Fangs For The Fantasy

Elena is walking in the middle of the street by herself and for some reason, she decides to lie down. In the house, Stefan is worried that they are going to lose her because Elena’s humanity is one of the things that makes her who she is.  Damon tells Stefan that it’s only been a couple of days and reminds him that Elena is a vampire and that shutting down is one of the perks.  Stefan reminds Damon that Elena burned down her family home with her brother’s dead body still inside but Damon flippantly replies, “it saves us the trouble of having to do it ourselves, I call that a win. Worse case scenario, I’ll invoke the sire bond and tell her to turn it back on.”  Stefan is not convinced and says again that Jeremy just died and that if they force all of that grief on her all at once that it is going to overwhelm Elena.  Stefan suggests that they need to give Elena a reason to turn it on.  Damon says that they will show her a good time and that people like to have fun.  Outside a car approaches Elena and a woman comes running assuming that Elena is injured.  When she runs back to get a blanket for Elena, Elena attacks her.  Damon has to pull Elena off the woman and she explains that this woman is the first person she has seen in days whose body is not laced with vervain and that she is hungry. Damon points out that if she is going to start leaving bodies all over the place that people are going to start asking questions. Elena replies that she does not care and moves to feed again. Damon pulls her away again and says, “I can’t believe you’re making me say this, show a little restraint.” Elena drops the woman on the ground and walks away.

Hayley is at a truck stop and stops when she hears a noise. A vampire begins to attack her and Klaus pulls him off saying, “that’s no way to treat a lady,” before making short work of the vampire. Hayley is happy to see Klaus who comments, “you did say that it was urgent.” He adds that she was foolish enough to make a deal with Katherine and now she is nothing more than a loose end and will be lucky if Katherine lets her live. Hayley reminds Klaus that he promised to protect her and Klaus replies, “I will, just as soon as you tell me everything you know about Katherine.”

Elena is in the shower, while Damon and Stefan discuss plans for her.  It seems that Damon wants Elena to go back to school, but Stefan is not keen on the idea of going and playing chaperone and reminds Damon that he has to go and find the cure because Elena needs it now more than ever.  Caroline walks into the room and says that she believes taking Elena back to school is a fabulous idea.  Damon is surprised to see Caroline, who explains her presence by saying that their house has the only vervain free showers in town, thanks to their fancy water filters. Caroline says that Liz believes things are going to get worse and so Damon agrees to go after Katherine and instructs Caroline to take Elena to school.  Stefan and Damon head into the bathroom to tell Elena the plan and she says that she has nothing better to do.  Damon then uses his sire bond to tell her to go to school, learn, study hard and not eat anybody.

Elena is now at school and she takes down a flyer announcing a memorial for Jeremy.  Caroline is on the phone leaving yet another long message for Tyler.  Matt approaches Caroline to ask about Bonnie and Caroline says that Bonnie is fine and that she’s just a little drained from everything.  Elena interrupts the conversation to ask about getting her old spot on the cheer leading squad.   Caroline replies that she thinks this would make Damon really happy.

Damon is now at Klaus’ and says that he has come up with a list called, “things you suck at: number one, finding Katherine.  Number two, covering up your secret conversations with that backstabber Hayley. So where is she and what does she know about Katherine?” Klaus asks why he should help them, since they killed his brother and then imprisoned him in the Gilbert living room.  Damon tells Klaus that he needs to prioritize because Katherine has the cure and his guess is that she is going to want to use it on him.  Damon suggests that he gets the cure and gives it to Elena so that everyone wins.  Klaus replies, “I can’t help you mate, Hayley’s off limits.”

Liz and Stefan are talking and she tells him that the entire blood supply from the hospital is missing.  Stefan asks if she is accusing the vampires and Liz replies that this town is at a tipping point and that one more unexplained house fire and things are going to tip over.  Liz then apologizes and says that it’s been a rough week.  She adds that Miranda Gilbert was one of her best friends in highschool and to see what’s happened to her family.  Stefan promises that he will do whatever he needs to, to help. Liz replies that he needs to because whoever stole that blood put a lot of people in danger and risks exposing all of the vampires, including her daughter.  Liz asks if Stefan can think of who wants blood that badly.

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On Fangs for the Fantasy we’ve covered some of the many ways to dodge around actual inclusion of minorities in TV shows and books - usually the writers just throw tokens at us, or erase us entirely. But when it comes to GBLT inclusion there is a new crafty tactic on the horizon - the suggestive Bromance. And no show has mastered this more than Teen Wolf. Teen Wolf has already set itself apart because it is one of the few shows on television wherein the male characters are overtly sexualised and the women are not. This, in addition to being an excellent twist on the gender roles we see, unfortunately also gives perfect fodder for these Bromances and faux inclusion seen through “slash goggles.”

