For the Hatred of Twilight

There is something utterly depressing about a work of fiction that is poorly executed. I've read my share and felt disappointment at the time I've wasted, the lack of quality in the work and the fact that somewhere out there is an editor who thought this book was worth sacrificing a forest for, or at least a buck-load of ink.

I am not a fan of writers who underestimate their readers. I've read books (cough The Da Vinci Code cough) where the writer seems terrified of being construed as a wrangler of difficult story lines and contrived motives and so he continuously repeats all the facts every five pages. This becomes annoying, especially because these facts keep building up in number until, around page 275, you have to read half a page of summary of things you have already gotten the hang of 200 pages earlier. But Stephanie Meyer is an author of a different breed. Her underestimating the reader has nothing to do with hammering the details of the plot home, because, let's face it, there are no plot details to hammer - what Meyer does is drop a hint that is so colossally obvious that it's more like a three-story billboard, before she moves passed it and brings it up... No, you know what, it's better with an example:

In Twilight, Jacob tells Bella of the cold ones and how there's a legend that his tribe turned into wolves way back when and fought them, protecting the innocents. Now, this coincides with the fact that a huge wolf, almost a bear, has been seen stalking around Forks (or in the woods or wherever). Shocker. What could it mean? There has been a slew of crappy Hollywood movies the past decade which have dealt with the war between vampires and werewolves. But Meyer doesn't seem to think that this was the most glaringly obvious thing she could have presented us with. No, instead she spends five hundred pages of New Moon having Jacob exhaustingly insisting that the nit-wit Bella "remember what he told her about the cold ones and the legend of his people" so that she can figure out exactly what the hell is making him act so weird.
Now, as I've only really read Twilight and skimmed through New Moon as I thought it was the biggest pile of crap I had ever had the displeasure of resting my eyes on, people may argue that I have no right to speak so loudly about this. But I do, I do have a right. Because it's enough to read and skim through two of these books to form a firm opinion about the Twiverse (non-existent).

The Characters: Bella is supposedly this middle aged teenager who constantly has to shoulder more responsibility than she should have to at her young age with not only a mother who can't really take care of herself, but also a football obsessed, beer drinking, disaster-of-a-cook dad. She's a clutz, which is thrown in there to make her likable and relatable: she has flaws, too, damn it! She doesn't see herself as the bell of the ball or anything superficial like that, but, of course, in reality, she is stunning.

Upon arriving at her new high school the entire male student body are entranced, and she's persued by... well, many of them. This might have worked if Bella wasn't such a self-obsessed, care-about-nothing-but-my-own-woes type of character. Does she ever think anything nice about anyone of the people surrounding her, fawning at her Texan elusiveness and dying to include her in their click? Does she ever feel gratitude for any of the welcome she receives or any of the attention she gets, or is it all awkwardness and uber-elusiveness? (Sidenote: yeah, it is.)
The only person that piques her interest is the equally elusive, equally pale, equally stunning Edward. He piques it to the extent of blast-off, and she realizes that she's in love with a vampire. Close-up. Fade to black. Cut to commercial. So far I thought Twilight was a fairly interesting book with the flattest language I had read in a long while, but clearly directed at the younger teen set so I thought it was alright.

However, in New Moon the bizarro traits of Bella's character become alarmingly apparent, the loudest being the fact that she's suicidal without Edward. For someone to lock themselves away for three months is not only unbelievable, even in Teen-Angst World, it's also extraordinarly unhealthy. My beloved grandmother passed away and though I'm still grieving her everyday, I was able to pick myself up and carry on with the day-to-day within a week, because there's never any choice but to pick yourself up and carry on. When Bella finally emerges from her chambers she's like someone already dead to the world, and the only way she can feel alive is to put herself in situations of mortal peril, because then she can hear Edward's voice. Consider the message Meyer is sending to impressionable teenage readers all over the world - it's horrifying.

Bella is not a strong protagonist, most of the things that happen are done to her, she has no drive in her own story whatsoever apart from The Choice she has to make between Edward and Jacob - more of that later - and the fact that she's the catalyst for a war between two races that have been coping fairly peacefully with each other until now. I don't know if it's laughably tragic or tragically laughable.

The Characters: Edward. Yeah, I know, what character?
Well, he's old, he speaks funny, which really he doesn't, he talks like a normal seven-teen year old, or possibly twenty-year old American. Meyer states through Bella that when he speaks he sounds old and refined, but she never exemplifies this in his dialogue.
He clearly likes to show off his intelligence by quoting the most over-used-to-show-off-intelligence Shakespearian play of all time, and of course there's the Meyer creature also wanting to elude to whatever linkage she perceives between the work of the greatest and most influential writer in history and that which is done by her bleeding pen. (It boggles the mind. Truly.)
He likes to hunt animals in the woods.
He doesn't like to bite people.
He thinks marriage should come before death (even though isn't it "until death do us part" so the marriage would, in effect, be null and void as soon as he bites her).
He glitters in the freaking sun.
He can read minds, but not Bella's, which is one of the saddest parts of this whole tale because he actually falls in love with her by default, doesn't he? Yeah. And poor Bella is too much of a nit-wit to see it. I'm sure that, after half an eternity together, she would put two and two together and they would have a quiet, two hundred page row about it where every other sentence is repeated back at the other.
He doesn't like werewolves.
He drives a shiny, shiny car and he drives it fast, fast, fast. (You would too, if you were immortal. Oh, right, Bella's usually in the car with him. Oh, well.)
He can run like the wind. Faster than the eye can see. Still he pays for petrol. Go figure.
He crawls in through closed windows and stands in the darkness of your room at the foot of your bed and stares at you, in the darkness of your room from the foot of your bed, for hours without making a noise or telling you about it or asking for permission. (What's the technical term for that again? Stalker, right. But what's more disturbing is that Bella finds it endearing and flattering and wonderful. Hello!)
He glitters in the freaking sun.

