Okay, but more bobitms thoughts! Cw: extremely vague bobitms spoilers, but spoilers there are.
I feel like, for as many people who react poorly to Alice's chapters and the repetition of her Catty memories, I end up finding a new thing about them that I love. Though, if i'm honest, I feel like Alice's chapters are perhaps the most challenging because they're so unsparing when it comes to her flaws and the fact that those flaws are incredibly relatable.
Alice is a young woman stuck at the cusp of her life, and has delayed that step beyond for far too long. Though what I think the Catty segments show even moreso is that Alice has always been on the cusp. She constrains herself to manage the feelings of others, trying to keep peace in a household that will never be peaceful (insofar as there is something of a feminist critique to be mined that speaks to an injustice, the very sort Catty is flipping out about), and has to silence her own wants and truth. However, what all this shows you, through each of these memories, is that the timid adult doesnt spawn ex nihilo. Each one of those moments swaddled her in layer after layer, and she's drowning within them, barely able to tread temporal water without being dislodged from her present.
Consequently, it strikes me that much of Alice's story (at least its beginning) is the presentation of a terrifying truth: if you don't make choices in your life someone will make them for you. In delaying her life, the development of herself, she becomes easy prey for Lottie. The perfect prey in fact, if we believe Lottie's reason for taking intrigue in Alice. Alice may have consented to sex, but she was very much hunted in a manner not that different from how Lottie was hunted by Sabine. Prey may choose to run, but the predator is guiding them toward the ambush.
And this is where Alice is so hard for so many to read about. They want to focus on cool vampire powers and hunts; the idea that, like Alice, they'd still be uncool, anxious, and timid despite all their newfound power is agonizing. To be told that you are only going to be more of yourself is awful when you lack a clear image of who you even are! Then there's the elements of shame at play that so many lesbians tend to have these days; while we have so much more language than our elders did (like Sabine and Lottie), there's a lot of invisible structures in play in our lives that leave us inept at even talking to girls. Made all the worse when our environment is so lacking in other queers, mentor or otherwise, who might show us how we can be. Yet, so many of us turn inward (in part due the lack of a social group usually) and self-flagellate via recognizing how our elders had it so much worse but that they can do all this stuff you're failing at, ignoring the fact that some of our elders had more mentorship and physical community than many of us possess. A strange lack which has meant a lot of us never received a low stakes space to be taught how we might exist in our world.
In this way, Alice embodies so many of the implicit struggles of the modern young lesbian. She might have no been fast tracked toward marriage, but the gravity-like presumption of naturalism that Patriarchy possesses is still in play, weakening our ability to exist. All of which is a hard pill to swallow, but a fundamentally necessary one. Being able to name your identity isnt enough. A single label will not save your life. Only through being able to live your life, make choices for yourself, and surround yourself with a supportive community will save you. To do otherwise is to be left at the mercy of any passing monster.
There's more I could say, but i'll stop for now.
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