I don't care about your sparkly spakking twit, Smeyer. Get out.
I keep seeing promotional things for the new Twilight movie. I do not approve of this. Let me tell you why.
There are many and varied reasons for hating the Twilight series and I subscribe wholeheartedly to all of them.
The first, and most obvious, is the writing is so dribblingly and mind numbingly atrocious that to read more than a sentence at a time requires a lobotomy and studied disinterest in your own continued sanity. I have no idea how many thesauruses were raped to bring this unholy creation to fruition, but my guess is somewhere in the vicinity of... many. A multitude. A plethora if you will. Copious amounts of- ok, you get the idea.
It is essentially a harlequin romance that got a bit up itself and now entertains delusions of being legitimate literature. If you removed every synonym for "attractive" from this series it would be about half the length. Adonis, perfect, handsome, gorgeous, flawless, blah, blah, vomit. Not only does this make for dull reading, but it does very little to convince me of the strength of the central "relationship" (more on that later).
Not once in the entire series does she think about what he's like (or if she does, she says completely nonsensical things; like that he was much politer to her father than he deserved. Oh yes, your father was mildly standoffish to the boy who alienated you from all your other friends, made you run away from home and who left you so broken hearted that you turned into a zombie for months on end when he broke up with you. What a cunt your father truly is), only what he looks like.
She wants to be a vampire purely because she doesn't want to be physically older than him. I'm sorry, what? Eighteen is over the hill now? In what universe does a woman peak in her late teens? I for one am extremely happy that I will never have to be a teenager again, never mind for all of eternity.
Another annoying thing is the author's habit of constantly telling instead of showing. Or rather showing the opposite of what she tells us. She tells us that Bella is bookish, mature, caring and average looking, but she shows Bella acting childish, callous, shallow, bitchy, she is never shown to be reading a book that isn't for school, the only book she brought with her when she moved was a copy of the complete works of Austen (and reading Austen doesn't make you smart. It makes you a girl) and every male character who encounters her falls head over heels for her. Who she generally treats like shit if they aren't a vampire or a werewolf. It's... bizarre.
The second reason is the central relationship and how it is portrayed. It is very clearly an emotionally abusive relationship and it's presented as the romantic ideal. I have no problem with unhealthy relationships or abuse in fiction, providing that this is how the relationship is supposed to be portrayed, a la Nobokov's Lolita, but Stephenie Meyer (the woman responsible for this abomination) and the fans of the series get genuinely affronted when you suggest that "their" Edward is anything less than perfect.
Well yes actually, he is less than perfect, let me count the ways: watching Bella sleep (before they were introduced, before he knew if he was going to kill her or not); telling her that her friends were shallow and stupid (she didn't hang out with them after that. What a shocker); following her around when she left town (for her own protection of course. Everyone knows that girls are too helpless to be allowed go shopping by themselves); telling her that she's weak and he could kill her very easily (which isn't intimidation at all) and making her decisions for her (like forcing her to go to a school dance, breaking her car to stop her seeing another friend, preventing her from leaving the house so she couldn't see said friend... the list goes on).
But mentioning any of this seems a wasted enterprise because fans will at this point just roll their eyes and say "Well, he's a vampire, of course you can't judge him by human standards."
I'm glad you mentioned that actually because NO HE IS NOT A FUCKING VAMPIRE!
Alright?
I know that it may seem petty to split hairs over the definition of a fictional species, but one thing I can quite safely say is that Edward Cullen is not a vampire and nor are any of his sparkly compatriots.
Vampires. Do. Not. Fucking. Sparkle. Ok?
There is a twist on a theme and there is Just Making Shit Up Because You Can't Be Arsed Do The Research. Seriously. She has admitted to not researching vampires At All before starting the book (the only research she did was when a character googled vampires and she was "curious what the character would have found"... ffs. By this stage though she didn't care any of the traditions of the genre and she happily continued to piss all over vampire lore without a second thought.)
Dracula is a vampire. Carmilla is a vampire. Count Von fucking Count is a vampire. Edward Cullen. Is. Not.
I like vampires- the majority of my DVD collection involves copious amounts of necks being ripped open, I have a full shelf of vampire novels, I have fangs that I wear out on occasion, I don't feel embarrassed by the fact that I have fangs that I wear out on occasion. I may point out at this point that sparkle-pires do not have fangs. They. Don't. Have. Fangs. They're... they're not vampires ok? They're glittery blood drinking golem-pixies or something, but they're not vampires.
Vampires are supposed to be dark and creepy and gory and SCARY and while 'Wardo is certainly creepy and scary in the way Mark McLeod (a fifty something who followed Miley Cyrus around America, sent her presents, stared at her on her own balcony and said he was going to marry her) is creepy, he does not at any point in the entire 575710 word wankfest appear to be even a fraction of the dark and terrifying menace that any half way respectable vampiric protagonist should be.
They're not supposed to have ~*~souls~*~ and worry about getting to heaven. When Buffy introduced a ~*~vampire with a soul~*~ back in 1997, the idea was fairly original and it was handled pretty well (like Buffy freaking the fuck out when she found out that she'd been sucking face with a vampire). Now the idea is played out and beaten quite thoroughly to death, to the extent that there are several shelves of books with roughly the same blurb in the Young Adult section of whatever bookshop you care to go into.
Blah is a small-time waitress/special agent of the FBI/high school student in [insert nondescript location]. Until the vampire of her dreams walks into her life and blah blah blah
I am pissed off that this is what my favourite genre has been reduced to: tome upon tome of irrelevant, interchangeable, teenage masturbatory fluff that is fast tainting the reputation of the far superior literature that it dares to desecrate by association.
