Hello folks and welcome to this new bi-weekly post on stuff I just hate. There is quite a lot out there but every other week I’ll try to make an informed argument and hopefully we can all have a bit of a chat about it after. Not all of you will agree with it, but that could be part of the fun.
So what better place to start, especially with the teaser trailer being released today, than with Twilight. Dun dun dun…
This post will just deal with the films before any of you get too angry, as I haven’t read any of the books, after all I’m not a 14-year-old girl. But even writing just about the films, where do I begin? There is just so much.
Maybe the obvious place would be vampires. What Twilight has done to vampires is a massive insult to any vampire writer or fan there has ever been. True Blood and American Vampire (a comic series by Scott Snyder I highly recommend) know how to write a vampire. They are vicious killing machines that really couldn’t give a fuck. They are powerful creatures who take what they want, when they want.
THEY DO NOT SPARKLE.
Why oh why do they have to sparkle? And go out in the day? That is just ridiculous. I literally do not think there could be a bigger insult. They took something that through generations has scared the hell out of people, and in some cases, had huge impacts on popular culture, but Twilight took that and tore it apart, picked up a few things and added some sparkle. Idiots.
Oh and if sparkling wasn’t enough. They’re also ‘vegetarians’. Another kick in the nuts to all vampires. They are creatures who can’t die but they decided to take the moral high ground and decided not to eat humans, they only go out and hunt deer and other animals, because that’s nicer. You’re a vampire, you don’t have to be nice. Go and kill some people, just for fun.
Then you have Bella. Bella has just pushed feminism back by about a thousand years, she is literally that useless. Let’s face it, all she had to decide between is necrophilia or bestiality and she can’t even do that right. The whole of the first film is just her running around moaning how she loves Edward, she does nothing constructive, take charge or do anything empowering. Women, in case Twilight hadn’t noticed, are empowered now, they can do stuff themselves, but not Bella, for she is useless.
Then we have Team Edward vs Team Jacob, again, little kids arguing over necrophilia and bestiality. When the films come out, this seems to dominate social networks and you see people on the street just wearing tops about who they support. Really? I just can’t understand it, Edward is a wet drip and Jacob just takes his top off all the time. You wouldn’t see me walking down the street wearing a team Katy Perry shirt. And anyway, in the first film Bella picked Edward, so why Jacob is he even still in the films? Move on Jacob, find someone else, and please stop taking off your damn top while you’re at it.
Going into a much deeper subject, which I won’t spend too long on, is Christianity. Now, I don’t mind religion, be religious all you want, I don’t mind, just please don’t push it on me. That’s what Twilight does, it pushes overly Christian ideology on thousands of young girls who it could well affect. No sex before marriage? We’ve moved on from that. I’m not saying be a slut, but again this is pushing back development by hundreds of years. Women should be allowed to do as they please, not be forced to wait.
Back to the storyline, does anything remotely interesting happen? Bella can’t choose between Edward and Jacob, she chooses Edward, they fall in love, they get married, she gets pregnant, he makes her a vampire, the end. Where is the good part? Where is anything to draw me in and captive me? They made five films out of this as well, what does that say about how mind-numbingly boring stuff is now-a-days. And I know you might say ‘But it’s a love story, a romance’. There are so many better ones out there. Dirty Dancing, Romeo + Juliet, and before you say they don’t involve vampires, True blood. At least Sookie is actually a powerful character and does more than cry and moan.
Then there’s the racial subtext. Is there anything these films don’t want to push back by hundreds of years? So one of the only black people in the film is evil. This has been seen in other films in the past, but not in recent films. Twilight has an overly white cast and it just pushes the wrong ideas. Even Jacob and his werewolf tribe, they scream Native Americas and to back this up, they but them in the middle of a forest and portray them as a lower work force. MOVE ON TWILIGHT, MOVE ON.
Then there is date night with a girlfriend, deeming that guys up and down the country have to sit through this drivel. I’ve seen all the films up to now, and each time it has been with a girlfriend, and as of today I’m glad I’m single just because it means I won’t have to watch the last film. It really puts a damper on going to cinema, spending a bucket load of money and all just to see Twilight. So thanks for ruining date night.
There is more I could talk about but I think that will be enough for now. Hopefully I will hear from some of you in the comments section and be sure to check back in two weeks for the next instalment. Until then, I leave you with this meme. If only Twilight would end like this…
There is one good thing about these books – they are getting people to READ!!! Girls who might otherwise not be interested in reading are picking up these books and actually reading them, for fun. So many kids these days don’t think of reading as fun and Meyer’s books are just that – no literary merit or much of a plot for that matter, but they are fun.
