampire hunting gear because she invoked the Preternatural Enddangerment Act and there was a case where a US marshal was tried for murder because he invoked without said changing, and the lawyers argued that this proved he didn't really believe that the situation had merited a warrant of execution. However, she does not do this until AFTER the vampires she was after have all been caught and put behind bars anyway, so they are no threat, therefore the PEA no longer applies since it's for situations where there is a lethal threat to humans, which there is not now. And anyone who was with her when she went after these vampires can vouch that she did not change when actually going after them despite the fact she was in woefully impractical clothing and, she tells us, had a change of clothes on hand all along.
- Anita is shocked to see a group of vampires who, rather than being supermodel levels of hot, look like ordinary people. This is treated as an incredibly unusual thing, not just that some are particularly old or young but that they look NORMAL. I know that it's the norm for beautiful people to be chosen for Belle Morte's line (even though they're the line who needs good looks least, since they have lust powers anyway) but did the vampires turned by other lines for presumably-functional reasons all just happen to be hotties-by-21st-century standards by coincidence?
- Anita thinks a group of vampires could not be the ones who bit a man to death because she can sense they have not fed tonight. It is never considered by her or anyone else that they could have bitten him without feeding.
- Anita is nicknamed War by the vampires, as in the Horseman of the Apocalypse, and this is "Because you've killed more of us than Death." but that doesn't make sense. Whether you die of war, famine, or pestilence, you are still dying, you are still ultimately taken by Death, so Death should be the name for the one that kills the most, not War.
- Anita angsts about being "one of the monsters" because she can raise the dead, even though that's a psychic ability and she's never been shown to count human psychics as monsters, and despite her claims that she thinks monsters are people. If she thinks they're people, why is it so bad for her to be one then? In the hands of another author this could reveal her hypocrisy and that she still has subconscious prejudice against the post-human and non-human, but since this is LKH it's just Anita getting to have her cake and eat it too despite how little sense it makes. I really, really hate "protagonists angsts miserably about not-bad stuff that isn't even their fault" really hard to boot, especially when Anita's done so many actually-monstrous things she never pays mind to.
- Anita places "not being able to grow out hair" and "not being able to heal wounds" on equal levels of importance for what vampires can do with their supernatural energy
- Anita getting all those vampires shot in Ch. 5 & Ch. 6
- Claims someone "looked like a victim" whatever that means
- Says she has no idea what a man just died for even though he explicitly told her he preferred death to being enslaved by her and Jean-Claude
- As I said in the Mary Sue section, for all that she claims she's uncomfy fucking Cynric, there's actually no reason she has to fuck him at all
- Only now does she put two and two together that "hey, if I get hurt Nathaniel could die, and if I die he almost certainly will too" and "My job is highly dangerous with a big risk of injury or death" to realize she puts Nathaniel at risk as much as she does herself. She still does not seem to realize this also applies to Damian, Cynric, and all her other Servants, just Nathaniel.
- The entire fucking thing with Cynric
- Only now does she realize that being metaphysically bonded to a guy as his Master and he as her Therian Servant means she can't just dump him. Except it doesn't mean that, it just means she can't get rid of their bond, but in her head that means she has to keep fucking and dating him. She also has only realized it with Cynric, not the others, or at least is only distressed over it with Cynric, since she claims (emphasize on claims) not to want to be with him. The fact that neither she nor her lovers have the option of being able to leave was never a problem until it was inconvenient to her desires....or her proclaimed desires, anyway.
- Urlrich the cop doesn't know vampires have super-hearing
- Anita, Miss Preternatural Biology Expert, doesn't know if vampires can choke
- When the fuck exactly did Anita have that conversation with Jean-Claude about hair that she shoehorns in a recollection of during Ch. 13?
- Asher is a pussy for not wanting brain matter in the carpet
- Proof that Benjamin is old is that he remembers the Council in Europe...despite the fact the Council still rules Europe and so he could have just died and immigrated less than a year ago and still be old enough to remember them
- Every women in every branch of St. Louis law enforcement trying to date Brice, to the point of having a betting pool on it
- Anita doesn't cook her own dinners, despite having time to do so, Nathaniel and the others do. This is fine in itself, but she doesn't like what they cook. Instead of just making herself something different (or asking Nathaniel to make her something else, which we all know he would at the drop of a hat) she nonetheless eats the salads despite disliking them. This shows so much laziness that is worthy of being in the WTF category, though I would also say it potentially counts as Mary Sue too, since it lets her diet and be skinny but not doing it because she WANTS to like those OTHER vain girls who diet because they're vain. Seriously, have we ever not heard Anita use '"diet" as a dirty word?
