The Host Recap – Attached (Chapter 55)

I really wish a chapter would come along that wouldn’t make me feel like groaning on every page, but with only 5 chapters left to go after this one, and 54 so far before it in which that’s happened, there’s just no way I’m going to be able to avoid it.

Right now, the end of this terrible journey feels so close but so far away at the same time; on the one hand, it’s only 5 more chapters and the movie review, but on the other, that’s another three fucking weeks with this book, and I’ll be surprised if my recaps end up any shorter between now and the end.  There’s just too much wrong with this book to cut them back very much.

The chapter starts with Jeb clearing a path for Wanda through the crowd, so she can get to the other side of the room where Kyle is standing.  He tells everyone they’ll have their chance to tear Kyle apart for endangering them later, but for now, he wants to get the situation sorted out.

It seems odd to me that Jeb just kind of stood there watching everyone gang up on Kyle until Wanda showed up, and then he immediately jumped into action.  I’m sure he thinks that Kyle deserves everyone’s ire, but as much as he may not care what they do to Kyle, he is the type to care about the girl that Kyle has brought with him, because she is not (directly) the one who put them in danger.  So I’m not sure why he wasn’t protecting/dealing with her, at least, before Wanda showed up.  Just doesn’t seem right to me.

The girl could have been injured before Wanda ever showed up – if she (Wanda) ever did – without anyone protecting her.  The fact is, Wanda only showed up at all because Meyer had her go look for Trudy so all this could happen; if she hadn’t left to do that, she’d still be with the human host, and no one, Jeb included, seemed to be thinking of going to get Wanda.  So how far would Jeb have let this go if Wanda hadn’t shown up?  Would he have just stood there until something bad happened?

Wanda notices that Maggie and Sharon disappear into the back of the crowd as she comes through, and at first she says that they are “melting away from the reinstatement of reason“, but then realizes that they’re actually moving away from her involvement more than anything else.  Wanda, I was about to smack you, so it’s a good thing you realized that they didn’t want to be near you, not reason.  Because that was fucking stupid, and you sure as hell are not indicative of “the reinstatement of reason” in any situation, ever.

Kyle put you at risk too (not to mention everyone you claim to love), and you don’t know what the situation really is here either, so you cannot claim that you and/or Jeb represent ‘reason’ without having any idea what Kyle will say, or what you or Jeb will do about it.  I hate Maggie and Sharon just as much as you do, and I agree that they are petty, angry bitches, but even you don’t seem to have experienced them for more than a few minutes on rare occasions, so you can’t assume that you know them well enough to claim that they completely abhor reason all the time.

As we could have expected, Jared and Ian are at the front of the throng, so when Jeb parts them to let Wanda through, she makes sure to touch both of their arms, because she believes that will calm them down.  Man, the ego on this one.

Jeb tells Kyle that he’s torn between kicking him out and killing him, and not to bother making excuses, because in Jeb’s mind, there are no excuses that are good enough for what he did.  The girl peers out from behind Kyle, looking horrified, and Wanda can see a small hint of shininess in her eyes, indicating that she is, in fact, an alien.  So yeah, definitely Jodi.

Jeb finally does what I said should have been done in the last chapter; he turns to the crowd and tells everyone that Kyle has brought a guest and they’re scaring her, so he wants them all to clear out and get some work done in the garden or whatever.

That confirms that what they’re angry about is not that Kyle brought an alien back, it’s simply that he left without word and endangered them all.  But why didn’t Jeb go make this little speech before?  Why did he just stand there and let it happen, if he really cared that they were scaring the girl, and thought that they should all have “some better manners than that“?  He didn’t either; not until Wanda showed up, anyway.

The crowd begins to disperse, and Wanda says she can tell from looking at their faces as they leave that most of them are already getting over the situation, because what they’d been fearing would come of Kyle’s disappearance was much worse than the reality.  She figures they feel that Kyle is an idiot, but no harm has been done because he’s back now, so there’s no danger of Seekers or need to evacuate anymore…they just have to deal with another ‘worm’, which is something they’re used to now.

There are a few problems with this.  For one, I’d say these people wouldn’t be used to having aliens in their midst enough that it wouldn’t still be a significant worry for them, because the last time the lot of them had to deal with encountering an alien that wasn’t Wanda was when the Seeker barged in and tried to kill everybody, successfully killing Wes.

Yes, Wanda’s small group has done a couple of removals, but as it stands, the only experiences the people in the caves have with aliens coming in (aside from the ones that were brought in for Doc to attempt to remove their aliens before Wanda became involved with the removals, all who obviously died) are Wanda, the Seeker and the Healer who is currently with Doc…and all of the others may not even know about the Healer yet, because they haven’t successfully concluded her case yet.

So why would they be okay with an alien being brought in that clearly hasn’t been subdued, since she’s standing there of her own volition, and that they know nothing about?  They have no way of knowing if she’s a danger to them.  It’s not like any of them fully trust Kyle; that’s already been proven…so why would they blindly trust the alien he’s brought back, just because he seems to?

Especially in situations like this.

They didn’t trust Wanda for a very long time (and she’s still not fully trusted even now, as we saw with the Lacey jealousy a little while back), the Seeker tried to kill everyone, and then there’s a Healer that they may not even know about.  That’s not enough people to claim that they’re used to aliens being around enough to just get over this so easily.

On top of that, how can they be so sure that just because Kyle’s back and hasn’t been implanted himself, and doesn’t seem to have brought Seekers back with him (we don’t know that the girl he’s got isn’t a Seeker herself), that the Seekers aren’t on their trail?  He abducted this girl; whether she came willingly or not in the end, the other aliens would not understand that, so in their eyes it would be a strange disappearance, and if they came looking for Wanda and the Seeker, why wouldn’t they come looking for this girl too?

Wanda, Jared and Ian may be careful not to leave a trail when they abduct aliens (just assuming that; they may not actually be), but remember, Kyle has been described as being careless on raids and generally reckless on more than one occasion; how can anyone in the caves feel confident that he covered his tracks well enough that the Seekers won’t find them?  Harm may have been done here, it just hasn’t completely caught up to them yet, and I’m sure that would have crossed someone’s mind, so they shouldn’t all be so easily at ease.

Do it.

Also, this is (at least) the second time Kyle has broken the rules and the trust of everyone in the caves; the first being when he tried to kill Wanda, and now, when he risked endangering everyone to pursue Jodi.  How are they just ‘getting over’ that?  He is clearly a threat, and if they keep refusing to punish him for this behaviour, he may continue to be!

They have no reason to believe that Jeb will properly deal with him, because he hasn’t dealt with these situations well in the past, so I’m not falling for it.  These people wouldn’t just be okay with this and wander off the second Jeb told them to, without knowing at least a little of what he planned to do with Kyle and the new alien.

Annnnnyway, everybody leaves except Jared, Ian and Jamie (surprise surprise), who all cling to Wanda’s hands when Jeb glares at them, making it clear that they’re not leaving her.  Ahh, another move by adults that seems ridiculously childish to me; I missed those.  It’s been a while.

Jeb rolls his eyes at the boys, as well he should, and then turns to Kyle, who thanks him.  He tells Kyle to shut up and warns him again that he wants to shoot him, which causes the alien girl to whimper.  Kyle asks Jeb if he can save the threats until they’re alone because they’re scaring the girl, and reminds him of how sensitive Wanda is to violence and threats and whatnot.

So why should he remember all the stupid little things she’s sensitive to?

He smiles at Wanda, then turns to the girl, who he calls Sunny (Sunny and Summer, how creative; wonder what season it was when Meyer wrote this one), and tries to calm her down.  He introduces her to Wanda and tells her that Wanda won’t let anything hurt her; that Wanda will help her, just like he told her she would.

Sunny looks up at Wanda, obviously still afraid, while Kyle gently leads her out from behind him so that she is standing next to him, his arms around her waist.  Wanda tells her that Kyle is right that she won’t let anyone hurt her, and tries to verify her name, which (with some coaxing from Kyle) we learn is actually Sunlight Passing Through Ice.  That’s kind of pretty, really, as much as I still hate all the alien crap, and Meyer’s apparent need to add that Jeb is “unquenchably curious” about her name.

All the other guys are silent as Wanda, Sunny and Kyle talk, which apparently soothes Sunny, because she can feel that there’s no hostility toward her.  Is there still none toward Kyle?  Because I’d think there would be, and I’d think if there was, that would still effect her.  If they’re soooo super sensitive to anger and whatnot, it should bother her even if it’s not directly toward her, from everything Wanda’s said, but I guess this is another of the many exceptions Meyer thinks she can throw in here without us noticing.  A small one, admittedly, but still.

Wanda tells Sunny that she was a Bear too, then tells her what her name was on the Mists Planet, and of course, because Wanda is soooooooo famous, Sunny recognizes it and remembers the other name that Wanda was called there that she didn’t like.  Wanda realizes, when that comes up, that she’s going to have to get into her alien history if they keep talking about it, and she doesn’t want to do that (THANK GOD), so she switches gears and asks Sunny if she liked being a Bear.

Sunny begins to cry at that question, so Wanda apologizes even though she doesn’t know what she did, while Kyle tries to comfort Sunny again, reminding her that she won’t be hurt.  Sunny whispers that she likes it on Earth and wants to stay, which while a valid thing to feel and say, seems very much like something a child would say (or at least the way a child would say it, anyway; most adults don’t talk like that unless they’re intentionally trying to act like children), so I feel like Sunny must be pretty young.  But…Jodi can’t have been, to have been with Kyle, so I feel like this is yet another time when the personality will not be consistent with the age.  Way to go, Meyer.

Wanda gets teary-eyed as Kyle continues to try to comfort Sunny, then Jeb clears his throat, which startles Sunny because she’s still on edge from everything that’s happened, and I’m going to skip the bit where Meyer ONCE AGAIN reminds us that “souls were not designed to handle violence and terror“.  That just leads into more about how special Wanda is and how fucked up the Seeker was, but Sunny, oh, she is what the aliens are really like.  Because we’ve seen such proof of that so far, and it’s not like each one could just have its own personality or anything.

Jeb apologizes for scaring Sunny, and suggests that they head to Doc, because there are still some people milling around.  If I were her, I’d be more scared at the idea of going to a doctor than I would being around random people, since she seems to know what’s going to happen and doesn’t want it to, but off they go anyway, even though Jeb is sad about missing out on new alien stories.

…Or at least that’s what Wanda thinks must be the problem when he sighs, because again, the ego is strong with this one, and she can’t imagine that he could be thinking about anything but her when she’s present.  He couldn’t have sighed because, oh, he noticed too that Sunny doesn’t want to leave Earth, but he knows she’s going to have to and he feels a little guilty about that?  No?  No chance of that?  Riiiight.  Couldn’t be that, because that’s not about you.  Fuck you, Wanda.

As they leave, Jeb forces Jamie to go back to school, which Wanda agrees with because she doesn’t want him to see the removal procedure performed.  She asks him if he can send Trudy to Doc on his way to school, because Doc needs her, so Jamie whines about missing everything, acts like a fucking 5 year old again, and mopes his way off to class.  I really could have liked this kid, if his character hadn’t been written completely wrong.  Again, Meyer, way to go.

Wanda thanks Jeb for getting rid of Jamie, then they keep walking to Doc’s, Kyle continuing to comfort Sunny.  Wanda is amazed to see him being so gentle and compassionate, figuring it must be getting Jodi back that triggered it, though she’s still surprised he’s able to show so much kindness to the alien part of her.

Can Wanda finally see that humans are caring and compassionate now, please?  There is literally no one worse than Kyle that’s alive anymore, so if even he can be all these wonderful things, can we finally stop hearing about how all humans are inherently bad and love violence?  If Kyle can be supportive, caring and gentle, after all the anger and violence she’s seen in him, can’t she see that that could be the case for most anyone, and that sometimes there are just bad seeds, like her Seeker was?

Wait, no, she won’t see it there because she blames Lacey for the Seeker’s attitude, even though it can’t all be Lacey’s fault…but still, please, Meyer, let this be the end of hearing how horrible humans are and how wonderful and fearful of violent aliens are, because we’re clearly at least a little bit good under the surface somewhere.  Okay??

Jared asks Wanda how the Healer’s doing, so she explains that she woke up, but she’s scared and doesn’t remember her name.  She (Wanda) asks everyone to be quiet and move slowly when they get there, so as not to startle the Healer, and also asks Jeb to get rid of his gun, which he agrees to do.

Then we’re back into more of Wanda’s emoness about how much longer she has left, because she squeezes Ian’s hand and likes how it feels, but she doesn’t know if it will be the last time she gets to experience that.  Stryder pipes up again to tell her that it won’t be her last time walking down that tunnel and whatnot, because that’s the only thing Stryder gets to talk about anymore, and then Wanda is trembling, so both Jared and Ian hold her hands tighter.  Yup.  At least Jared got a mention here; it’s usually just The Ian Show now.

They walk in silence for a bit, then Sunny reiterates to Kyle that she doesn’t want to go back to the Bears, and asks if she can stay on Earth.  He tells her that she can go somewhere other than the Bears, but she can’t stay, and she and Wanda both start crying about that, then they’re finally at the hospital.

Doc is still talking to the woman we can’t call Summer but who I’m going to call Summer anyway until she gets another name, so they all stop in the entryway, and then Wanda enters alone and says hi.  Summer is startled, but Doc calms her down, reminding her that Wanda is a friend.

Wanda tells Doc that he’s got some more visitors, so he reassures Summer that all of them are friends too, and that they’re all humans who would never dream of hurting her.  Not quite true, but he doesn’t know that yet.

Summer says it’s okay for them to come in, so they do, one by one, as Wanda introduces them.  Doc is shocked to see Sunny, but Summer doesn’t seem to notice that Sunny is an alien, so Doc just skips over that and explains to her that there are a lot more humans that live there.  Wanda tells Doc that Trudy is on her way, and suggests that maybe Trudy could find a room for Summer to rest in, which Doc thinks is a good idea, as does Summer after she verifies that Trudy is human.

Sunny notices the cryotanks that hold the two Healers, as well as the seven empty tanks that are waiting on the floor, and she begins to cry into Kyle’s chest again, telling him that she doesn’t want to go, she wants to stay with him.  Kyle apologizes to her again as she breaks down completely, and then Wanda decides she needs to talk with Sunny.

She begs to stay with Kyle when he attempts to pull her away from him to talk to Wanda, but Wanda promises her that Kyle isn’t going anywhere, she just wants to ask Sunny a few questions.  For some reason, Sunny latches onto Wanda even though she’s just met her, and the two girls and Kyle head over to the far corner of the room, so Summer won’t hear their conversation.

They all sit together, facing the wall, and Kyle expresses remorse about the situation, saying he didn’t expect it to turn out how it did.  Wanda asks him how he found and captured Sunny, and Kyle explains that he decided to look for Jodi in Las Vegas instead of Oregon because he knew she was close to her mother and that’s where her mother lived, so he figured she’d go there, even if she’d been implanted (going off of the assumption that she’d do what Wanda did in trying to find Jared and Jamie).

Turned out he was right, because he found Jodi there with her mother and father, but they were all aliens, so he waited until night-time, then snuck into Jodi’s room while she was sleeping, threw her over his shoulder and jumped out the window with her.  He had expected her to scream, but she didn’t, she just stayed silent, so he worried that she had shredded her brain…but obviously she hadn’t.

When he got her to the Jeep, he realized she was completely conscious and didn’t even look afraid of him or upset about what he’d done, so he decided not to tie her up like he’d planned to, and instead just buckled her in and started driving home.

If I were him, I’d have been worried that she was a Seeker at that point, just trying to find the way to his hideout before killing him so she could lead the other Seekers to his friends…but that doesn’t seem to have crossed his mind, despite how much he thought Wanda was trying to do that every second of her time in the caves until recently. Ahhh the convenient personality changes…

Kyle says that Sunny was quiet for a while as he drove her back to the caves, then she identified him by name and told him her name.  After that, she seemed to open up to him completely, because she was so happy to see him.

Sunny pipes up, telling Wanda that she used to dream about Kyle all the time, and that she always hoped the Seekers would find him because she missed him so much.  She says that when she saw him, she thought it was the dream again, which is why it didn’t scare her, and Wanda is clearly upset by that.

Kyle tells Wanda that Sunny is “a good kid“, and asks her if they can send her somewhere nice, which Wanda says is what she had wanted to ask Sunny about.  She asks her where she’s lived before, as Trudy shows up, and Sunny replies that she’s only lived on Earth and with the Bears, because she lived five life terms with the Bears.

She says she likes living on Earth better than with the Bears, and is very upset to have spent so little time on Earth, which Wanda says she understands, then asks if there’s anywhere else that Sunny has ever wanted to go.  She suggests the Flowers and Spiders, but Sunny shoots both of those down, so Wanda suggests the Dolphins, even though she’s never been one herself.

(Please stop talking about the alien species)

Sunny is upset that everywhere Wanda is suggesting is far enough away that Kyle will be dead by the time she reaches it, so Kyle asks if there are any other choices.  Wanda tells him that there are a lot of places in the universe, but no others that the shuttles are going to, because only a few are still open for settling.

She turns back to Sunny and apologizes for having to send her far away, explaining that the Seekers want to find the human friends she has in the caves, so if she goes anywhere closer, they’ll bring her back to make her show them the way to the caves.

Sunny says that she doesn’t even know the way because Kyle covered her eyes, and Wanda is sad as she realizes the trouble Kyle went through in hopes that Wanda could help Sunny, because she knows that in reality, she can’t do anything that will make her happy.  She tells Kyle that the only options are the Bears, Flowers and Dolphins, then tells Sunny that she’ll like the Dolphins, because they’ll be nice.

Sunny just keeps crying, so Wanda changes the subject, asking her if Jodi is in there with her.  Sunny is confused, so Wanda asks if she ever hears Jodi’s thoughts, and Sunny responds that Jodi doesn’t have any because she’s there now.

Kyle asks Wanda if that’s a bad sign, and she responds that she doesn’t know enough to tell, but it’s probably not good.  She goes on to ask Sunny how long she’s been on Earth, but Sunny isn’t completely sure, so Kyle answers that it’s been six years.  Wanda asks how old Sunny is, and she tells her she’s 27, which surprises Wanda, because Sunny seems to her to be much younger.  Yep, there’s that age thing I knew was going to happen.

Kyle asks Wanda why her age matters, and Wanda says she’s not sure, but it seems like the more time an individual spent as a human before implantation, the better chance they have at recovering their human mind, because they have more human memories, more connections, and more years of being called by the right name.

He asks if 21 years is enough, and she says they’ll find out, but this is all bullshit.  Wanda has now performed this procedure twice, and before those she claimed that she had no idea if the human’s mind could come back, so the only basis she can use for this claim she’s made to Kyle is those two she just did – the Seeker and Summer.

The problem?  The Seeker was described as at least somewhat close to the same age as Stryder; obviously older, but not much older; certainly not more than early 30s or something like that…and after Wanda performed the procedure on her host, the human’s mind came back almost instantly, and very clearly, knowing exactly who she was and what was going on from the moment she awoke.

But Summer?  Summer was described as, and I quote: “Forty-five, maybe a little younger, maybe a little older”, and she almost didn’t come back, and even now that she is back, she doesn’t remember anything about herself.  So we have two individuals that Wanda has done this procedure on, and the older one didn’t retain anything about herself, but the younger one did instantly.

So how can Wanda claim that having been a human for longer gives a better chance of success?  She’s just seen that that’s not true, TODAY!  Even if she’s stupid enough to use just two cases as proof of her hypothesis, she’s still actually only proved that the opposite of her hypothesis is true!

That is, unless I completely misjudged the Seeker’s age, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t.  Even then, though, the aliens supposedly only took over Earth 6 or 7 years ago, meaning Summer would have been implanted when she was around 38 or 39…hell, even if they invaded 10 years ago and she was taken straight away, she’d still have been 35 by then, which is definitely longer than 21 years spent as a human, and she didn’t come back!  So clearly the real answer to Kyle’s question is no, 21 years is probably NOT enough!

God, this is all so stupid.  Why did Meyer bother to indicate Summer’s age if she was going to try to make this claim in the next chapter??  I can’t believe how poor Meyer’s writing is!  She seems to completely lack forethought!  I’m trying to think how she could turn this all around, but she’s made completely contradictory claims here, so I just can’t see it happening.

On top of all this, how the hell is it that Sunny became all in love with and trustworthy of Kyle to the point of being willing to follow him without question, when she didn’t have a resistant host?  If it was just memories and dreams that led her to do it, and every human host would have memories and dreams, then shouldn’t all the aliens be seeking the humans they once loved and matching up with them, even if they are still human?

What was the point of the “resistant host” storyline in this book at all, if all the aliens will do this with the ones their hosts once loved?  Stryder was completely unnecessary here, as was the whole bit about the Seeker having a resistant host too, if this was just going to happen anyway!  There didn’t need to be all this fucked up shit about who loves who and whatever the fuck, if every alien does this because of the emotions of their human hosts!

And I mean come on, if the aliens realized this was happening, and it was obviously a risk to them since they would all be potentially seeking out the ‘enemy’, why wouldn’t they just give up on this planet and move on?  It’d be pretty easy to realize it wasn’t going to work out when this started happening, and it would have started happening during the first waves of infiltration!

