Twilight Time – 306.5

I generally try to be respectful of other opinions and preferences. After all, life is much more interesting with us all liking different things, and probably allows for better distribution of resources. Every now and then, something annoys me more than is logical. I once vented my spleen on The Family Circus, along with soft fluffy towels and “the f-bomb” (http://sporkful.blogspot.com/2008/03/sporks-pet-peeves-3375.html), and now I have something else. I hate Twilight.

I have nothing against it as a time of day, or a condition of the light, or even as a type of zone, but as a popular book series it sticks in my craw. I know I’m swimming against the current on this one, but I am not alone.

My first contact with the series came in Hawaii. Maria had rashly invited a friend on our trip, not fully grasping at the time that enjoying a trip to the mall with someone does not necessarily translate into enjoying spending eight days straight and sharing a hotel room with someone.

It ended up being a bit of a drag for the trip. We like to see and do lots of things, and never planned on lying on the beach flirting with cute boys, which was all the friend wanted to do. We just had different ideas of what the vacation should involve, which resulted in conflict. For example, she didn’t want to go to Pearl Harbor, but she did want to go to the swap meet, which was our next stop after Pearl Harbor (they are really close together). She was worried she would not be able to manage meeting us there, though, so she decided to come, and almost decided to go out to the monument until she learned that they make you watch a short film before going over, so she stayed on the grounds and sent text messages while we went over. Call us snobs, but we were a little dismayed by her lack of intellectual curiosity. She was a huge fan of Twilight.

It was not a craze yet, or at least I had not heard of it, but she had brought the book along and was re-reading it, and rhapsodized about it when asked. It was so romantic, because he was so strong that he couldn’t even touch her (huh?) and they were playing baseball and hitting the balls over the mountains. I thought it sounded stupid, but I shrugged it off.

I guess it continued to grow in popularity, but my next memory is when the third book came out, and there was all this buzz on Amazon and on message boards. Bella was finally together with Edward, but there was a strong contingent that felt she should have chosen Jacob. Okay, no big deal. The disgust did not start until the fourth book.

I often check in with themoviespoiler.com, and sometimes with the sister site, thebookspoiler. I read the spoiler for Breaking Dawn. Okay, I had to skim some, because when you are not invested it is hard to stay with the whole thing, but I picked up three things.

· One, Bella has a daughter. Clearly this will allow Jacob to have a love of his life, and it is nice to throw the dog a bone.
· Two, she managed this by having sex with Edward while still human. Based on my earlier understanding, this sounds like the opposite of safe sex, but if we rule out the possibility of humans and vampires having sex there will be a lot of disappointed Goths, so okay.
· Three, and this is where the hate started, Renesmee.

Yes, I get the origin and meaning of the name, but what a stupid, jacked-up name. I remember once talking to a five-year old girl whose parents had gotten her and her sister pet goats, and she was telling me the names, and those goats had really long names. I think between the two, the names Princess, Rainbow, and Sparkle were all used, along with some other things, because obviously they wanted their goats to have the most beautiful names possible. If you leave out something good, how will others know how special this goat is? For her, it was kind of adorable. Stephenie Meyer should know better.

With a food allergy, generally there is initially a small reaction and then it builds up with each exposure. A good hatred is like that too. I only kind of hated Twilight and thought it was stupid here. I needed more exposure to really hate it. That came. It came through millions of teenage girls, and also adult women. It came through my own sisters.

A friend loaned them the books, and they fell hard for Edward. They had some embarrassment over it, but they kept reading anyway. Maybe I was wrong, so I tried. I was not wrong.

First of all, the prose is so bad that I cannot read it through. I have to skip around. I suspect there will be no further attempts, but here are some highlights.

· Edward tells Bella that he used to come in and watch her while she slept. She does not realize how creepy this is because she is too busy contemplating the wonder of having “this god” in her room. Girlfriend, it is terribly creepy. Boundaries are really important. Also, horrid, florid, clumsy prose.
· Vampires sparkle? That’s exactly what you’d expect from someone who came up with the name Renesmee.
· Edward’s “siblings” get Bella a car stereo as a birthday gift, which she is not interested in and they obviously know, because the install it for her while she isn’t looking so she can’t take it back. Ingrate.
· Bella gets angry at her new vampire family for picking overly fancy clothes for her and her child. I’m not saying that some irritation is not justified, but clearly this family loves you, for reasons I am missing. Try and appreciate that. Then again, she didn’t seem to appreciate her human father much either.
· Edward seems to tell Bella (lovingly) about how much she used to stink. I’m not sure if it was the struggle not to bite her because she made him so hungry, or just that humans stink and she was lucky to no longer be one.
· Finally, the sex. I don’t know exactly how often Bella thrills and has her eyes roll back in her head a little, but one thing I do know is that it’s irritating and stupid. To be fair, writing about sex usually does end up sounding stupid. For the sheer mechanics you are either being really crude, or throwing in euphemisms that are almost invariably cheesy. I won’t deny that it works well as movement, but as words the whole thing becomes kind of preposterous. I think it can be hinted at fairly deftly, but this was not done.

These are all excellent reasons for me not to read the books, but I’m not sure that it justifies my revulsion. I mean, I have never tasted anything more disgusting than oysters, but it doesn’t bother me that other people eat them.

Part of it is probably the hype. It was fairly recent that the movie came out, and everyone was reading the books again, or lucky to get tickets to the midnight showing, or some such nonsense.

Also, the fixation on Edward was, I think, a bad thing. My sisters liked that he was totally devoted to Bella, and taking care of her, and they don’t see that happening in real life, and I kind of get that, but he is a moody, inflexible stalker, and Jacob seems to have anger issues. I don’t think living with either of them would be a picnic. And I guess one of their friends asked her husband why he couldn’t be more like Edward. That is not constructive criticism.

I don’t automatically mind hype. I didn’t mind with Harry Potter or the Lord of the Rings, and I was okay with the hype over the new Star Wars movies until they turned out to be major disappointments. Then again, the hype really turned me off of The Da Vinci Code. Perhaps it is a combination of factors.

For a literary hero I could actually fall in love with, I think the best so far would be Joe Harman from A Town Like Alice. He’s someone you could follow across the world and live with once you got there (and I’m pretty sure the last part is more important than the first part).

So that’s where I’m at. I not only hate it for myself, I have a visceral reaction to other people liking it. It irritates me. Somehow a twenty-nine year old mother of three was able to hold on to the fan-girl attitude and writing style of a girl half her age, and it’s making bank. At least they’re reading, some will defend, but I say “Garbage in, garbage out.”

I should also mention that I really meant for my next post to be about dancing, but I was thrilled to find that Stephen King was quoted saying that ‘Stephenie Meyer can't write worth a darn’, and it filled my sour little heart with joy. I posted the link, and got some interesting comments, so poured out all my thoughts here, as I do. And you know, King isn’t always to my taste either. He goes for crude a lot and I don’t like it, but he is inventive, effective, and prolific, and even if he is not my first choice, reading his work does not make me cringe in pain and have to stop. It’s just different.