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a_sporking_rat- Boz seriously overestimates how big he is. For instance, he tried to jump from my lap to the computer desk, but only made it halfway before plummeting to the carpet. He was fine, but my dad was cracking up because LOL HOW BIG DOES HE THINK HE IS TO THINK HE COULD MAKE THAT LEAP
- He's also trying to burrow through the bottom of a cardboard box. His little paws make such futile scuffling sounds!
- Oatmeal scared the piss out of me when I saw her sleeping outside her boxes; I thought she was dead, she never does that! But it turns out she's now taken to nesting in the open, probably because it's getting warmer. I woke her up and she made squinty eyes and offended little noises at me.
KISS THE DEAD, CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT & FORTY-NINE
Anita tells us how she keeps her face uncovered so the bomber can tell she's among "the heavily armed people about to come through the door" but is otherwise "geared up as if it were any other monster hunt" which she says in a way it is. "I let myself fall into the rhythm of moving with the men" and describes that movement, because she can't just say they go to the goddamn door. She also has to talk about how it's "the door I'd gone through a hundred times, a thousand times" and then lets Nathaniel "see" her above him but keeps a greater psychic distance than before "because he needed to be as fast and smooth as only he could be, and I needed to move with precision with the men around me. We both had our jobs, our strengths, and we needed them now." Given the situation, that last sentence wasn't needed. The reader knows this. I know this is the most miniscule example of LKH's tendency to tell the reader things that they know, but since getting into writing myself I'm finding myself extra critical. This is also a YMMV, since I favor a more economical (though far from minimalist) prose type, so keep that in mind.
"I let Nathaniel know we were coming through the door, and then I cut ties" and Dev lets them through the door, nothing blows up meaning Nathaniel did good and all the men are in the far side of the room where they have "dog-piled the bomber. I ran, I ran the way I had in the warehouse, except this time I wasn't moving to save some stranger from getting it. I was moving to get the men I loved" and she is "across the room, above the pile of them before I'd had time to think" and "it was like magic". So basically she's super-fast (more so than before) just when it's most dramatic and she needs to be? And she describes what position each man is in, and then she sees the bomber, he yells "No!" and then she shoots him in the head. Even though "blood and thicker things exploded out the back of his head" she doesn't like that "the entry hole was small, neat, even." So she shoots him again even though he's already dead so that "the back of his head was just not there anymore" and "now all we had to do was hold on until the bomb techs got inside and told us we could let go."
The chapter ends there.
Well, that was anti-climactic. It just...didn't feel right? Like I didn't feel that tension and relief that a scene like this could have had. To be completely fair, that could be to my bias against this book and the fact that I *wanted* to see Anita and her men die, but I think it could also be that LKH just didn't execute the entire thing well at all. We've seen previous examples of how she seems to think that just plopping in something dramatic, such as sexual abuse, is enough to actually make things dramatic just by being there, and it's not, you still have to execute it right, and she either doesn't do it right or doesn't even really do anything at all. I think she tried here, but her pacing was really off to me, or maybe it was what she chose to focus on, I'm not totally sure. It just overall feels like a rushed, tacked-on ending rather than an actual climax, especially since it does nothing to actually resolve the issues that resulted in the bombing but it's probably going to be treated as if it did solve everything just to shoot this one guy, seeing as how we're like 98% done.
Also, on her shooting the guy twice: I think LKH meant for Anita to just be so emotionally distraught over nearly losing her lovers that she couldn't help just shooting and shooting, but the way it's written very literally says that she did it just because she thought the first one didn't make enough of a mess. And again, I guess we could read that as a desire to just DESTROY this guy who was going to take her 'lovers' from her and that overwhelming her, but the way it's written is the exact opposite; it's devoid of emotion and comes off as a very cold, deliberate decision made just for the sake of the gore itself.
Chapter 49 starts with "When all the wires had been snipped and the bomb taken away, I sat on the edge of the stage with Nathaniel on one side and Sin on the other" while Nicky, Claudia, Pride, Dev, and the guards are all talking on the other side of the room. Anita figures that they're discussing how this happened and how to stop it from happening again and "I didn't care." I'd just like to note that, as with earlier instances in the book, Sin is being put on the same level as prize harem boy Nathaniel here. She first banged Sin in Skin Trade, but after that he sort of ceased to exist save for a conversation in Hit List and getting a mention in the epilogues of Bullet and Flirt. But now, he's pretty much third in line, getting lots of attention in this book, and given special privileges like not having to wear a condom with Anita. And all this just after he turns 18. I think LKH deliberately waited until he was age of consent *everywhere* in the USA to do this, and that squicks me out. I mean, I guess it's better than if she didn't wait, but it gives the feeling that she was just itching to do it but feared the backlash if he was considered underage in any state a reader might inhabit.