- Anita is also praised for being reasonable because...her boyfriends don't eat things before stripping that might make them bloat?
- Arnet being embarrassed over having asked out someone that turned out to be the boyfriend of a co-worker somehow means she's not going to take no for an answer from Brice without getting pissed off
- Arnet saying that JC might have to be taken down by the police one day and that Nathaniel would be free to have a life if he could get away from JC and Anita somehow counts as her threatening JC and Anita is going to take this to someone higher on the food chain
- A new guy whom she knows nothing about is in town. He immediately buddies up to her, gives her a deep personal secret about himself, and asks a lot about her personal life. Anita is suspicious...but her suspicion is that he's not actually gay and actually wanted to get with Arnet or something, rather than considering he might be an undercover bad guy
ANITA IS EVIL
- Anita seems to think that it is a legal option, perhaps the only legal option, to shoot a bunch of critically injured vampires rather than helping them because she invoked the PEA act. But the act says you can kill them if doing so will prevent further loss of human life. None of these vampires presented a deadly threat even BEFORE they were needlessly wounded by police officers due to a disaster that ANITA SET INTO MOTION, they're sure as hell now not a danger that they're lying on the ground dying or at least incapacitated and in great pain. Anita, however, says that if we don't like it, we basically have to blame the law and how everyone writes it is sheltered little poopheads that don't understand the real law. Luckily when faced with being the one to actually make the call and thus have it officially on her head, she decided not to execute them.
- Anita convinces a police officer to a put a gun to the head of a vampire in custody who is not doing anything. As a result she sets of a disaster in which multiple vampires are killed while also in custody and not doing anything, for which she takes no responsibility whatsoever and frames as the fault of the vampires and as deserved.
- Anita is a not-so-secret Imperialist
- She looks at vampires who look like they are around Cynric's age, and thinks of them as looking like children. So, doesn't mean she sees Cynric as a child then? That's honestly even worse than if she had deluded herself into thinking he was somehow an adult.
- EVERYTHING IN CHAPTER 10 & 11
- Everything with Shelby, for so many reasons
- Anita is a complete asshole to other cops, and in fact frequently puts them in danger for her own selfish reasons, but the second their deaths can be used to legally justify killing vampires, she goes on a rant about camaraderie and how it means so much to be cops...and in the process, also makes it clear she believes in retribution-killing
- She clearly loves eating a burger and fries in front of Zerbrowski for the sheer fact he can't
- The only reason she can fathom that someone might want to rescue someone else from an abusive relationship is in order to fuck them
- When a gay man confides in her about the problems and prejudices he faces, she makes it all about her, and approves of him dating women in order to keep those women away from her men (nevermind if these women are hurt by being used like that)
STUFF I LIKED
- The part where she had to pay for her ridiculous choice of footwear by walking through a gross icky blood puddle.
- Finding out what kind of medical help vampires can receive that will help them heal in addition to their natural healing abilities
- When she was having a hard time feeling sorry for Smith, despite knowing she should, because she was too wrapped up in her own problems. It was a really human, everyday sort of selfishness that I could really emphasize with.
- When she recognized what she was doing in the above situation, and tried to fix it by offering an apology to Smith. The fact she saw a flaw in it being All About Her and actually *took action* about it is incredible for this character!
- When she gave credit to someone else for doing something just as well or better than she does, especially when it was not some hated 'girly' skill but something she usually acts like the one and only enlightened guru on (making relationships work, citing Zerbrowski and his wife Katie as success experts when Smith wants advice on that from her)
- Bringing up, as she did all the way back in the first book, that sometimes after she cuts off the head "I might burn the body parts separately and throw the ashes into different bodies of running water if the vamp was really old, or really powerful" as a surefire way to prevent them from coming back. This suggests to me that very old/powerful vampires can even come back from being decapitated and burned down to ash...which makes my desire for Mr. Oliver to be able to return quite workable!
QUESTIONS RAISED
- If an elderly person becomes a vampire, do the benefits of vampirism (speed, strength, healing, etc.) eliminate all the internal physical symptoms of their old age?
- If vampires can beef up their muscles after death, can they lose muscle? Get fat?
