Last time on why god why, a new flavor of rapey love triangle!

Upon Ian’s return, he realizes she heard all that. He asks what she thought, prompting a long, repetitive ramble about omg how can a boy like me.

Or my thoughts on Melanie? Melanie’s thoughts on their conversation? Whether I agreed with
Jared about her rights?
I didn’t know what I thought.

MELANIE’S THOUGHTS ARE NOT YOURS SO YOU BEING INDECISIVE AS USUAL HAS NO RELEVANCE TO HER OPINION

Her continued useless waffling is apparently what he loves about her.

He smiled at me. It was odd how his eyes could both scorch and warm. Especially with a color that was closer to ice than fire.

So…blue? So he’s another aryan boyfriend.

He explains that he like-likes her, and she explains that she has no real clue about any of this, only without even that much coherence.

he reached across the narrow space and picked up my hand. He held it in both of his for a moment, and then he trailed the fingers of his left hand slowly up my arm, from my wrist to my shoulder. Just as slowly, he pulled them back again. He looked at the skin of my arm rather than my face, watching the goose bumps that formed along the path of his fingers.
“Does that feel good or bad to you?” he asked.

Okay, that’s actually pretty reasonable. Then here’s again, does it really matter? Melanie’s obviously in love with someone else, so while starting slow is better than grabbing her for a kiss, there isn’t anything else from here they can really go.

Bad, Melanie insisted.

And furthermore even that’s enough to be creeping Melanie out. Instead of respecting that-

But it doesn’t hurt, I protested.
That’s not what he’s asking. When he says good… Oh, it’s like talking to a child!
I’m not even a year old, you know. Or am I now? I was sidetracked, trying to figure out the date.

y halo ther pedophila kink.

The book’s had her insisting earlier that she’s a child because she’s only been in this particular body for a little while, but it’s only now it’s come up in connection to sex. It doesn’t help that she’s also now especially stupid and slow even for the low standard of the cave period in general.

Melanie explains that the guy’s talking about if it feels like their crush on Jared, and yeah, it doesn’t.

“Wanda?”
“Melanie says bad,” I whispered.
“What do you say?”

Melanie says bad should cover it. But this isn’t about if what’s being done is moral or not, is it? Ian just wants to know if she loves him back, so if someone else is being molested along the way, that’s not really his concern.

The brainslug stammers that she just doesn’t know, which prompts more loving stares from his pretty eyes, because his kink is obviously women who sound like they’re five.

His hand traced up and down my arm again. “Would you like me to stop?”
I hesitated. “Yes,” I decided. “That… what you’re doing… makes it hard for me to think. And Melanie is… angry at me. That also makes it hard to think.”

Infantilism! That’s what I was trying to think of. This is like infantilism. It’s not sex with an underage body, it’s sex with an underage mind.

Melanie jumps in to say that it’s not the brainslug she’s mad at, which, I guess that’s better than blaming her for the guy’s actions, but then again, she just said they should stop not because it was upsetting Melanie, but because upsetting Melanie was making Melanie upset her.

“I’d like the chance to speak with Wanda privately, if you don’t mind. Is there any way that could be arranged?”
Of all the nerve! You tell him I said no chance in hell! I do not like this man.
My nose wrinkled up.
“What did she say?”
“She said no.” I tried to say the words as gently as they could be said. “And that she doesn’t… like you.”
Ian laughed. “I can respect that. I can respect her. Well, it was worth a try.” He sighed. “Kind of puts a damper on things, having an audience.”

I don’t even know what to say.

I really don’t. I’ve been staring at this for five minutes.

He tells her to think about it, and she decides that she feels different than Jared but she definitely likes him liking her. Melanie’s demands for him to go away and stop touching her continue to be ignored.

“You don’t really feel that way about me, you know,” I whispered. “It’s this body.… She’s pretty, isn’t she?”
He nodded. “She is. Melanie is a very pretty girl. Even beautiful.” His hand moved to touch my bad cheek, to stroke the rough, scarring skin with gentle fingers. “In spite of what I’ve done to her face.”

I don’t remember Ian smashing her face in. I thought that was Jared. The book doesn’t clarify, just has the brainslug saying she’d have denied that they were his fault, but she’s said similar stuff about Jared beating her.

I don’t know if I should praise the book for at least remembering that the violence in the book has been severe enough to leave scars or criticize it for the fact it’s glossed over anyway.

“But, pretty as she is, she’s a stranger to me. She’s not the one I… care about.”
…
“It’s not the face, but the expressions on it. It’s not the voice, but what you say. It’s not how you look in that body, but the things you do with it.You are beautiful.”

This would all be very sweet if it wasn’t for “Kind of puts a damper on things, having an audience.”

The brainslug continues going on about the brain/body difference.

