Previously: Edward offers Bella up to the having sex with another guy gods. Or something.
—
Catherine: Already going into this chapter, I can see a lot of wolf thoughts in italics and I hate this narrative device so much for some reason. (K: SAAAAAME.) You may remember that the last chapter ended with Jacob refusing a direct order from Sam, the Alpha wolf, and then crumpling on the ground. I believe those of us in the Pick Up Artist community refer to that as a ‘beta cuck’.
This is supposed to be this big build up from New Moon for us to finally see what happens when a wolf actually refuses the command of their Alpha but I don’t care about… any of this so.
Marines: You are one definitive step ahead of me because I don’t remember most of this. Build up from New Moon you say? Was that the one with motorcycles? I remember motorcycles.
Annie: All these books have blended together like one giant manure fire for me, so… you have great memory, Catherine. This is such garbage. All of it.
Kirsti: All I remember about New Moon is the terrible depiction of depression, and I’d prefer NOT to remember that.
Catherine: Please order me one of whatever you guys drink to forget.
Jacob manages to get up off the ground and Quil and Embry are relieved. Quil offers to take point for Jake during the fight against the Cullens since he’s been wanting to… uh, I guess, eat them? For a while. Jake says that everyone is pretty pumped for the fight except himself and Seth, who considers the Cullens his friends. Jacob is ignoring everyone else mostly and feeling like a puppet on a string being pulled along.
Wow, Jake, must suck when someone forces you to do something you don’t want to, huh? Like forcing you to make out with them? REMEMBER THAT?
As if Meyer is purposefully mocking us, Embry tells Jake that “there’s not point in fighting it” because they’re all gonna end up doing what Sam wants. *shudder* (A: I haaaate her so much.) (K: GROSS, STEPH. STOP.)
Jacob realizes that they’re right and that the pack has a leader for a reason but then he takes a page out of Sicky Mcdeadbrains book and has a magic ~~realization~~. He realizes that he is sort of like, the back up Alpha of the group because of Ephraim Black being his great-great-great grandfather and that means he could he doesn’t actually have to listen to Sam if he doesn’t want to? I guess?? It’s not explained very well.
Mari: That gif is GOLDEN. Wow… Wooooow.
Annie: Haaaaaa, haaa. That is amazing.
K: That’s almost as good as the RPatz gif I’ve had on my hard drive for the past two years, just waiting for when we got to Breaking Dawn. It’s not time yet, friends. BUT SOON.
Catherine: I’m excited. RPatz may even hate this series more than we do.
Anyway, Jake gets super dramatic about this:
“I had not been born to kneel to him. The bonds fell off my body the second that I embraced my birth right.”
It turns out that all he needed to do to become his own Alpha was to think about it real hard. The power was in you all along, Dorothy! Jacob then pads over to Sam and is all “No” again and Sam dog gasps. Where was our list of stuff that Meyer doesn’t understand as an alien visiting this earth? Oh, here it is:
- Dogs
- Gasping
Mari: IDK, I feel like that list is missing a couple hundred items but who I am? Just the girl that mostly remember motorcycles in New Moon. Carry on.
K: My niece’s dog gasps repeatedly when she gets really excited, but that’s because she’s a fucked up overbred nightmare of a thing and her muzzle is too short to let her breathe properly. So basically, she has dog asthma. But I’m pretty sure that’s not what Steph is going for here.
Catherine: Sam is dog-smacked that Jake would abandon his family for his enemies, and Jake says that the Cullens aren’t their enemies, and he didn’t realize that until he started imagining killing them. I kinda thought he’d already gleefully been doing that this whole time, but okay. Sam pushes him farther and Jacob says that Ephraim Black’s son was not born to follow Levi Uley’s. Honestly, who wants this pretentious asshole in the pack anyway? I would have kicked his ass out long ago. (K: Right about the time he started having Bella themed daydreams 24/7.)
So Sam, Paul and Jared all turn on Jacob and this time Jacob dog gasps and says that he wasn’t intending to fight them. Sam wonders what the hell he’s actually planning on doing then. If he’s not gonna fight them and he’s not gonna help them is he gonna just go home and watch Netflix? Good question, Sam. Meyer drops a bunch more stuff about Alphas in wolf packs that she picked up from .03 seconds of Googling and all of which, you’ll be tickled to know, has recently been deemed factually inaccurate. I’m not kidding, look it up.
Mari: If I didn’t already know this was a thing, I would believe it was false just on the grounds that Meyer believes it’s true.
Annie: We’ve already long-established that Meyer isn’t a fan of truth or research, so.
K: Shocker.
Catherine: Jacob says that he’s not contesting Sam’s Alphahood, he’s just ‘going my own way’ and I laugh because I was kidding about that Pick Up Artist thing earlier and now look where we are. Don’t Google, ‘men going their own way’ btw. For your sanity. Don’t.
Jacob finally says that he won’t stand by while the pack kills the Cullens and Bella’s freak baby and runs off. He starts heading toward the Cullen’s anti-choice aquarium to warn them about the puppy-pocalypse that is about to come down on them. Before long he hears paws running behind him and realizes that Seth is following. Jacob tells him to go back to Sam and Seth ignores him. They both realize that they can no longer hear the thoughts of the other wolves because separate packs aren’t linked and whoops—I guess they’re their own pack now.