And let me just say, Meyer, there is no way in fucking hell you are going to convince me that it’s just miraculously Jodi that managed to do this without a resistant host.  Why the hell wasn’t the Seeker after someone Lacey loved?  Where is the consistency here?!

You needed to make Stryder resistant for your storyline to work, same with Lacey, but it wouldn’t work if Jodi was resistant, because then we wouldn’t get the drama of not knowing if she’d come back if Wanda performs the procedure on her, but it is SO FUCKING EASY to see how this is all bullshit that DOES NOT ADD UP!  How stupid do you think your audience is?  How stupid are YOU?  I have to think if you went on to publish this book with all of this still contained in it, you may not have even realized how completely you fucked it up!   Hoooly fuck, this is infuriating.  That this book has sold ANY copies is even more infuriating, nonetheless the vast amount that it has sold.

Let’s get this recap done, I’ve had enough of this shit.

Sunny starts crying about how it’s not fair that Wanda gets to stay on Earth and she doesn’t, so Wanda agrees that that wouldn’t be fair, and assures her that she doesn’t get to stay either.  She even tells her that they might leave together, though she’s very obviously lying about that, and she knows it.  It doesn’t bother her that she’s lying, though, because Sunny will maybe have “a different host with different emotions and no tie to this human beside me“.

Uh…but I thought you retained all the memories of your previous lives?  That’s how you’ve told us all these stories about the stupid alien shit, after all, isn’t it?  So…she will have a tie to Kyle, because she’ll remember him and remember her love for him.  Is Wanda counting on Sunny being a species that can’t feel the emotions she’d remember feeling for Kyle?  Because she’s never been a Dolphin, and she’s planning to send Sunny to be one, so she has no way of knowing what emotions Dolphins have.

I won’t bother getting into what emotions real Dolphins have, because we already know Meyer’s alien species are fucking idiotic and not the same as ours at all despite their names, but yeah, either way, Wanda can’t possibly know if they have emotions or not.  Who’s to say Sunny won’t go there, find the Dolphins experience emotion even more strongly than we do, and spend the rest of her life/lives in agony because she has all these memories of Kyle and she will NEVER be able to see him again?

Yeah, that’s right, that’s entirely possible, isn’t it Wanda?  You know fucking nothing, so stop trying to act like it’s all going to be okay.  You can’t justify this.  You can’t make it okay that you just lied to her, but you do, by shrugging it off with “Anyway, it would be too late“.  You’re such a bitch.

Wanda reiterates that she has to give her body back just like Sunny does, and then Ian butts in, angrily asking “What?” before the chapter ends.  Because yeah, of course when Wanda asks to speak to someone privately and goes off to the other fucking side of the room, that means “Hey Ian, please follow us without our consent and stand behind us as we talk, eavesdropping on our conversation”.

IAN IS A FUCKING CREEPY, DISRESPECTFUL BASTARD AND IT’S BEYOND TIME FOR WANDA TO REALIZE THAT!  If he can’t even respect you having a private conversation with someone that DOES NOT AFFECT HIM WHATSOEVER, what the fuck do you see in him, Wanda?  You obviously didn’t know he was there or you would never have said that, so you KNOW he shouldn’t have been listening!!  God I wish he’d fuck off!

And with that outburst of rage, I’m done for today.  Tune in next time to see Ian have to account for his disrespectful actions in NO WAY WHATSOEVER!

(See Mike’s take on this chapter at http://emptystress.wordpress.com!)

The Host Recap – Forgotten (Chapter 54)

Well, this chapter didn’t start how I expected it to.  I expected a lot of whining from Wanda about the Healer killing himself, but that’s not what happened, and you’ll see why in a little bit.  And don’t worry; true to form, it’s a stupid, stupid reason.

So instead of the whining, we start this chapter with Wanda listing off a bunch of female names as she tries to guess what the human host’s name is, because apparently she hasn’t woken up yet, even though it’s been hours since the removal.  So maybe there was whining, we just missed it, but I still don’t think so given what’s to come.

In the time since the removal, Doc removed the coverings from the holes in the ceiling of the hospital to let some light in, which I’m only mentioning because Meyer did, so it must be important, right?  It seems he has to go outside and climb up the mountain every time he wants to take them off or put them on, so it’s going to be fun for him doing that all the time, since they can only really do the removals at night as that’s the only time they can safely abduct the aliens…but hey, whatever floats your boat.

I have to say, though, I think the only reason Meyer actually mentioned that Doc did that was so she could attempt to explain how Wanda knows what time it is.  That’s a lot of work for what is a pretty unimportant bit of information, in the grand scheme of things.

Anyway, Wanda’s petting the human and saying female names, as mentioned, trying to get her to wake up, while Doc sleeps and everyone else does whatever they’re doing elsewhere.  Wanda thinks about the guy that shredded himself, wishing she could have explained to him why she was doing what she did, because she thinks he might have understood and let the body live if she’d had a chance to explain that it was about love.  Yeah, yeah, yeah, the souls are all about love and wondrousness; we’ve heard this before.  I don’t care anymore.

“The request would probably have made little sense to him, though.  The body was his body, not a separate entity.  His suicide was simply that to him, not a murder, too.  Only one life had ended.  And perhaps he was right.”

What. The. Fuck.  No, Wanda.  No, no, no.  Why are you still claiming that the body belongs to the alien that invaded it??  You have contradicted this viewpoint SO MANY TIMES!  You are planning to have yourself removed BECAUSE you believe that Stryder’s body belongs to HER, because it FUCKING DOES!  How can you still be claiming this?  It was not and would never have BEEN his body, and while maybe he could have thought it was, because your kind are fucking selfish morons, YOU CANNOT SAY HE WAS EVEN POTENTIALLY RIGHT IN THINKING THAT.  HE WAS NOT.  He destroyed a HUMAN’S brain, and the HUMAN was the one that owned the body.  It was DEFINITELY murder, just as it would be if you destroyed Stryder’s brain, and you damn well know it.  Why would you even be DOING these removals if there was “only one life” in there??

“At least the souls had survived.  The light on his tank glowed dull red beside hers; I couldn’t ask for a greater evidence of commitment from my humans than this, the sparing of his life.”

…Wait, what?  Okay, I’m glad she’s finally giving the humans credit for something, but how is this possible?  How could the alien have survived after shredding the human’s brain?  She just said, in the paragraph before this one, that he would be committing suicide, and that he would see it as taking only one life – his own.  If he doesn’t die from the shredding, then how is it suicide or taking anyone’s life but the human’s?  This makes no fucking sense!

EVERYTHING Wanda has said about the shredding so far indicates that it leads to the death of the alien too.  Like I said, she just said it was suicide, and it was precisely what she was worried about with the Seeker; that the Seeker would kill herself before Wanda had a chance to remove her.  Want proof?  Here you go; this is in the first paragraph of chapter 52:

“I wasn’t sure if she had any idea of what I was going to do, and I didn’t want to give her any reason to kill her host and herself.”

And that’s not the only other time it’s mentioned that the shredding kills both.  So why, all of a sudden, has that changed?  There is no reason why the alien should have survived here!  This is what I was referring to in the beginning of this recap as the stupid reason why Wanda isn’t whining about the man shredding himself; because the alien didn’t actually die for some stupid fucking reason, only his host did, even though everything we’ve been told even in this same goddamn chapter states that he should have died! FUCK, I hate this!

On top of all this, though, I also hate that Wanda is a hypocritical enough person that she thinks the humans are horrible because she thinks they want to kill the aliens to save themselves, and when it’s that kind of situation she thinks they should want to save both…but she’s not really upset about this death because the alien didn’t die, just the human did.  So, what; she’s exactly like she thinks the humans would be?  Yeah.  Fuck off, Wanda.

Wanda continues to list off female names to the unconscious woman, as we’re informed that her vital signs were all normal after the chloroform wore off, but none of Doc’s efforts to revive her were successful regardless.  Wanda begins to wonder if the reason she’s not waking is because she’s “gone” already, meaning it’s too late for her to come back because she was not a resistant host like Stryder and Lacey.

This leads her to worry that Stryder wouldn’t come back either, because she wonders if maybe Lacey was an anomaly (again, Lacey cannot have been the first this procedure was ever performed on, if they know how to do it so well, so she should know whether this is true or not already), but Stryder assures her that she’s not lost.  Wanda can tell Stryder is worried too, though, so she promises her that she (Stryder) will stay there, which is pretty much a way for her to silently say that she won’t have herself removed if there’s a chance Stryder won’t come back if she does.  Awww.  Except I don’t feel anything at all because I hate her (Wanda) too much.

More names listed as Wanda gets emo because her plan hasn’t turned out how she wanted, but considers that at least she gave the humans a way to help themselves if they were ever taken.  Not really, though, because the aliens are the only ones who survive this if it’s not successful in bringing back the humans, and the humans aren’t going to be wanting to go to this much extra effort just to keep the aliens who stole their bodies alive, so it’d really be easier and safer for the humans just to kill them.  So this would help no one but the aliens in any way at all.  Kinda stupid to think it would do otherwise (if the humans don’t end up making it).

Wanda decides to change gears in her efforts to wake the woman by talking to her instead of just listing off names, but she starts doing so by trying to make her feel guilty about how depressed her friends will be about the woman not waking, because it’s just another bad thing in a string of bad things that have happened to them.  Yeah, guilt would really make me wanna wake up, Wanda.  Good plan.

She tells the woman how nice the people in the caves are and that they’re her family now, and then when that’s not successful, she thinks about how attractive the woman is, then begins to beg her to wake up.  She tells her that her friends need her help, especially Doc, for her medical knowledge, except she says it like this:

“You’ve been a Healer for a while now; some of that care for the well-being of others must have rubbed off on you.”

I am only willing to accept this as an okay statement if she meant that in the sense of medical care, not caring for the well-being of others in general.  Otherwise, I would have to stab her for once again acting like humans don’t care about others.  So let’s hope Meyer meant it the first way.

Wanda switches back to listing off names again for a minute, then lets her mind wander, speaking her thoughts out loud as she does so.  She ponders about what will happen if Kyle doesn’t come back, wondering if they will have to find a new home somewhere else, and lamenting that she couldn’t really help the humans even if she ‘could‘ stay (-_-), before commenting that maybe Kyle won’t mess up, and everyone will get to stay where they are.

She laughs at that idea, because she doesn’t think it’s possible for Kyle not to screw up, since he’s careless on raids and such, but of course we know nothing bad will happen with Kyle, because there aren’t enough chapters left in the book for any more big climaxes (or Meyer’s idea of them, anyway).

Wanda knows that she has to stick around at least until the situation with Kyle is resolved one way or the other, though, because until then, the humans will need her eyes to get them out of any situations that might arise with Seekers.

“It might take a long time, and that made me feel warmer than the sun on my skin.  Made me feel grateful that Kyle was impetuous and selfish.”

Wow.  You’re happy that the people you supposedly care for could be in danger, because it means you get to stick around longer.  YOU are making the decision to go, not them, but because you don’t want to go soon (even though you rushed everything so you could, supposedly), you’re happy that they may have Seekers after them because then they’ll need you.  Really, wow.  You’re grateful that Kyle put them in danger.  And you have the nerve to call him selfish?

He was going to find the woman he loves; you did stupid things for “love” (I use the quotations because since she’s become annoyingly obsessed with Ian, it seems her ‘love’ for Jared has completely disappeared) too, you horrendous bitch.  How dare you pass judgement on him for doing the same, especially when what you’ve just said right here is far more selfish than what he did.  You’re really just a shockingly bad person.

“‘I wonder what it’s like here when it gets cold.  I can barely remember feeling cold.  And what if it rains?  It has to rain here sometime, doesn’t it?  With all these holes in the roof, it must get really wet.  Where does everyone sleep then, I wonder.’”

There are a few things potentially wrong with this.  I took a quick look into the climate information for the area where Wanda claims to be, and what I found just doesn’t add up with what she’s saying here.  Now I won’t pretend to be an expert on this, but I looked at a few different sites for comparison of data so I could have a bit more of a comprehensive idea here, and what I found just doesn’t work with what she’s saying.

In the Arizona desert, which is where I understand Wanda to be from what I’ve read, the temperatures are obviously very high during the days, but can get as low as freezing in the valley areas at night, which would mean that Wanda would have, at least when she was wandering around lost before Jeb found her, experienced cold at a time recent enough that she could remember it.  In fact, if that did happen, she would have experienced many more problems at that time than she did in this book.

Now, there are times of the year when the temperatures don’t significantly drop at night in the desert, but those are generally during the summer monsoon season, when – you guessed it – there are a fair amount of thunderstorms there.  No, the desert does not ever get a lot of rain, but it does get some (enough to make it one of the wettest deserts in the world, if I’m looking at this properly; it says Phoenix is in the Sonoran Desert, and it seems they are quite close to Phoenix), so if it’s summertime (which she says it is), Wanda should already have experienced rain there, and if it’s not, then she should have experienced cold (and there’s also rain in the winter, but we’ll just pretend it’s one or the other for Wanda’s sake).  So either way, these questions are stupid.

On top of that, she’s been in the caves now for months, and while the desert can go a stretch of months without receiving any rain, it’s highly unlikely that with the length of time she’s been there, it hasn’t rained at all.  Besides, if it hasn’t, I’d wonder how they haven’t have more problems with drought; those underwater streams would not be fed by much if nowhere in the surrounding area had any rain coming in at all, and they seem to use a lot of water irrigating their crops.  They’re supposedly in the middle of the desert, remember.  But hey, that’s also potentially possible, so nitpicking.

Either way, these questions are stupid to me.  Even if they were valid, though, I’m surprised she’s never thought of or asked these things before; it’s not like the others wouldn’t have dealt with this stuff by now.  And really, I’m not sure why Meyer is even going on about this stuff.  It’s just further proof that neither she nor her editor (still hard to believe she had one, but I know she did) did any research on anything she claimed in this book, and it’s not plot relevant.

Oh, wait, it is, because Wanda’s blathering on about weather and how curious she is to know the answers to her stupid questions leads her to say the word “summer”, which makes the woman she’s talking to twitch a little.  Golly gee, how exciting.

She says it takes her by surprise when the woman twitches because she had forgotten about her as she “sunk into the melancholy that was always conveniently near these days” (agggggh my overwhelming hatred of this whiney fucking bullshit; once again, why does anyone like a character like this?!  She’s not 14, she should be out of this emo stage!), but she can’t have; she was literally JUST TALKING TO HER, asking her if she was curious about these things!  She didn’t have time to stop thinking about the woman before she twitched!  This was just another excuse to whine! WHY DO WE NEED THOSE?!?

Wanda looks at the woman, but she’s completely still again, so she thinks she might have imagined the movement she felt.  She tries to figure out what she could have said to make her twitch anyway, just in case, so she starts blathering on about change, then decides that the woman must not like change when she doesn’t respond to that, so she asks if the woman wants summer to last, and her eyelids flicker.

She asks if the woman likes summertime, and her lips twitch, so she repeats the word “Summer”, assuming it to be the woman’s name, and tells her to “come back” and open her eyes.  Her eyes begin to blink rapidly, so Wanda calls to Doc to wake up, and tells him that she thinks the woman is coming around.

She keeps talking to the woman, calling her Summer and trying to encourage her to come around, until she notices that the woman is grimacing in what looks like pain, so she asks Doc to bring the No Pain.  Before Wanda can get it, though, the woman grips Wanda’s hand and opens her eyes.  Wanda tries to comfort and relax her, but the woman begins to panic, crying out and pulling away from Wanda.

Doc is there too, at this point, and he tries to calm the woman down, assuring her that no one will hurt her as she squeezes her eyes shut and curls into the mattress.  Wanda tells him that she thinks the woman’s name is Summer, and Doc reminds her about her alien eyes, which are reflecting the sun from the holes in the ceiling.  Oh, so that’s why Meyer bothered to have Doc go to all the trouble to take the coverings down.  Great.  Totally worth it.

Wanda lets go of the woman’s hand as she begs them, saying “not again”.  Doc tells her his name and that she’s going to be fine, but he calls her “Summer” in the process, which causes her to cry out at him, telling him not to call her that.  She says it’s not her name, it’s the alien’s, and Wanda feels guilty about getting the wrong name.  Stryder tries to make her feel better, telling her it’s not her fault because Summer is a human name too, but I get the guilt here.  That would feel pretty shitty, hopefully for more than one reason, but probably only one in Wanda’s case.

Doc promises not to call her Summer anymore, and asks what her name is, but she says she doesn’t know.  She continues to panic, asking what happened and begging Doc not to “make her be someone else again“, so he continues to try to calm her down, promising that no one will make her be anyone but who she is, and that her name will come back to her in time.

The woman demands to know who he and Wanda are, telling him that she saw Wanda’s eyes, so she knows she is one of the aliens.  Doc explains that he’s human, like she is, and shows her his eyes for proof, then tells her there are lots of humans there that will want to meet her too.  The woman cringes and says she’s afraid of humans, so Doc reminds her that she’s not, the alien who used to inhabit her body was.  He tries to remind her of the time before the alien was in her, when she was a human, and assures her that she is one again.

She continues to be upset about not remembering her name, but Doc just reaffirms that it will come back to her in time.  She verifies that he’s a doctor, then tells him that her alien was too, and that her name was Summer Song.  She asks who she is, and Doc assures her they’ll find out.

Wanda starts to leave the room, planning to find one of the human women to help Doc deal with the woman, and the woman notices, panicking again about the fact that Wanda is not human.  Doc tells her that Wanda is a friend, and that she shouldn’t  be afraid of her because she helped him bring her back.

See? Just a normal friend.

The woman asks where her alien is, saying she was afraid because there were humans, as Wanda leaves the room.  Doc answers, telling her that Summer Song is going to a new planet, and then asks the woman if she remembers where Summer came from before coming to Earth.  The woman tells him that Summer was a Bat, then asks where she is, and that’s all we get to know about that conversation, because then Wanda is too far away to hear anymore.

Wanda is, of course, not surprised to hear that the woman’s alien was a Bat, given the name (because remember, the Bats all sing and whatever), but she is surprised when she finds that every area she goes to in the caves where there would normally be people is empty.  There are clear signs that people were very recently in all those areas, but they aren’t there anymore, so Wanda starts to worry that they may have evacuated without her and Doc.  Well, that’s stupid.

Luckily, Wanda realizes that it would have been stupid of them to leave Doc behind, and Stryder reminds her that Jared, Jamie and Ian wouldn’t have left her behind either, so we’re spared some of the drama here…but Wanda’s attempts to find everyone still take more than a page, even without that, and that seems very excessive to me, so I’m going to skim this.

Sooo blah blah blah, no one in the kitchen, Wanda is hungry but is not going to do anything about it so what was the point of mentioning it, Wanda worries that maybe they didn’t evacuate soon enough and the Seekers got in, Stryder reminds her that if they had, they’d still be in the caves looking for other humans, and they would have heard something besides, but Wanda thinks they may still be looking, so she feels she has to get back and warn Doc so they can get out…then Stryder’s upset, thinking that Jared and Jamie might be gone, and Wanda’s upset about everyone else because she has so many friends cause she’s so popular.

Wanda decides that if need be, she’ll hunt all of them down and steal them back, because she won’t let the aliens take her family, and I can’t wait until we hear about how great the aliens are the next time, so I can remember how for a moment here they were the enemy again, but then she changed her mind like she always does.  She says if she had any doubt as to where she stood, this moment would have erased them, but she’s said shit like that before and gone back on it, so it really means no more to me now than it did the other times.

Finally, Wanda hears the sound of voices down the hall from where she is, so she presses herself against the wall, into the shadows, and she and Stryder discuss where it sounds like the sounds are coming from.  Shit is said here that is supposed to make me feel good, like she and Stryder are now really a team, but I was supposed to think that before and Wanda betrayed that repeatedly, so Meyer, please stop trying.  It’s too late for this shit.  You can only pull this so many times before no one fucking cares anymore.

Wanda creeps down the hallway, thinking about the voices she hears and wondering if the fact that they’re familiar is a good sign or a sign that the Seekers just perform really fast insertions (that’s fucking ridiculous given the production that her insertion was; why were we ever supposed to believe this was some sort of fast paced street procedure, Meyer, after the way you laid it out in the beginning of the book?), and this is all just an effort by Meyer to produce dramatic tension, but it really isn’t successful at all.  I don’t feel tense, I feel bored.  Move on, Meyer.  Hurry up and get to the end of this.

When Wanda gets to the doorway, she’s happy to realize that the voices are angry, because of course that means they can’t be implanted, because only humans get angry.  Yeah, we’ve seen such proof of that in her and the Seeker.  Absolutely.

She realizes that Kyle must be back and hurries into the room, feeling relieved that everyone is safe, but unhappy that Kyle being back means she’s going to ‘have to’ go.  Stryder tries, once again, to convince Wanda that she’s still needed more than she (Stryder) is, but Wanda shrugs that off, saying she could find excuses to stay forever, but she won’t with Stryder as her prisoner.  Again with the thinking this when it applies to Stryder, but not to other human hosts, for some reason…annoying.  And I’d like Wanda to give up on this plan now, since we know it won’t happen and I’m sick of all the conversations where Stryder tries to beg Wanda and she says no for reasons that she doesn’t even believe in.