- Vampires cry blood, but clearly blood tears aren't what is keeping their eyeballs moist or they'd look like they had constant cases of pinkeye...and also they sweat, but not blood, just regular sweat. What the hell is going on here? Or is it that they cry blood when their tears are real, and clear regular ones when they're faking?
- Can vampires choke?
- Just how long ago was Shelby freed? If it was recent, why didn't JC do anything about the pedophile keeping her? Why was it left to this rebel group to find and free her? All suggestions point to Shelby having been freed pretty recently, since it's this rebel group that freed her and they seem to be new...suggesting that in the entire time JC has been Master of the City, he never discovered that a pedophile vampire had turned a child and was keeping her captive, or, if he did, did nothing to free her. And when we also consider that these are the first rogue vamps not aligned to JC and his Kiss, or to the Church, and that this pedo vamp was not among these rogues...who was he allied with? Was he a Church member? Or was he in JC's Kiss all along? Or both, since the Church apparently belongs to JC now? Sure, Shelby could be from another city, but these rebel vamps she's with aren't from out of town, and I doubt they made a random trip to another city given how focused they are on staying out of clutches of any MotC...
WORLD-BUILDING FAIL
- The police station has metal tables in the interrogation rooms so that people can't scratch anything into them like with wood, but, according to Anita, failed to account for the fact that vampires and therians can easily use super-strength to fuck up metal with just their fingernails and some time. Considering that vamps/therians have always been around, law enforcement should well know what their limits are and aren't. This can, however, at least be explained by the idea that Anita is wrong and that the police know full well that supernaturals can damage/scratch metal tables, it's just that metal is the best they can do on their budget and at least it's better than wood.
- Apparently you can kill vamps for theft but not for attacking police officers, even when they were also using mental powers on a cop even though it's been previously stated that warrants a death sentence, and using non-lethal force to stop a vampire is never considered. It's either murder or nothing.
- A cop is shocked to learn how to kill a vampire to ensure its death (shooting the head and heart, removing the heart) even though HE FACES THEM IN THE FIELD LIKE TODAY, APPARENTLY, AND HUMANITY HASN'T BEEN COMBATTING THEM THROUGHOUT ALL OF HISTORY AND THEREFORE HAD AMPLE TIME TO LEARN THEIR WEAKNESSES AND THE MOST EFFECTIVE WAYS TO KILL THEM.
CANON & CONTINUITY ERRORS
-Anita was established as being as fast or faster than wereanimals in Hit List, and wereanimals were canonically stated in Skin Trade as being faster than vampires as a species. It was also hammered home that her touch makes her vampire powers more potent. Yet a regular low-level vampire is able to move fast enough to pin Anita to a table without her being able to stop him or fight him. She also makes prolonged skin-to-skin contact with him with no affects, and her touch-related abilities are never mentioned or brought up.
- Anita claims that it is the faith of the wielder that causes holy items (or any object the wielder has faith in) to ward off vampires, not the object in itself. She also says that non-believers may successfully wield these objects if said objects were previously blessed by someone of deep enough faith to make it stick, such as a priest blessing crosses and holy water. She then says that there are some priests she doesn't go to for holy water anymore because holy water blessed by them has failed to work for her in the past, suggesting their faith has faltered. However, this ignores the fact that even if the priest blessing the holy water was of insufficient faith, Anita's own faith should still, by canon rules, have been able make the holy water effective against vampires. This could indicate a flaw in Anita's own faith, but given that crosses still work just fine for her, it is more likely an oversight on LKH's part.
- She claims vampires are unique in their super-powers even though therians and fey share most of them.
- Claims in the second chapter that her use of necromancy on a vampire suspect in the first chapter was accidental, even though it explicitly wasn't. If you're going to lie like that, at least wait until some readers will have forgotten what really happened!
- Claims she has to make a real effort to keep the 'door' closed between she and JC lest they bleed over into one another's thoughts and feelings, yet there was no mention of her making any such efforts during the previous three books I sporked
- JC tells a pretty different tale of how he came to think up forming an American council than what actually happened in Bullet, but I count this less as a continuity/canon fail and more of him being deliberately sneaky
- Cynric and other Therian Servants falling in love with her instantly as a result of being bonded to her as said Therian Servant, despite this NOT being a feature of Human/Therian Servants. No explanation for why it happens with Anita is ever given.
