Cerulian Sins--chapter 12

I think the thing that aggravates me the most about this series is Jean Claude's pet name for Anita. Correct me if I am wrong, but doesn't ma petite translate to "My little?" There's probably a cultural language thing that I'm just not getting here, but I think being short and being called "My Little" by a boyfriend who could bench press a cement mixer full of cheerleaders if he wanted to would probably make my lebido go the way of the dodo.

It's not so bad when the series is good, because Jean Claude is supposed to be an asshole, but when the series sucks, my GOD does it get old.

Anyhoo, Anita, Jean Claude and Asher are all about to have sex.

There is no way to make blogging about a sex scene interesting. I've been trying for three books now, and the summery is basically "Lick kiss lick lick suck, Karma Sutra, that shouldn't go there, if it is spilling it's not orgasm, it's bad hygene, and sex shouldn't fix everything."

That's every sex scene LKH has ever written.

Anita also establishes that she doesn't want to be there when the vampires "die" at dawn. Because they do that .

(Jack Flemming. Jack Flemming. My kingdom for Jack Flemming, Vampire PI)

Dawn is only two hours away.

Okay, so now they should start having sex.

 I was suddenly very aware that I was the only girl, and they were both men. I know that sounds silly. I mean, I knew that already, but  .  .  . I suddenly felt it. It was like walking into a bar and feeling all those eyes follow you as you walk, like lions watching gazelles.

Anita, baby? Asher is far less interested in you. Seriously. You are not the main attraction here. You're that barricade Asher has to vault over to get to the main ride, if you know what I mean.

And then we get that little flash of good writing that reminds me what a fucking waste this series was. Anita slips off the bed because silk sheets tend to do that. Asher and Jean Claude spend a few minutes talking about how Jean Claude injured himself seducing a duchess and falling off her bed, and it's actually a good and humanizing kind of moment. We are reminded that these are people with a history before Anita showed up, who will have a history together long after she's gone--theoretically--and that Anita is just a bit player in their drama.

And then it goes back to being the All Anita, All the Time show, and she's in a race with dawn and the ardeur to get Asher naked. Which means we now have to describe every inch of scarring, and oh fuck does that take forever.

A note. Asher has been like this for centuries, and he's acting like it happened two or three months ago. Like being hideously scarred has ended his life forever, and woe is he, he will never be whole again.

One of my personal heroes is a cop. I've forgotten his name, I've only seen him on TV, and he's probably the single most awesome person I've ever heard of. He rolled a police car during a chase and got burned on every inch of his body. The first time I saw him on TV it was a medical show about implants and replacement bodyparts (I was a weird kid) and they were building him a new nose and new ears because the fire kind of took his. I remember thinking "Oh, hey, cool, how nice of them to make implants for the damaged police officer."

Fast forward a couple years, and I'm watching cop shows now, and there's the scarred cop. He's a dectective now, working homicide, and those prosthetics I watched them build ten years ago? Yeah, those are nowhere. Because his scars weren't him and his body wasn't him, and he was far more interested in doing his job than he was in how he looked in front of a TV camera. That is what strength looks like, and I wish to God I could remember his name so I could link the whole world to how awesome he is.

The problem I have with Asher isn't that he's a fucked up scarred mess who needs to heal. It's that he's been that way for hundreds of years, and LKH expects us to buy that Anita is healing him with her vagina. I think people can heal, I think people can change, but I think that healing and change has to happen from inside. One thing that fasicnates me, and it's something I keep coming back to in my own writing, is the resiliance of the human spirit. That we get knocked down and get back up and say "throw it again, dude" and no matter how awful our lives get, we're not ready to give up and we're completely ready to let the scars heal over. With Anita, there's this aura of "love can fix everything" that is psychological poison for everything attached to it. It's bad for Anita because she can't fix everything, and it's bad for the people around her because it implies that they can't and shouldn't take personal responsibility for themselves. It's a codependant relationship, and like any codependant relationship it turns every party involved into a soul-sucking black hole.

Anyhoo, the climax of this chapter, and yes I did that on purpose, is when Asher is finally bare-ass naked and it is revealed that his penis, blog readers, his penis is perfect. Because it was scarred, you see, and a doctor figured out that if he did something to it, Asher's penis would go back to being normal. Jean Claude loses it and starts sobbing and holding Asher and Asher starts sobbing and holding Jean Claude and this happens:

They held each other and cried, and laughed, and healed, and I was suddenly superfluous, kneeling on the bed in my lingerie. And for once, I didn’t mind in the least.

Wow. Two guys who have loved each other for centuries are having much needed catharsis, but it still has to be all about Anita. WOW. Thank you. Thank you for allowing these guys a moment of privacy that isn't tainted by your vagina. Very big of you.

End of chapter. Fuck you, Anita Blake.