Today, I must bare my soul to you all. I must open myself up to disdain and ridicule. Today, I am going to write about all the reasons I secretly love Twilight.
Haha, just kidding. I actually hate it like a normal person.
I realize the subject of Twilight-bashing has been worn to death, but as Twilight-bashing is a long-standing hobby of mine, I thought I might as well wear the subject to un-death (get it? Because vampires? I’M FUNNY). I actually read all four of the books, just so I could make fun of them and actually know what I was talking about. This post, however, only concerns my hatred for the first book, because I like to organize my hate.
Plot in a nutshell: Some average girl goes to a new school, meets a hot guy, who turns out to be (gasp!) a vampire. She falls hopelessly in love with Hot Vampire Guy, and, oddly enough, he falls hopelessly in love with her. But there’s a ‘bad vampire’ after Average Girl who wants to eat her (this guy is my favorite character). So, Hot Vampire Guy must risk all to save her. Complications inevitably ensue. Hot Vampire Guy wins, and he and Average Girl ride off into the sunset together. The end.
Let’s start with the protagonist: Bella Swan.
No, seriously, that’s her real name.
Bella is clumsy, bad at sports, and is constantly in danger of bodily harm. Her awkwardness makes her easy to relate to, but other than that, she’s practically nonexistent. She’s nothing more than a glorified prop dumped in the middle of the story by the author. With almost no personality, she’s as boring as a pet rock. Edward’s Pet Rock, to be precise.
The only persona we can really assign to Pet Rock is that of a whiny child. She spends the entire book moaning about how bad she is at sports, being consumed by how gorgeous Edward is, and generally wallowing in her own teenage angst. She has no real interests–no goals, no ambitions, no hobbies. Stephenie Meyer briefly mentions that Pet Rock likes the book Wuthering Heights, and she also seems to have an appreciation for classical music, but these things are really only mentioned once over the course of the whole book, and are never reintroduced as integral parts of her character.
Now for Edward… Let’s face it, girls, we are NEVER going to find an Edward Cullen. Anywhere. He’s perfect. He even sparkles. Seriously. In bright sunlight, our Edward looks like he was rolled in glitter for a kid’s art project. He is the ultimate hero; tall, polite, mysterious and handsome.
From the moment Pet Rock sets eyes on Edward, she becomes so preoccupied by him that she can’t possibly think about anything else. If it ever crosses Pet Rock’s mind that Edward might leave her, she hurls herself into a black abyss of despair. Not that she’s all that happy anyway, she’s constantly complaining about something or other.
The story, being told in the first person, subjects us to listening to all of Pet Rock’s utterly insipid thoughts, which either revolve around how miserable every aspect of her tiny little life is, or how all of Edward’s shirts seem to fit him snugly enough to effectively show off his sculpted, “incandescent” chest and abs.
Oh yeah. Those weren’t spray-painted on at all.
Unlike Pet Rock, whom we never get a detailed physical description of, every time Edward walks into a room we are forced to listen to the poor, demented author rattle on about how gorgeous he is, exactly what he’s wearing, and what his breath smells like. I kid you not. Half the book consists of paragraphs of Edward-worshiping tripe, something akin to this:
Suddenly, Edward walked through the door. I felt my heart beating faster and faster. Could he hear it? Slowly, I let my eyes travel to his wondrous face. I sighed rapturously. Truly, I thought, Edward’s face must be God’s gift to a depraved humanity. His hair was combed to the left today, I noticed–it had been combed to the right the day before. How utterly angelic he was! He was making an interesting fashion statement today–he was dressed in a tattered, dingy, polka-dotted shirt, and baggy purple pants, all full of holes. He looked like a homeless clown, I thought. An adorable homeless clown. My eyes went down his entire frame until they reached his feet, clad in the ever-classy socks and sandals combo. One of the socks had a hole in it. I drew in my breath. Out of the hole peeped the curved, white surface of his big toe. His beautiful, perfect toe! I was spellbound. I could not look away. Oh, I would have fallen down on the ground at his feet and tenderly kissed that toe, that appendage belonging to the man–vampire–whom I ardently loved.
Edward is infatuated with Pet Rock too, for whatever reason. He seems nice enough at first, once you get past the whole spooky glowering thing, but then he starts to get confusing. He offers Pet Rock a ride to Seattle, and then literally two seconds later he’s telling her that she “really should stay away” from him. Mixed signals much?
Then things start to get creepy. Edward starts BREAKING INTO PET ROCK’S HOUSE AT NIGHT TO WATCH HER SLEEP. I’m sorry, is that not a red flag in the paranormal YA universe? Just to make things even more dysfunctional, we see Pet Rock enthusiastically rejecting the perfectly nice, normal gestures of the boys at her school in favor of Edward’s weird stalker-like behavior.
Edward literally obsesses over Pet Rock and her safety (no wonder–she’s a walking catastrophe just waiting to happen). This is probably interpreted by the teenage girl population as “Oh, that means he really really loves her! How romantic is that?” when it is, in fact, a sign that Edward, perhaps, has psychological problems of some kind? Hmm. In real life, his monomaniacal behavior would be more of an annoyance rather than a swoon-worthy trait.
There doesn’t really seem to be any real love going on between Edward and Pet Rock. Edward (supposedly) loves Pet Rock because she “fascinates him” and…she smells nice. Such ardor. Pet Rock “unconditionally and irrevocably” loves Edward because he’s so pretty and is constantly saving her from the jaws of death. She has no life outside of her relationship with Edward; if she’s not with him, she’s obsessing over him. If she’s not obsessing over him–you must have finished the book.
Edward and Pet Rock are probably the world’s most perfect couple. It’s true. They’re both content to spend the rest of their lives making googly eyes at each other and telling the rest of the world to go to hell (Pet Rock has people practically lining up to be friends with her, for whatever reason, but she dismisses their attentions as ‘annoying’ and instead chooses to hang out with Creepy Vampire Stalker Man).
I did enjoy Twilight to some extent. It certainly was entertaining. So many parodies of both the book and the movie have been made, but it doesn’t really need one. It’s a parody of itself. Reading it out loud, it gets especially ridiculous (my favorite line is “And so, the lion fell in love with the lamb.” GAG ME WITH A SPOON).
nothing irrelevant 