What is slash? Slash is fiction, usually fanfiction, which places two male characters into romantic/sexual relationships usually for the purposes of fetishization. “Slash goggles” is a term developed to refer to watching a show and looking for hints of anything (a touch, a gesture, a look, anything) that would back up these characters being a couple.

So, what is the problem with this? Well, aside from the problem of fetishisation, appropriation and homophobia that are unfortunate issues within slash, there’s a huge problem with ambiguity encouraging erasure.

For too long, writers have been using character ambiguity as an excuse to avoid including GBLT chaarcters. Rather than overtly say a character is GBLT, they can imply it - and get praise for inclusion from people desperate for inclusion (or desperate to see hot guys get it on) when they haven’t actually included anyone, or only made the slightest gestures of inclusion.

Teen Wolf doesn’t just subtly cater to this - but is probably the most blatant in pandering to it. Don’t believe me? Look at this little video made by Dylan O’Brien and Tyler Hoechlin.

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Jane Yellowrock has a job from Leo Pelliser, Master of the city of New Orleans and, as it turns out, Master of the whole South-east of the United States, meaning he has far more oomph than Jane imagined.

He has sent her to escort Gregoire, one of his top vampires, to negotiate with the local vampire Shaddock who wishes to become Master of Asheville on account of his children becoming vampires super-quickly without decades of madness. It’s an important bodyguard job and Jane is focused on it and in charge despite the distraction of Rick, her sort-of-boyfriend turning into a wereleopard.

Unfortunately things are complicated by the remaining werewolves from the pack she destroyed in the last book seeking revenge – and by revenge that means slaughtering people in her area. Jane is forced to work with local police to find the wolves, balancing law enforcement with orders from Leo who wants them dead as soon as possible. Jane has her own reasons since Molly and her family (and coven witches) are in the area –Molly’s husband blames her for putting their children in danger, Jane cannot stand the idea that she has put them at risk again

But even Molly’s coven isn’t a source of peace – with it being betrayed from within with dark magic, old secrets and an ancient evil being summoned at the heart of it – an evil whose influence is making all Jane’s jobs that much harder and that much more complicated.

This book was overwhelming. There was a lot happening – with the parley talks, lethal werewolves running around killing people, the Grindylow apparently with its own agenda, Kenmebi both mentoring and threatening to kill Rick, the rogue vampire to hunt down and, of course, Evangeline playing her own game. At times I was almost lost, I kept wondering what plot line we were on and where we were going and why. Usually, such a book annoys me, I wish they’d remove a plot line so the story would flow better, there wouldn’t be so many distractions and I wouldn’t feel like I had to take notes to try and keep up with everything. But not in this case. Yes it was overwhelming but it was equally clear that it was meant to be. As Jane bounced from crisis to crisis, slipping sleep, desperately trying to fit everything in – this was one of the themes of the book; exhaustion, stress and constantly have to run to keep up with everything – and everything being too important to just cast aside or even realistically delay. It makes for a very strong part of the book, being very sustained and well balanced. I was overwhelmed, but I wasn’t lost.

I also like how the storylines come together – it adds the plausibility of not having everything just spontaneously happen at once and prevents everything in Jane’s life happening in complete isolation. It is very well done and doesn’t feel even remotely strained or convoluted – it flows naturally and it’s also completely and utterly unpredictable. I didn’t see the ending, I didn’t see what was happening and discovered everything as and when the characters did – the mystery was mysterious and the confusion was natural and shared with the protagonist.

The pacing was excellent, I was never bored and it never dropped and got lost. The action scenes were well laid out and described – nothing was too rushed or dragged. Everything was described appropriately – it was a very well balanced book, really well written and never once made me want to put it down.

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We follow a series of short stories to catch up on various parts of Carrie Vaughn’s world here.

From ancient vampires in the court of Henry VII, as well as the parable of Daniel, through to Rick, the current master vampire of Denver’s long history both in the time of Coronado as well as his brushes with past attempts by the US government to study supernatural beings.

Kitty, of course, has an outing and we get to see how she dealt in all her solo time away from the pack and we fill in some much needed information about TJ

The star of the book, we get to see both Ben and Connor growing up, Connor as a monster hunter and, of course, his time in prison meeting Amelia and what that entailed.

This is a book that collects several of Carrie Vaughn’s short stories that have appeared in various anthologies. I’ve said before that I don’t like short stories and I include that as a caveat here – look at my rating from the understanding this isn’t my preferred style of writing.

The main problem I had with all of these stories is that there was an awful lot of naval gazing. Lots of angsting, lots of monologuing, lots of sitting around rambling about their feelings. Now this isn’t something I’m a fan of at the best of time since it tends to be a whole lot of telling not showing and the length of angst just serves to either make it feel fake or make me wish one of the side characters would give them a swift kick and tell them to snap out of it. But it’s worse in a short story context because we have a big chunk of angst, then when it’s resolved we move on to a new chunk of angst from a different person/situation.

