#SO TO SUM UP bc these tags got long as fuck for a one sentence post: the thing that turns good scooby into great scooby is defined in the

[iheardarumorxxx]

Midnight Sun, Chapter Four - Visions

Weirdo goes back to school. Seems pointless but sure.

Like a stalker. An obsessessed stalker. An obsessessed, vampire stalker.

This is it, guys. This is the entire canon of Twilight. Boiled down into one sentence. 

But in all honestly, lets look at this. I said before in my chapter three recap that I hate this thing Eddie does where he goes on and on about how something he’s doing is wrong and then just keeps on doing it anyway, and this right here is a perfect example of that. He is outright admitting that he’s obsessed with Bella, that he wants to stalk her. And there’s the added point about how he is a vampire who (according to the text and what we’re told) is especially drawn to the smell of Bella’s blood. He’s outright saying that he’s wrong and should just leave her alone with this little collection of fragments. But will he? According to four books worth of canon, the answer is a hard no. He’s going to keep going, but I guess since he acknowledged that it’s wrong, he can just go ahead and keep doing it anyway.

Eddie is just being a whiny little lump for this entire section about school. How boring it is and how he doesn’t wanna be there and so on and so on. It’s stupid. Then he gets to Banner’s class and talks for a bit about how he should be lying to everyone and exaggerating Bella’s injuries (of which she doesn’t really have any) so that if she starts rambling on about Eddie and his brood being a Pire, he can claim that it’s because she got her skull bashed in during the van incident. Instead, he gives the Glare Of Doom to Banner and broods some more.

And, of course, because we must shit on Rosalie, she is brought up, Emmett mentions that she’s pissed at Eddie for his stupid little potential exposure stunt, and Weirdo just rolls his eyes. Silly Rose, being mad about that. She should be off worrying about her hair or something, right, Eddie?? Fuck you.

Emmett is still way better than this book deserves. He’s sitting here, trying to comfort Eddie in his little bitch fit (in the way that he can comfort him, since Emmett is, unfortunately, still an idiot), and warning him about how Rose and Jas are pissed and how Jas has apparently made up his mind (presumably to just go kill Bella bc lbh, Jas has a murder boner) and that’s a genuinely nice thing for him to do when he has every right to be annoyed with Ed for his little stunt too.

I could imagine how the girl would react to my kidnapping her.

Just.... let that line sink in for a second folks. Of course, we all know how Bella would react, because by this point in Twilight, she’s already gushing about how much she LUVS Eddie, and how she’s so drawn to him and wants him so bad, but he just hates her so much gawd, life isn’t fair. But lets pretend for a second that Bella isn’t an idiot and actually was a rational human being. She gets kidnapped by this biege turtleneck Pire to ‘be protected’ from his family. 

Eddie? Sweety? She would absolutely flip the fuck out. And you would be risking even more exposure because she would fight and try to get free, and then probably turn your ass into her police chief dad.

Idiot! Lunatic! Moron! Jackass! Selfish, irresponsible fool!

For as much as SM likes to shit on poor Rosalie.... she’s kinda the only brain cell in the entire Cullen clan. 

Carlisle's Mercedes was there, next to Emmett's big jeep, Rose's M3 and my Vanquish.

This is what I was talking about with the CD thing. She will not name a band, but lets just list a bunch of shitty lux cars that they Cullens own to show how rich and awesome they all are. I hate this flashy and obvious display of wealth that comes down to nothing more than the price tag. They don’t give two flying shits about those cars outside of how much money they dropped to get them.

The Cullens are having their meeting about whether they should murder Bella. It is extremely boring because SM spends far too long discussing where everyone is sitting. Literally, we get the geographic location for each and every member of the Cullen clan and it is just a dumb laundry list. It only serves to drive up the word count and make this even longer to slog through. I dunno if I’ve mentioned this yet, but I hate Esme. She’s such a whiny, hand-wringing perfect housewife stereotype and it drives me crazy.