“Ian, what if I’d come here in Magnolia’s body?”
He grimaced and then laughed. “Okay. That’s a good question. I don’t know.”
“Or Wes’s?”
“But you’re female–you yourself are.”
“And I always request whatever a planet’s equivalent is. It seems more… right. But I could be put into a man and I would function just fine.”
“But you’re not in a man’s body.”

See, the question of love as it relates to bodies is an interesting one to consider, but it’s really ruined by his no homo insistence that she herself is female. I mean, the idea that you love someone for their mind alone normally implies that you’re not hung up on that mind’s gender.

“But this body is part of you, too. It’s part of who you are. And, unless you change your mind and turn us all in, it’s who you will always be.”
Ah, the finality of it. Yes, I would die in this body. The final death.
And I will never live in it again, Melanie whispered.

And why does Melanie just accept this?

Throughout the cave sequence, it’s just been forgotten that nothing prevents the brainslug from giving Melanie’s life back, even at times like this when there’s people discussing the rest of their lives.

She says that this species lives the shortest life of anyone save the spiders. A human lifespan without illness is presumably somewhere past 120 years, which means that almost life on our planet is considered insanely shortlived. I mean, there’s some turtles and stuff that can live hundreds of years, but they’re very much the exception.

“Don’t you think, then…” Ian paused and leaned closer to me so that I couldn’t seem to see anything around his face, just snow and sapphire and ink. “That maybe you should make the most of what time you have? That you should live while you’re alive?”
I didn’t see it coming the way I had with Jared. Ian was not as familiar to me. Melanie realized what he was going to do before I did, just a second before his lips touched mine.

“Good or bad?” he whispered against my lips.
Bad! Bad, bad!
“I–I can’t think.” When I moved my mouth to speak, he moved his with it.
“That sounds… good.”
His mouth pressed down with more force now. He caught my lower lip between his and pulled on it gently.

Melanie tries to fight back, and the images of violence upset the brainslug in a way completely ignoring Melanie’s wishes didn’t, so the brainslug asks him to stop.

“I am sorry, Melanie,” he said. “I know this must be impossible for you.”

Empty apologies don’t mean anything.

Interestingly, Melanie is allowed to agree that this is bullshit, probably because she’s a side character and can hold the occasional opinion the author disagrees about.

Then the brainslug explains that Melanie’s losing already almost nonexistent grasp over the body, although she has no idea why. So in the end, for all the claims Melanie’s so strong, she’s actually in the bottom twenty percent with the rest of the failures.

Then she reveals that the last time Melanie broke free, it was because the brainslug was overwhelmed by such strong feelings…

“What did he do? Just kiss you?”
I nodded.
Ian flinched. His eyes tightened.

So, he’s totally willing to push things further when he’s not getting any clear sign she understands what’s going on or how she feels and another women is screaming in the background for him to stop, but her rejecting him, that’s the tragedy here.

The brainslug apologizes for this.

“Don’t be. I told you I’d give you time, and I don’t mind waiting for you to think things through. I don’t mind that at all.”

So in other words, don’t apologize yet, I’ll give you a little longer to realize you should do what I want.

He does say he’s uncomfortable with the issue of if she loves Jared or if it’s Melanie’s feelings, because the fact she’s made it clear there isn’t a good distinction for that kind of thing doesn’t matter, he’s busy manpaining.

Then, as though a switch had been flipped, Ian was his normal self again. He laughed. “Time is on my side,” he said, grinning. “We’ve got the rest of our lives in here. One day you’ll wonder what you ever saw in Jared.”

Melanie won’t, of course, but she’s helpless to stop any of this.

Jamie appears to interrupt:

“Guess what? Jared was saying at lunch that he didn’t think it was fair for you to have to move out of the room you were used to. He said we weren’t being good hosts. He said you should move back in with me! Isn’t that great? I asked him if I could tell you right away, and he said that was a good idea. He said you would be in here.”
“I’ll bet he did,” Ian murmured.

It is literally impossible for me to give a fuck. All of you are just doing whatever you feel like to try to get her within molesting distance, what do I care who did what?

Oblivious to the fuckery going on between the two, Jamie just says the three being together will be putting things back the way it was before.

It felt sort of like a razor sliding between my ribs when he said that–too clean and precise a pain to be compared to a blow or a break.
Jamie analyzed my tortured expression with alarm. “Oh. No, I mean but with you, too. It will be nice. The four of us, right?”

Sure, three people and one person trapped within her body, but you don’t care that the thing that looks like your sister is actually puppeting her body around while your real sister stares helplessly out its eyes.

In another book, the fact the supposed humans seem to share the brainslug ethos that it doesn’t matter the personality so long as the person next to you looks like someone you remember would be a huge point. You could probably get an entire creepy book out of exploring that alone.

Anyway, the brainslug says that what ultimately matters is that Jamie wants it, so sure.

“You want something, Ian?”
“Sure, kid. I want you to tell Jared he’s shameless.”

Yes, truly your own plan of keeping her entirely to yourself so she couldn’t be around her own brother was so morally superior.