#STS is like 90% of the time a way to avoid acknowledging that a character is gay

[kokkuri3]

I don't like people saying Vincent has single target sexuality either that makes me feel extremely weird

[ayearofpike]

Thirst No. 3: The Eternal Dawn

Simon Pulse, 2010 478 pages, 26 chapters + epilogue ISBN 978-1-4424-1317-7 LOC: MLCS 2012/41874 (P) OCLC: 651759027 Released October 5, 2010 (per B&N)

When we last saw Sita, she was brain-traveling back in time to kill the first vampire before he was ever born, thus ending the line of eternal bloodsuckers forever. Little did we know that this was simply her way of writing herself out of Seymour’s life. She is very much still immortal. But Sita is learning that there is more to her family, both found and genetic, linked to an even older power that is bound to destroy her. That is, if the multinational trillionaire corporation that happened into some kind of crazy mind control doesn’t do it first.

Check out that fake boast on the cover: “long-awaited new book.” Um ... no? You ended the series, asshole, we weren’t long-awaiting SHIT. But we all know that the new expectations of the genre are that everything is a series, and so the publisher no doubt did more business by linking these books together even though there’d been no previous expectation for another Sita book before the reprinted bind-ups showed us Pike was at it again.

And there’s a lot going on in here too. The Eternal Dawn opens a door to a whole new world of vampire fighting with all the things it introduces. Sita, long a loner, now has a whole cadre of friends and assistants and hangers-on that connect her new world to the old world, and even to the ancient people that she’s just starting to learn about. Again, I get it: teens want to read about popular kids, or at least popular among a small select group. They don’t want a total loner, which actually has become troublesome in itself as school shootings become more regular and publicized and railed against. And also, we have a precedent of Team Vampire from those other popular sparkly vampire books that came out just before this. 

But this doesn’t really work for me. Sita has always been that strong solo artist who didn’t want to rope people into her fold, as much for their own safety as because they couldn’t do stuff as good as her. And yet by the end of this book there’s like eight people all living together. Yes, circumstances change, we’ll get to that, but for someone who read the original Sita books in 1995 and was expecting a story along the same lines, this part feels like a betrayal of her character.

Ugh, I’m already tired of writing about this book and this is only the introduction. Let’s see how fast I can power through the summary.

So for some reason Sita has relocated to Truman Village, Missouri. Well, we learn the reason pretty quickly: Teri Raine, a freshman runner at Truman College who has no idea that her ancestor is still alive and watching out for her. In fact, the first thing Sita does is straight murder a dude who’s raped other girls and now has his sights on Teri. But not just by draining him of blood, which she no longer needs after Kalika: she drinks enough to weaken his heartbeat and then crashes his car into a lake, where he drowns in terror. Holy fuck, Sita, you got even darker.

Back in town, she introduces herself to Teri as a budding writer who wants to hire her as a research assistant. She sets up a meeting with Teri at the club where her boyfriend is playing later that night. Then she goes home, where she feels suspiciously watched, and it turns out there’s a couple driving up to ask what she knows about IIC. This, it seems, is a huge multinational corporation with a penchant for privacy that has an extensive file on one Alisa Perne. Which ... come on, dude, it’s been twenty years, why are you still using the same alias? But these two are curious and suspicious, not just of Sita but also the company, where the woman happens to work even though she’s not totally sure what she actually does. But she does know that her boyfriend was looking into it, just before he mysteriously disappeared.

So Sita says she’ll stay in touch and then goes to her meeting, where she immediately gets all of the boners for Teri’s boyfriend. He’s super talented and totally hot and gives off this aura of worldliness and experience, all of which is like catnip to our eternal vampire. She hasn’t been intimate or even interested since Ray, or I guess Arturo technically. So all of this stuff that happened before was real, but up to this point Sita hasn’t really explained how it got written down or why she’s doing it herself now instead of using a muse like Seymour. She is, in fact, a published writer, and the story she shows her new ... kids? is Pike’s token acknowledgement of the vampire/werewolf dichotomy that you can’t ignore if you’re writing a vampire book in 2010. It’s enough to get Teri to agree that she’ll work with Sita, and they all shake hands and part ways.