MARY SUE-ISM
-The case and its villains turn out to be entirely focused on her, rather than her just being the cop working on the case. If this happened once or twice it'd be okay, even realistic when her level of involvement in the supernatural world starts getting deeper, but she's been the focus/goal/etc of every case and every villain in every book that I've sporked so far. LKH can no longer think of villains who aren't obsessed with Anita and supernatural cases that don't focus all around her.
- Despite having a range of potent supernatural abilities, she becomes a helpless damsel against a very low-level vampire so that she can 'accidentally' flash her sexy thong undies to the room full of policemen. She also, of course, chose to wear absurdly impractical clothing to the interrogation that ensured this would happen, even though she had no reason to do so and canonically knows better (as evident by the fact she's sneered in past books at other women for showing up to crime scenes in heels, etc....despite also having done it herself a few times in previous books too)
- She is not reprimanded for the above mistakes, despite the danger it placed other people in.
- She takes a nice long pause during the action to tell us all about how she is superior to all other animators and why. I am actually okay with her being a necromancer and thus a cut above all other animators. I really am. It's par for the course for the main character to have something special about them that sets them apart, and it was also a plot point that made Jean-Claude's interest in her make sense, and certainly a lot more interesting/bearable than if he'd just wanted her for being such a unique and sexy woman. However, when you add in her panwere status, living vampire powers, and being queen of several therian groups plus unique abilities not seen in ANY other person or creature before (namely, power-copying) and being the first female vampire executioner and the executioner with the highest kill count and everything else...yeah, that's too much. Way too much. Not to mention that even if it was just the necromancy, taking the time (especially interrupting everything else) to tell us all about just why she rules so much with it is Mary Sue masturbation. There's having power, and then there's wallowing around in it and flinging it in our faces.
- She feeds on another officer via energy vampirism (eats his anger) and mentally fucks him up in the process, but is not punished for it in any way
- Anita is not only one of the few vampire executioners to have been given a nickname/title by the vampires, she's also one of the top four who have been nicknamed after the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and the ONLY one to have earned two nicknames (War and The Executioner) and "she was the Executioner, years before the rest." ANITA: BEST *AND* FIRST AT EVERYTHING!
-Speaking of being first and best and only...she says "a necromancer, the first real one allowed to live and mature into their power in over a thousand years. The vampires had killed people like me for centuries" I'm okay with the idea of this in itself, but we saw other necromancers in this series, like Dominic Dumare and Nicky Baco. What about them? I guess Dominic could be over a thousand since he was a human servant, but Nicky was a regular mortal guy. Were neither of them truly mature in their powers, then? But how could the vampires be sure they wouldn't mature? Were there magical blocks against them becoming "real" necromancers like Anita, or did they deliberately hold themselves back from maturing because of threats from the Council, or does LKH just not fucking care about her canon when it comes to making Anita first, best, and only at everything?
- Somehow all those vampires getting shot in Ch. 5 & Ch. 6 isn't her fault
- Anita is a hugely special person for still finding JC sexy after seven years of dating him...despite the fact that neither his appearance nor her standards for being attractive have changed
- Her boyfriend is the "sexisest vampire in St. Louis" and everyone wants to see him naked on stage but they don't get to because he doesn't strip all the way, so only Anita gets the full monty but everyone else gets to know what they're missing, nah nah nah!
- She totally doesn't want to be fucking Cynric. Really. As she'll tell you at length. And yet there is nothing actually making her!
- Anita freaking out over how she can't dump Cynric, but this was never presented as a problem before with any of her other men, whom she also can't dump because of metaphysical bonds (well, she could dump them as lovers, but she'd still be stuck with them forever as Therian Servants). It's only a problem now that *she* might want to dump a guy; it was never considered bad at all before back when it was just *their* choice to be with her that was being taken away. BAD THINGS ARE ONLY BAD IF THEY UPSET ANITA!
- On the entire RPIT squad, only Anita and the people she likes (Dolph and Zerbrowski) have not been divorced.