"I just sat there with Nathaniel's hand in mine, and Sin holding on to the other hand, and just sat there holding them, and being held. That was enough. That was more than enough." Sin asks if this is what it's always like at her job and "his voice sounded odd" and Anita wonders if he really sounds odd or if the gunfire is messing with her hearing. She says sometimes, he says he wouldn't want to do this everyday, and Anita says "Good, then find some nice and much safer job." Does anyone else read this line as sounding insulting, like she's calling him a wimp? I know it's not what LKH intended because Anita is smiling and squeezing his hand but the phrasing reads like that. Cynric lays his head on her shoulder and Anita notes that he is seven inches taller than she is and how his hands are soooo much bigger than hers are. Nathaniel, meanwhile, is holding her other hand while having one on her thigh and because of how this series features sex at the most inappropriate times, I can't help but want to spray him with a spray bottle while telling him NO NOT NOW. He kisses her cheek, she "cuddled into the kiss", and then she feels Jean-Claude "wake for the day" even though wouldn't it be for the night? He telepathically asks her what happened, and she starts to cry and the chapter ends.
- He's also trying to burrow through the bottom of a cardboard box. His little paws make such futile scuffling sounds!
- Oatmeal scared the piss out of me when I saw her sleeping outside her boxes; I thought she was dead, she never does that! But it turns out she's now taken to nesting in the open, probably because it's getting warmer. I woke her up and she made squinty eyes and offended little noises at me.
KISS THE DEAD, CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT & FORTY-NINE
Anita tells us how she keeps her face uncovered so the bomber can tell she's among "the heavily armed people about to come through the door" but is otherwise "geared up as if it were any other monster hunt" which she says in a way it is. "I let myself fall into the rhythm of moving with the men" and describes that movement, because she can't just say they go to the goddamn door. She also has to talk about how it's "the door I'd gone through a hundred times, a thousand times" and then lets Nathaniel "see" her above him but keeps a greater psychic distance than before "because he needed to be as fast and smooth as only he could be, and I needed to move with precision with the men around me. We both had our jobs, our strengths, and we needed them now." Given the situation, that last sentence wasn't needed. The reader knows this. I know this is the most miniscule example of LKH's tendency to tell the reader things that they know, but since getting into writing myself I'm finding myself extra critical. This is also a YMMV, since I favor a more economical (though far from minimalist) prose type, so keep that in mind.
"I let Nathaniel know we were coming through the door, and then I cut ties" and Dev lets them through the door, nothing blows up meaning Nathaniel did good and all the men are in the far side of the room where they have "dog-piled the bomber. I ran, I ran the way I had in the warehouse, except this time I wasn't moving to save some stranger from getting it. I was moving to get the men I loved" and she is "across the room, above the pile of them before I'd had time to think" and "it was like magic". So basically she's super-fast (more so than before) just when it's most dramatic and she needs to be? And she describes what position each man is in, and then she sees the bomber, he yells "No!" and then she shoots him in the head. Even though "blood and thicker things exploded out the back of his head" she doesn't like that "the entry hole was small, neat, even." So she shoots him again even though he's already dead so that "the back of his head was just not there anymore" and "now all we had to do was hold on until the bomb techs got inside and told us we could let go."
The chapter ends there.
Well, that was anti-climactic. It just...didn't feel right? Like I didn't feel that tension and relief that a scene like this could have had. To be completely fair, that could be to my bias against this book and the fact that I *wanted* to see Anita and her men die, but I think it could also be that LKH just didn't execute the entire thing well at all. We've seen previous examples of how she seems to think that just plopping in something dramatic, such as sexual abuse, is enough to actually make things dramatic just by being there, and it's not, you still have to execute it right, and she either doesn't do it right or doesn't even really do anything at all. I think she tried here, but her pacing was really off to me, or maybe it was what she chose to focus on, I'm not totally sure. It just overall feels like a rushed, tacked-on ending rather than an actual climax, especially since it does nothing to actually resolve the issues that resulted in the bombing but it's probably going to be treated as if it did solve everything just to shoot this one guy, seeing as how we're like 98% done.
