99: Heading Towards the Horizon - Chapter Ten

Title: Heading Towards the Horizon
Author: AngieRosie
Media: Movie
Topic: Pirates of the Caribbean
Genre: None Listed
URL: Heading Towards the Horizon – Chapter Ten
Critiqued by Lyle

Good morning, everyone!  Welcome back to the Library for another installment of “Heading Towards the Horizon: The Tale of Let’s Just Narrate Almost Verbatim From the 4th Pirates of the Caribbean Movie, But Add a Useless High Schooler While We’re At It.”

For those whose memory need some jogging, let us sum up what we’ve witnessed so far on this journey into the Author’s fantasy.

Jace/Jaicee is 16 and the daughter of Jack and Angelica.  When she was 8, Captain Barbossa wanted to kill her merely because the author needed a plot device to move her story forward and murdering a child seemed like a good way to go about it.  To save this kid’s life, Tai Dalma (the goddess Calypso who, apparently, wanted to return to the Bayou because maybe she missed the jambalya?) sends both Jace and her mother, but not her father, 260 years into the future.  This tactic works for 8 years until Barbossa finds his way into her high school with only a vague explanation of how he got there in the first place.  He kidnaps her and she manages to use a “neckless” to go back in time to 1700′s London.  If you’ve seen the 4th movie, I don’t need to tell you any more because the author actually plopped Jaicee-Sue right into the first twenty minutes of said movie, completely contradicting any timeline that may have been feebly struggling to emerge from this wreck of a story.

Chapter Ten – Black Beard’s Ship

Okay, first of all…

*grabs Hard-Cover Harry*

I’ve named my Smacking-Book.  Secondly…

*SMACK*

Blackbeard is one word.

That aside, what follows next is rather mind-numbing.  I think I’ve met Wall-o-Text’s distant cousin, Wall-O-Dialogue.   There are 67 “paragraphs” in this chapter.  Of those 67 paragraphs, 64 of them begin with someone talking.  As I wade through this sea of quotation marks, I notice one distinct thing:  The author is, once again, merely regurgitating the movie with a few added lines referring to Jace.

“Now!” We quickly got up and Dad. I followed him as he talked to the person from London.

“There’s been a horrible mistake,” he said.

“Just keep moving,” the man said.

“We’re not supposed to be here,” I told him.

“Many a man’s woken up at sea with no idea what, when, wherefore or why. No memory of the night afore whence he signed up and drank away all his bonus money.” Dad was really getting frustrated with this man.

“No, no, no! You don’t understand mate. I’m captain Jack Sparrow. The original. The only.” I shook my head in agreement.

“Scrum, and the pleasure of meeting you both is mine. Now, keep moving!” He handed us each a mop and we started spreading tar on the deck.

For those unfamiliar with the movie this follows, that is almost word for word exactly what happens when Jack wakes up on The Queen Anne’s Revenge and talks to Scrum.  I’m thinking that the author owns the movie and has been watching it way too much.  It was a passable movie at best… this obsession with living through it is  baffling.

Also, there is a lot of this:

“Scrum. Why is there a glass coffin,” Dad asked.

“Do I look like the man in charge,” he asked sarcastically with a slight smirk.

“Where are we,” I asked him.

Those three sentences are consecutive, by the way.  I didn’t leave out anything in between.  So, that said, where are the fracking question marks?!

*SMACK*

The entire chapter is one big talk-fest with very little description about anything: setting, what other people are doing, what other people look like, what the main characters are doing…  It’s just like the voices were talking in the author’s head and she decided to jot them down without any explanation as to what the hell is going on.  All we know is that they’re on the desk spreading about some tar.

A few more lines of dialogue later and we find out that they’re on the Queen Anne’s Revenge.  Jace knows the ship’s name is familiar but can’t seem to remember what it’s supposed to signify.  For someone who is supposed to know all about pirates, she must have skipped the chapter on “Worst Pirates Ever.”  Jack fills her in and get this:

“Blackbeard.” That’s all he said before we were ordered up on deck to scrub.

Wait… weren’t they already spreading tar around on the deck?  This must be one of those new-fangled British Double-Decker pirate ships or something.  Someone does not proof-read her work, me thinks.  That would have been so easy to catch; it’s only separated by 7 lines of dialogue.  You don’t even have to scroll up to see it!  It’s. Right. There.

Moving right along, they work on scrubbing the deck (although it’s never really mentioned that’s what they’re doing.  They merely get yelled at to scrub.)  They find out the  first-mate is a woman.  Jace notices her mom up at the helm and points her out to Jack.

Then Jace is whipped for inactivity by one of the slave-driving zombie-officers Blackbeard employs.   *fist pump*

Angelica sees this and comes barreling down the stairs to the main deck to have a word with the zombie-officer while Jack takes Jace under deck to check her injury.

Wait a tick…

*looks that over again*

If Angelica is on the main deck berating a zombie that can hardly understand her, who the hell is steering the ship?  I think our author is under the impression that the “helm” is that raised portion of the ship.

*SMACK*

A little  bit of research would have shown our incompetent authoress that the “Helm” is a fancy term for “Ship’s Wheel.”  Hence the phrase “take the helm.”  It means: “Put your hands on the bloody wheel so we don’t hit something.”  It does not mean: “You’re in charge of the raised platform thingy.”  That raised platform is called a quarter deck, although it is sometimes combined with the poop deck if the aft of the ship is only a single platform and not two consecutively raised platforms.

Anyway, under deck Jack announces that the whip will merely bruise her and did not break the skin.  That zombie must be pretty wimpy, which contradicts what they look like in the movie.  Here’s two for reference.  Honestly, bruising?  The best she could hope for is a bad welt.

*SMACK*

There, now you’ll have a lump to match your bruise.

While down under the deck, Angelica joins them to check on Jace.

“I only came to see if my daughter was all right,” she stressed the ‘my’ as if my own father wasn’t really my father at all.

“She’s my daughter as well.”

“I raised her!” Were they seriously going to do this?

I’m going to have to side with Jack on this one.  It’s not like Jack said “Screw you, I’m not going!” and threw a tantrum to stay in the 1700′s.  He was just never invited to go with them into the future.  For Angelica to be upset about the fact that she had to raise Jace on her own is on par with someone getting mad at her military spouse for being deployed during her birthday.  It makes no sense.  Be mad at the situation, sure, but don’t be idiotic enough to get mad at the person who had no choice in the matter.

*SMACKS ANGELICA SPECIFICALLY* 

Grow up.

Anyway, more movie verbatim dialogue reveals that Angelica is “posing” as Blackbeard’s daughter, even though everyone already knows she’s Blackbeard’s daughter because the author told us so in the first chapter.  I mean, isn’t that part of the reason Barbossa hated Jace?

Then Jace is told she doesn’t have to work while on the ship and Jack is told to get back to scrubbing.  Without any indication that they went up on deck, Jace leans over the railings of the ship and watches the waves as they sail onward towards the Fountain of Youth.

Right before the end of the chapter, Jace looks up toward the quarter deck again and sees a strangely familiar boy for a split second before he disappears.  Oh, look!  She’s attempting foreshadowing and mystery!  It’s totally Caden, although she doesn’t say that.  Anyone who doesn’t see that coming needs to have a chat with Harry.

Join me next time as the author completely contradicts EVERYTHING we just read.  It’ll be fun!

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