Wanda sees Kyle pinned against the far wall, clearly protecting something behind him and pleading to the group to calm down.  He tells Jared to back off because he’s scaring “her”, and then Wanda sees a face appear behind him for a second (with black eyes; why do they not look alien?), which means Kyle did find Jodi.  So then…why is everyone angry?  Is it just because he left and endangered them?  That’s a valid reason, but couldn’t they deal with that after they deal with the girl who’s obviously with him?

If she’s not an alien somehow (which wouldn’t make any sense), it’s really cruel to put her through this instead of just getting her integrated and then freaking out on Kyle when he’s away from her, and if she is an alien, then they really should probably deal with her before dealing with Kyle anyway, for the safety of everyone there.

And if she is one and she’s there peacefully with Kyle for some reason, for one it will need to be explained how that’s possible (and if it’s another convenient thing like “Oh she was a resistant host because she loved and remembered him too much, and her alien fell in love with him too and always wanted to find him but couldn’t, so yayyyy”, I’m going to end up in an institution), and two, why would everyone freak out about it?  The situation was worse with Wanda; at the time Wanda showed up they couldn’t do the procedure to remove the alien, and now they can.

So to sum up, if they’re mad because of Kyle endangering them, they should wait to freak out at him until the girl he’s brought (presumably Jodi) has been dealt with, and if they’re mad because he brought an alien home, that’s stupid because they’ve been through worse before, and she’s no threat to them if she’s alone, he’s clearly protecting her, she’s clearly afraid, and they can remove her alien anyway now.  So, explanations at some point, I hope.  Jared, at least, should not be mad, yet he seems to be one of the most angry people present.

Apparently Sharon and Maggie are there too, despite that they disappeared for a long while, but they’re only there because they don’t like happiness but they’re “at home with fury“, supposedly, which is so incredibly stupid and is obviously just another chance to remind us that they’re evil bitches, in case we had forgotten.  Lacey is there too, and she’s also angry for some reason, even though none of this is really her business, so…yeah.  This is all just one giant mess.

Kyle notices Wanda at the back of the room, though, and calls out to her, asking her if she could come give him some help (bold question), and then that’s the end of the chapter.  And I don’t really know that there’s much else I can say for now, until we see where this goes, so…there you have it!

(See Mike’s take on this chapter at http://emptystress.wordpress.com!)

Q&A: Ultimate Sin

The twenty-sixth question for the Q&A section of this blog is: “What was the biggest sin ever committed against you?”

I’m not sure I can answer this question.  I mean, I know the answer, but it’s…rather personal, and implicates a certain individual from my past in doing something very serious, on more than one occasion.  I’ll just say that there’s not much worse this individual could have done to me, especially in the way they did it, and leave it at that.  No gifs today either, because the nature of the sin committed here really was too dark for me to feel right ‘livening it up’ with gifs.  Sorry guys; hopefully next post will  be better.

Check out Mike’s answer at http://emptystress.wordpress.com, and please feel free to post your own in the comments! 

(Next question: “What sin do you most enjoy committing?”)

The Host Recap – Condemned (Chapter 53)

Well, this chapter was annoying.  Surprised?  Yeah, me neither.  I’m sick right now, so I apologize if this isn’t the most interesting or comprehensive recap; at this point, I just want to get through it, so I really hope it ends up making sense.

So we start off by learning that the Seeker’s host body is named Lacey, and Wanda thinks that’s a really inappropriate name because it’s too ‘dainty’ for her personality, since she’s still loud and complains a lot, like the Seeker was/did.  So hey, maybe I was right when I said they might not want the host body to live, since it was previously mentioned that the souls start to take on a bit of the attitude of their host…clearly Lacey and the Seeker weren’t all that different.  The Seeker may even have been nicer than Lacey, in actuality.  We will never know!

What’s great is that at the very beginning of this chapter, Wanda expresses her impression of  Lacey, which is basically that she’s annoying and repugnant (which is kind of hilarious since Wanda complains almost non-stop too, she just doesn’t realize that she’s annoying), but we’re also told in the third paragraph that Lacey’s got a lot to say, so right from the get-go we know how shitty this chapter is going to be.  You’re really enticing me to read on, Meyer!  I can’t imagine anything better than willingly submitting myself to complaining that’s bad enough to put even Wanda off!

“‘That’s why we don’t like you,’ she told me that first night, making no change from the present tense or the plural pronoun. ‘When she realized that you were hearing Melanie just the way she was hearing me, it made her frightened. She thought you might guess. I was her deep, dark secret.” A grating laugh. ‘She couldn’t make me shut up. That’s why she became a Seeker, because she was hoping to figure out some way to better deal with resistant hosts. And then she requested being assigned to you, so she could watch how you did it. She was jealous of you; isn’t that pathetic? She wanted to be strong like you. It gave us a real kick when we thought Melanie had won. I guess that didn’t happen, though. I guess you did. So why did you come here? Why are you helping the rebels?‘”

So, Meyer points out that Lacey doesn’t switch from the present tense or the plural pronoun here…but why?  Why would she do that?  The rest of what she says here explains only why the Seeker wouldn’t like Wanda, not why Lacey wouldn’t.  Lacey could certainly dislike her for other reasons (mostly that she is an alien, and therefore the enemy), but it wouldn’t really make sense for her to dislike Wanda for the same reasons, so I’m not sure why Meyer did this.

Continuing with this quote, I must have misunderstood the way Callings work, because I thought you got one before going to your next planet, or at least as soon as you were put into your host body, but apparently the Seeker chose her Calling (another thing I didn’t think they could do; guess I mistook all of this) long enough after implantation that she knew both that she had a resistant host, and that her efforts to subdue it would always be in vain. So what did she do for a Calling before that, then?  Nothing?

Also, how did the Seeker know Wanda would have a resistant host before meeting her?  The way Meyer wrote this, the Seeker was around from the very beginning, because she was in the Healing facility when Fords implanted Wanda into Stryder’s body…so the Seeker had already become a Seeker by that point as a result of her resistant host, and wanted to follow Wanda because she somehow psychically knew Wanda would have a resistant host after implantation too, but that she would be able to control it better somehow (even though she never did)?  Why was she there when Wanda was implanted, otherwise?  Did I miss something here?

And even after the Seeker knew Wanda had a resistant host in Stryder, she also knew Wanda didn’t have control over Stryder…so what made the Seeker think Wanda was stronger than her?  From the way I read this book, it was quite the opposite.  I don’t know if anything that I’m saying is making any sense, and even if it is, I’m not sure I’m making valid points right now.  My brain is pretty fuzzy, and doesn’t seem to be processing anything properly, so again, sorry about that.

At the end of that quote, Lacey asks Wanda why she’s helping ‘the rebels’ (seems an odd choice of words for a human, but meh), and Wanda explains that it’s because she and Stryder are friends.  Lacey is not happy about that, and demands to know why they would like each other, so Wanda simply explains that they each think the other is a good person.  I beg to differ.

Lacey assumes Wanda has Stryder brainwashed, which prompts Wanda and Stryder to have a brief discussion about how Lacey is worse than the Seeker, at which point Wanda makes pretty much the same point I did about the effect that Lacey had on the Seeker…and then Lacey launches into complaining about the living conditions in the caves.  Yay, I really needed to be reading about this this late in the book.  Couldn’t bother fleshing out the potentially interesting/exciting/relevant scenes, but you had to go on about all the things Lacey doesn’t like about living there so we can see just how much she’s a self-entitled, greedy bitch, eh Meyer?

Jeb apparently gave Lacey a tour of the caves the day after the Seeker was removed from her, and wished she’d been killed instead of saved throughout the whole thing.  Everyone else wanted to see Lacey, though, and welcomed her in even though she was being incredibly bitchy and whatnot, which made Wanda slightly jealous, even though she understood why Lacey was better received than she was.  Okay, I’ll give her that.

It also seems that Wanda explained to Ian and Jamie what happened with the Seeker/Lacey, and that it went a lot better than she’d expected because neither of them realized that the fact that the removal was successful meant that she would be leaving.  I’m not sure why she ever expected that they’d assume that it would mean that; again, no one wants or sees the sense in her ‘leaving’ but her, so why would they jump to that conclusion?

But Wanda thinks the reasons Ian and Jamie don’t realize what she’s going to do are that Jamie sees her and Stryder as a ‘package deal’, so he doesn’t see the need for the two to separate, and that Ian is too caught up in the potential changes being able to remove the souls might bring to notice.  Or…maybe Ian sees you as a package deal too, or thinks that if you’re removed at all, you’ll be put into another body.  Ever think of that?  Because it’s stupid to cut yourself out completely, no one thinks of it.  That’s really the only reason.  Ian and Jamie are both giving you more credit than you deserve, because they think you’re too smart and caring to plan to do what you are planning to do.

But we’re supposed to believe she is.

She then mentions that Ian is ‘enraged’ over something, and it quickly becomes obvious that that ‘something’ is Kyle, as Ian starts going on about how he or their mother should have killed him.  Apparently everyone is angry at Kyle, Jeb because whatever Kyle did is going to keep him from going on the next (and Wanda’s last, supposedly; she makes sure to point this out, but again, she’s not going to leave.  We know that.) raid to send the Seeker’s soul off to space, which he was excited about doing, especially because not going on the raid means he’s stuck with Lacey in the caves.  I’d assume he’s not the only one staying behind, though, so it’s not like he has to spend 24 hours a day with her.

It turns out Kyle has put them all in danger by taking off on his own in the night, stealing the Jeep, and going out into the world to find Jodi, his girlfriend who was taken by the aliens and is apparently in Oregon.  I’d think it’d be a little more difficult for them to pull off the raid they’re going on without the Jeep, as it sounded like the other vehicles were stashed incredibly far from the caves (since they had to walk a long time just to get to the Jeep, and then drive to the other vehicles)…but I’m sure that won’t end up being a problem at all.  Meyer will likely just skip over it.

Another useless tangent here where Meyer talks about how Jared and Jeb wanted to put off the raid to send the Seeker off planet until Kyle got back, and how there was another place they could have evacuated to temporarily, but they didn’t do any of that because Wanda was in a hurry to get the Seeker out, because she was afraid someone would kill her if she didn’t soon.

The only part of this worth noting at all is where Wanda says the Seeker deserves a “mild, pleasant new life with the Flowers“, despite that she doesn’t know how much of the Seeker’s personality was influenced by Lacey, and the Seeker still was the one who killed Wes and attempted to kill Brandt (and really, everyone else), by her own choice, not Lacey’s, so she still doesn’t deserve anything good.  I hate the way Wanda thinks.

Wanda considers it ironic that Ian helps her to speed the raid along, because he’s really just speeding up the time until her death, but either way, she’s grateful that he helps her convince Jared to get the raid done while Kyle is gone, because she’s confident that they can make it back before they have to make a decision regarding what to do about Kyle.

She’s also grateful that Ian helps her play bodyguard to the cryotank with the Seeker in it, and he ends up being the only one she trusts to hold it when she needs her arms for something.  That seems a bit ridiculous, since she’s had at least Jared, Doc and Jeb all promising to do nothing to hurt the Seeker, and Doc has yet to learn how to do the procedure so he’s sure to keep his word on that…but meh, whatever; we’re supposed to see this as her relationship with Ian growing, I assume, so fine, he’s the only trustworthy one.  That’s absolutely consistent with his personality and the story thus far.

“He was the only one who could see, in the shape of that small container, a life to be protected. He could think of that shape as a friend, something that could be loved.”

This, however, I’m going to go ahead and call bullshit on.  He doesn’t think the Seeker is “a life to be protected” or “a friend“, and definitely not “something that could be loved“; if he can’t even see those things in his own brother for attempting murder, he’s sure as hell not going to see them in someone/something that did murder someone he cared about.  The only reason he doesn’t harm the Seeker is because he wants to sleep with Wanda, and she’s a complete fucking idiot for not seeing that.  She thinks Ian is oblivious for not seeing her plan, but she’s even more oblivious for not seeing his.  He doesn’t give a shit about your Seeker, Wanda, he just doesn’t want to lose the chance to bone you.  Simple as that.

“He was the best ally of all. I was so grateful for Ian, and so grateful for the obliviousness that saved him, for the moment, from pain.”

Yeah, Ian is the best ally of all.  I’m pretty sure I’ve given about a hundred reasons so far why that’s not true, and it’s pretty damn awesome to see Wanda forgetting about what everyone else has done for her because she’s decided Ian is oh so great.  Wasn’t it Jared that took you to get the supplies for Jamie that saved his life, Wanda?  Wasn’t it Jared who went with you, without questioning you at all, to get the cryotanks?  Wasn’t it Jared who helped you when you performed the removal on the Seeker?  Did Ian have any part in any of those things?  No.  Ian is not the best ally.  Stop being blinded by your complete and utter stupidity.

So anyway, they go to Phoenix because, conveniently, there’s a shuttle field just southeast of it, with several Healing facilities nearby that Wanda can snatch a Healer at.  She wants to do a removal on one of those so the humans will have someone with them who may retain at least some knowledge of the Healing practices that the souls that were put into them were able to perform, so that they can help the humans identify and use the alien medicines properly, and point them to better (unattended) stashes of medical supplies.

Wanda describes the shuttles she sees coming and going, as well as the ones that aren’t going anywhere, which are clearly the ones she wants.  She tells the guys that everything’s labelled, because of course it is, and that they should avoid ships that are going to the Bats and See Weeds, because the See Weeds are just one system over, so it only takes a decade to make a round trip, which is too quick.  She says the Flowers are the farthest away, and the Dolphins, Bears and Spiders all take at least a century to go one way, so they should only send tanks to those, and I’m just not going to bother going into any of this crap about space travel.  I’m sure Mike will get to it when he comes to this chapter, and he’ll do it better than I could even if I wasn’t somewhat deliriously ill, so I’ll just…move on.

Oh, but I am somewhat surprised that they would label the ships by the species of the host, not the name of the planet, since the planets do seem to have names (Bears would be Mists Planet, unless I completely misunderstood all that crap)…but hey, whatever.

Wanda explains that getting the Seeker on the correct ship will be easy, because the aliens have all kinds of delivery vehicles there, so they will blend in.  In the van.  What kind of van is this that it blends in with airport delivery trucks?  Man, I wish I cared.

She starts describing an alien she can see getting ready to load some tanks onto one of the ships, and then decides to circle the ship to give him time to get inside it, so she can ‘make her move’.

“I pulled past, examining the scene in my mirrors.  There was a lit sign beside the tube that connected the head of the ship to the terminal.  I smiled as I read the words backward.  This ship was going to the Flowers.  It was meant to be.”

Yes, Meyer, it was fucking meant to be, like every fucking other thing that has happened so far.  Have I said yet how sick I am of all this convenient bullshit?  WHY does this always have to happen?  Why can’t you make ANYTHING even the SLIGHTEST bit interesting?  And then to just sum it all up as “Oh, it’s meant to be”?  Fuck you!

The man Wanda was watching disappears into the ship, so she tells the boys to get ready and pulls up between a ship’s wing and the tank truck the man she was watching was using, then turns off the van and opens up the back, where the Seeker’s tank is.  She takes the tank and begins to walk casually toward the truck, but finds that she feels more and more nervous as she goes, and finally starts to worry that the humans won’t be able to pull this off once she’s gone.

Stryder, for some reason, assures her that it’ll be okay, because if Wanda really does go, she (Stryder) will still be there, and she’ll do it herself.  I don’t see how that’s any better, because she’s still not an alien so it would still be a problem if anyone saw her…and besides, I’m not sure Jared would ever let her do something like that again after Chicago, so she’s probably not right here at all.

Wanda thanks her anyway, and puts the Seeker’s tank into the truck.

“The addition, one among hundreds, was not noticeable.”

Hundreds?  Why are hundreds going from just this one little location?  I thought they didn’t get sent off planet very often?  Is there some schedule as to when they take all of them for a flight off planet, and they just stock the tanks up until then?  Because if so, your precious humans might need to know that, so they don’t show up when they’re not even going to be able to complete this task.

And hell, even if it’s not just specific days that they do this, it was pretty fucking conveniently timed that someone was doing this right when you showed up needing to add one, and again, if not many go off planet I doubt they’re back and forth loading these things all day, so even then, the guys would need a schedule to know when to show up.  So this plan just would not work at all, in reality.  Not even a little bit.

Especially not if they had to load more than one at a time, which might be noticeable and would definitely be more difficult to carry, so they’d need either to make multiple trips or to have multiple people carry them…and again, doing only one at a time would be even riskier, because it would mean more trips.  So there is just nothing about this idea that is intelligent.

Wanda says goodbye to the Seeker and wishes her better luck next life, then goes back to the van and drives away.  Ian climbs into the passenger seat and starts talking to her once they get far enough away, saying it doesn’t look too hard, which is fucking stupid.  Wanda says they were lucky with the timing (yep, it was definitely luck -_-) and that they might have to wait longer next time, which again would be WAY more of a problem than she’s making it out to be, and I’m not sure why none of the humans see that.

Ian irritates me again by calling Wanda “the good luck charm“, but she ignores that, only responding to him when he asks if she feels better knowing the Seeker is safe, which of course she says she does, but she’s lying.  Because Ian is oh so smart, he notices she’s lying, but she manages to divert his attention by saying they should go catch some Healers, so he says nothing about the lie.

We find out that Wanda’s plan was to lead a Healer or two out of a Healing facility by telling them that she had a friend in her van that was injured, but surprise surprise, she doesn’t even have to go that far, because when she gets to the Healing facility, there are two Healers getting ever so conveniently into their car in the parking lot.   Again, Meyer, fuck you.

She pulls up behind their car, catching their attention, and then gets out of the car, all weepy because apparently she feels soooo bad for doing what she’s doing.  Ugggggh.  She tells them that she has a friend in the back and she doesn’t know what’s wrong with him, so they go with her to the back of the van, where Jared chloroforms them as soon as the door is opened.

Jared pulls the Healers into the van and off they go, Ian driving this time.  He apologizes to Wanda and holds her hand, then calls her a fucking “excellent charm“, pissing me off yet again, while Wanda gets emo because apparently their ‘missions’ went too well, and she feels that fate is rushing her.  SHE was the one who said she was in a hurry to do this shit, why the hell is she bitching about it happening too quickly?  And did she really not want the ‘missions’ to go easily?  If they hadn’t, chances are some of her friends would be either implanted or dead right now!  Stupid fucking bullshit.

They keep driving, and Wanda decides she wants fast food because how could anything be more fucking important and relevant to the storyline, so they go through the drive thru for fast food, where she gets WHO THE FUCK CARES?!

Wanda considers this her ‘last meal’, because she’s an overdramatic twit, and then we get a bunch of fucking paragraphs about her dipping a fry into a milkshake because that’s SUPER FUCKING IMPORTANT, and doesn’t make her look like a bitch at all, since she apparently only started doing it to piss Stryder off.  Yaaaay inane crap!  Why the FUCK is this shit included in this book?  No one cares about your obsession with food, Meyer!  MOVE ON!

They make it home with nothing of note happening at all, and even the Seekers are apparently no longer around, because they’ve decided people just disappear and die in the desert for no reason all the time, and Kyle must have gotten away scot free, so that’s not even a thing they have to worry about.

“We’d had a saying like that on the Mists Planet: Cross too many ice fields alone, and wind up a claw beast’s meal.  That was a rough translation.  It sounded better in Bear.”

This…is an actual line that’s in the book.  It’s lines like this that make me wonder how this book ever got published.  That is one of the dumbest things I have ever read.  Nothing would make that sound better, Wanda.  I’m just…actually baffled by how stupid that is.  Wow.  Just wow.

When they get back to the caves, a bunch of people are there waiting for them, but not the people that are dead (obviously) or Lily, which makes Wanda sad and think that maybe she’s better off not living on a “sad planet with so much death“.  Well maybe your kind should have left the humans alone, and then these things wouldn’t have had to happen, eh Wanda? The death of one of your ‘friends’ there was caused by the woman you just sent off to have a happy life elsewhere, so you should feel good knowing you prized a murderer you hated over a friend you supposedly loved.  You should leave, but not because you want to avoid death.

Wanda is also sad because random background character I don’t care about number 5’s son is being held on Lacey’s hip, which means Lacey is already trusted more than Wanda ever was, just by virtue of being human.  This is kinda unrealistic to me, given that Lacey supposedly has such an obnoxious personality and they think Wanda doesn’t, but Meyer once again needed something else for Wanda to whine about, so I’m not at all surprised she added this shit.

Jared and Ian carry the Healers they caught down to the hospital, and Wanda and Doc go through all the prep measures to perform the removals they plan to do, while Jared shows Ian how to use the cryotanks.  Wanda has Doc swear that he will follow through on all of her terms, which he does, and then we repeat that process with Jared, Ian and Jeb, because she couldn’t have just asked them all at once, before Wanda starts to show Doc how to do the procedure.

I’m going to skip over all this, because she went through it all before when she did it, so it’s just repetition, but in the end, Doc is successful at removing the soul from the female Healer.  It is mentioned that the host is losing a lot of blood during the procedure, so I guess I was right about it being damaging, but Wanda thinks the aliens must have something to stop that, which of course they will, because they have everything.