Not a whole lot of personality here, mostly traits that are so shallow it's hard to understand what the allure is, apart from his ever-repeated angelic good looks.

The Characters: Jacob is a macho hunky, boy-next-door smashed-into-one type of character who has the pride of his native american heritage straightening his backbone and his sights set on Bella. All he does in every scene is try to get close to, protect and/or tell Bella of his feelings for her - his entire existence in the book is centered around Bella, which makes him truly dull indeed. The fact that he's a werewolf doesn't even heighten their relationship or put a twist on anything as it's so apparent from the get-go what he's about, it's only highly ironic that the two men Bella should even be mildly attracted to are both of a supernatural origin. I'm sure Meyer saw this as a perfect set-up for Bella actually turning into a vampire herself - she's so clearly supposed to not be a mere human; but it feels contrived to me, as does so much of the lacklustre love story that is the entire plot of the Twilight Saga.

And the rest of the characters are only fillers to try and create some sort of society around Bella and Edward. Bella's friends at school are of no real consequence except to depict Bella interacting with friends at school. Even though they're really more of acquaintances as it is. Edward's "family" are only there to illustrate where Edward comes from and who taught him that it's naughty to chew on humans. Also, they offer up a bleak opposite to Bella's broken home and inapt parents, a real family that she ultimately longs to be a part of. Jacob's friends and family are only there to make up a pack of werewolves, they barely have different personalitites to them and none of these filler-characters have any kind of depth or any true purpose to serve, apart, perhaps for Alice, with her seer ability. Even though I think it's a cheap ploy to simplify the story telling for Meyer, to have someone who can deliver what's going to happen through dialogue and save Meyer the time to have to plot out how the characters might find the information out for themselves. The Volturi are only there to throw in a bit of history (the intelligence-show-off again) and a scenery change, although Italy sure felt like Southern Alabama to me.

The Plot is truly non-existent in these books. There's some sort of war brewing in the background of Bella and Edward's mundane dialogues, but, as said, I can't comment since I haven't read the third or fourth books. All I can say is that I'm sure whatever is about to go down takes a backseat to Bella and Edward getting hitched and starting a family.

I find it rather saddening to think of the potential that the Twilight Saga might have had. I see opportunity for truly great drama in the books I've read. With more vivid character and place description, with dialogue that doesn't read like they're strangers reciting the phone book at one another and with an actual story line that had a plot that, yes, was character driven, but had situations where those characters had to react without the person they can't live without - literally - having to be in danger of death and destruction, these books could have been rather compelling. The story is age-old and has been done before, indeed, but so has practically everything else. It's what you do with the trite and the tried that sets you apart from the rest. The fact that Meyer steals most of her inspiration so clearly from other works of fiction makes the Twilight Saga all the more lacking in originality.

I have good friends who love the series (though they admit to New Moon being the most boring part of the four, mostly due to the lack of Edward in it. Oh, shudder. But at least it's a glimmer of sanity) and it absolutely does not compute with me that half the world is absolutely beguiled by this piece of garbage. I can understand that people love a good, intense, charged coupling - I do as much as the next person - but there's nothing good, intense or charged about Bella and Edward if you look at them closely.

¤ They get together after not even half of Twilight has progressed.
¤ They're entire relationship consists of wanting to be together forever and inventing obstacles between themselves why they can't be and even these obstacles are uninteresting and generic. (Edward doesn't want to damn Bella into his glittering disco-ball existence, Bella is scared of coming off as a cliché if she marries her high school sweetheart at eighteen. Yeah, thanks for pointing that out, Stephanie Meyer.)
¤ The fact that Jacob is hovering in the background is the most boringest attempt at bringing some sort of tension back in the books that I have ever read.

And that's it. There's no real drama here, all of their problems are prounounced through dialogue more than they are through action in endless discussions on the subject matter and in endless in-Bella's-head-monologues which are written in such a bland, blank language that no real emotion can be derrived from them apart from Bella trying to tell herself that she's more grown-up than what her forever analytical rants and actual actions tell us she is. She behaves like she's younger than seventeen for most of the books, with no self-awareness, identity or strength of character whatsoever. Seriously, list ten things about their relationship that doesn't have to do with forever, vampires or love - I freaking dare you.

Now, let's tackle The Love Triangle, shall we? The fact that Meyer tries to fool her audience into sitting on pins and root for Bella to choose Edward when it's so clear that there's really no choice to be made sickens me. It shows such low regard for the reading public, as well as such little investment in and knowledge of her own characters, that it makes me feel physically ill. Bella can't live without Edward, this repeatedly stated fact makes it a completely absurd addition to this tale that she would be cozying it up to the fuzzy wolf-man and forget all about the earth-shattering, mind-blowing beauty of her vampire.

Lastly, I just have to wonder at the editor who has sacrificed three or four forests to publish this piece of crap embarrassment. WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?!