- Zebrowski putting her on the same threat level as Dolph even though SHE'S A GIRL and how flattering a testament this is to how ~dangerous and badass~ Anita is
- Yadda yadda Anita is so scary even the monsters are afraid of her yadda yadda
- Shelby just happens to make criticisms of Anita and Jean-Claude (too powerful, enslave others, etc.) that us "haters" have as well. Naturally, she is portrayed as in the wrong for it and is bullied by Anita for "justified" reasons
- Zerbrowski becomes a pod person so he can not only think up the fucked up shit with Shelby, but also assure Anita how right she is and how wrong Larry is and also ANITA CAN FIGHT AND LARRY CAN'T SO NYEAH NYEAH NYEAH also Larry is the haterz and Anita is so great
- In retribution for Larry speaking up against Anita, a new character, Brice, is introduced to be immediately established as popular so that he can then publicly shit all over Larry and talk about how great and cool Anita is and how much better she is than Larry
- The constant harping on how ANITA IS A COP AND KNOWS WHAT COPS DO AND HOW COPS THINK CUZ SHE'S A COP ISN'T SHE COOL
- Because Anita is such an Exceptional Woman for not chasing after him like that slut Jessica Arnet he confides to her that he's gay despite the fact they just met and he's not out in general yet
- Anita has a whole host of hot men who make her meals for her, and is praised as being "reasonable" for not complaining about this. She is also praised for being "reasonable" for the fact that her lovers, being strippers, don't eat food that will make them bloat before performances, despite the fact she has nothing to do with that
- Zerbrowski proclaims that the only reason other cops call Anita unreasonable is because they're jealous
- Brice, Zerbrowski, and Anita have a five page conversation about how awesome Anita is, all her super-powers, how great she is at killing, how this isn't bragging because it's true, and how anyone who has a problem with her is just jealous
- Brice's problems somehow become all about Anita and how she knows how it is
- Brice basically exists as a tool not only to sing her praises and insult her detractors, he's also there as a tool to get women to keep away from her mens...by dating those women, just for her. And he's only just met her but he volunteers to do this.
JUST PLAIN STUPIDITY & WTF
- Anita goes on and on about how vampires can't just be allowed to run around doing as they please and that's why the MotC system is required...even though vampires becoming legal citizen makes them beholden to human law and gives them reason to obey said law, and lacks the corruption, abuses, and hierarchy of the MotC system.
- A cop asks Anita about the basics of why and how crosses glow in response to vampires. Anita assumes from this that he must be having a crisis of faith, which is ridiculous enough on her part, but what's more she also says that if he is he has to be re-assigned to a different unit because he won't be able to use faith against vampires...even though she told us in this very chapter that non-believers can still successfully wield holy objects against vampires if those objects have been blessed by a priest or someone else "holy enough to make it stick"
- Anita tells some criminals to put their hands on their heads. They are confused by the request until reminded they have seen this on TV.
- The psychic abilities of one police officer includes being able to tell when a therian is shifting, because apparently you gotta be psychic to know that someone is PHYSICALLY MORPHING INTO A GIANT ANIMAL
- Anita is sent to find out what happened to some cops who went radio silent. At the scene, she deduces, based on the number of cars there, that there are two or three officers she is searching for. However, shouldn't she have been informed before leaving how many went missing? Why did she have to estimate like that?
- "His throat was savaged on one side so there was no way to check for a pulse; it was gone, torn out." Um, if the throat is torn out, it's true there's no way to check for a pulse, but that's a non-issue because you OBVIOUSLY DON'T NEED TO AT THAT POINT.
- Smith is shocked when Anita reveals the teenagers she just gunned down were vampires...despite Anita finding them with her necromancy, the fact they threw a grown man across the room in front of him, and didn't go down even when she shot them in the heads and chests.
- Anita changes into full vampire hunting gear because she invoked the Preternatural Enddangerment Act and there was a case where a US marshal was tried for murder because he invoked without said changing, and the lawyers argued that this proved he didn't really believe that the situation had merited a warrant of execution. However, she does not do this until AFTER the vampires she was after have all been caught and put behind bars anyway, so they are no threat, therefore the PEA no longer applies since it's for situations where there is a lethal threat to humans, which there is not now. And anyone who was with her when she went after these vampires can vouch that she did not change when actually going after them despite the fact she was in woefully impractical clothing and, she tells us, had a change of clothes on hand all along.
- Anita is shocked to see a group of vampires who, rather than being supermodel levels of hot, look like ordinary people. This is treated as an incredibly unusual thing, not just that some are particularly old or young but that they look NORMAL. I know that it's the norm for beautiful people to be chosen for Belle Morte's line (even though they're the line who needs good looks least, since they have lust powers anyway) but did the vampires turned by other lines for presumably-functional reasons all just happen to be hotties-by-21st-century standards by coincidence?