I am not a happy goth.
In conclusion:
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There are many and varied reasons for hating the Twilight series and I subscribe wholeheartedly to all of them.
The first, and most obvious, is the writing is so dribblingly and mind numbingly atrocious that to read more than a sentence at a time requires a lobotomy and studied disinterest in your own continued sanity. I have no idea how many thesauruses were raped to bring this unholy creation to fruition, but my guess is somewhere in the vicinity of... many. A multitude. A plethora if you will. Copious amounts of- ok, you get the idea.
It is essentially a harlequin romance that got a bit up itself and now entertains delusions of being legitimate literature. If you removed every synonym for "attractive" from this series it would be about half the length. Adonis, perfect, handsome, gorgeous, flawless, blah, blah, vomit. Not only does this make for dull reading, but it does very little to convince me of the strength of the central "relationship" (more on that later).
Not once in the entire series does she think about what he's like (or if she does, she says completely nonsensical things; like that he was much politer to her father than he deserved. Oh yes, your father was mildly standoffish to the boy who alienated you from all your other friends, made you run away from home and who left you so broken hearted that you turned into a zombie for months on end when he broke up with you. What a cunt your father truly is), only what he looks like.
She wants to be a vampire purely because she doesn't want to be physically older than him. I'm sorry, what? Eighteen is over the hill now? In what universe does a woman peak in her late teens? I for one am extremely happy that I will never have to be a teenager again, never mind for all of eternity.
Another annoying thing is the author's habit of constantly telling instead of showing. Or rather showing the opposite of what she tells us. She tells us that Bella is bookish, mature, caring and average looking, but she shows Bella acting childish, callous, shallow, bitchy, she is never shown to be reading a book that isn't for school, the only book she brought with her when she moved was a copy of the complete works of Austen (and reading Austen doesn't make you smart. It makes you a girl) and every male character who encounters her falls head over heels for her. Who she generally treats like shit if they aren't a vampire or a werewolf. It's... bizarre.
The second reason is the central relationship and how it is portrayed. It is very clearly an emotionally abusive relationship and it's presented as the romantic ideal. I have no problem with unhealthy relationships or abuse in fiction, providing that this is how the relationship is supposed to be portrayed, a la Nobokov's Lolita, but Stephenie Meyer (the woman responsible for this abomination) and the fans of the series get genuinely affronted when you suggest that "their" Edward is anything less than perfect.
Well yes actually, he is less than perfect, let me count the ways: watching Bella sleep (before they were introduced, before he knew if he was going to kill her or not); telling her that her friends were shallow and stupid (she didn't hang out with them after that. What a shocker); following her around when she left town (for her own protection of course. Everyone knows that girls are too helpless to be allowed go shopping by themselves); telling her that she's weak and he could kill her very easily (which isn't intimidation at all) and making her decisions for her (like forcing her to go to a school dance, breaking her car to stop her seeing another friend, preventing her from leaving the house so she couldn't see said friend... the list goes on).
But mentioning any of this seems a wasted enterprise because fans will at this point just roll their eyes and say "Well, he's a vampire, of course you can't judge him by human standards."
I'm glad you mentioned that actually because NO HE IS NOT A FUCKING VAMPIRE!
Alright?
I know that it may seem petty to split hairs over the definition of a fictional species, but one thing I can quite safely say is that Edward Cullen is not a vampire and nor are any of his sparkly compatriots.
Vampires. Do. Not. Fucking. Sparkle. Ok?
There is a twist on a theme and there is Just Making Shit Up Because You Can't Be Arsed Do The Research. Seriously. She has admitted to not researching vampires At All before starting the book (the only research she did was when a character googled vampires and she was "curious what the character would have found"... ffs. By this stage though she didn't care any of the traditions of the genre and she happily continued to piss all over vampire lore without a second thought.)
Dracula is a vampire. Carmilla is a vampire. Count Von fucking Count is a vampire. Edward Cullen. Is. Not.
I like vampires- the majority of my DVD collection involves copious amounts of necks being ripped open, I have a full shelf of vampire novels, I have fangs that I wear out on occasion, I don't feel embarrassed by the fact that I have fangs that I wear out on occasion. I may point out at this point that sparkle-pires do not have fangs. They. Don't. Have. Fangs. They're... they're not vampires ok? They're glittery blood drinking golem-pixies or something, but they're not vampires.
Vampires are supposed to be dark and creepy and gory and SCARY and while 'Wardo is certainly creepy and scary in the way Mark McLeod (a fifty something who followed Miley Cyrus around America, sent her presents, stared at her on her own balcony and said he was going to marry her) is creepy, he does not at any point in the entire 575710 word wankfest appear to be even a fraction of the dark and terrifying menace that any half way respectable vampiric protagonist should be.
They're not supposed to have ~*~souls~*~ and worry about getting to heaven. When Buffy introduced a ~*~vampire with a soul~*~ back in 1997, the idea was fairly original and it was handled pretty well (like Buffy freaking the fuck out when she found out that she'd been sucking face with a vampire). Now the idea is played out and beaten quite thoroughly to death, to the extent that there are several shelves of books with roughly the same blurb in the Young Adult section of whatever bookshop you care to go into.
Blah is a small-time waitress/special agent of the FBI/high school student in [insert nondescript location]. Until the vampire of her dreams walks into her life and blah blah blah
I am pissed off that this is what my favourite genre has been reduced to: tome upon tome of irrelevant, interchangeable, teenage masturbatory fluff that is fast tainting the reputation of the far superior literature that it dares to desecrate by association.
I am not a happy goth.
In conclusion:
=/=
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