But back at Sita’s house, shit is exploding. Like, she pulls up to the garage and bullets start hitting everything. She finds a weapon of her own and dashes out into the woods, where she encounters an unusually strong and skilled man with a Gatling gun. She disables him, but before she can learn who he is and why he’s after her he whispers something in ancient Egyptian and then is consumed by terrible fire. Is this related to the whole IIC mystery?

Who knows? First we gotta drool over Teri’s boyfriend in the pool. Sita wants to help him get this bread (or whatever the kids are saying) with his musical talent, but he isn’t ready for the spotlight. They talk a little more about Sita’s writing and the different pen names she employs, and now the boyfriend is starting to get some feelings that Sita is more than who she claims. Which, why wouldn’t he, she’s not exactly being subtle or cautious in throwing all her wealth at these random kids.

There’s a quick side trip to Fairfield, Iowa, to track down and extract information from the contract killer IIC hired to take out the employee’s boyfriend, and here I had to pause and do some Google Maps. According to the book, Sita flies to Cedar Rapids and then drives 90 minutes to Fairfield, but Truman College is in northeast Missouri. Does this make sense at all? No! There’s no such thing as “Truman Village” or “Truman College,” but there is a Truman State University in Kirksville ... which is already a 90-minute drive from Fairfield. In fact, to fly to Cedar Rapids from Kirksville, Sita would have to connect through St. Louis AND Chicago. How fuckin’ long does this impatient immortal want to travel? Does she not own a globe? There is a public municipal airport in Fairfield; it would have been more believable if Sita had literally flown herself. And guess what? I caught this easily avoidable flub because we’ve seen the hour-and-a-half drive from Cedar Rapids before. Not counting on someone with a master’s in English analyzing your shit, are you, Kev? Or, like ... a map?

But anyway, the killer gives up his next contract, which is a young Indian girl living in San Antonio. Sita flies there and meets the girl, who has been hideously scarred by having acid thrown in her face upon backing out of an arranged marriage. She copes with the pain and partial loss of eyesight by praying to Krishna, which resonates with Sita, obviously. The girl has contract work with IIC, basically answering weekly questions over the phone with yes or no, so it’s unclear to Sita why she’d be a target. But she arranges for the girl to be protected and then takes off for LA, where IIC is headquartered.

Once there, Sita waltzes right into the joint and asks to speak to the CEO. While she’s waiting, a creepy little girl in the waiting room smashes a vase, and Sita helps clean it up. But then she goes into the office, where she immediately feels oppressively observed, and also kind of intimidated that the boss isn’t scared. She (the boss) makes it clear that IIC did not send the fire killer, and Sita was pretty sure already, since the dude in Iowa wasn’t in the same league. She does offer to help Sita protect herself from this mysterious group if she joins up with IIC. But we already know Sita isn’t a joiner, unless it’s a group she can form herself with some random college kids who get her horny.

Instead, she goes to find the couple who tracked her down, but the dude is obviously dead. Well, not obviously, but someone with Sita’s senses can smell the amount of blood that’s been washed down the bathtub. She tracks down the woman and gets her the hell out of town, all the way to ... Barstow? An hour and a half? Seriously? Like, I get it that to someone from the city Barstow probably feels like a middle-of-nowhere armpit (and it is kind of an armpit). But haven’t we already learned that this company can reach people anywhere?

But then Sita leaves and waits to follow the boss home ... only she doesn’t go home for like two days. And when she does, she leaves everything unlocked. There’s another encounter with another creepy little girl, but then the boss is just sitting on the couch watching TV, easy pickings if Sita just wanted to take her out. Only she can’t. In fact, she suddenly finds herself unable to move, act, or even think on her own. The boss somehow manages to compel Sita to stick her gun in her mouth and pull the trigger. But at the last second, Sita thinks of Krishna and ends up shooting the TV. So whatever IIC is, it’s got power that isn’t easily resisted.