- Anita thinks a group of vampires could not be the ones who bit a man to death because she can sense they have not fed tonight. It is never considered by her or anyone else that they could have bitten him without feeding.
- Anita is nicknamed War by the vampires, as in the Horseman of the Apocalypse, and this is "Because you've killed more of us than Death." but that doesn't make sense. Whether you die of war, famine, or pestilence, you are still dying, you are still ultimately taken by Death, so Death should be the name for the one that kills the most, not War.
- Anita angsts about being "one of the monsters" because she can raise the dead, even though that's a psychic ability and she's never been shown to count human psychics as monsters, and despite her claims that she thinks monsters are people. If she thinks they're people, why is it so bad for her to be one then? In the hands of another author this could reveal her hypocrisy and that she still has subconscious prejudice against the post-human and non-human, but since this is LKH it's just Anita getting to have her cake and eat it too despite how little sense it makes. I really, really hate "protagonists angsts miserably about not-bad stuff that isn't even their fault" really hard to boot, especially when Anita's done so many actually-monstrous things she never pays mind to.
- Anita places "not being able to grow out hair" and "not being able to heal wounds" on equal levels of importance for what vampires can do with their supernatural energy
- Anita getting all those vampires shot in Ch. 5 & Ch. 6
- Claims someone "looked like a victim" whatever that means
- Says she has no idea what a man just died for even though he explicitly told her he preferred death to being enslaved by her and Jean-Claude
- As I said in the Mary Sue section, for all that she claims she's uncomfy fucking Cynric, there's actually no reason she has to fuck him at all
- Only now does she put two and two together that "hey, if I get hurt Nathaniel could die, and if I die he almost certainly will too" and "My job is highly dangerous with a big risk of injury or death" to realize she puts Nathaniel at risk as much as she does herself. She still does not seem to realize this also applies to Damian, Cynric, and all her other Servants, just Nathaniel.
- The entire fucking thing with Cynric
- Only now does she realize that being metaphysically bonded to a guy as his Master and he as her Therian Servant means she can't just dump him. Except it doesn't mean that, it just means she can't get rid of their bond, but in her head that means she has to keep fucking and dating him. She also has only realized it with Cynric, not the others, or at least is only distressed over it with Cynric, since she claims (emphasize on claims) not to want to be with him. The fact that neither she nor her lovers have the option of being able to leave was never a problem until it was inconvenient to her desires....or her proclaimed desires, anyway.
- Urlrich the cop doesn't know vampires have super-hearing
- Anita, Miss Preternatural Biology Expert, doesn't know if vampires can choke
- When the fuck exactly did Anita have that conversation with Jean-Claude about hair that she shoehorns in a recollection of during Ch. 13?
- Asher is a pussy for not wanting brain matter in the carpet
- Proof that Benjamin is old is that he remembers the Council in Europe...despite the fact the Council still rules Europe and so he could have just died and immigrated less than a year ago and still be old enough to remember them
- Every women in every branch of St. Louis law enforcement trying to date Brice, to the point of having a betting pool on it
- Anita doesn't cook her own dinners, despite having time to do so, Nathaniel and the others do. This is fine in itself, but she doesn't like what they cook. Instead of just making herself something different (or asking Nathaniel to make her something else, which we all know he would at the drop of a hat) she nonetheless eats the salads despite disliking them. This shows so much laziness that is worthy of being in the WTF category, though I would also say it potentially counts as Mary Sue too, since it lets her diet and be skinny but not doing it because she WANTS to like those OTHER vain girls who diet because they're vain. Seriously, have we ever not heard Anita use '"diet" as a dirty word?
- Anita is also praised for being reasonable because...her boyfriends don't eat things before stripping that might make them bloat?
- Arnet being embarrassed over having asked out someone that turned out to be the boyfriend of a co-worker somehow means she's not going to take no for an answer from Brice without getting pissed off
- Arnet saying that JC might have to be taken down by the police one day and that Nathaniel would be free to have a life if he could get away from JC and Anita somehow counts as her threatening JC and Anita is going to take this to someone higher on the food chain
- A new guy whom she knows nothing about is in town. He immediately buddies up to her, gives her a deep personal secret about himself, and asks a lot about her personal life. Anita is suspicious...but her suspicion is that he's not actually gay and actually wanted to get with Arnet or something, rather than considering he might be an undercover bad guy
ANITA IS EVIL
- Anita seems to think that it is a legal option, perhaps the only legal option, to shoot a bunch of critically injured vampires rather than helping them because she invoked the PEA act. But the act says you can kill them if doing so will prevent further loss of human life. None of these vampires presented a deadly threat even BEFORE they were needlessly wounded by police officers due to a disaster that ANITA SET INTO MOTION, they're sure as hell now not a danger that they're lying on the ground dying or at least incapacitated and in great pain. Anita, however, says that if we don't like it, we basically have to blame the law and how everyone writes it is sheltered little poopheads that don't understand the real law. Luckily when faced with being the one to actually make the call and thus have it officially on her head, she decided not to execute them.