That being said – I’d rather read a real paranormal romance. More sex, more death and much better writing.
Susan I do see your point, but I must ask, are that many people actually picking up the books? LOTR were massive films but I’m not sure many people actually went out and read the books afterwards. And like you said, even if they do read them, they are terribly written books and could in fact stop people reading a wider range of literature, and enjoying good literature, because what they first experienced was crap.
when the first book came out, twilight, my friends said dont read it as it reads like bad fanfiction and that the general consensus on the internet is that the book are bad dont read them. so i havent. my parents think the books are good and that i should read them but i won’t on principle. i was in hospital for four months from october 2010 to feb 2011 and the second movie ( i think) was oe of the movies on ( the hospital tvs had a movie channel, THANK GOD.) i thought it was a pretty good movie. i watched it maybe 4 or 5 times. they had maybe 5 movies on during the day and i watched them multiple times out of boredom.
“i watched them multiple times out of boredom.” I think that pretty much sums up why you watched it and doesn’t mean it was any good
I’ve sent a lot of younger friends from twilight to Scott Westerfeld’s “Uglies” Series, and Gemma Doyle’s “Great and Terrible Beauty” which ARE well written and interesting, so I think there’s hope for the younger generation yet.
Gah – The Gemma Doyle books are by Libba Bray – Still great YA fiction
I read the first book before it was popular (the cover caught my eye) and I thought it was mediocre at best. Full of cliches, nothing really creative. I have read some about the later books and that made me decide to avoid them. I have never seen the films. I just don’t understand the power of Twilight to grab even otherwise intelligent, nose-in-a-book people and make them love it. My sister, who is 37 and usually a book snob, has read and loved the books, watched and loved the movies, even though she also admits they’re badly written. A 25-26 year old friend of mine has done the same. I just don’t understand it at all. Your review is spot on.
I read the books long before they blew up into the maelstrom of idiocy that they’ve become and actually enjoyed them. Granted, I was the target audience to the letter, but it was a series that kept me entertained. I was out of high school once the movies came out and wanted to brush up on the books before going to the theater. I didn’t get even halfway through the first book because it was nauseating. The movies were such jokes that my sister and I (unabashed theatre nerds) made a tradition of going to see each movie for a good laugh. The entire concept junk punched everything vampires have ever been about, slapped feminism in the face, and did everything in its power to lower our already slipping standards for entertainment. It says that poorly thought out plot lines strung together by mediocre writing are worth multi-million dollar movies made by actors who probably couldn’t have even passed theatre 101.
I don’t think they mentioned christian ideology once (If they did quote please). Bella’s not having sex until she was married was probably just used to make the series longer.
They only mentioned christian ideology in passing, referring to the “vampire myth” of crosses and such. Though I’d be willing to bet that her holding out had more to do with the Meyer’s Mormon beliefs than making the series longer. The length of the series has more to do with her lack of any sort of appreciable sense of coherent story structure.
Not at all. The series was originally supposed to be adult romance. It had sex scenes in the first book. Meyer’s Editor told her she could seel them as YA titles if the sex was removed. It was entirely about target audience and not pissing off parents with premarital underage sex. Meyer’s may be a mormon, but ascribing her writing choices to mormon malice seems overhyped to me.
dude spot on this made my day reading this i am a huge book person ive always read at higher levels than my peers but when my step sister brought these books into my house before they were popular i wanted to vomit i am a huge snob when it comes to mythology and destroying over 200 years of vampire lore in one foul swoop killed this whole series for me
Sorry, but you’re wrong. Bella, as she comes of age through out the series and grows into her role as mother (yeah, it’s accelerated, why the hell not) grows from someone unable to defend themselves against the monsters around us (like a child), to a defender and full equal with her husband and ex-boyfriend. Yeah, she’s not a heroine like Hermione, but her wanting a family and a man doesn’t mean she’s setting feminism or women back at all. She knows exactly what she wants from the beginning and she never lets Edward telling her “it’s too dangerous” even when it really is, stop her from doing whatever she wants.
Also, Dracula, the big one himself, went out in daylight and many other vampires have chosen Vegan lifestyles. The Twilight Ones can’t just choose not to kill by taking only a little blood from victims. Their bite is venomous. Either they kill or they create more vamps whenever they bite.
As for the Sparkling, why the hell not? Orlok was butt ugly just because, Dracula clings to walls, Lestat had sex with everything in sight, and From Dusk til Dawn’s vampires were essentially made of jell-o. So Sparkling is somehow too fabulous for the increasingly Emo vampire scene?