When he’s got the soul out, Doc gives it to Ian, who is “the perfect assistant” (-_-), and he puts it into a cryotank after admiring it with wonder, which makes Wanda all sappy toward him.  Wanda feels better once the tank is closed, because she realizes that everyone really will take care of the souls as well as she would have, so it doesn’t make it as bad that she has become a traitor, I guess.

But right when Wanda is starting to feel good about everything, Jeb cries out and lifts his gun because the male Healer is on his knees on his cot (amazing he managed to get that far up without anyone noticing).  Why they didn’t think to give one of the Healers more chloroform than the other when they knew they could only do one at a time, I don’t know, but hey; stupidity seems to run rampant here.

Jared tackles the Healer and pins him to the cot, intending to use more chloroform on him, but he’s too late; the Healer stares at Wanda, clearly feeling betrayed, asks her “Why”, and then collapses onto the cot, clearly having done the brain shredding thing that Wanda was so afraid the Seeker would do.

Wanda jumps toward him and cries out in anguish, and that’s the end of the chapter.  So yay, now we’re back to Wanda feeling guilty about shit again, and it’s gonna be another “back to square one” situation.  Really, Meyer, continually bringing your main character back to square one on various subjects is not a good way to flesh out a plot.  It’s lazy, stupid and boring.  I’ll be on chapter 54 next recap, and there are only 60 chapters, yet the story still hasn’t gotten interesting, fun or romantic.  What a waste of time this has been.

Still, I’ll see you next time, because I’m going to continue to waste my time until this book is done, because I said I would.  I’m sure you’re just as excited as I am to see what happens from here!  (Spoiler alert:  It’s nothing good.)

(See Mike’s take on this chapter at http://emptystress.wordpress.com!)

The Host Recap – Separated (Chapter 52)

I’m just gonna dive right into this one, because that seems the best way to get it over with.

The chapter starts with Meyer having skipped the entire scene where Jared and Wanda get the cryotanks, because they’re back at the caves, bringing in their ‘plunder’.  Part of me is happy about this, because it means I didn’t have to read all the details of them stealing the tanks and travelling back to the caves and whatnot, but at the same time, this feels both lazy and (once again) too convenient to me.

Meyer spends so much time going on and on about crap that doesn’t matter, and repeating herself, and describing things that absolutely no one needed described, and then she just skips over major sections like this, and it pisses me off.  It could be argued that the scene she skipped here was not an overly important one, but it was certainly more important than many she kept in (including the stupid Bear/Claw Beast story in the last chapter), and it is a bit important that Meyer prove that the humans could have acquired cryotanks without Wanda around, and to prove that, you need to show us what the process of getting the tanks would be.  But she just couldn’t be bothered, and she didn’t want to give us the chance to doubt that Wanda’s plan would work for any reason, so here we are.

It sucks that Meyer passed up yet another chance to include some real action/adventure in this book, as she could have had something happen during their tank collection that was actually, y’know, interesting.  Suspenseful.  Fun, even.  But no, here we are, with the same old boring crap.  Awesome.

Anyway, they’re bringing the stuff in through the south vent (the one that goes through Doc’s office) because Wanda is worried that if she goes through the main entrance, the Seeker will hear the commotion caused by their return, and will then figure out what Wanda is doing and do that brain shredding thing.  Though again, Meyer already set up the Seeker’s character as a closet coward and too in love with life to kill herself, so that’s not going to be a problem anyway.

When she gets inside, Wanda finds Doc at his desk, tools laid out, preparing for the procedure he’s about to perform on the Seeker.  He’s got a propane lantern, which surprises me a bit because I would think it would probably be a bit difficult to find propane, since the aliens don’t use the same things we used to power their vehicles and so on, so I would be surprised if this many years after the invasion there was still much (if any) propane around…though now that I’ve said that, I’m not actually sure if Meyer did say they use other methods for fuel or not.  I think she did; I seem to remember that being mentioned…but maybe not.  But I’m not going to look back through the book to find out, because if she can’t be bothered to check her own facts (and she’s proven multiple times that she can’t) then why should I?

Seeing Doc preparing to do exactly what she made him promise to do makes Wanda feel nauseous, but she’s not sure whether it’s because of what she knows is to come, or because she’s still sickened by her memory of ‘catching’ him ‘with blood on his hands‘ a few chapters back, despite that it’s been established multiple times that that was not something that she should hold against him so much for multiple reasons.  Either way, though, she’s getting what she wants and is not happy about it yet again; what else is new?

Doc is apparently relieved that Wanda and Jared are back, even though it means he’s going to have to go through with Wanda’s plan instead of just killing the Seeker, and he’s very happy when Jared reveals to him that they have brought back two crates of Heal for him.  Now he can needlessly waste as much as he wants every time someone gets hurt!  Yay!

Jared also mentions that they’ve found a better way to renew their stores than to have Wanda stab herself, but Doc doesn’t laugh, he just stares “piercingly” at Wanda.

“We both must have been thinking the same thing: Convenient, since Wanda won’t be around.“

What the…seriously, Wanda?  This is what you really think Doc is thinking right now?  Who the hell has such a cold thought about the death of someone?  I’m pretty sure he’s looking at you piercingly hoping you see how much it’s going to hurt Jared (and everyone else) to lose you, with perhaps a bit of anger at the fact that you haven’t told Jared what’s going to happen.  But whatever he’s thinking, I can guarantee it’s not that anything is fucking convenient!  He is obviously a caring, emotional person; that’s been proven a thousand times…so he would NEVER be so nonchalant about death, especially that of a friend!

Doc changes the subject, asking if they got the cryotanks, as Jared notices the tension between Doc and Wanda.  Wanda answers that they got 10 tanks, as that was all their car could hold, which verifies that it was the car they took, not the van/truck, so they really would have stuck out like a sore thumb when they were driving around the loading area the way they were, which is probably part of why Meyer skipped that scene.  Didn’t want to have to get into what would really have happened had they attempted things the way they were.

Why didn’t they just take one of the bigger vehicles, though?  It would have offered at least a chance of fitting in better, as well as providing them more space to bring back tanks and supplies. If they have those available, I just can’t see why they wouldn’t utilize them when they know they need a supply of something.  But I’m pretty sure I won’t get an answer to that.

After Wanda reveals how many tanks they got, Jared pulls on a rope behind him, and the second box of Heal and all 10 tanks clatter down onto the floor behind him.  …What?  Meyer says something about loose rock related to this, and I just don’t understand how or why this happened.  Is that really the most efficient method to get them inside?  What was the rope attached to?  What’s with the loose rock?  Why bother adding this to the scene at all; why couldn’t they have just carried the tanks in??  Why the fuck do you do this shit, Meyer?!

In the last chapter, Wanda specifically mentioned that the aliens were moving the tanks carefully, but apparently that’s just because they were occupied tanks; the unoccupied ones can be “treated roughly” without a problem because they are made of “no element that exists on this planet“.   Yeah, because if they weren’t then you couldn’t just treat them however you want without having to think about it, right Meyer?  Though really, when it comes right down to it, why the fuck do we care what they’re made of or how strong they are?  Is it going to be relevant later for some reason?  Cause it sure as hell isn’t now.

Doc picks up one of the cryotanks and looks at it, then asks Wanda if they’re hard to use.  She says they’re extremely easy to use (of course they are; they have to be for her to be able to use them and Meyer to be able to describe their use. Wouldn’t want anyone to have to think, now would we?)  and she’ll show him how, then asks what Jeb, Brandt and Aaron said about her plan.

Doc says the guys are in agreement with her terms, but she says she won’t show him how to remove the souls unless she believes that that’s true.  Doc says that’s fair, but Jared is confused, so Doc asks Wanda what she’s told Jared…which seems a very stupid thing to do right in front of him.  She says she’s only told him that she’s going to save the Seeker, then turns to Jared and explains that Doc has promised her that he’ll send the souls to another planet if she teaches him how to remove them, and that he won’t kill anyone.  I would have to think Jared would have figured that out by now, since they brought more than one cryotank back; he’d have to be pretty slow if he didn’t, at any rate.

Jared says he can agree to those terms as well, and that he’ll help the others follow through, then asks if she’s got a plan to get the souls off planet.  Wanda responds that doing that will be no more difficult than what they did in stealing the tanks; they’ll just add tanks to the pile instead of taking them away.

You have got to be kidding me.  You have GOT to be fucking KIDDING me!  Are the souls really so dense that they won’t notice a bunch of extra cryotanks being added to their load, especially when Wanda has said that so many less are going off planet than are coming in?  Even if they don’t label the tanks, you’d think they’d still notice the extras, given there can’t be many there to start!  And I’d especially think they would notice if they get a bunch of new tanks showing up more than once!

Does she expect them to just take the tanks back to the loading facility one at a time or some shit?  Because that would be the fucking stupidest idea ever.  She’s already risking their lives just having them pick up the empty tanks at all; making them also go drop off new tanks is definitely going to get them noticed at some point!  Unless the aliens are completely brain-dead, they will notice that every so often a bunch of empty tanks go missing, and then a while after that, a bunch of full ones show up!  COME ON, Meyer!  It only takes one of the humans getting caught ONCE to kill them all!

Aggggh, this is so fucking stupid!  There’s NO WAY it can be that easy, and even if it was, it’s not like Wanda showed Jared where they’re supposed to drop them off, since he’s only just finding out that that’s what they have to do now!  They wouldn’t put the new tanks with the occupied ones they saw coming in, because then they wouldn’t be sending the souls off planet, and they sure as hell wouldn’t put them with the unoccupied tanks, so how is this anywhere near as easy as she’s making it out to be?  This is illogical fucking bullshit!

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again; I fucking hate this book!  NONE OF THIS SHIT MAKES ANY SENSE!  You can’t make everything up to this point oh so fucking dramatic, then have the BIGGEST HEIST THEY HAVE TO PULL OFF be a piece of cake!  This SHOULD NOT be easier than raiding empty houses at night!  If it was, I CANNOT see why the humans wouldn’t have invaded at least the stores of medical supplies already, but also probably every single loading area the aliens use, since they’re not guarded and that makes for much easier raiding!  I am so fucking pissed off!  Okay, I need to go take a breather now, before I end up stabbing something.  I’m normally a huge fan of reading, but this book makes me never want to read again.

Okay, so after all that stupidity, Doc asks Wanda if she has a “time schedule” in mind, and Wanda thinks she hears eagerness in his voice, so she has to convince herself that he’s just eager to learn how to remove the souls, not to kill her.  I have to think she mistook the inflection in his voice, because as eager as he probably would be to learn this sort of thing, I’d think that more than that, he’d be nervous about what might happen and what he has to do to Wanda, and I think that’s probably what she’s actually hearing.  Different people express nervousness in different ways, and I just can’t imagine Doc is in a huge rush to deal with all of this right now.  But at least she didn’t completely assume the worst of him.

Jared asks if they can wait until he takes the Jeep back to its hiding spot, because he wants to watch, and Doc says they can.  Poor Aaron and Brandt.  Jared leaves, and once he’s gone, Doc asks Wanda if she talked to Jared about Stryder.  Wanda says she didn’t, but she thinks Jared knows where this is all going.  She feels he must have guessed her plan, and I feel the same way, because they’re not exactly being subtle about it, but it really seems like he actually hasn’t figured it out, so we’re still going to need to deal with dramafest later on, I’m sure.

Doc tries to argue that Jared won’t allow her to kill herself once he figures out that bit, but she cuts him off, saying that Jared won’t get a say, and reminding Doc that the deal was all or nothing.  Doc gives up on arguing with her, and decides to go talk to Jeb about getting things ready.

“He reached for a bottle on the table.  The chloroform.  I was sure the souls had something better to use.  I would have to try to find it for Doc, before I was gone.”

Yep, there’s that chloroform again that I’m not sure how they got such easy access to, especially since they seem to have a fair amount of it, as well as the obvious reference to the Still that Wanda saw when they were driving around looking for the cryotanks, that I mentioned would surely come up later.  You’re not getting any less transparent, Meyer.  Not mentioning the Still by name here is not clever, it just makes Wanda seem like even more of an idiot for not thinking of it, when she just saw and commented on it an hour or so ago.

Before Doc can leave, Wanda asks him who knows about what they’re doing, and he says it’s still only Jeb, Aaron and Brandt, and that they all want to watch.  Wanda is okay with that, but tells Doc not to tell anyone else about it, which he agrees to and then leaves.

And this is where this chapter gets absolutely fucking stupid.

With Doc gone, Wanda goes to sit against the wall, wanting to be nowhere near the cot they’ll use to perform the removal.  She realizes, while trying to distract herself from thinking about her own death, that she hasn’t heard from Stryder in a while, and at first I was glad that she noticed that because I thought it very strange that neither she nor Jared thought to consider Stryder’s feelings about this at all, but I’m now not glad for it because of what Stryder’s presence does to the next couple of pages.

Wanda is surprised that Jared spooning her didn’t wake Stryder up and piss her off, and I’m not at all sure why Jared didn’t notice that Stryder didn’t show up there, unless he’s started forgetting about her in favour of Wanda, but even thinking about that again and attempting to call out to Stryder doesn’t elicit a response.  Wanda can still feel Stryder’s presence, unlike when she disappeared completely, so she’s not worried about Stryder, but she is afraid that Stryder is ignoring her, so she keeps trying to get a response from her.

It’s not until Wanda “apologizes” for spooning with Jared by blaming him entirely for it happening because she says she “didn’t do anything“, so she doesn’t think it’s fair for Stryder to be mad at her, that Stryder says anything.  Yeah, Wanda, because Jared was totally pinning you down to the ground, and there’s no way you could have moved if it made you uncomfortable or feel guilty.  You had to stay there, and it’s all Jared’s fault.  Childish bitch; learn to take some responsibility for your actions.

Stryder is annoyed at Wanda but says she’s not mad at her, she just wants Wanda to leave her alone.  Wanda asks Stryder why she won’t talk to her, but Stryder just ignores her again, so Wanda prods around trying to find out what Stryder’s thinking.

“She tried to keep me out, to put the wall in place, but it was too weak from disuse.  I saw her plan.”

Too weak from disuse?  The fuck?  It’s not a physical object, Meyer; if she could do it when she barely existed and was new to having an invader in her brain, she sure as hell could do it now when she is stronger and has good reason.  Quit it with the fucking convenient bullshit, you talentless hack; I’m not buying it!  I’d love to say that goes for everyone else as well, but I’d clearly be wrong about that, so I’ll just toss a big ol’ fuck you over to you on my own behalf.

Wanda asks Stryder if she’s lost her mind, because she realizes that Stryder’s ‘plan’ is to make herself disappear so that Wanda won’t kill herself, because she can’t think of any other way to stop Wanda.  Wanda says she doesn’t get why Stryder would do that, because she knows Stryder wants to be with Jared and Jamie again, which Stryder admits to, but says that at the same time, she can’t stand the idea of being the death of Wanda.

Oh, for god’s sake, this is such fucking bullshit.  Stryder has been fighting since day one to get her body back, and as much as she may want Wanda to stay living, she would NOT erase HERSELF to accomplish that.  There is just NO FUCKING WAY that would happen.  Stryder is not THAT stupid.  But I’m sure it’s because at least in part she’s jumping into Wanda’s normal self-pity mode too, where she thinks Wanda should live because she’s more useful, so she (Stryder) should just martyr herself, especially because she just couldn’t live with the guilt of knowing that she killed Wanda even though she didn’t because Wanda made that stupid goddamn decision herself and Stryder tried to fight her tooth and nail on it…aggh,.  Holy fuck, Stryder, is this ever stupid.

You’ve seen how she thinks and what she does, and I don’t care how much you ‘love her’ (as ridiculous as THAT even is to consider), you would not kill yourself so that she could have YOUR body, and YOUR boyfriend, and YOUR brother.  Fuck that.  I will not believe this shit for a single second, and I don’t know how any reader has.

Wanda tells Stryder she loves her too, and for some reason that grates on me like nothing else, and then she says that there’s not enough room for the both of them in her body, in the caves, and in Jared and Jamie’s lives.  Um…why, exactly?  You guys seemed to come to a peace on this, and you would never have thought this way if the Seeker hadn’t shown up; in fact you were super excited to get back to life in the caves before that.  So you know damn well you’re full of it.

Stryder says she disagrees about there not being enough room, so Wanda simply tells her to stop trying to annihilate herself, because if she thinks Stryder can do it, she’ll make Doc remove her right away, or she’ll tell Jared about Stryder’s plan.  Telling Jared is a threat because of what Jared said before to Stryder about giving no guarantees as to what he would or wouldn’t do to keep her around, so Wanda starts to picture the kiss she had with Jared, as well as various times Stryder and Jared made out or had sex.

Stryder is clearly displeased by this, though I’m not sure why if she’s planning to give up her body to Wanda, meaning that that stuff will only continue to happen anyway, and she (Stryder) just won’t be able to stop it…but she says she won’t give up anyway.  Wanda tells her that she’s been warned, and that she expects no more silent treatment, and then they decide to think about something else.  Yeah, okay.  Sure.  That’s absolutely realistic.

They start thinking about where they’d like to send the Seeker, and Stryder votes for the Mists Planet because of the Claw Beasts, but Wanda thinks it would be better to send her to the Planet of the Flowers.  She thinks that would be more fitting because it’s so mellow, and she believes the Seeker needs a “nice long lifetime eating sunshine“.  So…in other words, your punishment for her is to give her an easy life?  I get that you think that’s oh so clever because she’s evil and angry and you think she would hate that, but you don’t know that she wouldn’t enjoy it.  That’s like sending a serial rapist to a resort for the rest of his life.  It is NOT appropriate for the crime she committed, and there should be no chance that she’ll enjoy herself.

After that, they flip through some of Wanda’s memories because apparently they’re like fairytales to Stryder, so Stryder tells Wanda some fairytales too, and this is SO FUCKING STUPID!  I have no idea why we’re wasting time talking about this when action is supposed to be happening!  You skipped an entire scene that at least had the potential of having something interesting happening, all to gives us stupid crap about fairytales?!  What the hell kind of writing is this??  It’s HORRIBLE!

Luckily, Wanda hears Jared coming back, so we don’t have to spend any more time on that bullshit, and since he decided to come through the main entrance when he returned, Jeb, Brandt, Aaron and Doc are with him, as is the Seeker, being carried by Jared, because Meyer wanted to spare us another chance of anything exciting happening by just skipping over the whole process it must have been to subdue the Seeker.  Yay.  At this point, Wanda realizes that it’s time for the “first stage of her death”, which upsets Stryder, but Wanda just tells her to pay attention because she’ll need to help the humans with it when she (Wanda) is gone.

Stryder protests the idea of Wanda dying, but not the idea of paying attention, and then everyone is in the room, the Seeker unconscious.  Jared lays the Seeker on the cot gently, so that we can be reminded AGAIN that Wanda was not treated as nicely as that, but Wanda is sooo wonderful that she appreciates the ‘gesture’ (FUCK OFF MEYER), and Wanda asks Doc for the No Pain, which he goes off to get.

“I stared at the Seeker’s face while I waited, wondering what it would look like when her host was free.  Would anything be left?  Would the host be empty or would the rightful owner reassert herself?”

Again, as mentioned in the previous chapter, we already know the answers to these questions.  You know what will happen, Wanda; we both know that.  You know the host mind will come back, because this has happened before, and because of all the stuff with the Seeker wanting to take Stryder’s body for her own.  So just stop.  Please.  I’m tired of dealing with the same shit over and over with you, so seriously, just stop.

Doc gives Wanda the No Pain, which she administers to the Seeker while we get a completely pointless description of how small the Seeker’s face is as compared to Wanda’s hands.  She asks Jared to flip the Seeker over onto her stomach, which he does, and then someone turns on the propane lantern and Wanda realizes that Doc spent the time she and Jared were gone covering up the holes in the hospital walls/ceiling that allowed for sunlight, so that they could have the light on without any Seekers noticing.  Seems like a totally doable task for one man by himself.  Sure.

Blah blah blah, descriptions of people’s breathing and shifting positions, and then Wanda asks for some Heal, Clean, Seal and Smooth, which Doc gives to her.  She brushes the Seeker’s hair aside to make the cut, but then decides she doesn’t want to, so Doc agrees to do it for her.

It takes a long fucking time for Meyer to get to that, though, because she decides she has to lengthen out everything Doc says and does, and then have Wanda suddenly realize she’s an idiot because she hasn’t prepared the tank for the Seeker yet.  She gets Jared to get one of the cryotanks, then explains to him how to power it on and open the lid, which really doesn’t sound, when I describe it that way, like it’s a long process, but it actually takes an entire page for Meyer to describe it.  It was truly riveting.  Or not.

Jared is, for some stupid reason, surprised that a cryotank is cold, and then he asks how it’s powered. Wanda says she knew the answer to that when she was a Spider, but she can’t remember now.  Yet another thing Meyer knew her audience might wonder about, but didn’t want to be bothered having to describe.  Ah, the writing just gets lazier and lazier.

Wanda finally tells Doc to make the cut, so he does, and then Wanda asks him to hold the Seeker’s hair while she goes in to get the soul.  She knows he won’t be able to understand what she’s doing this time, because it will need to be fully explained to him, so she just goes about reaching in and holy fuck it takes almost an entire page for Meyer to describe the process of removing the soul.  I am so not talking about all that.