- Anita convinces a police officer to a put a gun to the head of a vampire in custody who is not doing anything. As a result she sets of a disaster in which multiple vampires are killed while also in custody and not doing anything, for which she takes no responsibility whatsoever and frames as the fault of the vampires and as deserved.
- Anita is a not-so-secret Imperialist
- She looks at vampires who look like they are around Cynric's age, and thinks of them as looking like children. So, doesn't mean she sees Cynric as a child then? That's honestly even worse than if she had deluded herself into thinking he was somehow an adult.
- EVERYTHING IN CHAPTER 10 & 11
- Everything with Shelby, for so many reasons
- Anita is a complete asshole to other cops, and in fact frequently puts them in danger for her own selfish reasons, but the second their deaths can be used to legally justify killing vampires, she goes on a rant about camaraderie and how it means so much to be cops...and in the process, also makes it clear she believes in retribution-killing
- She clearly loves eating a burger and fries in front of Zerbrowski for the sheer fact he can't
- The only reason she can fathom that someone might want to rescue someone else from an abusive relationship is in order to fuck them
- When a gay man confides in her about the problems and prejudices he faces, she makes it all about her, and approves of him dating women in order to keep those women away from her men (nevermind if these women are hurt by being used like that)
STUFF I LIKED
- The part where she had to pay for her ridiculous choice of footwear by walking through a gross icky blood puddle.
- Finding out what kind of medical help vampires can receive that will help them heal in addition to their natural healing abilities
- When she was having a hard time feeling sorry for Smith, despite knowing she should, because she was too wrapped up in her own problems. It was a really human, everyday sort of selfishness that I could really emphasize with.
- When she recognized what she was doing in the above situation, and tried to fix it by offering an apology to Smith. The fact she saw a flaw in it being All About Her and actually *took action* about it is incredible for this character!
- When she gave credit to someone else for doing something just as well or better than she does, especially when it was not some hated 'girly' skill but something she usually acts like the one and only enlightened guru on (making relationships work, citing Zerbrowski and his wife Katie as success experts when Smith wants advice on that from her)
- Bringing up, as she did all the way back in the first book, that sometimes after she cuts off the head "I might burn the body parts separately and throw the ashes into different bodies of running water if the vamp was really old, or really powerful" as a surefire way to prevent them from coming back. This suggests to me that very old/powerful vampires can even come back from being decapitated and burned down to ash...which makes my desire for Mr. Oliver to be able to return quite workable!
QUESTIONS RAISED
- If an elderly person becomes a vampire, do the benefits of vampirism (speed, strength, healing, etc.) eliminate all the internal physical symptoms of their old age?
- If vampires can beef up their muscles after death, can they lose muscle? Get fat?
- Vampires cry blood, but clearly blood tears aren't what is keeping their eyeballs moist or they'd look like they had constant cases of pinkeye...and also they sweat, but not blood, just regular sweat. What the hell is going on here? Or is it that they cry blood when their tears are real, and clear regular ones when they're faking?
- Can vampires choke?
- Just how long ago was Shelby freed? If it was recent, why didn't JC do anything about the pedophile keeping her? Why was it left to this rebel group to find and free her? All suggestions point to Shelby having been freed pretty recently, since it's this rebel group that freed her and they seem to be new...suggesting that in the entire time JC has been Master of the City, he never discovered that a pedophile vampire had turned a child and was keeping her captive, or, if he did, did nothing to free her. And when we also consider that these are the first rogue vamps not aligned to JC and his Kiss, or to the Church, and that this pedo vamp was not among these rogues...who was he allied with? Was he a Church member? Or was he in JC's Kiss all along? Or both, since the Church apparently belongs to JC now? Sure, Shelby could be from another city, but these rebel vamps she's with aren't from out of town, and I doubt they made a random trip to another city given how focused they are on staying out of clutches of any MotC...