Sometimes You Can't Say It Better...

So you just repeat what the other guy said.

I’m probably the (at least) ten-thousandth blogger to toss their two cents in about Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight. I’ll keep my opinion as short and sweet as possible, then. It’s a series of books. They’re very popular with both the YA crowd and the adult women crowd. They serve a purpose not unlike Harry Potter in that they bring young people, people who could be spending their time texting, playing video games or talking on the phone into libraries and bookstores. Unlike Harry Potter, there isn’t anything grand or epic about these books and, if you hold them up to older, acclaimed works, they fall woefully short.

They’re still coercing people into reading, and hopefully picking up other titles, so I can’t complain too much.

However, and this is a big however (imagine it in seventy-two point font if you will), the characters are horrible. Bella is a Mary Sue under a very thin veneer of narrative viewpoint and her two would-be suitors are a prudish, bullying stalker and a whiny teenaged narcissist.

I think one of the reasons I dislike Jacob so much isn’t even his own fault. Any time he, or any tribal members, show up they are immediately described as being “russet-colored.” Meyer uses the word “russet” the way Anne Rice used the word “preternatural,” which is to say too damn much and too damn often.

I’m not sure if Meyer is a bit racially insensitive, is unimaginative or just really likes potatoes, but if I never have to see her use the word “russet” again I will die a happy woman.

TrebleClef over at LibraryThing said everything I wanted to say and more in a review of Twilight that I would like to repost here today. I couldn’t have said any of this better.



Essentially what happens when you walk into Hot Topic, pick out the first twelve year old you see, and then have her write an Anne Rice novel. Twilight is a shallow blunder, and it sure is proud of it. The book reads like fan-fiction from a horny teenager (though that phrase may be redundant) with a mental problem, instead of providing any form of good writing we get every vampire cliché known to man until you're guaranteed every scene-fag that reads it will adore it. It is truly astounding how Meyer is able to say so, SO little in the course of 500 pages.

More than half of Twilight is just characters giving wry smiles, chuckling, hissing, glaring, flaring nostrils and raising eyebrows during some vapid, angsty conversation. The whole thing is narrated by some chick named Bella Swan, someone so lacking in human characteristics that it is more than easy to forget this is your main character. Reading this book makes it no surprise the only people who like this are around thirteen years old, both the main characters are covered in disgusting gloss and teenage perfection. Bella Swan and Edward Cullen are two of the dullest characters I've ever become acquainted with.

Bella is just another "average, ordinary, everyday girl" typical of romance novels. She is the "new girl in school" cliché and instantly becomes popular by doing nothing. She is made essentially perfect in every manner, but in an attempt to hide this the author decides to make her clumsy. The problem is that anyone familiar with these stereotypes knows that when it comes to these characters this is actually a "plus". It also doesn't help she spends a large amount of time I could have spent hammering a nail into my foot whining about how she always falls down. That is, of course, when she isn't using insane amounts of adjectives to describe the "dreamy" vamp of her life, Edward Cullen.

Oh, Edward Cullen. How I loathe thee. This talking mannequin is spoken about for pages upon pages with what looks like a late-night session on fanfiction.net with a teenager and a thesaurus. Like Boring Bella, Ennuyeux Edward is without depth and without flaw. Know what else Bella and Edward are without? CHEMISTRY. This is pretty much the book version of Neo and Trinity from the Matrix, except even worse. A third of the book is spent with these two Barbie dolls enjoying fake, unrealistic sexual tension akin to an episode of InuYasha until an awful plot forms. The important thing is that it ends with Cullen and Bella at the prom... AWWWWWWWWW, NO ONE SAW THIS COMING. AWWWW.

There is a lot more to say about this offense against literature, but this is just a quick little review from me. Despite all of this bullshit, the most infuriating thing about this 4-part story is that it isn't rotting on LiveJournal where it belongs. It is out there making millions with people who wouldn't know quality if it punted them in the vagina. It offers nothing to the reader. Just some clever marketing, some clever abuse of the masses. It is a superficial story that leaves readers with the image of a girl who discovers her own worth and gets all she ever wanted, by giving up her identity and throwing away nearly everything in life that matters. For this reason, Twilight's fame is far more understandable. For this sacrifice of self for the shallow and meaningless truly captures the spirit of the generation it's written for, or at least, the lack thereof.



This deserves a bit of applause, I think. Thank you for braving the anger of a legion of lovestruck young girls to point out Meyer's shortcomings. Hopefully the bulk of them will move on to something more substantial now that the series is (mostly) over.