One thing I wonder, though: How the hell is there enough space at the back of a human’s neck for Wanda to stick her entire finger into it without causing other damage?  That just does not seem right to me.  It’s also quite disturbing.  I want to move on, but I have to finish this chapter, so I can’t, but daaaaaamn I really want to because my god, I hate this.

However she does it, Wanda does get a finger in there, and starts feeling up the alien simply so Meyer can describe it, and then blah blah blah blah blah, so much description I don’t care about as she massages the entire damn thing, and then finds an arbitrarily numbered connection that is apparently the vital one and massages it to try to relax the alien, because “Kindness was always the way of the souls.  Never violence.”  -_- Stabstabstabstabstab.

The alien lets go after she massages it in its special place for a while, and then she feels it wriggle free and begin to twist its way out of the human’s neck.  When it’s out a bit, she wraps her fingers around it and pulls it out the rest of the way, and then we get to hear about how beautiful it is again, just like we did at the beginning of the book when Fords inserted Wanda.

Apparently Wanda feels love for the Seeker when she sees her in this form; maternal love…and I fucking hate this.  I’m a mother, and I would never love something just because it was beautiful if it was also EVIL and a MURDERER.   It’s not her child; I don’t care what reasoning Meyer tries to use here.  Fuck, she (Meyer) is just constantly throwing the good messages at us, isn’t she?  So glad young girls read this book.  We need more girls in the world who’ll love anything as long as it’s beautiful, even if it’s severely dangerous and horrible.

Wanda tells the soul to “sleep well“, then puts it into the cryotank and closes it up.  She takes the tank from Jared and begins to cradle it against her chest, and I’ve gotta say, if I was one of the guys in the room right now, I’d be really worried.  She should not be treating a murderer this way, and that she does just because it’s an alien does say a lot more about her than she, Meyer or anyone else seems willing to admit.  And only Doc knows what she intends, so it should just be alarming to all the others.  But, of course, it’s not.

Wanda looks back to the human body on the table and sees that Doc is already to the point of applying Smooth to the wound, so clearly she did not actually give a fuck whether the host was harmed or not, because she just left it to bleed out while she hugged the soul.  Not that it would have in that little time, she just obviously didn’t care one way or the other, so it’s good that Doc did.

She doesn’t see it that way, though; she just sees it as them being a good team, because she took care of the soul while he took care of the body.  Yeah, yeah, that’s a fitting viewpoint from her perspective and mine is from mine because I hate her; I know.

When Doc is done, he looks up at Wanda and tells her that what just happened was incredible, so she praises him for doing a good job.  Doc asks Wanda when she thinks the host body will wake up, and she says it’ll depend on how much chloroform she inhaled (which is apparently not much) and whether the host’s mind is actually still in there (which we already know it is).

“Before I could ask, Jared lifted the nameless woman tenderly from the cot, rolled her face-up, and laid her on another, cleaner resting place.  This tenderness did not move me.  This tenderness was for the human, for Melanie…”

Holy fuck you are such a fucking selfish bitch!  You’re moved by Jared’s ‘tenderness’ toward the Seeker because you know he’s only doing it to make up for not doing it to you, but you are bitter about him being tender toward a human body that’s just been through a horrifying ordeal and is recovering from surgery, because you think he’s doing it for Stryder?  Maybe he’s just doing it because it’s the fucking decent thing to do; ever think of that??

And hell, even if it was for Stryder, not just because she’s a human and he is a fucking half-decent person who doesn’t just toss people around nonchalantly, Stryder just ATTEMPTED TO KILL HERSELF TO SAVE YOUR LIFE, AFTER YOU STOLE HER BODY.  How DARE you act like you should be bitter about kindness toward her??  Seriously, what the fuck is WRONG with this character?  How do people like her?  How do people identify with her?  Why does ANYONE want her to stick around???

Doc checks the human’s pulse, then peels back her eyelids to look at her eyes with a flashlight, finding that they are back to normal.  He and Jared are both amazed, as is Jeb, though he also admits he’s conflicted, like he thinks Wanda is.  But Wanda is not conflicted for the right reasons, Jeb.  That’s what you don’t know.

Aaron and Brandt are apparently small children now, because they start talking in excited but immature ways, even though I’d think they would be feeling some conflict about this too…especially Brandt.  This should not be what Brandt wants for the Seeker, as much as he may want it in general.  That would have to cast somewhat of a shadow on the occasion, though I do imagine he’d be excited otherwise.

They want to go get more bodies to perform the procedure on, but Jeb tells them to wait because there will be no more “soul snatching” until the Seeker’s cryotank is safely on its way to space.  Wanda agrees with this, so…they really are supposed to send them off one at a time, and expect no one to notice that they keep fucking showing up there?  Seriously?  Agggh!

Wanda thinks about how she’s going to need more people to help with doing these things, because Jeb, Doc and Jared aren’t enough, which leads her to realize that she’s going to have to talk to Ian about it.  Realizing this apparently upsets her greatly, because she doesn’t want to have to tell Ian goodbye, and the thought of doing so brings her even more pain than the idea of pointlessly giving her life up for the Seeker does.  I can’t go any further into this, because I cannot at all support that she’s feeling anything positive for Ian.  I just can’t.  So I won’t.

She thinks the only thing worse than saying goodbye to Ian will be saying goodbye to Jared, but that’s because she thinks Jared won’t feel any pain at the thought of losing her, because he’ll be happy to get Stryder back, whereas the hurt of Ian is because he will feel pain when he loses her.  Yep, she’s so selfless that she doesn’t want Ian to hurt, but she also doesn’t want Jared not to hurt, because his happiness is not more important than what she perceives as his slight against her by not loving her back.  Have I mentioned how much I hate this bitch?

She says she’s not even planning to say goodbye to Jamie, which is really fucking nice of her since she knows Jamie does care about her, and that will hurt him a lot, but what the fuck does she care about abandoning someone who loves her and who she supposedly loves, without even saying goodbye, when she knew in advance that she would have to do so?  Remember, she cares about how people feel only when their feelings are inconvenient to her!  She cares how Ian will feel because she’ll have to face it, but if she can just go ahead and ignore Jamie, well then, she won’t have to feel anything for him, will she?

I get it, it would be much harder to say goodbye to Jamie, but if she’s so selfless and whatever the fuck, she should care more about how it will feel for him than how it will feel for her, but she clearly doesn’t.  So fuck her.  I will NEVER believe that she is selfless, no matter what she does.  Not at all, ever.

Doc calls Wanda over, because apparently she went somewhere at some point, and when she gets over to the bed where Doc is standing, she sees that the human is beginning to wake up.  The human begins to moan, and everyone goes silent, so Wanda tells Doc to talk to her because she doesn’t know what to say.

Doc tells the human she’s safe, and she opens her eyes and looks at Doc for a moment, then looks around the room.  When she sees Wanda, she recognizes her, then scowls…which I can only assume she does because Wanda is an alien, not because of the Seeker’s history with Wanda, unless the human host is evil too.  She says it feels good to have her head back and thanks them, and that’s the end of the chapter.

Soooo she woke up from the chloroform too quickly, in my opinion, and she really shouldn’t be that clear of mind right after waking up from chloroform, no matter how wonderful the No Pain is, but hey, whatever, it’s what happened and the chapter is done and I can’t muster the energy to talk about it anymore.  I did what I had to do, but these chapters are incredibly fucking draining, so that’s it for me!

(See Mike’s take on this chapter at http://emptystress.wordpress.com!)

Q&A: Somewhere Out There

The twenty-fifth question for the Q&A section of this blog is: “Where would you most like to be right now?”

Hmm, that’s a hard one; there are a few places I’d like to be!  I’d like to be in London to see Coriolanus live, I’d like to be in New York to see No Man’s Land and Waiting for Godot live…or in some warm, beautiful destination where I could just relax  and enjoy the beach, the water, the warm breeze; that sort of thing.  Yeah, that’d be nice.  But so would travelling most anywhere, really.  If only I could somehow combine all those things….or do any of them. 😛

If only it began today.

I’m actually not sure what else to say about this, so…there’s your answer for today!  I could have gone into some sort of deep, emotional thing about how I’d like to be with my “soulmate”, but I always want that, so I thought I should answer with an actual place.  Ideally, though, my “soulmate” would be at all those places with me, so…yeah.  There you have it!

Check out Mike’s answer at http://emptystress.wordpress.com, and please feel free to post your own in the comments! 

(Next question: “What was the biggest sin ever committed against you?”)

The Host Recap – Prepared (Chapter 51)

Well, that seals it: I’m done hoping this book is going to get even the slightest bit better before it ends.  I really thought that the home stretch of it might be okay, because surely the story had to go somewhere, but nope, I’m done.  There is no way that’s going to happen.  It’s only going to get worse, in new and even more horrible ways.  So I give up.  But hey, I tried, and I held out hope a lot longer than I’m sure anyone thought I would.  You’ve got to at least give me that.

In case that little intro didn’t make it perfectly clear, this chapter was atrocious.  There was not a single thing I liked at all at any point, and so much that made me actually shudder with rage.  I am stunned by how unbelievably bad this chapter was.  Remind me again why anyone likes this book?  How could they look past this stuff??

This is my least favourite chapter of the book so far, and that’s saying something.  And there are so many pages of it…ugh…

The chapter starts with Wanda finding Jared and Jamie in their room, even though she was just there about 5 minutes ago and they weren’t there then, and they weren’t on their way there either (since she didn’t pass them in her travels; we’d have heard about it if she did).  Again, I find this too convenient, but at the same time, I’m glad Meyer didn’t go into an extensive description of Wanda going to multiple places looking for them and not finding them, so I’ll take it.

Both guys look worried, so Wanda assumes they’ve talked to Jeb, though all Jeb could have told them was that she said she needed a minute.  Jared asks if she’s okay while Jamie throws his arms around her waist, and again, his actions are too fucking childish for his age, and he should definitely be tall enough by 14 that throwing his arms around her waist would be incredibly awkward, unless she is a giant.  Remember, Meyer, growth spurts are a thing in puberty, and Stryder hasn’t been described as being very tall.

Wanda tells Jared that she needs his help, so he stands and asks her what she needs him to do.  She tells him she’s going on a raid and needs some “extra muscle”, so he asks what they’re going for as he “shifts into mission mode”.  Oh for fuck’s sake; mission mode?  Really?

Mission mode.

She says she’ll explain on the way because they don’t have much time, and of course Jamie asks if he can go too.  Both Jared and Wanda shoot him down, so he lets go of Wanda and sulks on the mattress, because again Meyer has forgotten how fucking old this child is and that that is not the kind of reaction a 14 year old boy would normally give in that situation.  Especially not after all he’s been through.

This will seriously never stop annoying me.  As a writer, you are supposed to get to know your characters well enough that they almost take on a life of their own; they do things regardless of what you thought you wanted them to do and how you wanted them to do it.  Meyer clearly does not do this, because she has yet to keep any character consistent in this book (even Doc, at this point, has gone off track), and she doesn’t even know her own characters well enough to write them properly based on their ages.  For a bestselling author, she sure is shit at writing characters.

Jared and Wanda leave, going back toward Doc’s office, because Wanda wants to use the secret entrance/exit there to leave instead of the main entrance, because she doesn’t want to have to explain what she’s doing to anyone whose path she might cross.  No, she wants Doc to have to do that for her, so he can take the brunt of any anger they might feel regarding the situation.  God, she’s so thoughtful.

THIS is more thoughtful.

Oh, I know I didn’t mention the secret entrance/exit when she mentioned it in a previous chapter, so you might be a bit confused by that if you’re not actually reading the book (I envy you), but that was because I really didn’t see the point of mentioning it since it was clearly just another detail she threw in that was useless information at the time, but that was going to be conveniently necessary in the future.

I’m willing to bet that Meyer got to this chapter, then realized that with the way she set things up she couldn’t have Wanda leave without Jeb, Aaron and Brandt seeing her on her way out, so instead of trying to figure out a way around that, she just went back to the chapter where she laid out the ‘map’ of the caves and added in the secret entrance to get around it.  No part of me believes she actually had the forethought to put it in at the time she wrote that chapter.

Wanda asks Jared if he knows where Lily is, saying she doesn’t think she should be alone.  Suddenly she cares, when she’s desperate to change the subject because she doesn’t want Jared to figure out she’s planning to kill herself, but she didn’t care at all when it wasn’t convenient for her.  Great.  If you didn’t think she should be alone, Wanda, you should have stayed with her instead of running off to contemplate keeping the woman who MURDERED HER BOYFRIEND alive, or at least should have found someone to be with her then.  Don’t pretend to care now.  It’s offensive.

Jared says that Ian is with Lily, so Wanda says Ian is “the kindest” (what is she, 5?), then worries about who will comfort Ian when she dies.  Well, at least she gives a fuck about someone, even if it is for all the wrong reasons.

Jared asks what they’re in such a hurry to get, so Wanda tells him they’re getting cryotanks, and somehow, Jared doesn’t have any questions about that.  He just keeps running along with her, not saying anything, until he decides to ask where they’ll get them.  I guess after all their time together ‘raiding’ and such, he probably trusts her, but even so, I’d think he’d still have a question or two.  He is human, after all, and humans are curious by nature.

Meyer tries to pass off Jared’s lack of curiosity by saying he’s too focused on planning the raid, but that’s a little bit ridiculous to me.  She’s clearly only refraining from telling him now so it can be more substantial later when he does find out, but that’s just not the way this would go in real life.  Especially not when Jared knows the Seeker is back at home, and that’s a more immediate concern that needs to be dealt with.

Wanda tells Jared that empty cryotanks are stored outside Healing facilities until they’re needed, which makes them just so useful in emergency situations, since obviously in an emergency you can either wait to remove the soul until you’re at a Healing facility, or take it out and get to a Healing facility before it dies, which Wanda already said would not work because they don’t last long enough outside of their host body.  Yep, this makes total sense.  Especially because Wanda said they’re only taught how to remove the souls for emergencies.

It’s about as useful as this.

This leads me to wonder: Why do the aliens care about removing the souls without harming the host bodies, anyway?  I understand why they’d want to be able to do it without harming the soul, but why would they care about the body, if they only remove them in emergency situations or when the host body is about to die?

I mean, if the body’s going to die anyway, damage to it wouldn’t matter, and if it’s an emergency, I would say the removal would be either because the body was severely damaged already, or because its host was really messed up or too resistant, in which case it would not be usable by anyone else (especially since they’ve stopped using adult bodies as hosts for that reason).  Really, the only time they’d do that is with one as stubborn as Wanda’s Seeker, who wants to go a turn in a resistant body to see if she can control it any better.  So it just seems like the aliens would not, at any point, have bothered to figure out how to do this…but oh wait; they’re all things wonderful, so that’s the excuse Meyer would use.  -_-

…And I just realized that we actually knew that it was possible to remove souls from host bodies without harm to either all the way back in the chapter when Wanda decided to leave San Diego (I think it was San Diego…) to get rid of Stryder, because she was talking about going on to a different life, and the worry was that the Seeker was going to put her soul into Stryder’s body, which was something that was considered to be absolutely possible.  So Wanda’s “big secret” was actually not really a secret at any point in the book.  We knew it all along.  Just…wow.

That also means that Wanda does know whether or not the host’s mind will come back after the soul is removed, because it obviously doesn’t disappear, or there would have been no reason for the Seeker to put herself into Stryder’s body, because Stryder would have been gone already and therefore useless to the Seeker.  So…all of the ‘important plot points’ (I use that term very loosely) of the last chapter were things we already knew.  Yep.

Anyway, back to the cryotanks.  They’re stored outside of Healing facilities, and Wanda says there’s a surplus of them because more souls are coming in than leaving.  She also says that no one will guard the tanks, so the aliens won’t notice if some go missing.  Oh, how fucking convenient.  Also, this makes no sense, but you’ll see why that’s the case later.

Why would nobody guard the tanks?!  Aren’t they kind of important?  Do they not guard them because there’s a surplus, or do they just feel that there isn’t anything the humans could do with them that would be harmful enough to worry about them being stolen?  I could see why that might be true, but at the same time, humans can sometimes be pretty inventive; I’m sure we could at least make use of the parts that make up the cryotanks to form other things, if we so desired.  Oh well, not a big deal, I just hate that this is so fucking convenient again.  Of course they’re not guarded.

Jared asks where she got this information, and she tells him that she saw them in Chicago, as well as crated outside the Healing facility they went to in Tucson.  So in other words, she actually doesn’t know anything about them, because she’s only briefly seen them on a couple of occasions.   Well, I know I’d feel good about that if I was Jared.

He asks how she can be sure of…something, which she assumes is how she can be sure they’re tanks, if she saw them in crates, and she asks if he’s noticed the aliens’ fondness for labels.  Oh dear god, are you fucking serious?  “Fondness for labels”?  Holy fuck, this is stupid.  Everything is conveniently fucking labeled so Meyer doesn’t have to think at all about how to make the upcoming scenes work.  She doesn’t want to have to do any real writing, so she’ll just pass it off as the aliens being super fucking organized and loving labels, so Wanda and Jared can waltz right in without anything of interest happening at any fucking point.  I’m gonna lose it, I swear.

There are a few problems with your stupid labeling shit, though, Meyer: For one, if everything is fucking labeled, aren’t the aliens just asking for the humans to come and raid everything they’ve got, since it’s pretty fucking easy for them to tell what everything is, and they supposedly don’t guard any of it?  And on top of that, if they’re so fucking obsessed with labeling and organization and whatever the fuck, why the goddamn hell wouldn’t they have labeled the individual tanks, as even humans would have done, which would mean that they certainly would notice that some were missing? Especially if the humans have to make trips like this more than once, thanks to Wanda’s stupid fucking ‘deal’ with Doc!

Fuuuuck, this is so fucking stupid!  And that’s on top of the fact that Wanda is apparently all upset and stressed and sad at this point, so what the hell is she doing making lighthearted comments like “Haven’t you noticed our fondness for labels“?  BE. FUCKING. CONSISTENT.  Seriously.

Jared says he’s not doubting her, he just wants to make sure she’s thought it through, which she hasn’t at all, so it’s good that he’s being cautious.  There’s apparently a double meaning in his words, though that makes no fucking sense because he’d have absolutely no reason to suspect that she would be planning to kill herself since, as mentioned in the last recap, there is NO FUCKING GOOD REASON TO DO THAT, so a normal person’s brain wouldn’t go to that.  He would just be sincerely hoping she wasn’t leading them into something stupid without thinking about it.

The only other double meaning there could be is that he’s worried that she’s trying to put him in danger, or doesn’t realize that she might, by not killing the Seeker, which would mean he doesn’t trust her as much as it seems like he does, in which case I don’t know why he’d even go through with this without knowing WHY she wants the goddamn cryotanks.  None of this makes any fucking sense.

Wanda says she’s thought it through, though, so off they go, and luckily for them, Doc is already gone.  Convenient?  I think so!  Wanda wonders how Jeb and the others are taking what Doc’s got to tell them, and hopes they’re not discussing it in front of the Seeker, because she’ll ‘assume’ Wanda has turned traitor and will destroy her host’s brain from the inside.  She won’t have to assume, Wanda; removing her from her host body when it’s not her idea would be nothing other than a betrayal in her eyes, so if she hears them talking about it, you can guarantee you’ll return to shredded Seeker brains.

Oh, wait, we know the Seeker is secretly a coward and wants too desperately to live, so even if she does know what Wanda plans to do, she won’t shred her own brain, so this was all pointless to consider.  Yay.

Wanda wonders if she’s just giving the humans what they need with no restrictions – WHICH SHE SHOULD BE – because she’s not sure if Doc will keep his word, but then in the same breath she decides he will try to, he’ll just need someone to help him, and she’s not sure who will do that.  Hopefully no one, because it’s a stupid fucking plan, and Doc would never do it if she didn’t make him feel so guilty, so maybe if no one helps, things won’t turn out quite as stupid as she’s trying to make them be.

They climb through the vent and go down the hill, to the tune of Wanda’s excessive angst about her “gentle brothers’ and sisters’ lives” that she’s putting into “the angry and motivated hands of (her) adopted human family”, because she still hasn’t learned fucking anything and clearly only exists to make me angry.

“My humans had every right to hate the souls.  This was a war, and I was giving them a weapon.  A way to kill with impunity.”

Yes, the humans have every right to hate the souls, but otherwise, whaaaaaat?  They don’t want to use the ‘weapon’ you’re giving them to kill the souls, they want to use it to save the humans!  They’re not intending to kill anyone, and you’ve got no proof they ever were!  They just wanted to bring their own back.  You’ve made Doc promise to keep the souls alive, and he’s agreed, however stupid it is, so if that happens they won’t even be killing anyone at any point, just saving lives all around!  YOUR KIND ARE THE KILLERS, WANDA, BECAUSE THEY STOLE THE HUMANS’ LIVES COMPLETELY UNPROVOKED.  GET IT THROUGH YOUR FUCKING HEAD.

Jared and Wanda run through the desert as the sun begins to rise, because they know the Seekers will be out looking for humans during daylight and they don’t want to be caught.  I’d like to think they’re also running because Wanda has, without warning, just left Aaron and Brandt, who want to be able to properly grieve over Wes, standing guard indefinitely, with Jeb expecting Wanda back after a ‘breather’, and Doc having to deal with the position she just put him in, so she wants to get back to them as quickly as possible, but come on, it’s Wanda; she’s not that considerate.  She’s only running for her own safety; fuck everyone else.