Sita ends up taking everybody back to her house in Missouri: the IIC employee, the scarred girl and her uncle, and of course Teri and her boyfriend. Easy pickings, right? Especially now that Teri is running in the NCAA championships, and the strongest performers will be considered for the Olympic team. So Sita, true to her pattern of non-involvement and letting things play out their own way

Just kidding. She totally meddles and gives Teri some blood to make her feel stronger and run faster, but not enough to actually turn her into a vampire. So she wins the championship, and now everybody is going to London for the Olympics.

But Sita’s not done making Club Vampire yet. She has to track down Seymour. Wait a second, didn’t he die? No! It turns out that he got the right medication to treat his AIDS in time, and now is a successful writer living in New York City. However, he’s never shown anybody the weird vampire series he wrote in high school and keeps locked in a desk drawer, so he’s freaked out that Sita knows so much about it. But he does pretty quickly believe her and tag along with the group.

So they go to London (yes, the entire fuckin’ squad) and Sita gives Teri more blood. The boyfriend knows that Sita’s doing something, and he’s highly against it and a little pissed, because Teri would never take a performance-enhancing drug but that’s essentially what this is. Sita gives her more blood, and Teri yells out the name of the original vampire in her sleep, which ... how would she possibly know that? But she turns it on right at the end of the race, winning the gold medal and earning an invitation to party with the president of the United States at his hotel.

And then Sita hears some heartbeats. Four of them, all strong and powerful like the fire killer’s. She knows she’s the target, and figures she’ll be safer if she goes to the president’s party and hides out behind the secret service detail. But the four assassins show up anyway, and Sita ends up going full Matrix, blowing away two at close range and then leaping the height of the ballroom to take out a third. The fourth manages to get away, and Sita has to hypnotize the agents into letting her go after her. The car chase takes Sita to a ferry dock, where she misses the boat and has to swim after it (with the help of some friendly dolphins). She sneaks up on the fourth killer and incapacitates her, then they get off the ferry and drive the killer’s car back across the English Channel.

Let me repeat that. Sita drives a car. Through the Chunnel. Back to England.

(Technically, you can take a car, but it’s like a train-ferry. You don’t actually DRIVE.)

She checks them into a cheap hotel room and sets about trying to extract information from this killer. Yes, they have a connection to the ancient Egyptian civilization that Sita saw before, but they’re not the same evil fourth-dimensional lizard aliens we’ve come to know and love. Their people, the Telar, go back much farther and older than even them. They’ve taken responsibility for the planet and the things living on it, but right now humanity has gotten too large and too hubristic, so the Telar wants to pare it down. They do know about vampires, because one of their number ended up marrying (guess who) Original Vampire like a thousand years ago. So they know about Sita, and have maybe due to blood purity fanaticism have been led to believe she’s even more dangerous than she actually is, which is why they’re trying to wipe her out.

It’s been a long-ass day, so both Sita and her assailant fall asleep. But Sita dreams of demons and evil, and wakes up once more out of control and ends up drinking all the blood of this poor immortal, in the most horrific way. It’s mostly left to our imagination, but when she comes to (thanks to the intervention of Seymour and the young Indian girl) she mentions the “mass of torn flesh” (292) on the bed and feels ill. And lucky for everyone! Teri and her boyfriend have followed Seymour to this random, how-the-shit-did-they-find-it hotel somewhere a solid two-hour drive from London, and they’re totally disgusted by what they see and the boyfriend tells Sita to kindly fuck off and never come back. 

