Well stated Violet Sunlight!
I'd like to add a few opinions on this myself...
Knives wrote:Likewise, 'suicide squad' missions in various military forces through history (and sometimes today) follow the same principle; a team of volunteers, in full knowledge of their fairly certain deaths, choose to attempt an objective in the hopes that their deaths will be meaningful. They don't need prescience in order to understand their choice, just a knowledge of how realistic their odds are and a belief in whatever it is they're actually dying for. These men (and women!) act carefully, weighing the reward against the cost, and then choose to die.
One of the defining beliefs of the US military is that the "reward" always outweighs the cost. Every sacrifice is terrible and every sacrifice is necessary. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few...or the one. Each person who volunteers for duty knows that there is a very realistic chance that they could be killed. They join up because of their different beliefs, sense of honor, occasionally not having anywhere else to go, and various other reasons. Now, if you are talking about suicide bombers/terrorists...their deaths have no meaning for most except for the innocents that are harmed by their actions. That is
not noble or moral. That is murder! Don't mistake of someone volunteering to be "in harms way" as being the same as someone choosing to die.
Bella believes that James is
only after her and that he will hurt anyone and everyone close to her to obtain her. Yes, she initially believes that she's going to save her mother and to keep Charlie from being harmed, but she doesn't wait on Edward or any of the others to get there or tell Alice and Jasper because she does not want to take the chance that any of them could get hurt. In the book she tells James that she's left Edward a letter asking him not to avenge her. She doesn't want him to be harmed even though she is pretty certain that she will be killed. She wants this to be a self sacrifice, but what she doesn't count on is Jame's sadistic sense of the game. He is only doing this for sport and to get back at them for Alice. Edward:
"His existence is consumed with tracking, and a challenge is all he asks of life. Suddenly we've presented him with a beautiful challenge - a large clan of strong fighters all bent on protecting one vulnerable element."..."You wouldn't believe how euphoric he is now. It's his favorite game, and we've just made it his most exciting game ever." In the movie, she tells James to leave Edward out of it because he has nothing to do with this. She believes that if she goes to him and dies, the Cullens, Charlie and her mom will all be safe from him once the object of his game is dead.
Do you think she thought her death wouldn’t be “meaningful”? The Cullens were immortal so her "sacrifice" could literally have been remembered forever, instead of as a footnote in a history book. And most assuredly it would have held mass amounts of meaning to Edward, Charlie, Renee, Alice, Carlisle...etc.
Knives wrote: Predicting the future, as it turns out, is not all that hard if you act on a scale proportionate with your information.
Then I think Bella did an excellent job of deciding what her goal was considering the information she had. And since she wasn't killing off an entire town, only trying to stop the threat to her family, I would also say that she kept it very "on scale". Was there another option? James didn't offer not to kill her if she sent Edward to him. Nor did he offer to let her mother go. Do you think Bella believed for a moment that James wouldn't still kill her mother had she actually been there? I mean really, Renee would have witnessed a vampire kill her daughter. That would draw some attention wouldn't you think?
Knives wrote:...he chose to sacrifice himself to prevent the enemies of his faith from using its own resources against it.
Not sure what this statement actually means. He didn't give the wealth back to keep the Church from using it against the poor?
Bella choosing to sacrifice herself to prevent her enemies from hurting the others because of her... the only thing I see different (aside from one being a fictional teenage girl and the other a man in Roman history apparently in the position to have some effect on the church) is that this man, actually died and Bella was saved at the last moment.
Knives wrote:Bella, on the other hand, sprints off on the cuff, barely investing enough thought in her action to actually do it, and inevitably ends up horrifically injured (Twilight), nearly dead (New Moon), putting her friends in unnecessary and horrible danger (Eclipse) or mutilated and shattered with mind-blowing pain (Breaking Dawn) because she's so downright eager to do the 'noble' thing instead of the smart one. If she'd stopped to think about almost any of these (Breaking Dawn being the theoretical exception) she would've grokked pretty easily that throwing herself under the bus wasn't a good or even workable solution, but she doesn't. Rushing towards death with your eyes wide shut is called 'suicide', not 'sacrifice'.
I'm not certain what you mean by "barely investing enough thought in her action to actually
do it," what action does she do without a lot of thought? She didn't have a whole lot of time to decide anything after James calls. Can you clarify that statement?
In NM, she did not intentionally try to kill herself. She was trying to console herself with his "memory" that spoke to her when she was doing something foolish and dangerous. She never thought she was in real harm. The cliff jump could actually be seen as selfish but unintentional. Going to the Volturi, she had no choice and there was nothing to think about. This wasn't just some guy who broke up with her and ended a high school crush. This was a supernatural being that couldn't possibly exist, couldn't possibly see her as anything other than a mere human and couldn't possibly want to love her and be with her; that did exist, was consumed by her presence and who literally did not want to continue to exist if she was no longer in the world. What would you have done to keep him from going to the Volturi?
For Eclipse, here's what my 16 year old son had to say about the 3rd wife's sacrifice. "Why didn't she just cut herself? I mean come on...did she really have to kill herself if the only distraction needed was the smell of blood?" Bella was smarter than that. She wanted to help, she felt like the weak link and wanted to be the person that changed the outcome. She wanted to protect her friends and Edward. She wanted her death (if that's what it came to) to have meaning. She had no control over the fact that Victoria had set all this up because of her, or ultimately because of Edward. She worked with what she had. A knowledge of what would drive the enemy to distraction long enough for Edward to gain the upper hand. The newborns she was fairly sure would be distracted by her scent.