The meeting can be summed up pretty easily:

Rose: I wanna kill Bella. Ed: No! She’s MY toy! Rose: She’s a risk to us! She might expose us! Exposure would be a fucking bad thing, you dumb ass child! Carlisle, in his wise old man voice: Calm, my child. We are above such petty things, we are bastians of morality and virtue and perfect and shall not debase ourselves. MeyerPires are actually angels, you see, perfect in every way. 

It’s stupid. And I agree with Rose, leaving Bella to just figure shit out is a terrible idea. But I guess since the Vampire Mafia doesn’t exist yet, it’s fine. No one is gonna get pissed about the exposure except for Rose, and SM doesn’t give a shit about Rose, so we shouldn’t either.

I won't let Alice live in danger, even a slight danger.

Here is why I hate the romantic parings in the Twilight canon. EVERYTHING revolves around the significant other. Every relationship is the GREATEST AND TRUEST AND PUREST Love, and they never have to work at it. They go straight into SOULMATES. And the Menfolk are strong and Powerful and have to wrap their Womens up in cotton to protect them from everything. It’s a gross dynamic and doesn’t at all protray how relationships are and should be in the real world.

Edward is still calling Bella ‘The Girl’ and FUCK YOU EDWARD.

And here we get the big reveal that Eddie is in love with Bella. Shock, awe, definitely didn’t see that one coming. But seriously, the fact that Eddie is trying so damn hard to deny it is hilarious. Like, he outright admits to wanting to stalk her, but Love is where he draws the line.

Chapter over with Eddie Wangsting about how he’s gonna end up killing Bella one way or another. Either he’s gonna kill her outright or make her a vampire which he considers a death sentence. We’re gonna get the stupid thing where Eddie thinks Bella just hates him, and this pathetic, will they of course they will because the entire point of this book is to be a love story, will drag on. 

[firebirdsdaughter]

I'm honestly not too shocked that Aruto is going to work together Gai now. He always rubbed me the wrong way when it came to his views about Humagears, esp his reaction to Raiden & Subaru. That was a huge red flag for me. Also, if he's really so concerned about the well-being of Humagears, then he should offer counseling for the destroyed & revived Humagears to deal with the trauma. But I guess that would be too much to ask. As long as they serve humans who cares about Humagears' feelings.

I def agree w/ you, he’s rubbed me the wrong way in many of the same ways.

It’s hard to believe he sees HumaGear as people when he’s all pleased w/ Raiden talking about how he’ll be decommissioned soon and even calling the two of them ‘just like real brothers.’

You know, like he keeps saying Horobi is ‘trying to be like Jin’s father.’

And don’t even get me started on ‘a caring brother can’t be a spy,’ ‘if only you had been different,’ ‘why did you hurt Izu?’ ‘I’ve never treated them differently’…

AUGH.

To me, Aruto’s ‘dream’ can be summed up in a line from a song that was cut from Frozen (ya’ll thought I’d forgotten about this, didn’t you, but no) that goes ‘It’ll be just like it was, except for we’ll be best friends.’

This got long, so I’m cutting it here. Or. I’m trying to. 

He doesn’t see HumaGear as equal to people, he just wants them to stay right where they are, and ‘be happy’ there. ‘Good’ HumaGear are the ones whose development is convenient for humans. Raiden was ‘good’ when he saw no problem dying bc his ‘purpose was served,’ Naki was ‘good’ when they just wanted to support other HumaGear’s dreams as long as they were steered towards HumaGear w/ dreams of benefiting humanity, Jin is ‘good’ now bc he’s not trying to get HumaGear away from serving humans anymore and is also willing to kill his own father or due himself to do something that will benefit humans. The morality of the show has always been very much centred around humans, how HumaGear benefit humans, and HumaGear are expected to be these perfect little angels who exist to help humans and never think of themselves. Horobi is ‘bad’ bc he has resentment towards humans and has been so deeply under the Ark’s control for so long that he can’t think outside of her (esp not after being possessed) so obviously he doesn’t ‘want’ to be ‘change.’