What now? Sita can’t think of anything else but to find her prophet friend, the one who had Miracle Baby way back in the fourth book. The kid is I guess 17 now, and so engrossed in a video game that he won’t even talk to Sita. They’re living somewhere in the Greek islands now, and they drop in uninvited because the lady has taken pains to not tell Sita where she is now. Why is she so pissed? Well, she’s just as annoyed at Sita for trying to take the fate and the responsibility for all of mankind as the boyfriend was. (And actually, the events in this book are pissing me off kind of the same way.) But Sita wants some help and comfort and information, as best they’re willing to give it to her. She’s figured out that picking up the pieces of the glass vase gave IIC enough genetic information on her to be able to control her through their power system, and the prophet friend points out how the Indian girl can block this power. Which we’ve already seen. This is Sita’s protection. 

Still, she’s not willing to put a kid at risk when she follows her lead to Switzerland. Remember the Swiss fax number? Like, put two and two together, Sita. You can remember what someone you met once for ten minutes SMELLS like; you can certainly remember Original Vampire chasing you down from a whole COUNTRY. So she goes there and traces the dude to a hotel, where the owner says he’s been expecting a young blonde woman to ask about this former guest and points her to a secret vault that the guest said she’d be able to open. Inside is a book, in Original Vampire’s handwriting. It discusses how Krishna taught him about this ancient enemy, but stops short of explaining how to overcome it.

She makes a copy and then goes back to return it ... upon which she finds herself locked in a basement cell, the prisoner of the Telar. They’ve got an impressive torture device that taps directly into the pain center of a person’s brain, and they threaten to use it on Sita if she doesn’t tell them all of her dealings with IIC. That’s not a problem: Sita has no love lost for this company that has twice forced her to carry out her basest animal instincts against her will. But she stops short of telling them anything she knows about the ancient prophet or her current day reincarnation, so the torture begins. And again, she finds herself thinking of Krishna, and of Miracle Baby Teen, and finds she can control her brain even as overwhelming pain should be incapacitating her. 

So now the Telar leader doesn’t have control over her anymore, and he’s just about to kill her when everything starts blowing up again. It’s the Abomination, everyone says, which freaks the leader the fuck out. He takes off to warn the overarching bosses and instructs the remaining fighters to not let the Abomination leave this place alive. But they don’t stand a chance: this motherfucker has all of the lasers and straight murders EVERYONE except Sita. Guess who? It’s Teri’s boyfriend! Who it turns out was Original Vampire’s son with the Telar lady he married! No wonder he got Sita so horny. He knew how the Telar felt about vampires, but his dad was one, and he couldn’t just let Dad’s most ancient love die in some basement as a victim of immortal Nazis who also supposedly killed him for betraying the blood purity of their species.

He assault-helicopters them the hell out of town and then they take the whole clan to some abandoned mining town in Colorado, where he owns a safe house. And now Sita has to decide what to do, even though pretty much all the advice she’s gotten in this whole book is “do nothing unless you’re actually targeted.” I guess it’s hard to argue, though, that she’s not a massive target from both sides. She knows that IIC is using its wealth and power to manipulate world governments. She knows that the Telar intend to do the same and fabricate war so that humanity is pared down. And she knows that both powers are at odds. It seems pretty obvious which side is worse, but they’re not even given time to make that choice: the Telar are attacking.

Immortal Boyfriend has prepared for this kind of attack. He sends the mortals down into the mine, and he and Sita find a vantage point to repel the Telar forces. They dispatch pretty much the entire fighting force with a combination of guns, mines, and drones, but not before the Telar manage to release a toxin that makes even these immortals blister and cough. They make for the mine, but Sita hears some Telar nearby and takes one hostage to get the antidote, and he pretty much immediately joins Team Vampire to keep from dying. They go through the mine to Immortal Boyfriend’s other helicopter, but as they’re making their escape the bad guys target them. So it’s time to jump from another helicopter into another lake! Only it’s winter in the Colorado Rockies, and the nearest lake is frozen over, and Teri horrifically breaks her leg when she jumps and is about to die from blood loss.

Yeah. The whole reason Sita started this stupid club in the first place is almost finished, and very much does NOT want to be made over. She states it clearly. But Sita just can’t let her die.