The whole next section is complete and utter bullshit, because it’s all just Wanda trying to make herself feel better about her decision.  She thinks it would be wrong to ‘arm’ the humans ‘in exchange for the Seeker’s life‘ (even though she shouldn’t be fucking saving the Seeker at all, especially because, as she states here herself, the Seeker “would count her own life dearer than the lives of many“, so she clearly shouldn’t be allowed to live), and decides that the Seeker isn’t worth selling out the others, but that she has to do this because this will happen again.

She goes on about how the humans will kill any soul they encounter unless she gives them another option, but that’s not true; they didn’t kill her, did they?  And they didn’t even kill the Seeker without checking with Wanda first, even though she killed someone, so what proof does Wanda have that they’d kill the souls at all, for any reason other than an accident as they try to find a way to bring back the humans (which they promised not to do while she’s around anyway)?  They’ll only intentionally kill the ones that attempt to kill them.  Which seems entirely reasonable, as the souls do the same goddamn thing, or they wouldn’t carry weapons around.  So far, Seeker is the only one who intentionally killed someone who didn’t deserve it, because he didn’t have a chance to attempt to kill her before she shot him.

“More than that, I was going to save Melanie, and that was worth the sacrifice.  I was going to save Jared and Jamie, too.  Might as well save the repugnant Seeker while I was at it.”

Yeah, of course, lump a murderer in with 3 people who did absolutely fucking nothing except try to survive, and none of whom have actually intentionally hurt anyone at any point.  That’s totally fucking fair.  They’re obviously just as bad as her just by virtue of being human, and she’s obviously just as deserving as they are of life, after murdering one person in cold blood and attempting to murder a second.  This is so unbelievably fucked up.

“The souls were wrong to be here.  My humans deserved their world.  I could not give it back to them, but I could give them this.  If only I could be sure that they would not be cruel.”

Oh, what the fuck?  Once again, you see that the souls are the ones in the wrong, and that the humans have done nothing but try to defend themselves, yet you think the humans shouldn’t be cruel?  Is it not fucking cruel to you that your kind tried to fucking erase EVERY HUMAN ON EARTH so that they could use their bodies, when the humans did NOTHING to them?  Why shouldn’t they be “cruel”?  They cannot possibly do anything as bad as what you’ve done to them, even if they do outright murder every soul they encounter!  Being imprisoned in your own body while someone else uses it for purposes you never would have, for the rest of your life, is far worse – and definitely crueler – than death!  Fuck you, Wanda!

“I would just have to trust Doc, and hope.

And maybe wring the promise from a few more of my friends, just in case.”

You manipulative little shit.  You’re not even trying to hide it any more, you’re just coming right the fuck out with your manipulative crap!  You better not “wring the promise” from a single fucking other person, you bitch.  How dare you act like you feeling guilty is enough that you should kill yourself, but then go on to make other people feel guilty?  You seriously do not give a shit about ANYONE but yourself, do you??

“I wondered how many humans lives I would save.  How many souls’ lives I might save.  The only one I couldn’t save now was myself.”

FUCK YOU AND YOUR EMO BULLSHIT.  Once again, YOU MADE THIS DECISION, YOU CAN STOP IT.  And trust me, no matter what you do, YOU are not going to be saving ANY humans lives, you’re going to COST human lives, and you’ll get credit for NOTHING more than that. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.

It’s amazing how much rage this book induces in me.  I’m only 3 pages in, and already almost on page 7 of this recap, because this chapter is so infuriating.  I can’t even think straight with how angry I am, sometimes.

They keep running until they get to the Jeep, then head into the cave that it’s hidden in.  Jared grabs them some water, which they sit in the cave and drink before Jared mentions that they’ll need to wait until dark if they want to steal the cryotanks and not get caught.  It’s fucking JUST become morning, and Jared thinks that “I could tell you were in a hurry to get out of there” is a good enough reason to have run all that way, when they can’t even fucking DO anything for at least another 12 hours?  Really?

She only wanted to get out of there so she wouldn’t have to explain herself!  She wanted Doc to have to do it for her!  Now the guys are going to have to guard the Seeker for the entire day and the night while these selfish bastards go get the tanks!  That’s not “a breather”, you inconsiderate bitch!

Wanda says it’s fine that they’ll have to wait because she’s sure the guys will wait for them now, proving she really just does not give even the slightest of shits about how anyone else feels, and then they start talking about the Seeker so that Wanda can be emo again about how the Seeker was given better living conditions than she was.  Yayyy, this is SO FUCKING IMPORTANT, I’m so glad Meyer included it in this chapter!  It just wasn’t long enough without it!

“‘Why are they so kind to her?’  I whispered. ‘She killed Wes.‘”

HYPOCRITE.  FUCKING HYPOCRITE!  You want to whine about how they gave her a mat and a pillow when she killed Wes, while you’re trying to SAVE HER LIFE and let her go SCOT FREE after she killed Wes?  How the fuck can you even ask that question?  Ask yourself why YOU’RE being so kind to her!  THAT I would love to know!

Jared says the reason they’re so kind to the Seeker is because after the way things went with Wanda, they don’t want to feel like ‘monsters’ again, so they’re trying to make up for that with the Seeker.  Oh my god, Meyer, really?  No one is that stupid!  NO ONE would think that not giving a comfortable bed and food to someone who MURDERED one of their friends would make THEM a monster!  That is fucking ludicrous!

Why did you bother to add this?  Because you didn’t think Wanda whined about enough?  Because you didn’t think we got that you were trying to make her seem slighted all along?   Just because your reasons were bullshit doesn’t mean we didn’t fucking get what you were going for!  But there is NO FUCKING WAY this shit is believable, especially since BRANDT is one of the ones guarding her, and SHE SHOT HIM.  Brandt is not going to want to give her a bed after she nearly killed him!  He’s not going to feel bad, or even worry about EVER feeling bad for depriving her of something, when SHE ALMOST DEPRIVED HIM OF HIS LIFE.  How is this book getting more and more stupid by the page?!?

He goes on to say that the humans didn’t realize that treating the Seeker that way would upset Wanda, and that they thought she would like it…does anyone see the problems with this?!  Firstly, OF COURSE it would fucking upset her; it would upset anyone, and they’re smart and empathetic enough to know that!  Does Meyer ACTUALLY think humans lack empathy??

Secondly, if she LIKED that you were treating the Seeker nicely, Jared, why the fuck would you want to give her a chance to keep the Seeker alive??  You KNOW she deserves to die, and if you think Wanda is going to empathize with the SEEKER instead of with her ‘family’ and the supposed friend of hers who DIED, WOULDN’T THAT BE A WARNING SIGN TO YOU THAT SHE MIGHT NOT HAVE YOUR BEST INTERESTS AT HEART??  It would be to me!  Oh my god, I can’t handle this shit.

Wanda pretends that she does like it that they treated the Seeker that way, because “it’s always better to be kind” (then why don’t you fucking try it sometime), but I know she still doesn’t, and so does she.  She feels better that they were thinking about her, though, because of course she does; she’s an egotistical bitch.

“‘It’s not a good feeling – knowing that you profoundly deserve the title of monster. It’s better to be kind than to feel guilty.‘”

*shudders with rage* YOU. ARE. NOT. THE. FUCKING. MONSTERS!  Unless Jared is trying to guilt Wanda into realizing that she is the monster here, this is just more fucking bullshit that I cannot ever imagine Jared being stupid enough to believe in.  I HATE THIS BOOK!  I HATE THIS BOOK AND EVERYTHING ABOUT IT!

Jared decides they should sleep, which Wanda agrees to, because she doesn’t want him to ask any more questions about their raid, though he seriously fucking should have by now instead of talking about this inane bullshit.  They lie down on the ground, because that’s obviously more comfortable than climbing into the Jeep would be, and Jared starts to spoon Wanda, and I’m supposed to care about that but I just fucking don’t.

Blah blah blah, Wanda thinking because she has a hard time sleeping cause she’s getting exactly what she wants from Jared and getting what she wants is always worth complaining about, just like EVERYTHING ELSE THAT EVER HAPPENS, whining about how she doesn’t have enough time left because the time until her SELF-IMPOSED death will go too quickly, and then Jared’s waking her up and it’s sunset because of course it is.

Jared helps Wanda up and gives her a meal bar and some water, then asks her if she’s still in a hurry.  She says she is, despite that she just slept for an entire day, and they get into the Jeep.  Jared decides they should go to Phoenix because it’s “logical” that the aliens wouldn’t notice that kind of raid (oh for fuck’s sake), because he doesn’t know what possible use the humans could have for the aliens’ cryotanks.  Okay, sure.  Fuck it; we’ll go with that.

Wanda ignores him because she’s a bitch (I can see no other reason why she would at this point), and then the next thing we know, it’s dark and they’re trading vehicles and getting on the freeway.  Blah blah blah, they drive to Phoenix, Jared being careful to stay under the speed limit this time, and then they’re finally in the parking lot of the Healing facility.  It only took 5 and a half pages of nothing.

They drive around the back of the building looking for the tanks, and a lot of aliens are walking around as they go, but of course they pay no attention to Jared and Wanda, because no one pays attention to Wanda when she goes anywhere, but we always have to hear about it anyway.  They head toward some shipping trucks as Wanda reads the labels on all the crates they pass, thinking they might want to pick up some of the ones that have medical supplies in them as well.

As they go, she notices a crate that says “Still” on it, and I’m only mentioning this because now that it’s come up once, it’s undoubtedly going to come up again, because why else would she have noticed it, so there you go.

Wanda is happy to see all the labeled, unguarded crates, because she feels it means that when she’s gone, the humans will have everything they need, but the fact that they’re directly ‘unguarded’ does not negate the fact that there are aliens walking around all over the place, and the humans will not be able to get by with all of them there.  But, hey, I’m sure it’ll all work itself out, right Wanda?  Why consider that?

When they get to the back of the building, they notice people unloading crates more carefully, which is apparently notable because it means they must be unloading cryotanks.  Guess they’re fragile or something.  Unsurprisingly, they are cryotanks, as confirmed by the label that Wanda sees when it is ever so conveniently turned directly toward her for no real reason, but they’re the occupied ones, which just means that the unoccupied ones can’t be far away.

Lo and behold, Wanda sees a shed half full of unoccupied cryotanks and points it out to Jared, telling him that that means that the closed sheds on the other side are probably all full of unoccupied tanks as well.  Jared keeps driving, and as they reach the corner of the building, he snorts, noticing that the building is labelled the ‘maternity wing’.

…

Meyer, you are not clever.  I want to be angry, but I’m just fucking drained, so all I’m going to say is that you’re not clever, and fuck off.  Please.

Wanda says they’ll have to wait for a bit, but that it looks like the souls are almost finished their work, which makes it seem like she knows they’re all going to go away soon, even though she’s never seen any of this before so she really doesn’t know that for sure.  They could be there all night, for all she knows, though of course they won’t be because convenience.  So I guess the humans will be able to steal stuff later on after all.  Huzzah.

Jared circles the hospital again for some reason, though I’m pretty sure doing it in the first place was suspicious enough, so now he’s just making it obvious that they don’t belong there (especially since they’re driving about in a car, and every other vehicle there is a truck of some sort, unless Meyer’s going to say they took one of the vans/trucks they somehow have, but either way, it wouldn’t be the same as what the souls have), and then parks at the back of the parking lot, away from the lights, because again, that’s totally not suspicious at all.  Good thing this time the aliens really aren’t suspicious, unlike every other time they weren’t suspicious but actually were!

Jared turns off the car and holds Wanda’s hand, then asks her if she’s going to save the Seeker.  She says she is, and he guesses that it’s because it’s “the right thing to do”, EVEN THOUGH IT’S FUCKING NOT, and she agrees that that’s one reason.  What are the other reasons, exactly?  I’m still trying to figure that out.

Jared asks if she knows how to get the soul out without hurting the body, but he asks it as though he assumes the answer to be yes, which again doesn’t make sense to me, because I’m not sure why he’d assume the aliens would care about that.  I know why HE would care if they could, so maybe he’s just asking for that reason, but I dunno.  I have to wonder, though – would they even want the human whose body the Seeker is in back?  Earlier in the book, it was mentioned that the souls seem to take on aspects of the hosts, so maybe the human host was just really fucking evil…you never know!

Wanda confirms that she knows how to remove the souls safely, and tells Jared she’s done it before in an emergency, but not on Earth.  He asks where she did it and what the emergency was, and now I just want someone to shoot me, because it’s ANOTHER FUCKING ALIEN STORY.  When will these ever end?!

I sincerely hope this is the last one, because it is by far the WORST one, and I can’t handle it if they somehow get worse than this.  As it stands, I’m just about to write about this one and it’s making me feel like dying.  Please, book, spontaneously combust or otherwise just disappear….I want to be done now…

The entire rest of the chapter is this story.  She leads up to it by thinking how much Jamie would have loved it, but since she’s so not going to die before the end of the book, I’m sure Jamie is going to have to hear it too, which makes me feel quite ill…and then she says it happened on the Mists Planet, when she was named Lives in the Stars (because of her ‘reputation’; hahahaha I’m Wanda, I’m SO FUCKING SPECIAL).

She was with a friend and a guide, and they were travelling across an ice field to see “one of the more celebrated crystal cities“, and they thought that they were on a safe path, but then BAM, Claw Beast out of the snow.  God, you cannot imagine how little I want to be summarizing this story right now, but I’m trying to make it a little fun, at least. Forgive me if I fail completely; it’s not an easy job.

“‘An average adult Bear has about the mass of a buffalo.  A full-grown claw beast is closer to the mass of a blue whale.  This one was bigger than most.‘”

A Claw Beast is…close to the mass of a blue whale, and…this one is bigger than that.  I…cannot even begin to explain how many problems there are with this.  I can’t, and to be completely honest, don’t even want to, because I’m afraid I might have an aneurysm.  Luckily, I’ve found this handy little link where Matthew from Bad Books, Good Times outlines exactly why the mass Meyer is referring to here is fucking bullshit, and you can find that here (http://procrastinatorsrant.wordpress.com/2013/10/02/bbgt-extra-credit-stephenie-meyers-claw-beast-is-just-ridiculously-implausible/).  So please, give that a look so I don’t need to go over it again and thusly die.

Moving on past that stupidity, then (thank you, Matthew, sincerely), we find that the Claw Beast has sprung up between Wanda and her friend and their guide, and it quickly proceeds to saw her friend clear in half with its pincers.  Nice.

Instead of running, like she should do since Bears are apparently faster than Claw Beasts, Wanda hesitates, but lucky for her, her guide starts to distract the Claw Beast by attacking its tail so that she will have a chance to run.  Wanda can’t remember the guide’s name despite that he put himself in mortal danger for her, because she’s JUST THAT CARING, and instead of using his distraction to get away, she STILL STAYS THERE.

The Claw Beast turns on the guide, hitting her friend’s body as it does so and knocking his torso such that it lands next to Wanda, and again, instead of running, Wanda decides to do something she admits is stupid.  She decides she can’t stand to let her friend die, even though she acknowledges that she has no  body for him and she’s too far from any city to get to one before he would die, and she’s got no painkillers to give him while she removes him from his host, so as selfish as it is, she uses the ice cutting side of her hand and cuts into his brain and removes him.

So…she risks more trauma and pain coming to her friend because she wants to, basically, and this is supposed to make her seem like a good person because it turns out alright in the end.  Great.

When she’s got her friend’s soul out, she notices that he’s barely alive, so she shoves him into “the egg pocket in the center of my body, between the two hottest hearts“, and I am now completely, thoroughly disturbed.  That’s disgusting, and incredibly stupid to boot!

She knows the soul will only last a few minutes without a body, and she doesn’t think she can remain conscious enough to perform a procedure that would allow her to insert him into her own head to share her host with him (as though she’d actually be willing to do that if she could), even if she did have the healing medication necessary to survive that procedure in the end, because Bears have too many hearts to survive the blood loss it would lead to, so she doesn’t know what to do.

Suddenly, the Claw Beast roars, and Wanda begins to panic at the thought that it will turn on her soon, but then decides to use the Claw Beast as a host for her friend.  Meyer takes a while to lead up to this, as she always does, but that’s where it goes in the end, so you’re welcome.

She jumps up onto the Claw Beast’s leg and pulls herself up the side of it until she gets up to its head, in a way that makes it clear that Meyer has seen far too much cheesy movies, and then she digs into the Claw Beast in ways that don’t make any sense at all for reasons you’ll see in the link I provided above.

Then blah blah blah, unnecessary drama relating to all this that I’m not going to bother going into because it doesn’t matter at all, and after a few too many paragraphs of this crap, she finally removes her friend from her disgusting egg pocket and shoves him into the Claw Beast’s neck.  Cause, y’know, neck is the same as brain.  Definitely.

The Claw Beast gets up and throws Wanda off, and it’s angry now, so it comes storming toward her, ready to attack.  It doesn’t end up hitting her, though, it just hits the snow next to her and then looks confused, which is hilarious to Wanda, despite the fact that Bears don’t laugh so it’s actually fucking not.  Yeah, she bothered to write that.

Her friend takes a bit of time to get acclimated to being a literally impossibly large beast all of a sudden, and to having a smaller brain to work with, but then realizes that Wanda is his friend, and lets her ride him to the crystal city, holding his wound shut.

Wanda says that after that, people started calling her Rides the Beast, which she didn’t like, so she made them go back to her other name, and then that’s the end of the story, thank fucking god.  I tried to summarize it as quickly as possible, but it was something like 2.5 pages long, so it didn’t end up going as well as I wanted it to.

Wanda looks at Jared when she’s finished talking, and sees that his eyes are wide and his mouth is hanging open, so she starts silently praising herself about what a good story it is.  It is NOT a good fucking story, Meyer, it’s stupid, it’s impossible, and NO ONE in their right mind would ever believe it.  I hate it.  So much.

Wanda thinks about how she’ll need to get Wanda to tell the story to Jamie when she’s gone, then realizes she doesn’t want to think about that, so she tells Jared the aliens are probably done unloading, so she wants to finish what they’re doing and get home.

Jared stares at her and shakes his head, then says:

“‘Yes, let’s finish this, Wanderer, Lives in the Stars, Rides the Beast.  Stealing a few unguarded crates won’t present much of a challenge for you, will it?‘”

And that is the last line of the chapter, and also my least favourite line in the entire book now.  I feel like I should say more after that, but…no.  I’ve said enough.  This chapter is one of the worst things I’ve ever experienced, and I need it to be over now, so that’s it; it’s over.  I’m done.  See you next time, much as it hurts me to say that.

(See Mike’s take on this chapter at http://emptystress.wordpress.com!)

The Host Recap – Sacrificed (Chapter 50)

I should be happy to be on chapter 50, because that means that after this chapter, there are only 10 left.  But this chapter was so unbearably worthless that I can’t even get excited right now.

Wanda and Stryder start this chapter off fighting, and we quickly discover that this is all about the secret Wanda has tried to make seem important throughout the course of the book that I still don’t really care about at all.  We also learn that Wanda only means to get rid of herself here, not kill Stryder too, though Meyer takes quite a while to make that clear (and as usual, I don’t appreciate how the lead up is confusing and disjointed instead of intriguing).

So…what exactly is the point of that?  She wants to get rid of herself…because that will somehow help things?  I can’t see what benefit that serves for anyone except for Stryder, really, and I guess Jared.  Otherwise, it leaves them without someone who can easily get them supplies, and who is supposedly now their friend.  I just don’t see how she can justify that.

Is it just guilt again?  She mentions that if she does this she will no longer be an expatriate, she will be purely a traitor, so maybe she just wants to destroy herself because she can’t stand to be a traitor even though she doesn’t agree with what the souls are doing anymore.  I bet that’s it.  So it’s still stupid, then.

Wanda calls Stryder stupid for telling her not to do it, because she feels that Stryder should see the potential of it and be happy about it, but no, Wanda, you’re still the one being stupid.  Martyring yourself when it’s absolutely unnecessary is stupid.  Maybe Stryder should want you out of her body, but if she did, I’d say she’d want you put into another body, not just killed or gone forever.

Why don’t you just remove Seeker, kill her, and put yourself in her host body?  Then Stryder would get her body back, but you could still live.  I know it’s not ideal, because you would associate the body with her, but it’s better than nothing, you’d get over it in time, and I doubt you want to take another host body for your purposes…though maybe you will want to do that later.  I can see this book going that way really easily.

Wait, why am I trying to find ways for Wanda to survive?  Moving on.

“This was the secret I should die to protect.  The information I’d been desperate to keep safe no matter what hideous torture I was put through.

This was not the kind of torture I’d expected: a personal crisis of conscience, confused and complicated by love for my human family.”

So…it is because of guilt, then, because no one else is ‘torturing’ her; she’s doing it to herself.  Man, I’m sick of this.  We get it, Meyer; she’s so wonderful and caring that she’s developed a guilt complex.  Again, great message for your readers.  It just gets better and better.