I said it in the tags of my other post, but there’s something wrong w/ the picture when you’re holding a literally mind controlled AI who hasn’t had any concept of free will or self thought in his entire life aside from small snatches that were quickly stomped out, more accountable than a human w/ full autonomy and knowledge and power who deliberately did things that caused death and harm (and shot someone in the head). It’s not a good message. I’m supposed to feel bad for Gai bc he’s ‘sad,’ but Horobi deserves to die? I’m sorry, what?

The message has very much been ‘humans are special special and HumaGear are expendable/need to be carefully moulded into a ‘singularity’ that’s at the least convenient for humans.’ ‘Good’ HumaGear aspire only to properly serve their humans, to be like them, they are pure and angelic creatures who never feel anything ‘negative,’ and if they do, they need to be purged.

I could rant myself in circles about this for ages. I think for me, the really glaring example is Aruto’s treatment of Jin, a relationship that could have been an interesting learning experience for both of them (though, honestly, I was also hoping to see Fuwa also help Aruto realise the issues w/ his attitude, bc as he started coming down from his prejudice and aggression, Fuwa actually treated HumaGear more like equals than Aruto did, one of the many things I loved about him and Horobi as a pair), but instead ends up being a glaring example of Aruto’s… Whatever.

So Horobi has his first moment of clarity and genuinely fears for Jin, so the Ark steps in and ‘tells’ him to protect his son, so he does and it hurt, and Jin is hysterical. Izu proceeds to walk right up to the still-transformed, clearly emotionally volatile and very uninjured Jin, and announce w/ a smile that Horobi has been defeated. Jin, hysterical and lost, reacts in the only way he knows how, violently, which she should have bloody seen coming, wth. But then, Aruto is demanding to know ‘why did you hurt Izu’ like she did nothing wrong and Jin just attacked her randomly (which was a thing that could have happened and would have made his emotions make mire sense, Jin lashing out at Izu as ‘revenge’ for Horobi), and then Jin gets treated like the total bad guy. Then, on top of that, Aruto finds out during the fight that Jin doesn’t actually know what’s going on, he’s just been raised into this. Instead of immediately trying to change tactics and reason w/ him, Aruto just spews his ‘I want HumaGear and humans to smile together’ line (what does that even mean?), and when Jin rejects that, Aruto just… Gives up and says ‘if only you had been different.’ doesn’t try to prompt Jin to think about what Jin wants, what Jin is feeling, doesn’t bother to try to find out why Jin is so hysterical. It gets even worse when he quickly gains the firepower advantage and learns that Izu will be totally fine, but he still doesn’t bother trying anything else. He just kills Jin, bc… What? Jin didn’t immediately bow to his ‘love’ for HumaGear? Of course once sentence wasn’t gonna do it, he just watched humans kill his father! Aruto didn’t need to kill Jin at all, it would have been easy to disable him—alternatively, if they really wanted Jin to go down there, there were ways to do it that didn’t make it come off as Aruto quickly erasing a HumaGear for having any negative feelings or resentment towards humans, esp when you follow it w/ a scene of him and Izu being all pleased about other HumaGear ‘behaving’ themselves, and then never mention Jin again.

