Why did Carlisle let or make Edward suck out James's blood at the end of Twilight? Edward has enough medical experience to administer drugs or do a tourquinet, and Carlisle has MUCH more control. Not to mention that BELLA IS EDWARD'S SINGER. It makes NO sense to have the guy MOST tempted by her blood do the sucking versus the guy who is LEAST tempted by ANYONE'S blood.
The short, and probably accurate, answer is drama/romance. I honestly think it was on SM more than the characters. The reason is that having Carlisle do it just doesn’t feed the romance and drama as much as having Edward do it. Does it make the most sense for the situation and characters? Nope! But if Carlisle did it, you wouldn’t get the “It was impossible to stop, but I did, I must really love you” and “Edward, my angel!! Wow he must really love me!” stuff.As I’ve said before, one of the strengths of SM’s writing is the sort of stream of consciousness, in the moment style. It’s so so easy to get swept up in it. But one of the downsides of this is that she’s so there in the moment that sometimes she seems to pick the most dramatic way for something to happen rather than the most logical way. This is one of those things. It makes infinitely more sense for Carlisle to do it. He HAS tasted human blood before–four times–and was able to stop every single time. He 100% could do it–I mean, even later in the series he offers to change Bella himself because it’s the safest option. The in-text explanation is that Carlisle can’t do it because he’s treating her other wounds which would make a certain sense… if SM hadn’t told us that EDWARD has been to medical school twice. Sure, he hasn’t practiced, so we wouldn’t want him to perform any surgeries (and yet … he does in BD, essentially!), but he could certainly handle applying pressure to a wound, right? That’s not advanced surgery, it’s pretty basic first aid? But it had to be Edward for the drama/romance. He’s the romantic hero, having someone else do it would rob him of getting to be the hero, even though it makes… way more sense and is much safer. It’s kind of the same reason that Edward and Bella have to be the one to kill Aro in the Alice’s vision in the BD 2 movie. Everyone else gets to have specific revenge, so it should have been Esme to kill him to avenge Carlisle, right? But no–the main characters/heroes need to kill the big bad. And so Edward has to “save” Bella here.And there’s the whole issue where ‘saving’ her from becoming a vampire, in retrospect, becomes kind of pointless. It would have saved Bella and the Cullens a ton of problems if they just let her turn right then, and when she DOES become a vampire she LOVES it and is easy for her so all their hand-wringing and warnings in the middle books feels unnecessary. There’s Charlie, of course, but given how things went down in BD, I’m sure they’d have found some way to keep him in Bella’s life even with a turned-by-James scenario. I was honestly shocked that in Life & Death she went a different way, there.
theartofmadeline
titsay
2087
tangentwithtanner
