The sparkling is a handy shorthand/symbol for All That Is Absurd About Twilight (which is a rather vast category that really cries out for a shorthand/symbol), and I use it that way as much as anyone, but ironically it doesn't actually bother me in and of itself.
In context, it's the exact same problem Anne Rice's vamps have, except that Twiverse vamps don't combust in sunlight. So in Rice you instead have Lestat mentioning that he has to powder down heavily for stage lights. Meyer gets more specific and arguably more literal in describing the "marble-like" quality of their skin, but ultimately it's exactly the same mental image.
(Which admittedly begs the question of "Oh, hey, did you ever think about MAKEUP? Especially for the girls?" But there are so many larger logic holes to fall into. Like "What kind of masochists are you people that you're going to high school over and over and over again? Surely you can start from, say, 19 and still give yourself a decent amount of time in a given location before people start noticing?")
I'm also not at all bothered by their failure to combust in sunlight, since I have yet to encounter an earlier example of that than Nosferatu, and am therefore unimpressed by many people's insistence upon a tradition of less than a century's vintage.
So, to be honest, I was actually rather fond of the revisionist logic of "We stay out of sunlight because otherwise it's immediately glaringly obvious that there is Something Very Wrong about us, which is easier to camouflage absent full-spectrum illumination, and somewhere along the telephone game of folklore it got transmuted into people thinking it would actually harm us."
I think there are some other worthwhile elements of worldbuilding in there too. The problem is how thoroughly they're overshadowed by serious narrative issues, a bad case of thesaurus addiction, and the fact that there is literally no discernible plot until 2/3 of the way through the first book.
In conclusion, make all the fun you want. That pang of guilt is much less hassle than attempting to actually slog through the damn thing.
"a bad case of thesaurus addiction"studiesinlightAugust 29 2009, 16:43:14 UTC
I admit that I've only read about three pages of the first book. The prose was so purple that it made Baroness Orczy look post-modern in her restraint.
Gracious, but I loathe low-stakes vampire universes. What's the point of a tame vampire?
Re: "a bad case of thesaurus addiction"wiliqueenAugust 29 2009, 16:57:29 UTC
To her credit (as slight a dent as it makes in the loooong debit column), Meyer's vamps are high-stakes in the sense you and I usually discuss. Edward and his surrogate family hunt only animals, and are viewed with suspicion by other vampires as a result. It's taken as read that starting to feed on a human will result in the human's death. And even if they were to exhibit some miraculous burst of self-control -- or be interrupted, as demonstrated by the primary villain taking a bite out of Bella's hand and being dispatched before he can finish the job -- they have "venom" that immediately commences the painful process of converting the victim if they don't die outright.
I personally find that to be a step too far -- mostly because I have issues with the logical ramifications of her assertion that the venom replaces all bodily fluids in the conversion process -- but I do concede that it's anything but erring on the side of fluff.
Eventually the movie will make it to the top of my NetFlix queue, and I'll find out if the glimmers of worthwhile storytelling benefit as much as I figure they must from being relieved of the burden of Meyer's narrative and its endless explication of Bella's mental hamster wheel. (I don't argue the workings of the wheel, only the hundreds of pages spent following them minutely.) I expect it's still pretty bad, but I'm curious.
In context, it's the exact same problem Anne Rice's vamps have, except that Twiverse vamps don't combust in sunlight. So in Rice you instead have Lestat mentioning that he has to powder down heavily for stage lights. Meyer gets more specific and arguably more literal in describing the "marble-like" quality of their skin, but ultimately it's exactly the same mental image.
(Which admittedly begs the question of "Oh, hey, did you ever think about MAKEUP? Especially for the girls?" But there are so many larger logic holes to fall into. Like "What kind of masochists are you people that you're going to high school over and over and over again? Surely you can start from, say, 19 and still give yourself a decent amount of time in a given location before people start noticing?")
I'm also not at all bothered by their failure to combust in sunlight, since I have yet to encounter an earlier example of that than Nosferatu, and am therefore unimpressed by many people's insistence upon a tradition of less than a century's vintage.
So, to be honest, I was actually rather fond of the revisionist logic of "We stay out of sunlight because otherwise it's immediately glaringly obvious that there is Something Very Wrong about us, which is easier to camouflage absent full-spectrum illumination, and somewhere along the telephone game of folklore it got transmuted into people thinking it would actually harm us."
I think there are some other worthwhile elements of worldbuilding in there too. The problem is how thoroughly they're overshadowed by serious narrative issues, a bad case of thesaurus addiction, and the fact that there is literally no discernible plot until 2/3 of the way through the first book.
In conclusion, make all the fun you want. That pang of guilt is much less hassle than attempting to actually slog through the damn thing.
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Gracious, but I loathe low-stakes vampire universes. What's the point of a tame vampire?
Reply
I personally find that to be a step too far -- mostly because I have issues with the logical ramifications of her assertion that the venom replaces all bodily fluids in the conversion process -- but I do concede that it's anything but erring on the side of fluff.
Eventually the movie will make it to the top of my NetFlix queue, and I'll find out if the glimmers of worthwhile storytelling benefit as much as I figure they must from being relieved of the burden of Meyer's narrative and its endless explication of Bella's mental hamster wheel. (I don't argue the workings of the wheel, only the hundreds of pages spent following them minutely.) I expect it's still pretty bad, but I'm curious.
Reply
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