We leap to the epilogue, where Seymour is preparing himself for a funeral. Everyone’s there: the Indian psychic (who has been healed by months of plastic surgery and a little bit of vampire blood), the seer buddy and Miracle Teen, the new Telar recruit, the evacuated IIC employee, Immortal Boyfriend ...

And Teri.

What the fuck? Whose funeral is this?

It turns out that yes, Sita did turn her goddamn descendant into a vampire against her goddamn will, and of course Immortal Boyfriend was even more pissed than before. So much, in fact, that IIC was able to train their system onto him. Sita was able to reason a little bit, but Seymour saw the writing on the wall and couldn’t just let this dear old friend he just met get shot with a frickin’ laser beam. So he charged the dude, and of course he stood no chance, but Sita dove in front of the gun before Immortal Boyfriend could fire it.

So here we are. And Seymour is the last one at the grave, paying his respects. But then Teri comes back. And she whispers into his ear that she is still here, that she is Sita inside Teri’s body.

Obviously now we have to fuckin’ read Thirst No. 4, right? And honestly, as annoyed as I am at how long this vampire story is getting dragged out, and at how much Sita is changing because of market pressures learning from time, this is still a better cliffhanger than “I went to prom with the vampire, somehow wearing a leg cast and one high heel, and thought about what everyone else hadn’t told me yet but I would be finding out in the next three books, so go buy them, everyone.” 

Still. This thing was hard to write, you guys. I will not give up with only five books to go, but seriously? I kind of want to.

[that-thing-that-feeling]

Not trying to start anything, I’ve just seen some ppl talking abt how the premise of the movie sounds like it could v easily play into the “slutty bi” trope. The movie is about “a recent graduate who becomes unexpectedly entangled in a relationship with a man and a woman during an aimless summer after college”. A lot of ppl who define themselves as bisexual, especially women, are stereotyped as being unable to make up their minds between the two genders. No one is judging the movie or saying the movie is decidedly biphobic, just acknowledging that the story has the potential to play into some harmful stereotypes abt bisexual people. I hope it doesn’t, but I don’t see anything wrong with admitting that it’s a possibility. Yes we should give films the benefit of the doubt, but we should be aware of what we’re walking into, that’s all. And the director is a lesbian, but that doesn’t automatically give her the capacity to perfectly tell stories about the whole LGBT spectrum. Straight ppl aren’t the only ones who ever stereotype others.

AYA isn’t a perfect movie about sexuality struggles by any count (I agree the way he died was a bit unnecessary), but in their defense that movie took place in a small town in the 90s. It’s supposed to be messy and blurry, bc being gay/bisexual was still p much seen as a social death sentence back then. In comparison Chestnut takes place in modern times in a liberal city, it’s even named after a gay neighborhood in Philly. If the story is about a woman struggling with her sexuality, the setting just strikes me as an odd choice. Anyways, I rlly do hope the movie avoids all the potential pitfalls, I rlly want Nat to finally have a movie do well!! 😭

Natalia has had a movie do really well—YGY won an acting award at SXSW (which was primarily for her great acting in it), got her amazing reviews, she put in the work by doing a lot of really good press for it, and I think it was in the most watched on Netflix for awhile when it went on there. I think it should have lead to more big roles for her, but then ST took so long to film so we’re still seeing what effect it had (her filming something right after ST was a good sign tho). And Re: Chestnut I disagree with having that be the initial reaction to it before even seeing it bc we don’t know what the deal is with the character. maybe she’s poly. Maybe she’s bi. Maybe she realizes she’s lesbian. Idk how much it’s also supposed to follow the director’s story as well. I honestly have no idea from that plot description what’s going to happen. Anyway v curious to see it and reviews from the fest. I do agree on AYA being set in the 90s in a small town that it was trying to do something with that, whether it succeeds or not anyone can judge, but I obvs think it’s a great film and love Charlie’s performance in it sm.