In which we delve a bit more into the psyche of Tonner Edward (while Anna and Elizabeth harass him vigilante-style).

Part One

May 1st, 2009: In which the fugitives' reign of terror begins, and a sulky Tonner Edward explains exactly what vampires are.

Featuring

• Anna Dollerious
• Elizabeth Swann

• The Ellowynes
• The Littlest Edward
• Tonner Edward

Notes

• I had originally wanted the line after the first picture to say, "but the guys just thought DEATH TO SPARKELPIRES [sic] was the funniest thing ever," as if the girls had misspelled it, but it was hard enough to find all the letters as it was, and it just so happened that "LE" came as one piece.

• I'm not sure if "I am READING THE CLASSICS" is somewhere in "Growing Up Cullen," but it wouldn't surprise me. 

• Several days before on Twitter, I mentioned that the SLOD entry I was writing at the time was getting too "contemplative and psychoanalytical. It's dolls, people, not 'The Portrait of a Lady.'" Much of what I was writing at the time got split off into this entry, which in turn got split into two parts, just to keep people from dying of boredom. So that's where the entry title here comes from--both Portrait of a Lady and, for reasons that the last line of Part One will make obvious, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.

• There was no subtle way to include the extra picture in the story, but the book Tonner Edward is reading--my Rackham-illustrated hardback of Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination--is open to the illustration of Ligeia and her long, dark, wavy hair. It was always my favorite part of the book when I was a kid.

Icons

Part Two

May 4th, 2009: In which a momentous decision is made, The Littlest Edward is a tiny sparkle cowboy, and Tonner Edward admits to 1) enjoying the taste of suffering and 2) having a particular fetish.

Featuring

• Purple Arwen
• Lyra Silvertongue (and Pan)
• Faramir Two
• Galadriel
• The Littlest Edward
• Tonner Edward

Notes

• "My new glitter eyeshadow" was actually a sample of Aromaleigh's Twilight-inspired "Lustre" powder.

• Because I'm a loser who doesn't like the taste of beer, Woodchuck Amber is what I drink in situations where you want to sit around with something in a bottle. Otherwise, I tend to drink Long Islands (or margaritas, if we're being festive).

• In the Twilight books, Carlisle is the father figure who turned most of the Cullen "family" vampires and has been encouraging them to lead a "vegetarian" life of feeding only on... animals. Like... I understand the metaphor here, but... whatever.

• Let's have a big hand for Squeakers the cat-toy stunt mouse, who was not actually harmed in the shooting of the "Edward gets caught eating a mouse" pictures.

• "The Narnia Rule": In the Chronicles of Narnia, it's a big thing that you're not supposed to eat the talking animals, leading to a very awkward moment of realization in The Silver Chair.

• "I want their life. I want their death": "The blood is the life" is not only a key line in Dracula, but recurs in many other post-Dracula vampire books and movies. So I wanted to take it a step further and say that he actually wanted his victims' death as well--a more psychological component than the (somewhat sympathetic) idea that blood is necessary to sustain a vampire's life because it is life. Throwing "death" in there as well just makes it really, really sick, which something I always found lacking from the Twilight vampires. So Tonner Edward is the character who's supposed to represent more what vampires "should" be like, the very creepiest aspects, in contrast to the tamed, neutered sweetness of The Littlest Edward.

• "I'm not sure he'd even heard those words aloud before": In the draft of Midnight Sun on Stephenie Meyer's website, Edward says something along the lines of "I said a word I'd never said before in the presence of a lady" during the Death Van scene. My (sarcastic) guess was "dang" (one of Bella's preferred cuss words, along with "Holy crow!"); an earlier bootleg version of the half-finished book reveals that he said "Damn it." I'm just saying: this is the baseline of hardcore swears for Edward Cullen.

• "Tofu?": This is, in fact, what Edward compares eating animals to in the book and the movie. The whole scene here, then, is kind of a pastiche/parody of the one where Edward explains "vegetarianism" to Bella.

• The Littlest Edward's cowboy hat (along with a spare) was supplied by MaggieCat, who also felted Kaisa.

• The ponies' trough is a glass jewelry dish I usually keep on my dresser. It actually appeared in before, in this picture from Forth Eorlingas.

See also

• Dolls

• The Secret Life of Dolls