Also, on her shooting the guy twice: I think LKH meant for Anita to just be so emotionally distraught over nearly losing her lovers that she couldn't help just shooting and shooting, but the way it's written very literally says that she did it just because she thought the first one didn't make enough of a mess. And again, I guess we could read that as a desire to just DESTROY this guy who was going to take her 'lovers' from her and that overwhelming her, but the way it's written is the exact opposite; it's devoid of emotion and comes off as a very cold, deliberate decision made just for the sake of the gore itself.
Chapter 49 starts with "When all the wires had been snipped and the bomb taken away, I sat on the edge of the stage with Nathaniel on one side and Sin on the other" while Nicky, Claudia, Pride, Dev, and the guards are all talking on the other side of the room. Anita figures that they're discussing how this happened and how to stop it from happening again and "I didn't care." I'd just like to note that, as with earlier instances in the book, Sin is being put on the same level as prize harem boy Nathaniel here. She first banged Sin in Skin Trade, but after that he sort of ceased to exist save for a conversation in Hit List and getting a mention in the epilogues of Bullet and Flirt. But now, he's pretty much third in line, getting lots of attention in this book, and given special privileges like not having to wear a condom with Anita. And all this just after he turns 18. I think LKH deliberately waited until he was age of consent *everywhere* in the USA to do this, and that squicks me out. I mean, I guess it's better than if she didn't wait, but it gives the feeling that she was just itching to do it but feared the backlash if he was considered underage in any state a reader might inhabit.
"I just sat there with Nathaniel's hand in mine, and Sin holding on to the other hand, and just sat there holding them, and being held. That was enough. That was more than enough." Sin asks if this is what it's always like at her job and "his voice sounded odd" and Anita wonders if he really sounds odd or if the gunfire is messing with her hearing. She says sometimes, he says he wouldn't want to do this everyday, and Anita says "Good, then find some nice and much safer job." Does anyone else read this line as sounding insulting, like she's calling him a wimp? I know it's not what LKH intended because Anita is smiling and squeezing his hand but the phrasing reads like that. Cynric lays his head on her shoulder and Anita notes that he is seven inches taller than she is and how his hands are soooo much bigger than hers are. Nathaniel, meanwhile, is holding her other hand while having one on her thigh and because of how this series features sex at the most inappropriate times, I can't help but want to spray him with a spray bottle while telling him NO NOT NOW. He kisses her cheek, she "cuddled into the kiss", and then she feels Jean-Claude "wake for the day" even though wouldn't it be for the night? He telepathically asks her what happened, and she starts to cry and the chapter ends.
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no subject
Date: 2014-04-16 09:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-04-16 10:20 pm (UTC)....nah she'd just find some way to make it legal instead.
no subject
Date: 2014-04-17 12:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-04-17 01:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-04-17 03:07 am (UTC)1. NO. NO ONE IS GOING TO DO THAT. NO AGENCY IS GOING TO ALLOW THAT, OKAY. THEY KNOW SENDING IN PEOPLE WITH HER WILL PROVOKE-- nevermind. I don't care.
2. Is the rhythm of moving with men different than with women? I'd understand the need to specify if this was a sexual context, but nope. Oh, wait. She's probably trying to subtly hint at her height.
3. I just... that's it? She runs in there super fast and double-taps? That... *throws up hands* Boz is better at writing tension than this.
4. So she's just sitting there holding hands and just sitting there holding and being held? HOW IS THIS A PUBLISHED AUTHOR?!
5. It sounds extremely maternal in an almost condescending way, yes. I don't understand why LKH feels like Anita should balance between guardian and lover still, because it's creepy. I don't understand Cynric being a top-tier lover at all.
6. Look, literal hand-holding! Instead of so many men that they would have to grab ears and feet.
no subject
Date: 2014-04-17 07:44 pm (UTC)4) I ASK MYSELF THIS EVERY TIME I POST
5) probably she likes it *because* it's creepy
6) LOL!
no subject
Date: 2014-04-17 09:51 am (UTC)I think you may have nailed the problem right there.
no subject
Date: 2014-04-17 07:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-04-17 07:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-04-17 06:43 pm (UTC)Here's the other thing: There are REASONS we don't shoot bombers, suicide or otherwise.