Stryder tells Wanda – I’m sorry, howls at Wanda (-_-) – that she doesn’t want her to kill herself for the Seeker, but Wanda just asks her sarcastically if she should just wait until they catch another ‘innocent soul’ to do it, because she’ll have to do it sometime.  Um…why?  They said they wouldn’t take any more souls back there to experiment on while you were in the caves with them, and Doc told you he doesn’t want to do the experiments anymore at all, so why would you have to do this sometime?  Why can’t you just go on living as you have been?

Just don’t ever tell them your ‘secret’ unless one of your own gets taken; simple as that.  And then you’ll be telling them for a good reason, not for the sake of killing someone, so you won’t need to kill yourself.  But I guess that wouldn’t solve the guilt thing because nothing ever would for someone as pure and angelic as Wanda, so never mind.

Oh, I guess I should mention, in case it wasn’t clear, that Wanda’s secret is that she knows how to remove souls without the human host or the soul dying.  That’s the thing Meyer takes forever to get to, but in order for what I’m saying here to make sense, I guess I should explain that early on.  So yeah, that’s it.  Riveting, isn’t it?  I mean, it’s not like we all already could have guessed that she had that knowledge.  I sure as hell thought she did.  This doesn’t even feel like a secret to me, just another lie she told the humans.

Stryder continues to try to get Wanda to think about what she’s planning to do, while Wanda feels sick, and then:

“I could do it, Mel.  I could justify letting her die if she was one of those innocent souls.  I could let them kill her then.  I could trust myself to make an objective decision.

But she’s horrible, Wanda!  We hate her!

Exactly.  And I can’t trust myself.  Look at how I almost didn’t see the answer…”

…What?  I don’t understand this section at all.  I’ve read it over and over trying to make it make sense in my brain, and I’ve felt like a gigantic idiot for not getting it, but I just really don’t.  She hates the Seeker, so she doesn’t consider herself able to make an objective decision about whether she should live or die?  She killed someone!  That’s pretty cut and dry!

Why could she let them kill the Seeker if she was an ‘innocent soul’?  Why the hell would that be better?  Am I reading this entirely wrong?  I would think killing a soul who had done nothing would be far worse than killing one who is a MURDERER.  I cannot at all wrap my head around how she would be okay with killing someone innocent, but not okay with killing the Seeker.  I really must be reading this wrong; I just don’t get it.

You almost didn’t see that you could remove her because you were blinded by your hatred for her, but that wouldn’t have happened with an innocent soul because you wouldn’t have hated it, so you would have come up with this possibility sooner and still felt you had to kill yourself anyway?  Is that it?  Cause I still don’t see how that changes the fact that she’s a murderer.  It doesn’t make her crime any better. Ahhh, I’m just going to move on now.

Jeb asks if Wanda is alright, and she tells him she’s fine, even though it’s obvious she’s not.  The Seeker recoils like a vampire in sunlight at this point, I think because Jeb came over, though I don’t know why that would do it since he’s not holding a gun, Aaron and Brandt are…but maybe Meyer forgot that detail.  Jeb asks Wanda what’s going on, and she tells him she has another question for the Seeker, but she needs a minute to herself.

Jeb tells her they can wait for her to take a breather, so she rushes out of the room and heads to her bedroom to think.  Along the way, she trips over Lily in the hallway because it’s so dark, and finds that she is crying.  She asks Wanda why life and love go on, because she feels that they shouldn’t anymore.  She also asks Wanda what the point of living is, and Wanda coldly responds that she doesn’t know, and doesn’t even bother to try to comfort Lily.  She just leaves her there, crying and questioning life.

I’m sorry, but what the hell?  This girl is crying, you know she’s just suffered a loss; why wouldn’t you even stop for 5 minutes to give her a hug, or talk to her, or let her cry on your shoulder, or anything?  And when she’s talking about there being no point to living, you don’t fucking leave her alone! These are at least borderline suicidal comments she’s making; what the fuck is wrong with you that you just run off to your room when she’s like that, without even doing as little as getting someone else to be with her?  You think your question is so much more important than her fucking life?

Fuck, I hate Wanda SO MUCH!  This is no way to treat a ‘friend’, and hey, so much for her guilt; if she really felt bad about ‘being the cause’ of Wes’s death, she would damn well try to comfort the heartbroken girlfriend that’s been left behind by that death!  And she would certainly make sure she (Lily) doesn’t die as a result of this as well, especially by her own hand!  Wanda thinks she’s such a good person, but she’s still actually fucking terrible.  This is atrocious.

At first when I read this I thought Lily’s reaction was a bit much for the short time they would have been dating, and to a certain extent I still do think that, though I know that of course different people react to death in different ways…but now none of that even matters because I’m so much more pissed off at Wanda.  Regardless of whether Lily’s reaction is reasonable for the situation, these are the emotions she is expressing, this is how it’s affecting her, and no one is even trying to help her with it!

Yes, I know, some people want time alone to grieve, but she’s making fucking suicidal comments.  I can’t imagine that anyone else in the caves who heard her talking like that would just say something cold, then skip over her and run off to their room because they’re too self-absorbed to care.  But Wanda, oh, of course she does.  Yet we’re still supposed to like her and think she’s some wonderful martyr.

Wanda throws herself onto the bed when she gets to her room, and asks herself the “one more question” that she told Jeb she had.  The question is if she’ll “do it”, which I assume means tell everyone her secret and save the Seeker.

“I could save the Seeker’s life.  I knew how.  It would not endanger any of the lives here.  Except my own.  I would have to trade that.”

I still don’t fucking get this.  WHY?!  WHY WOULD YOU HAVE TO TRADE IT?  Can you please fucking explain that, Meyer, rather than repeatedly telling us it’s a fact but giving us no reason why??  The Seeker sure as hell isn’t going to make her trade it, and neither are any of the humans, so it’s only her!  Why the fuck do you want to save her and kill yourself, Wanda?!?  Aggggh!!

Stryder tells her not to do it, but Wanda says it’s inevitable anyway, and she should have seen that long ago.  NO IT’S FUCKING NOT!  There is no reason why it would be!

She recalls when Jamie was sick and she told Stryder that she couldn’t give her more than not erasing her, and says that wasn’t the complete truth; the truth is that she can’t give Stryder more than that and stay alive herself.  Ooook…pretty sure we could have figured that out on our own.  Again, I was always pretty sure she knew how to get the souls out safely before.  I would think it would have to have happened at some point in her many lives.

Anyway, she admits that she lied to Jared when she said she didn’t know how to make herself not exist, but tries to justify that by saying that it was true when she said she didn’t know how to fade away while inside Stryder, she just didn’t realize that she was lying to them both by implying that she couldn’t erase herself entirely.  I’m gonna say it probably did cross her mind then, but it wasn’t something she wanted to do, so she didn’t bother to mention it.  I believe she’s stupid, but I also believe that that thought would come into her head whether she wanted it to or not, she would just then ignore it.

“It was just that I had never considered that option viable, ultimate betrayal that it was to every soul on this planet.”

Oh, shut the fuck up, you pretentious, selfish, lying bitch.

This chapter is so full of drama that will obviously not come to anything that will matter at all in future chapters.  If there weren’t 10 chapters left in the book, I might believe that she’d actually do this, because she at least wants to believe really badly that she cares that much about the rest of her species, but with so much left, it’s obvious this is going absolutely fucking nowhere.  And that pisses me off.  I’m sick of all the pointless drama in this book.

Wanda claims that once the humans know how to remove the souls, it will cost her, but I still can’t see how.  I really can’t.  How does she not yet see that what the souls have done to the humans is essentially murder, since they’re taking away the lives of the humans who inhabited those bodies?  How can she keep calling the humans’ attempts to save their own ‘murder’ when she doesn’t see the aliens the same way?

And even if it was murder on both sides, still, how the hell will it cost her to help the humans save their own?  It’s not like they’re going to tell all the aliens she told them!  If they caught an alien, it would be removed, and all would be well.  It couldn’t tell anyone else.  Is it because she couldn’t bear to go back to live with the other souls after betraying them?  Cause the humans want her there, so she really wouldn’t have to, and I can’t see why she would anyway, because that would be so much worse for her.  She could stay with the humans until she died.  I really don’t see the point of all her whining.

Stryder argues with Wanda again about this, so Wanda asks her if she wants to be free, and she says she wouldn’t ask Wanda to do this, and she wouldn’t do it for her (even though she kind of is by trying to keep Wanda alive), so she sure as hell wouldn’t do it for the Seeker.  Wanda responds that she doesn’t have to ask; that she thinks she might have volunteered to do it eventually anyway.

Stryder is still upset, which Wanda notices, and explains that she would have volunteered to do it because she could give Jamie and Jared everything they wanted by doing it, because she’d be giving them Stryder back, and that if Jared had ever asked her to do it, she wouldn’t have said no.  Stryder says that Wanda is too self-sacrificing and she needs limits, which pisses me off, because Stryder has seen what Wanda does and can hear what she thinks; she knows damn well that Wanda’s decisions are hardly ever actually in someone else’s best interests, they just look that way from the outside.

Honestly, I think this entire thing is just so that Wanda can find out how much Stryder cares about her.  She’s fishing for compliments, essentially.  She doesn’t actually want to sacrifice herself, and I’d be willing to bet she doesn’t even intend to, she just wants Stryder to join in with Ian in thinking she’s sooooo self-sacrificing, so she can stick around and claim it’s Stryder’s fault if Stryder ever gets upset with what she does, because Stryder said she wanted her there.

In other words, she can start fucking Ian using Stryder’s body, and Stryder won’t be able to be upset by that because she wanted Wanda to stay, when Wanda was going to just go.  That better not be what happens, or I swear to god…

Wanda starts moaning about Ian because the thought of him makes her heart hurt, which makes me want to vomit because she’s actually seriously falling for that douchebag, but Stryder uses it to her advantage, trying to make Wanda feel guilty by claiming that her death will take everything Ian wants away from him.  Lucky that Stockholm Syndrome kicked in when it did, eh, Stryder?

Wanda says it would never work with Ian anyway because even though he loves her body, her body doesn’t love him (what?), so Stryder changes gears and just says that she can’t let Wanda do this; that Wanda has to stay, because she is of more value to the humans than she (Stryder) is.  Wanda continues to argue that she doesn’t see any other way but to go, because she knows the souls are wrong to have come to Earth.

So…she knows the souls were wrong to do what they did, yet she feels so guilty about betraying them – the individuals she now knows to be the ‘bad guys’ – that she feels she has to die.  Wtf?  This is making less and less sense as the chapter goes on.

She says she doesn’t have a choice but to “do the right thing and leave“, and that the humans survived without her before, so they will again.  She says Stryder can help them using what she’s learned about souls during her time with Wanda, and that this is the closest she can do to giving the humans a happy ending.  Man, the dialogue in this chapter is so overdramatic.

Stryder protests again and starts to cry, which touches Wanda because she had never realized how much Stryder cared for her.  She has to fuck up that potentially touching moment though too, by doing another “who cares more” competition, claiming that Stryder cares about her almost as much as she cares about Stryder.  Seriously, Wanda, fuck you.  You stole her body and now she’s trying to save your life, even though you fucking off would give her her life back.  She is literally giving up her life to imprisonment for your sake.  You’re not talking about giving yours up for her; you’re talking about giving it up for guilt.  In the battle of who cares more, Stryder wins, even though that makes absolutely no goddamn sense.

Blah blah blah, Wanda repeating herself about how doing this would have occurred to her even if no one had asked her to do it (which they wouldn’t have, since she said she didn’t know how to do it, so it would be really great if she could stop harping on that), how much she loves Stryder which I don’t believe for even a second since she has consistently disrespected Stryder throughout this book, and more blathering on about how great souls are because they “can’t exist at the expense of one they love“.

FUCK YOU.  Once again, you did not consider this for Stryder’s sake, so stop acting like you did.  Stop acting like souls are so loving and giving that once their hosts resist them, they give in because they love them so much.  You have not yet given us one example of that happening, and you sure as hell didn’t do it yourself, because Stryder was resisting literally since day one.

You’re not better than anyone, Wanda, and obviously neither are any of the other aliens, because if they were, your ‘secret’ would already have gotten out by now (when someone else gave themselves for their host).  So just fuck off.  Souls can live selfishly just fine, and from what I’ve read here, always have.

Wanda starts checking herself out in the moonlight, so we get seven paragraphs of her describing every part of her body that she looks at and touches, in intricate detail.  WHY?!  This is page 510.  510!! Why do we need to do this at this stage?!  I’m skipping all of this.  FUCK this.

Oh, except this part:

“They could hold a child, they could comfort a friend, they could love…but that was not for me.”

She’s talking about her arms there, if it wasn’t obvious, and I find this funny because she means it in the emo sense that it’s not for her because she’s an alien and they’re human and blah blah blah stupid shit we’ve heard a thousand times no matter how much the humans have come to accept and love her, but to me, it’s because she can’t actually be fucking bothered to comfort a friend if it’s not convenient for her, so no, it damn well isn’t “for her”.

So after all that boring crap (it really was boring to me; it felt like the chapter was going on forever for no good reason, since I didn’t care about anything she said there), she goes on about how much she loves and “craves” her body (wtf?), and how ironic it is that it’s the first body she’s felt that way for and also the one she’ll have to give up.  Uh, okay, whatever, Wanda.

She laughs, and describes it as “air that popped in little bubbles from my chest and up through my throat“, which makes me think she might want to make a doctor’s appointment, because I’m pretty sure that shit is not normal.  Laughter has never felt like bubbles popping in my chest before.  If it feels like that for you, Meyer, please get checked out.

Annnd now we’re back to touching body parts and describing them again.  Fuck yeah!  Progress!  This book sucks.

Oh wait, this time she’s describing her lips so she can go on to gloat about how she’s kissed all the guys.  Greeeeat.  And now she’s trying to figure out how long she’s been on Earth again, and lamenting how short her time has been on this planet, and all the emoness that goes with that every time she brings it up.  She asks if a little more time would be so wrong, and Stryder says it wouldn’t, because that’s kind of the point she’s been trying to make all along.

At this point, Wanda feels it’s appropriate to quote back something Stryder said to her wayyy back when they were driving through the desert so Wanda could get rid of her, which is “You never know how much time you’ll have”.  I’m not sure why she says that, though, since she immediately follows it up with how she does know how much time she has, and that her time is up, except that no it’s not because you’re making that decision yourself, you stupid bitch.

More about how sacrificing herself is “being her true self”, even though that’s clearly bull, and then she finally gets up.  Thank god, because this chapter has seriously gone on for fucking ever and not a damn thing has happened yet.  5.5 pages with no action except for her ignoring Lily’s suicidal comments.  Awesome.

She decides she has questions to ask Doc now, so she heads to where she thinks he’ll be, and as per usual, we get a description of everyone she passes and how little they care that she’s passing.  Seriously, Meyer, every time?  Is that really necessary?

Instead of actually allowing us to get to Wanda and Doc talking so we can get this shitty chapter over with, Meyer interrupts Wanda’s run to wherever he is with a rant about how alone Doc has been since the night they saved Jamie, because Sharon moved out of their room after that night and moved in with her mom (because she’s a bitch), and Doc can’t bear to sleep in their room alone.

While I agree that it’s pretty fucking horrible that Sharon is that petty and disgusting a person, I’m still not sure why we need to go into this now.  Doc deserves better than her, he’s too nice to ever have dated someone like her, so who gives a fuck?  Move on, Doc.  You’re better off.  Is their relationship drama really plot relevant at all?  I find it hard to imagine it is.

Finally, Wanda gets to the hospital (I’m assuming) where Doc is, and he immediately jumps up and asks her if something is wrong.  She tells him everything’s fine, but that she needs him, and then her dialogue gets especially dramatic and unrealistic for the remainder of the conversation.  Yaaaay.  I’m going to skip over as much of this dramatic bullshit as possible because I hate it, but I will point out the relevant bits.

Wanda tells Doc that she knows how to remove souls from their human hosts without harm to either party, going on to say that “of course” she knows that, because all souls have to know how to do it in case of an emergency.  She says she even did it once herself…when she was a Bear. -_-

Doc asks why she’s telling him that, and she says it’s because she’s going to give him the knowledge he needs to do it himself, but only if he’ll give her what she wants in return.  She warns him that what she wants will not be easy, so naturally, he asks her to tell him what it is.

So what does Wanda want?  She wants him to keep the souls alive.  She wants him to promise that he will get cryotanks, put the souls in them, and get those tanks to shuttles off-planet, so they can go to another world to live.  She assures him that they won’t be able to hurt him, and that by the time they reach their next planet his grandchildren will be dead, so apparently their space travel is actually not nearly as fast as she made it out to be (not that I really have a scientific problem with that, I just like to point out when she’s wrong).

But the slow space travel is not the important part here.  The important part is this question:  How in the hell is Doc supposed to do any of this?  Does she think the humans just have cryotanks lying around, or do the aliens keep them in easily accessible areas?  Do they keep tanks in their homes for those emergency implants they supposedly have to do sometimes, as mentioned at the beginning of the book?  If so, do those not already have souls in them?

If they don’t, if they’re just empty tanks, why the hell wouldn’t the humans have already done something about those, to sabotage the aliens to at least some degree?  And if they do, shouldn’t they also have medical supplies, since they would need to use their medications on anyone they had to do an implant or removal on, which would again raise the question as to why the humans couldn’t have just gotten medical supplies themselves when they raided the aliens’ houses, and/or why Wanda had to harm herself to get them instead of just walking into a pharmacy and getting them there or something?

And hell, if the humans could get the supplies on raids themselves, is Wanda really any more useful than Stryder is to the humans?  …And here’s something I just thought of; why the hell didn’t they get toiletries before Wanda started raiding with them?  It’s supposed to be some big shit deal that she gets those, but they could have too, since I assume the aliens use them as they’re in human bodies and keep producing them, but do they just not get them because it’s guys doing the raiding?

I’m absolutely certain Meyer thought this multiple times while writing this book.

I have to say, I can’t think of a guy I know who would rather wash with burning cactus soap than pick up a couple of bars of good soap while raiding someone’s house.  And hey, if you want to stay with the somewhat sexist point of view, I’m pretty sure a woman or two might have asked them to at some point, since they would already be there raiding, so it wouldn’t be any more trouble.

Ohh so many questions.  Anyway, yeah, how would Doc get the tanks, and beyond that, how the hell would he get the tanks onto shuttles to send them to new planets?!  It’s not like he has a shuttle, and I’d have to think that would not be an easy process; can’t Wanda see how she would be necessary to pull that off, if it even could be done by her at all?  Humans certainly won’t get away with it!

Demanding that he do this is just setting more humans up to be taken by the aliens and either implanted or killed!  How can’t she see that?  How does that not make her feel guiltier than betraying the bad guy does?  Does she not care that she’s basically screwing everyone she loves just so that she doesn’t feel a little guilty right now?!

She thinks her conditions will mitigate her guilt if Doc keeps his word about them, but they really fucking shouldn’t, for the aforementioned reasons, and because she’s still betraying the aliens by doing this, if she wants to look at it as betrayal!  Sending them off to another world doesn’t make it not betrayal, it just makes it betrayal of both the species she currently ‘is’, because as mentioned, she’s sending the humans off to get caught by the aliens too!

She doesn’t see it, but she is the bad guy on both sides now.

Doc thinks about what she’s asked him to do, and then guesses that she doesn’t want them to kill the Seeker.  She doesn’t respond to that because she does want them to kill her, but she knows she can’t explain that in a way he’ll understand, so she just says the Seeker will be the ‘test subject’, to make sure Doc is going to follow through.  She says she’ll do the separation of the Seeker herself, and then when she (the Seeker) is safe, she’ll teach Doc how to do it.

…What?  For a second there, she made it look like she was going to do the separation so she could kill the Seeker and then be like “oops, haha, it was an accident, don’t do that when you do it” or something, but then she says she won’t teach Doc to do it until the Seeker is safe.  So she really intends to keep the murdering bitch alive!  She intends to send her off to live another life on another planet, where she will never have to face or pay for what she’s done!  This is not a life for a life, Wanda!  Not even fucking close!  If you save the Seeker, you just let her off scot free for killing Wes!  What the hell is wrong with you??

Doc asks who Wanda is going to teach him on, and she says kidnapped souls, like they tried to do before.  She says she can’t guarantee that the human minds will come back, because she doesn’t know if the erased can return, but that they’ll see with the Seeker…but shouldn’t she know?  She’s apparently done this before, and obviously other souls have too if they all have to be taught how to do it for emergency situations, so, uh, shouldn’t someone have experienced, at one time or another, the minds either coming back or not?

Is it just that she’s never done it on a human, and she thinks they might be different?  I’d have thought in all these years since they took over Earth, it would have happened at least once, so she’d probably know, but even then she should have some indication by what has happened with previous species.

Another point; does this mean Stryder knew Wanda’s “secret” all along?  Because Wanda did tell Stryder in the desert that souls only die when they are in a host body at the time it dies, but that they’re usually removed before that, so Stryder could obviously piece together that it was possible to safely remove them and that Wanda would know how to.  As, of course, could the rest of Meyer’s readers if they actually used their brains at all, but I’m pretty sure she was counting on them not doing that so this could be some sort of big shit surprise, and I’ll be very sad if it actually worked on anyone.

