I think my biggest question as I started this segment of Smolder is “are Graham and Anita gonna smash?”.
As we covered last time, the Anitaverse is not kind to characters of color and their characters get assassinated in a way that white male characters usually don’t… unless they (allegedly) represent one of Hamilton’s former loves. Graham is one of those characters that has never felt like he was respected in the narrative. He was a character who was mildly annoying and almost instantly removed from the running for a shot at being one of Anita’s sweeties… and it was frustrating because Graham is not good enough to be a boo but serial rapist and murderer Olaf might be? It’s infuriating.
When we last left Anita, she was busy being all up in her feelings because her pretty pretty dress has triggered her latent mommy/stepmommy/grandmommy issues about her appearance. Obviously, we’re still here in chapter fourteen. Anita is still upset. She’s so upset, actually, that she trips and almost falls in the middle of the street, something that triggers Rodina’s mockery and makes Ru defend her against his sister.
(Which, kind of makes it clear that if Rodina doesn’t get brainwashed… she’s going to die. She can’t live and be that opposite Anita to the point where her brother chooses to defend Anita over her.)
So let’s start with a meaty quote:
“It’s a spike heel on cobblestones, guys, anyone can trip,” I said, but I stayed where Ru had put me with his arm around me and him between us. I let myself put most of my energy into shoveling the emotional shit that I could feel inside my head and body. Emotions didn’t just live in the head, or the heart, they burrowed down into your gut, they poured over your skin, they filled up your eyes, they spilled out your fingertips and toes. Emotions were everywhere if you just let yourself feel them, and I’d worked hard to learn how to feel instead of stuff everything out of sight until it erupted in rage or made terrible choices. I was concentrating so hard on working my issues that I didn’t hear what Rodina said to me.
“I’m sorry, Rodina, what did you say?”
“I said, have you ever seen us trip, any of us?” Rodina asked, peering around her brother at me.
I knew the us meant the Harlequin. “I’ve seen you all mess up in fight training.”
“We can lose, but that’s not the same thing as tripping on a stone. You are so damn mortal, my queen.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know I disappoint you, Rodina, you aren’t winning any prizes with me either.”
“I feel your pain and confusion, and it hurts me that you are so unhappy, but tonight I simply don’t seem to care.”
Anita is so full of emotions and I get it. I get it. But it’s also… she only just told Ru and Rodina that she didn’t care that they were sad about their third sibling’s death because he tried to kill her. So why on earth is she expecting Rodina to ever have empathy for her when she’s made it clear that her empathy won’t be aimed at them ever?
Note: I did use dictation software for part of this so if there any errors well… even with me going through and editing… I am sure I missed the opportunity to correct things.
Returning to the Anitaverse, our convenient witness has gone off to give a formal statement about what she saw and experienced with the vampire on fire. While the young woman does not seem to think anything is amiss, Anita makes it clear in her internal monologue that this is just the first step on analyzing and unpacking whether or not she was responsible for a murder.
One of the things I find really interesting that shows up in this chapter, is the use of texting on the page. Part of this book when Anita texted one of her loved ones, her internal monologue is what carried that information to us. We got the details of the texts but not the words themselves. In this book, in this chapter specifically, we actually see the text messages on page with Anita texting back and forth with Ethan, one of her guards and possibly lovers.
It’s a little thing that isn’t even new — texting on the page is used to convey emotion and narrative without using direct dialogue in a bunch of novels I’ve been reading across the past decade and a popular YA series was built around texting –but it almost gives me hope for Hamilton bringing the series into the 21st century proper. Anita is a character who used a pager well past the point where people used pagers.
I was in high school, having never seen a pager in my life, but Anita was still getting pages to come to the different crime scenes in Saint Louis. Any update is a good update here, because like I said last time one of the big issues with the Anita Blake series for me is that it really lacks a sense of time and place.
We’ve returned to Smolder a month later (for me) and we’re doing a little less in the way of chapters because I had a lot to say about chapter eight and the other two chapters were short.
Chapter 4 begins with Anita complaining about the stress of her life in the upcoming wedding. it also includes one of the worst sentences I’ve ever read. after Anita talks about walking into the bridal gallery making her feel bad she talks about what had briefly made it okay:
Edward trying on clothes had made it fun again, and seeing Peter be a better adult than some of the immortals I knew, and Asher trying, and Kane getting his ass kicked by Peter. Everything fun was associated with the people, none of it with the bridal shop and clothes.
This is not a good sentence and I don’t want to pretend that it is.
I took a break from sporking/technically hate reading the Anita Blake series after I completed my readthrough of Rafael last year. (You can read that spork here)
I gave myself a year off from engaging with the series on any critical level because I didn’t like how much I was getting annoyed by Hamilton’s writing and her politics in and out of her universe. So I gave myself an ultimatum: no more. No more analysis. No more hate-reading. No more rude tweets backed up with screenshots.
I gave myself a year to calm down, chill out, and see if there’s something else I love to hate(read) more.
There was nothing else and, conveniently, the end of my hiatus landed on the release of Smolder, the latest Anita Blake book.
[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.
Content Warnings: racism (specifically antiblack historical revisionism and mentions of slavery that are poorly done), transmisogyny, poor representation of intersex people
When we last cracked open Rafael, the titular character and Anita had just realized that Hector was the animal to call and/or sweetheart of a master vampire that wasn’t America’s Next Vampire King Jean-Claude.
Chapter ten picks up with Anita in Jean-Claude’s bedroom, pacing around the bed because he has beautiful, bitchy, blond Asher with him and as Anita puts it “he still wasn’t on my cuddling list”. Mind you, she went to Jean-Claude for comfort but because she can’t communicate worth a damn and say “hey Asher, can you keep to one side of the orgy bed please? I’m still mad at you for not communicating to my specifications”, no cuddles for her.
When we last left Anita and her unwieldy polycule + Claudia and Benito, they were being homophobic as hell over one challenger to Rafael’s throne (the hella homophobic Nestor) and Rafael just dropped the bombshell that another, Hector, might be his long lost son. This, by the way, should be impossible as born-shifters are incredibly unlikely because of Hamilton’s own worldbuilding.
Either they kill the human mother partway through gestation and work sort of like a chestburster… or the shifter mother shifts during the full moon early on and just… has a period. It’s only recently (the Las Vegas book) where we found out that tiger shifters can “take pregnant women’s beasts” so they don’t shift and miscarry at any point. They only just started teaching other shifters how to do that.
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.
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