Firstly, bullets stop when they want to stop. That's why, except where I live, people generally don't try to shoot around a hostage. Because there's a really, really high chance that the bullet will go through the target and into the people around him/her. (And yes, that hostage got shot, like, three times or something. I felt so bad for her, pleading with the man who had her not to cut her neck and the police pointing guns at them not to shoot her. And failing all around.) If Anita's using a high enough caliber to literally blow the back of a man's skull off ('in like a penny, out like a pizza' is an actual tagline for an actual type of bullet), I have no doubt that the bullets really should have ricocheted off of the floor and into at least one or two of the...er... men holding the bomber down.
Anita really should've accidentally killed her sweeties.
Secondly, there are certain bombs that go off if they (or the person wearing them) is knocked over or even jostled. It's why everyone is all "DON'T MOVE! DON'T BREATHE HARD!" As I (vaguely) understand it, it has to do with what the bombs are made out of. Additionally, there are types of charges that are hella volatile. So, again we do not shoot at people even potentially carrying them.
Dead sweeties everywhere!
Thirdly, shooting a bullet is a process that involves a great deal of friction and sparks. That's why, when you see a gun shot at night, there's a flash. There are literally sparks being produced by the friction of the bullet's journey through the barrel. The bullet is hot as it passes through the air. Now, you ask, what has this to do with a bomb? Everything, I say to you. The sparks produced by the bullet's passage are enough to explode things. This is how the British fought off the German dirigibles during World War One. They alternated two specially made types of bullets and relied on the sparks from the bullets' passage through the hydrogen interiors of the dirigibles to blow the balloons up. It was the turning point in the war. (Londoners, watching the air battle, called it the greatest Sunday show on Earth... and went out to steal parts of the wreckage as souvenirs. The flying ace who blew up the first dirigible was treated like a rock star.)
Again! Dead sweeties! (And dead Anita!)
If I know this, without having to do any research, than Guns and Ammo Monthly should also know it because of the research that she does.
Moving on, this doesn't feel like an actual climax to me, probably because there was no narrative pull or lead up to it. And, as you said, none of the issues surrounding this or anything else were ever solved. Anita never even got around to asking JC about the unhappy vampire housewives and she apparently spent about 80 to 85% of the book with him!
I don't think they're talking about the 'bombing' so much as 'Holy shit! She nearly killed us all!' and 'WHY am I a security blanket? She forgets about me more often than not!"
And, as I think someone else said, Sin's still her ward. She's still his guardian. It's still not cool.
I know I'm meant to see that last bit as cute but I got distracted by wondering how one cuddles into a kiss since kissing usually involves lips and did she cuddle into Nathaniel's oversized lips? Also, I was squicked by the size kinks hints in the Sin bits. But really? That wasn't an end so much as the last, dying gasp of the chapter/wrap up.
EDIT: Also? What the hell kind of 'hero' has to get men to hold a bomber down so that the 'hero' can publicly execute them? If they can hold him down for Anita without blowing themselves up, they can certain hold him down long enough for the police and bomb squad to get there. Then there wouldn't be the danger of Death By Spark or the need for a public execution. One of the defining characteristics of a hero is that they fight their own fights and aren't deranged serial killers who get off on splattering everyone around them with bullets, bullet fragments, brain tissue, and bone shards.
no subject
Date: 2014-04-17 07:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-04-17 09:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-04-17 08:22 pm (UTC)It's not just terrible research with icky real-world implications; it ends up being bad storytelling. Guns are the deus ex machina that solves everything. Instead of Anita trying to talk the bomber down -- which would have been interesting -- we get this big fat nothing.
no subject
Date: 2014-04-17 10:08 pm (UTC)Which is just hilarious, especially since they're pure physics as enacted by imperfect hands.
It's not just terrible research with icky real-world implications; it ends up being bad storytelling.
I actually think it's a feedback loop. Because she doesn't have new/outside information to jog her brain cells, she doesn't have interesting plot elements. Because she can't think of any interesting plot elements, she doesn't bother with new/outside research, relying instead on "relationship drama" and television crime dramas (maybe?) to fill in the gaps.
Guns are the deus ex machina that solves everything.
Frankly, it's better than her deus ex sex-ima. Admittedly, it's still terrible,, but her frankly scarring sex scenes are magnitudes worse than her crappy action scenes.
Instead of Anita trying to talk the bomber down -- which would have been interesting -- we get this big fat nothing.
I agree that this would've been much more interesting. But! It would require Anita to be capable of imagining and empathizing with an alternate perspective to her empire and be something other than a brooding vegetable, neither of which are remotely within the reach of this series/writer.
no subject
Date: 2014-04-18 11:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-04-18 02:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-04-19 04:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-04-19 05:18 am (UTC)