Mari: So they’ve been subjected to the psychic wolf network this whole time and all they really had to do was think real hard about turning it off? Woooooow.
Annie: This has to be the laziest, stupidest bit of writing, ever. Me right now:
K: Pretty much exactly. We could have been spared so many italicised wolf conversations and “!!!!” if they’d just thought a little harder.
Catherine: I hate to say it but this probably won’t be the laziest. We’re still only at the beginning of the book, somehow.
They make it to the Cullen house and Edward is already waiting on the porch because he heard them approaching. Edward picks up from their minds that Sam and the others want to kill Bella and starts snarling and freaking out. Unfortunately, Emmett and Jasper are with him and don’t hear the mind conversation so they start snarling at Jacob and Seth.
Edward tells them to calm down by calling them ‘Em’ and ‘Jazz’, two nicknames that ONLY come up in this book and get overused to the point of eye-rollingness. This isn’t how nicknames work, Meyer. You can’t just suddenly give a character a nickname and then act like they’ve had it the whole time. Just. Also, ‘Jazz’ sounds like ‘Jizz’ so you’re a double idiot.
Annie: Yep, that is actually exactly where my brain went when I heard that nickname, too. Way to go, Meyer.
K: I mostly thought that two small girls had inexplicably joined the cast, because it’s fairly common for small children named Jasmine to be known as Jazz or Jazzy in Australia…
Catherine: If only.
Edward starts ordering people around and Seth leaves to circle the perimeter. Edward thanks Jacob and says that he wouldn’t have asked him to leave his pack like this for Bella, but Jacob thinks about that time Edward asked Jacob to bone Bella so that she could have his weird babies instead and he’s like ‘Yeah, you would’.
Edward gives the other vampires a quick run down of what’s happening after, like, 5 minutes of them just standing there. Seth returns and both he and Jake run off into the woods to watch for the other wolves. This whole time Seth is adorably optimistic about this entire thing and keeps asking Jake why he’s so sad. It’s kinda funny. Look, I still like Seth, okay? I think he’s the only one that doesn’t fall in love with a baby but I’m probably wrong.
Mari: If not in the books, I’m sure there’s a Meyer Q&A out there in which she assures her readers Seth got a baby too.
K: It’s like the really fucked up version of Oprah: “You get a baby! And you get a baby! And YOU get a baby!!”
Catherine: Why?! Gah!
Seth overhears in Jacob’s head that deal Jacob made with Edward about killing him if Bella dies and he says that it ‘sucks rocks’ which, you’ll note, is something teenagers say, like all the time. That’s SUCH a teenager thing to say. Man, that and ‘holy crow’ are two things that teenagers definitely say. Good job, Meyer.
Seth howls about this and Jacob tells him to shut up because that was the signal they set up for if the rest of the pack arrives. Jake has to run back to the house to tell Edward that the pack isn’t there. He overhears Edward telling the others that it was a false alarm. Emmett snarks about toddlers guarding them and Carlisle dads about Jake and Seth doing them a great service.
Jacob listens inside the house and hears Bella’s labored breathing and her heart beating too fast. He also hears Rosalie snapping at Carlisle about waking her.
Remember last book when we liked Rosalie because she wasn’t acting like some freaky Doctor Who monster whose trying to facilitate the birth of an alien baby to take over earth? Yeah.
K: Aah, memories…
Catherine: Jacob peeks inside the house and sees that the Cullens have moved Bella into a hospital bed and attached her to a bunch of monitors and shit. (A: Are they buying this stuff like Tom Cruise did? Or is Carlisle stealing from work?) (C: I’m gonna guess the second answer. Which is terrible.) Then there’s a confusing passage about Rosalie’s baby. Sorry, I mean, Bella’s baby. This one totally isn’t a demon spawn, promise.
Edward has a bad reaction and Emmett has to hold him back. Jacob runs back into the forest to find Seth and thinks that Bella is getting worse.
K: This whole thing reads very much as a “Don’t have sex, kids. You’ll get pregnant and DIE” analogy. But an anvil sized one that follows you around and whacks you in the head every couple of minutes. Yay.
Next time on Breaking Dawn: We figure out what a baby vampire might be hungry for in Chapter 12.
I'm a 28 year old graduated English major and almost librarian. I can often be found singing too loudly (poorly) in the car or spending some time (hours) on Tumblr. I am a lover of Harry Potter, the Spice Girls, and too many other things.
I'm a 30-something librarian and I still live with my parents because I'm super broke. Leader of Team Heartless Cow. I have an inexplicable love for 90s television, eat too much chocolate, and read more than is good for me.
I'm a 30-something south Floridan who loves the beach but cannot swim. Such is my life, full of small contradictions and little trivialities. My main life goals are never to take life too seriously, but to do everything I attempt seriously well. After that, my life goals devolve into things like not wearing pants and eating all of the Zebra Cakes in the world. THE WORLD.
Fuchsia-haired, caffeine enthusiast, dog person, Raptors fan, sometimes blogger, music & social media geek, freelancer, human being. She/her.