Another issue I had is that many of these short stories radically expanded the world. We had stories where brand new creatures are introduced and they’re background mentions. I’m sat reading it thinking “no no, stop – you can’t just introduce unicorns and merfolk and skip ahead! Back to the unicorns, someone explain the unicorn to me!” I found it kind of frustrating that we’re not looking at the unicorn instead we’re going to tell a love story (one that didn’t end Happily Ever After – which was certainly unique and new).

There were also several stories in this book that I didn’t particularly enjoy – I don’t think they added a great deal, especially Catherine of Aragon, the Daniel parable and Rick’s back stories. They were moderately interesting in their own right but didn’t add a great deal to the overall ongoing meta, they just weren’t relevant enough to what was happening in the 9 book series for me to be very engaged by them. I also didn’t particularly like that we were looking at Rick’s story in colonial Central America but the only glance we have at the native population is as victims Rick heroically saved. The other books with Kitty and Emma were decent enough stories but didn’t really grab me.

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We open rather dramatically with a man running for his life in a park from something that growls, has claws and catches him at a stone monument – the camera pans away before the no-doubt grisly end.

Dresden is busy buying herbs from an Asian woman (yes, it had to be, didn’t it? On TV only Asian people grow herbs. It is known) before being called by Murphy to go and see the mauled body that has had its hair and canine teeth removed – but the body we see is a woman, not a man. There is no male body. She’s the second body that has been mutilated like this.

They do find blood at the monument whether the man was cornered. And we get to interview Heather, the room mate who happens to have dropped round to the park – but she does tell them Mina (the dead woman) was on a date that night.

At the autopsy Murphy is told that the blood on the statue isn’t hers – it’s a man’s. And that the dead woman had silver powder (from old fashioned film development) in her nose and lungs. But she is interrupted when she finds Special Agent Raskin, an FBI agent from Miami investigating a serial killer is linking Mina’s to the previous deaths and taking over the investigation.

Harry has his own methods of investigating – bringing Bob out to look at the blood. By touching the blood he can assume the form of the people it came from. He reveals what the man looks like – and that the woman was a werewolf who died tasting silver. Bob posits that the man was defending himself from a werewolf hunting him, but Harry points out that he came with silver ready and that he took teeth and hair – so who was hunting who. We have a quick cameo to the man cleaning his wound over the 8 locks of hair he had collected.

Harry goes to check up with Murphy to confirm the silver and runs into the Special Agent who is, obviously, not especially happy to deal with a wizard – and is quick to push Harry out. Harry won’t take that and decides to interview Heather instead (with a rather hokey speech about unexplained things that she can’t discuss with the police). In a club one night Heather and Mina went to, something odd happened -  Mina got into a fight in which she was scratched (or bitten: the marks apparently could be either) in a fight with a woman at the bar. It was the bar where she met the man she was dating

They go on a little trip to the bar where it all happened allowing Dresden to take a mirror from the bar and then use a spell on it and Heather to review what happened in the bar – and to see the woman: Special Agent Raskin.

That’s when the FBI comes into to arrest Harry and bundle Heather off into a car with Agent Raskin – who then bites heather with wolfy fangs. Harry gets interviewed by Special Agent Harry Bushnell – the man who the werewolf was chasing. They found silver powder in his apartment (somehow managing to get a search warrant for it) and are arresting him for all of the murders.

In prison Harry is visited by Murphy and Harry asks about Raskin’s past – including a breakdown in Bosnia (presumably when she was bitten). He tells Murphy his suspicions about the 2 FBI agents – but all of the evidence from the crime scene has disappeared so they have no more blood to compare to Bushnell’s – in itself suspicious and pointing the fingers. He worries that heather is now in their hands

Speaking of – we switch to Heather hallucinating and dreaming about Mina who advises her to find Dresden to get help. But she’s being held prisoner by Agent Bushnell. They plan on releasing heather into the park and killing her after she turns. They need to kill heather as part of a ritual to cure Agent Raskin of lycanthropy – to bring her back, at least so Bushnell says before Heather uses her werewolf strength to send him flying. Agent Raskin, meanwhile, has gone to the prison to kill Harry – only to find him sat silently and the cell door unlocked – and the Harry there is just an illusion. Wizards are hard to hold.

Back to Harry’s shop, Dresden finds the FBI has pretty much torn it apart, which doesn’t amuse him. But they completely missed his hidden lab with Bob. Between them they confirm that there is a ritual – if you kill 9 werewolves of the same bloodline then you can cure lycanthropy.

Then Heather arrives, ill and sick and turning – and yes she tells Harry she has been bitten. Bob urges harry to use silver spikes to kill her but Harry refuses – telling Bob to get out. But Heather is turning and is losing control. Harry and heather work desperately to strengthen her control – and Harry reveals he knows lycanthropes who have managed to control themselves and live with lycanthropy.

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