T.03.12 Time

In Which We Have YET ANOTHER Debate About Bella

So after all the earlier debate, proposals, wheeling and dealing and eventual horse-wrangling, I'm low on synonyms for yet another discussion between Bella and Edward about her conversion.

• Edward is worried about Bella's soul and feels selfish.
• Bella worries she'll be different physically when she's a statue. Which seems obvious.
• Edward wants to know why she hesitated when he proposed.

Ok, woah. Take a break here. Edward didn't propose he tossed marriage onto the table while haggling with Bella back at the end of Book 2 after the silly vote. Worse, he did so with no apparent understanding of how Bella would react to this new bid. She was standing firm on vampirization after graduation, he raised it to vampire now + marriage. That's not a "proposal", that's a counter-offer. And really, what did he expect? If Bella was half as gung-ho about marriage as she is about dying, they'd already be wed and she'd be drinking raccoons for lunch. Edward seems totally against her vampireism, so he either already knew that Bella was anti-marriage or he was just trying to bowl her over with something out of nowhere. Ignoring the fact that he shouldn't have known how she'd react, NONE of this gives him any leverage in this debate. It's like tossing "let's move to New York" in and seeing how she'll respond.

Gah. Anywho, Bella is anti-marriage because of her parents. They were living in the promised land of 60's love until a ring entered the picture and as we all know that's bogus. Plus Bells doesn't want to be the straight-outta-Forks and married girl that is so socially ... something-something. I don't know if she's railing against the establishment of Forks and it's under-20 marriage rate or if she feels like a modern woman should be dodging proposals until she's post-menopausal. Guessing I haven't watched enough Sex In The City. Regardless, I guess Meyer has at least established that Bella's wonky family structure might have caused her to frown on the big ring thing, but that's pretty thin when the magic-love-of-yer-life is making you an offer that would give you the one thing you've advertised .you want more than anything else. Maybe Vampires have crazy divorce laws.

The morning news has more Seattle killings and so they leave this discussion and head to Vampire Manor. There they meet up with Carlisle, Jasper, Esme, Alice, Rosalie and Emmett. Jasper has a story to tell that requires him to disrobe and show off his many vampire bite marks.

SumUp D-

So sick of this debate. Didn't we resolve this with the big Alice wedding + Vampire switch after graduation thing a few chapters ago? Every three or four chapters it comes up again, starting in chapter 24 of the last book! Does Edward have some new bid? Is he going to raise Bella with a Porsche or big Harley or something? It's boring. It's annoying. It's trod ground. At some point we're supposed to have Vampires and Werewolves killing Vampires! Instead, it's more debate about a closed topic!

Honestly, I griped about the first two books having plots that exploded out of the last dozen chapters. As much as that sucked, this is even worse. Meyer is trying to build tension and it would be working if it wasn't taking so long. She broke away with the history of Werewolves, which was OK, but then we come back to more of the same: talking about things that we KNOW are going to happen and worrying about battles that should have already started. This isn't suspense, it's dragging things out.