Doc clues in that Wanda said “while I’m still here” when talking about teaching Doc and making sure he follows through with her demands, and asks her what she meant by that.  She doesn’t answer, leaving him to figure it out on his own, and then asks him if he knows what she’s giving him.  Apparently he gets it after that for some reason, so Wanda starts speaking quickly before he can protest.

She tells him there’s another thing she wants him to do for her, and that’s bury her beside Walter and Wes, because she doesn’t want to be sent to another planet.  She says Earth is “her planet”, but she doesn’t think there’s actually any place for her there at the same time.  She knows it might offend some people to have her buried by Walter and Wes, so if that happens, she wants him not to tell them that’s what he’s going to do, or even lie to them if he has to.  How will he know if it offends them if he doesn’t tell them what he’s doing?

Stryder stars ‘howling’ in protest again at this point, and Doc says no, he won’t do that (bury her by them).  Wanda begins to beg him, saying she doesn’t think Walter or Wes will mind, but he says that’s not the point; the point is that he can’t kill her because he’s sick of death, and sick of killing his friends.  When did he ever kill one of his friends…?  I really don’t remember that happening.  Don’t you get stupid and emo now too, Doc.

Wanda tries to comfort him (because she can’t get what she wants if he doesn’t go along with it, so it’s worth taking the time and effort to comfort him, which it obviously wasn’t for Lily because she wasn’t going to do anything for Wanda -_-), quoting Kyle again in saying that people die there, implying that it’s not his fault.  Which it isn’t.

Doc asks what Jared and Jamie will think, but she says they’ll be fine because they’ll have Stryder.  He asks about Ian, and she says he’s better off without her.  More accurately, though, she (and definitely Stryder) are better off without him, but of course she doesn’t say this or even think it.  I really wish she did.

Doc tells her he has to think about it, but she says they don’t have long because the guys won’t wait forever before they kill the Seeker.  He says he agrees to that part, sending the souls off planet, even though I still don’t know how because of all the cryotank shit, but he doesn’t think he can kill her.

Wanda tells him it’s “all or none“, and he has to decide right away, but he can’t tell anyone else about the part of their agreement where he kills her.  She says those are the terms, take them or leave them, and asks again if he wants to know how to remove a soul from a human body.

Once again, he tells her he has to think about it, but she continues to rush him, saying he already knows the answer; that it’s what he’s been searching for.  He shakes his head, but she ignores that because she feels the decision is already made (and I imagine she would have an epic freak-out if he didn’t do what she wanted anyway, since she always gets what she wants in the end and probably couldn’t handle it otherwise), and tells him she’ll get Jared so they can “make a quick raid for cryotanks“.  She tells him to hold off the others from killing the Seeker by telling them the truth; that she’s going to help him get the Seeker out of her body.

Yeeeeeah, that’ll go over really fucking well, Wanda.  Everyone’s gonna be super excited about that plan, and they’re totally gonna believe it’s not another plan of yours to capture them all.  And hey, what about my question as to where the sweet fuck you’re going to get the cryotanks from?  A “quick” raid?  How easy is it to get this shit?  I’m going to be seriously pissed off if it’s as easy as all the “grocery shopping” she’s been doing of late, but I bet it is.  Again, though, if it is, it’s because she’s a fucking alien, and she’s got to realize at some point that the humans will not be able to make quick work of it like she will.

Besides, doesn’t she expect that the humans will be a little pissed that she hid this knowledge from them all this time?  Oh, wait, they probably won’t be, because she’s Wanda and everyone loves her except Sharon and Maggie, who conveniently, just a few pages ago, isolated themselves from everyone else in the caves because they hate everyone now.  Fuck you, Meyer.  Seriously, fuck you.

And that’s it until next time.  Wheeeee.

(See Mike’s take on this chapter at http://emptystress.wordpress.com!)

Q&A: At Home

The twenty-fourth question for the Q&A section of this blog is: “What room of your home do you spend most time in?”

Well, this is an easy one.  I work from home, and my ‘office’ is currently set up in my living room, which is also where I spend my time when I’m home and not working…so the living room.  Really, if I’m home, I’m in this room every minute of the day that I’m not sleeping or cooking, and even then, my place is open concept, so the kitchen and living room flow into each other.   So, yeah, that was easy.  And there’s nothing more to say about that!

Check out Mike’s answer at http://emptystress.wordpress.com, and please feel free to post your own in the comments! 

(Next question: “Where would you most like to be right now?”)

The Host Recap – Interrogated (Chapter 49)

So in case you forgot, at the end of the last chapter we found out that Wes was killed by a Seeker.  This chapter starts with these words from Wanda:

“I killed Wes.”

Is anyone surprised that that’s how this starts?  Cause I’m not.  Meyer obviously feels it’s been too long since she’s made Wanda take the blame for something she didn’t do for the sake of reminding us of how wonderful, selfless and caring she is, so here we go again.

Skipping her emo crap about how it’s all her fault, everyone except for five people are in the kitchen eating, having just finished unpacking the truck.  I’m not entirely sure why Meyer felt it so necessary to point out that there are exactly five people missing, or to point out what the people present are eating, but hey, she’s the author, and I’m on chapter 49; I guess I really should be used to this sort of thing by now.

Jeb and Doc are explaining what happened to Jared, Ian and Kyle (because apparently Wanda already knows somehow, even though they all came in together and she claims to have helped unload, so I’m not sure when she would have found out that the others wouldn’t have), while Jamie sits with Wanda, patting her back, because he should totally be comforting his older sister instead of the other way around.  Though I guess the pain is freshest for her at the moment, or something.

We learn that Wes died four days ago and was since buried, and then there’s more about Wanda’s grief and crying before we get the rundown on where all the other random background characters we hardly ever care about are.  The only one that seems relevant at all is Lily, since she just started dating Wes the last time we heard about him, so now we know why Meyer randomly shoved the two of them together and forced us to read about it even if it seemed highly irrelevant at the time; so we would give a shit who Wes was later when she killed him.

…Except that the scene with Lily is really the only scene I remember him from at all, so as much as I know it would suck to lose your boyfriend, it’s hard for me to feel anything here because there was really nothing in the book at all that made me feel a connection to Wes.  Wanda acts like he was some super close friend to her, but unless I’m remembering it wrong, she barely gave much thought to him at any point, so Meyer’s efforts at recreating the real emotion generated by Walter’s death have completely failed here.

It seems that Wanda has some sort of psychic power, as she is able to describe a scar that Brandt has in detail, despite that he’s not in the room with her, and she hasn’t seen him since she got home.  The scar was caused by a bullet that I can only assume the Seeker shot at him, as it seems Wes was killed by a bullet as well; Brandt just got lucky in that his hit beneath his collarbone and not his brain, like Wes’s did.

I’m not going to bother getting into how unlikely it is that he could be shot where she describes and not sustain severe damage, because it does happen, but I will question why the hell Doc used up most of the Heal they had trying to get the bullet out, rather than performing surgery to remove the bullet since he’s a doctor, and then using the Heal to heal the wound afterward.  Now they’ve got pretty much no Heal, for no good reason.  I’m sure that’s going to come up later as something Meyer needed to happen to create her idea of tension, because otherwise it’s just stupid.

Anyway, Brandt is fine, Wes is dead, and Brandt now has the Seeker’s gun as he and Aaron guard her (I’m not even going to pretend it’s not Wanda’s Seeker; who else could it possibly be?) in the same place that Wanda was imprisoned when she was first brought to the caves.

Meyer wastes time going on about how she and the Seeker have evened out the number of people in the caves since two have died since her coming there, acting like no one would have died ever if she hadn’t showed up.  Except two people at least would still be dead, because Walter was going to die anyway since he had cancer, and Jamie would have died of his infection without the medication that Wanda got.  So…we’re really going to go on for a page about how horrible it is that Wanda ever went there, when it really wouldn’t have been all that different in the end anyway, except maybe a little bit worse?  Great…

Skipping all of that crap, because why would I bother, and also skipping the bit where Stryder decides to join the pity party and blame herself too, we find that the Seeker is a gigantic fucking idiot, because she thought it best to tear through the desert in an SUV to invade their cave, because when you think one of your kind has taken up with humans and you don’t know if she’s survived or not, the best thing to do is to announce your presence in the most obvious way possible so they know to come out and kill you.

Though, in her defence, it seems that’s not what happened, because despite how many people were in the caves, and the fact that they had a gun and advance notice that she was coming, she somehow managed to hurt one human and kill another before they captured her (which makes me think she must have gotten inside the caves before the attack).  I’m not sure if that’s impressive on her part or pathetic on theirs.  Going to have to go with the latter, though, honestly.

Stryder mentions what I did about how Jamie would have been dead without Wanda, and tries to argue that Jared would be too because of what happened with the Seeker stopping their truck, but that actually wouldn’t have happened because they never would have gone on that run without Wanda.  Still, though, I guess she was the one that informed Jared that souls don’t drive over the speed limit, so he might have been caught at some point anyway, but that’s not quite what Stryder is saying here.

Wanda starts to moan about why the Seeker had to follow her, acting like it’s unfair that she would do so when she (Wanda) is not hurting the souls and is potentially even helping them by keeping Doc from experimenting on them, but she knows damn well that’s not why the Seeker was following her in the first place, so what is the point of this?

Stryder doesn’t understand why the other humans haven’t killed the Seeker yet, and somehow, Stryder questioning that leads Wanda to the realization that she shouldn’t be afraid of the Seeker because she’s not as strong or fast as even Wanda is, and the humans now have her own gun trained on her, along with the one they had before.  Where the Seeker’s gun came from, lord only knows, since she didn’t have it back when she was with Wanderer, but she brought one with her when she invaded the caves and the humans got it from her in the end, so yeah, she’s in a pretty bad position.  From that realization, Wanda figures out that the reason the Seeker is still alive is simply so that the two of them can talk before the humans kill her.

She runs through the valid fears that the humans have about being found as a result of the Seeker’s disappearance, and describes how the Seeker’s car was left so it would look like she’d been killed by wild animals the way that it looked like Wanda had been.  She says that everyone knows the souls will not see the same thing happening twice in the same area as a coincidence, but I thought they weren’t suspicious creatures?  Why are they constantly suspicious of things, if they’re not suspicious?!

Besides, if they didn’t want to chance that the aliens would be suspicious, why didn’t they just hide her vehicle and things somewhere instead of leaving them to be found?  She took off from the other Seekers to continue her stalking of Wanda; it wasn’t like anyone was paying attention to her anymore…they probably wouldn’t have even noticed she was missing if evidence hadn’t been left behind.  Kind of a stupid move, guys.

Wanda has the strange feeling that the Seeker will be the one who walks away from their confrontation while she (Wanda) will die, and she’s not sure why she feels that way, but it makes her want to avoid talking to the Seeker.  She doesn’t want to let the humans know she doesn’t want to talk to her, though, because they’ll shoot her or try to remove her soul.

…So?!  I mean, they wouldn’t do the soul removal because they promised not to with Wanda there, so that’s moot, which Stryder reminds Wanda of (well, not really, she just says they’re just going to shoot the Seeker, but good enough), so what’s wrong with killing her?  You’re not so innocent that you wouldn’t want to kill her when she’s a threat to you and everyone you love, and has already killed one of your own, Wanda!  You did try to kill Kyle when he was trying to kill you, after all!  And imagine if it had been Jamie or Jared she’d killed?  Or hell, even Ian, apparently?

Stryder tries to remind Wanda why the Seeker needs to die and why she should want it, and Wanda knows Stryder is right that the Seeker can’t be left alive or things will only get worse and everyone in the caves will die, but she still doesn’t seem convinced somehow.

Jamie shakes Wanda out of her thoughts, and she realizes that Jeb has been trying to get her attention.  He asks her if she has any questions for the Seeker, because the guys that are guarding her are done with guarding and want to be with their friends so they can mourn properly.  Definitely can’t blame them there.

Wanda tells Jeb that she’ll go see the Seeker at once and gets up, despite Stryder reminding her that she doesn’t actually have any questions for the Seeker.  She says she’ll think of some, and Stryder is angry about that, because she realizes that Wanda is just postponing in an effort to find some way to save the Seeker.  Wanda says the Seeker’s death is inevitable, so Stryder makes sure to force the truth of that point home to her, which makes Wanda cringe.  You really need to get your priorities straight, Wanda.  49 chapters in, and you’re still full of shit.

Jamie and Jeb verify that Wanda is okay with what she’s about to do, and Jamie and Ian try to come with her, but she won’t allow either of them to.   As they go, Jeb tells Wanda what a complainer the Seeker is, which is “not like” Wanda…except it kind of is, the Seeker is just complaining about different things (that might seem less important) and doing so out loud, while Wanda whined endlessly where only Stryder and the poor, unfortunate readers of this book could hear her.

None of us do.

He says the Seeker also threatens a lot, in what sound like stupid, overdramatic TV villain ways, but that she never tries to escape, instead backing down whenever a gun is draw at her.  He says he thinks she wants to live “pretty dang bad“, which is pretty much the worst thing to say to Wanda when she’s torn on whether to let her be killed or not, but Wanda just changes the subject, asking if Jeb is sure the place they’re keeping her is the safest spot for her to be.

It’s at this point that we learn that the place they were keeping Wanda all along was actually very close to the entrance, they just managed to confuse her enough that she didn’t realize it.  Meyer goes on at length about this, though it’s really not that important (certainly not important enough to warrant all the detail she goes into), so I’m just going to skip over all that.  The Seeker is being kept close to the entrance, the same way Wanda was, but they don’t worry that she’ll escape because Wanda didn’t, and because she’s being guarded.  There, that’s all you really need to know.

Our first reintroduction to the Seeker has her spitting out a snappy, immature line and throwing her food dish like a child, which really does not seem at all in keeping with the character she was at the beginning of the book.   She was annoying then, but she wasn’t “four years old” annoying.  She continues to spout immature insults as Wanda moves closer to her, and then Wanda can see her, pacing at the end of the tunnel while the boys hold their guns on her.

Apparently, instead of making her go into the hole they had Wanda in, they’re just letting her roam free at the end of the tunnel, and they’ve given her a mat and a pillow.  What the hell?  Why are they giving her a bunch of comforts that they never gave to Wanda?  I’m not looking at this in a “this is unfair” sense, but in a “what the fuck, this person tried to kill you and you’re giving them a bed and food?” kind of sense.  I mean, it’s also unfair, yes, especially because Wanda had done nothing to them when they captured her, but this is just fucking ridiculous even without considering that.

Is there going to be a good reason why they did this?  I sure as hell hope so.  I know Meyer made sure not to put her in the hole because it would disrupt the drama of the scene when Wanda has to confront her, but that doesn’t explain the rest of it.  And I demand an explanation, Meyer!

Wanda and Stryder both feel stung by how unfair it is that the Seeker is getting treated better than they did, and that sting becomes worse when Brandt asks Wanda if she wants a moment with “her”.  Why?  Because they’re referring to the Seeker as a female, where Wanda was referred to as “it” for the longest time.  I’d say this is unnecessary whining, but honestly, I feel it’s kind of justified; the Seeker is being given a lot more respect after killing someone than Wanda was when she’d done nothing.

Perhaps it’s because they now realize that there’s a chance the human host is still inside, or they just understand that the aliens themselves are “people” with personalities and feelings and whatever, but that still doesn’t explain why they’d give a murderer such good treatment.  Hell, Kyle got worse treatment (at least temporarily) for just trying to kill someone, where she succeeded; this doesn’t make any goddamn sense.

Wanda says she does want to speak to the Seeker, so Aaron warns her to be careful as she walks down toward her.  The Seeker glares at Wanda and starts to taunt her, calling her “Melanie” and trying to incite her to anger by insinuating she’s a lesser soul.  Wanda tries to convince herself the hate she feels is not her own, though she knows it is, and stops a few feet from the Seeker.

Wanda makes note of the fact that she doesn’t feel safe and comfortable around the Seeker, as she usually does with those of her kind, which makes sense given she just killed someone and that prior to all of this, she kind of made Wanda’s life a bit of a living hell…and it’s probably a bit awkward and nerve-wracking facing one of your kind that knows you’ve given in to your host anyway.

This is making me wonder, though, whether any of the souls are actually as good as they think they are.  I mean, Wanda sure as hell isn’t, Seeker sure as hell isn’t…where is the proof that any of them are any nicer, kinder or gentler than any normal human you would meet?  They’re certainly very suspicious for creatures who claim to not be suspicious.

Again, the feeling that the Seeker will live longer than Wanda will passes through her, but Stryder tells her not to be ridiculous and to just ask the Seeker whatever questions she’s come up with.  The Seeker presses for the same thing, and then asks Stryder if she asked permission to kill her personally, but Wanda lets her know that she’s now called ‘Wanda’.

She looks the Seeker over and gets a bit jealous/hurt once again when she realizes that the Seeker is also unharmed, which she wasn’t when she entered, but in the humans’ defense in this case, Wanda was only harmed because Stryder reached out to Jared, and I’m fairly certain if they hadn’t been able to capture the Seeker without hurting her, they wouldn’t have hesitated to do so.  So that’s not really as fair to hold against them as the other stuff was.

The Seeker asks again what she’s waiting for, and if she’s going to kill her with her bare hands or her gun, but Wanda tells her she’s not there to kill or hurt her, and explains that the humans have only kept her alive because they didn’t want to kill her until they knew if she (Wanda) wanted to talk to her first.

The Seeker presses again to find out what Wanda wants, and Wanda finally asks her why she wouldn’t just let her (Wanda) be dead, and why she was so determined to hunt her down when she wasn’t hurting anyone.  The Seeker jumps up and begins to yell at Wanda, telling her that she did so because she was right that there was “a vile nest of killers” out in the desert somewhere, and that she (Wanda) was with them.  So basically, she just wanted to be proven right since none of the other Seekers believed her.  Ah, pride.

Wanda keeps questioning the Seeker, even though she retreats for the most part after her outburst, and Wanda seems to gain more resolve as her questions go on.  The Seeker does not answer the questions, but Wanda can see the answers in her eyes, as she confirms that after the aliens give up on finding the Seeker, they’ll lose interest altogether and the humans will be safe, because the other Seekers never believed her about the nest of humans in the first place.

Wanda can see the fear in the Seeker’s eyes as she realizes that Wanda is right, and Wanda feels better because she knows that the humans in the caves will be safe if that’s the case, though she still does not feel any safer herself.  She thinks about walking away from the Seeker, and wonders how soon they will kill her after she does, and in thinking about this, she realizes just how much she hates the Seeker and never wants to see her again.  Then:

“The hate that made it impossible for me to allow her to die.”

What?  How does that make any sense?  If you don’t allow her to die, she’ll kill everyone.  And why would you not want her dead if you hate her?  Wtf is this shit?

Wanda begins to talk to the Seeker more quietly now, so that no one else in the room can hear what they’re saying.  She tells the Seeker that she can’t think of a way to save her, and the Seeker responds exactly the way I would like to, asking why she would want to save her since she’s one of ‘them’ (humans).

Wanda agrees that she is one of them, but says that she’s also herself, and she doesn’t want…something.  She doesn’t finish the thought out loud, but in her head she rejects the idea that she doesn’t want the Seeker to die, because she does, but realizes that what it is is that she doesn’t want to hate the Seeker so much that she wants her to die.  She doesn’t want to feel responsible for the Seeker’s death if she dies because Wanda hates her.

What the fuck?!  This is the most twisted bullshit I’ve ever heard; how is this supposed to be at all believable?  SHE IS NOT THAT SELF-SACRIFICING, Meyer!  She has not been yet, she is not now, and it’s fucking stupid to think she should feel that way!  She doesn’t want someone to die because she’ll feel responsible, even though she has said it’s her fault that the innocent person who did die died at the hands of the monster she doesn’t want to kill?  She wants to risk more lives to save one that wouldn’t save any of them?  That has made it clear how she hates them?  What is WRONG with her??

Stryder asks Wanda if she’s insane, which she clearly fucking is, and Wanda starts thinking about the damage the Seeker has caused to everyone in the caves, and how she would definitely kill the rest of them if she was allowed to live.  But then she goes back to stupidity again and starts considering who she would be if she let her die when she could have saved her.  Umm, a person who cares about their fucking family and friends?!

Stryder goes in completely the wrong direction when she tries to get Wanda back to the side of logic by saying that they’re in a war and Wanda needs to decide which side she’s on.  Wanda says it’s clear what side she’s on, and Stryder agrees, telling her that’s who she is, but Wanda is still stuck on the idea of saving both the Seeker and everyone else for some fucking stupid goddamn reason.

Then she figures out how she can do just that, and Stryder starts to panic as she realizes what Wanda is thinking of doing.  She wants to do a trade; a life for a life.  I would think that logically that would just mean killing the goddamn Seeker because she took a life, but with Stryder’s reaction it’s clear that Wanda means to take her own for some reason, so…what the fuck kind of stupid idea is that?  Does she really think that will help anything at all?  This is the stupidest fucking shit yet.

That’s the end of the chapter, by the way.  It ends infuriatingly, so I can go on to the next chapter wishing Wanda would die just because she deserves to for making such a stupid decision, even though, guess what, there are still 11 chapters left in the book, so that won’t fucking happen!

God I hate this book!  Where does Meyer come up with this shit?  It’s terrible writing!  Come on, 11 chapters; this cannot possibly end soon enough!

(See Mike’s take on this chapter at http://emptystress.wordpress.com!)