Pages 87 - 109, We All Support the Team: How to Torture your Bratz

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What happened?  Barbie gives up his exploration and goes back to work at the diner, Sweebriar Rose.  We see his deep and abiding friendship with Rose Twitchell, the owner.  (She's a few years too old for him, but we can see: something special here, and these are the good guys.)  Meanwhile, tumorescent nutboy Junior Rennie -- son of the Big Man in Town -- not only seems to be getting away with killing Angie, but he actually manages to steal some money from his dad's secret lockbox AND return to the scene of the crime ... where he proceed to be kill Angie's best friend Dodee, who come's by for comfort.  (Dodee's mom was in the plane that crashed against the dome back on Page 3.)  We also meet Julia Shumway, editor of the local paper and another apprent Good Guy.  (Both the Sanders family and the Sweebriar Rose staff are suffering pretty badly here, and we've barely passed page 100 ...)

In between all the truly horrific stuff, SK cements characters into place with small, often nasty details (how many times have I already said this?).  This time around, we get a clear sense of who/what the just-now-deceased Dodee, was really like.  She's the kind of strange, loser-ish girls who likes to smoke dope, drink on the sly, and then play (even as a young adult by taking Bratz dolls and finding new and interesting ways to torture and destroy them.  Hell, her friend Samantha Bushey (whom we haven't met yet) actually buys MORE Bratz dolls on eBay so they'll have EXTRAS to mutilate.  Now why, exactly, is this so creepy?  Little boys do it to GI Joes all the time, and we accept it -- mostly as just boyish delight in symbolic violence (though think about that REALLY odd little kid in Toy Story 1, and the dolls he mutilated.  Ewww...).  Little girls do it, and it's sick.  (What was the book or movie in which the female lead's horrible sister is illustrated as a TOTAL BITCH because she used to steal her sister's Barbies and cut off their hair?  Help me out here.)  Worse, big girls keep doing it long after they should have stopped, and it's just plain icky.

Come to think of it, there are lots of behaviors that we see in children as experimental, temporary, generally tolerable, but in adults are seen as damn near psychotic.

Gosh, I love the kids, don't you?