[I forgot about posting this lol, hence the lack of header. It’s actually being posted in March 22, 2023]

Personally, I think Anita should be allowed to kill Padma.

And she’s right about why she wants to do it too:

“He’s the son of a bitch that skinned Rafael alive as torture because he wouldn’t give the rest of you up,” I said. I’d have tugged on the door handle if I’d had a hand free, but I still had a knife in each hand, which raised the question of how I had planned to open the door in the first place. I realized I’d gone for the wrist knives. I sheathed the one in my left hand in the right wrist sheath, which was on top of the wrist; the left sheath carried the knife on the underside of the wrist so I could draw them simultaneously. I’d carried them almost longer than any other weapon I owned. They’d been the first silver I’d bought after bullets. I tried to feel bad about the fact that I’d gone for a killing weapon first thing, but all I could think was if we killed Hector, it might kill Padma and then we’d all be safer.

But because that would be too easy… she can’t just do that.

Because the rats will then turn against her and Rafael and challenge him endlessly until they do succeed in killing him.

So Anita is like “okay well no matter what, I’m going to kill Hector tonight” and you know what… I want that for her. I love it for her.

Last time, we left Anita panicking over whether or not the rat shifter she’d killed (the one who Hamilton had Anita posit was more Asian than Mexican apparently) had actually meant to murder or just maim her. Chapter nineteen opens with her realizing that he’d come armed with a silver knife and that validates her tearing his throat open and ripping off his arm.

I’m a huge fan of violence, but this is literally overkill. Especially because Hamilton has to justify Anita’s violence. It doesn’t, ultimately, matter if the guy had a silver knife or not because self defense is self defense. It’s wrong to stab people who haven’t done anything to you or your loved ones first.

Not to be Like That on main, but a huge high point of doing these sporkings is knowing that you’re all cringing along with me as I do this. There is no point where you stop cringing across a modern Anita Blake installment, no point at which it stops being concerning, sexist, racist… or all three things at once. So thank you all for suffering along with me once more.

When we last revisited Rafael, it was with a relatively short (and actually super racist) set of chapters that ended with Narcissus (who is explicitly not into women) basically promising to ignore his actual sexuality to plow Anita for the power boost feeding the ardeur supposedly will bring him and the hyena shifters.

We return, in chapter twelve, to yet another discussion of stuff we’ve rehashed a bunch of times before. This time it’s the bodyguard situation. Anita can’t go to the rat shifter fighting pits without bodyguards because she’s technically a “leader” of the shifters but if she goes there without a bodyguard someone will try to kill her.

Anita Blake needs a relationship therapist.

She also needs a real therapist.

I mean this in the nicest way possible (which is still a bit mean, I know), but Anita really does need to do some heavy work to unpack her issues without unloading them onto other people. Across the series, Anita has increasingly used the language of therapy to get around certain issues with their relationships. There are all of these moments where the different characters make a point of going “we’re in therapy now” or “so and so is trying to work out their issues in therapy”.

But then it’s like… never effective?

Asher has been in therapy for half of his appearances and yet, he’s still really not able to handle the fact that he’s not Jean Claude and Anita’s main man or that Micah isn’t interested in him or that he still has extensive scarring from being tortured like 300 years ago.

Anita is in therapy for every single thing under the sun and yet chapter six still opens with her anxieties over relationships and stress over her not having the love she thought she’d have… all over holding Rafael’s hand and walking with him in-step.

Content notes for mentions of sexual coercion (sort of) and domestic violence.

When we last left Rafael, Anita and co had emptied out the communal showers in the Circus – Jean Claude’s underground lair and the least hidden daytime resting place for a vampire in the history of the genre. For this block of chapters? We’re still at the damn showers.