Fast forward, and when Jin comes back talking about wanting to free HumaGear from humans… Aruto actually asks him what he wants, finally? Then Aruto gets the boot from Hiden and decides to go to Jin for help. This should be a turning point where Jin get to properly confront Aruto about what happened and Aruto reflects on what he did, but no. Jin gets to shout a little, but then Aruto claims he never treated humans and HumaGear differently and says ‘I watched my HumaGear dad die’ and Jin just… Says nothing? doesn’t shoot back w/, ‘so did I, humans killed him.’ Then they get interrupted and Jin runs off… Only to… Rescue Izu later? But then after he does he… Grabs her hand and runs away and tries to convince her to be free? After… Literally buying his father time to reconnect to the Ark? And this is Izu? Who he stabbed? Okay… Anyway, then we have more stuff w/ poor connotations of Jin saying he ‘learned something’ from Aruto killing him and Izu ‘choosing’ to keep being Aruto’s secretary like a ‘good’ little HumaGear (her liking him and wanting to stay on his side would be one thing, but this… Esp w/ him claiming that he thought she should choose, going by his later insistence that Jin can’t take G-Pen bc he’s a human’s ‘partner’), and only then does he take a bullet for her. This apparently means something to Jin, although I feel like the implications of ‘she’s worth protecting bc she decided to keep serving humans and I killed you bc you didn’t want to do that’ should not have been lost on him (also wtf did Jin start caring about Izu?). The we have the next ep w/ aforementioned G-Pen incident which for some reason Aruto defending another HumaGear choosing to serve humans makes Jin decide to ‘believe in his dream’ or whatever. But then later the Raiden scene makes it seem like Jin was playing along bc that conversation w/ Horobi about HumaGear needing guidance to break free gave him an idea or something, I dunno, but naturally Aruto reacts like this is some huge betrayal, despite the fact that they hardly have any relationship—okay, so this friendship is something Aruto made up in his head, given his character, and apparent assumptions that all HumaGear actually adore humans, that makes sense. That could work. But then episode thirty fucking six happens. Jin apparently cares more for Yaiba, a human he’s barely interacted w/ who had yet to show any sign of no longer considering HumaGear to be tools, who had previously represented all the things Jin hated about them, then his own father. Acts all protective of her, throws himself in as a shield for her, moons about while she’s in the hospital. Then we learn he decided he trusted her (?????) enough to conspire w/ her to… Use his own father as a sacrifice to kill the Ark. Aruto seems to be more worried about Horobi, but merely yells a bit about how Horobi should ‘remember who he is by now.’ Come ep 37, Jin fucking takes a hit for miss perfect HumaGear Izu (note: aside from her grabbing the idiot ball in ep 15, my annoyance w/ Izu isn’t really something she as a character has done, it’s the way they’ve written her as the ‘pinnacle of ‘good’ HumaGear for her devotion to her human’), and tells Aruto to leave. Now that Jin is behaving in a way that benefits/is convenient for humans, though, Aruto is a like ‘oh, we totally were best buds, I was right!’ and is so worried and distressed about him, forgetting Horobi (who is so ‘bad’ for not being able to break through more than a decade of mind control! forget him, Jin must be saved!). Then we have that incredibly forced scene in 38 where Aruto tries to ‘get through to Jin’ and Jin ‘breaks through the Ark’s control bc of Aruto’ (see my draft horse pack on a shetland pony analogy) and ‘tells Aruto to kill him!’ which continues in to this ep. In which we also have… Gai. Who Aruto quickly puts effort into ‘reasoning w/’ and ‘showing the light’ bc ‘oh no he had a bad childhood’… Okay, but… You killed Jin for that, and he literally didn’t understand what he was doing. Gai had full autonomy and knowledge of his actions. People were hurt bc of both of their actions, but it’s Gai who gets a big speech and Jin who gets blown up. I said it back when it happened. If Jin had been human? I bet they would have made Aruto approach that much differently.

The fact that Aruto is willing to do all that for Gai but killed Jin, and only now considers Jin worth any effort bc Jin is behaving in a way that benefits/is convenient for humans even at the expense of HumaGear (being willing to sacrifice Horobi, even himself, to stop the Ark, while that goal is technically ultimately noble, the context gives a bad connotation), and not trying to talk HumaGear out of being subservient to humans and telling them to think for themselves, or wanting to revive a HumaGear that Aruto was content to leave deactivated bc he didn’t have a ‘use’… But Horobi only gets a few shouts and then ditched bc he ‘won’t listen’… Leaves a really bad impression.