How to offend a group of stereotypical, romance-novel-devouring, emotionally-driven, otherwordly-obsessed teenage girls?
That’s easy. Just say that Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series sucks. Just say that it is convoluted with cliches, one-dimensional characters, a lame plot, and annoying protagonists. Voila; instant group of angered teens just ready to sic their imaginary vampire troupe on you.
Okay okay, so maybe I’m exaggerating it a little bit, but I have still not quite come to understand why Twilight has been exaulted as the next Harry Potter, or why girls have fallen head-over-heels for Edward Cullen, a fictional character that is every kind of Gary Stu possible. And with the coming release of the final book in the quartet, Breaking Dawn, I have the feeling this won’t be the last I’ll hear the squeals of fangirls filling the bookstore aisles.
I’ve only read about 1/3rd of the way through the first book of the series before I had to toss it aside and run to the bathroom to instigate regurgitation of the delicious enchilada I had eaten for lunch. Let me present you with only a snippet of the atrocity, and then I shall elaborate on my uncommon spite.
Right off the bat, the book has somewhat of a monotonous, Livejournal-esque feel. Bella describes, in almost painfully mundane detail, every single thing she does. This technique is useful at times when it’s molded properly, but quite obviously Stephanie Meyer does not possess this ability. Instead, as one critic put it, she uses uncomfortable adjectives and adverbs in an attempt to make her writing elaborate. Unfortunately, most of the time it just falls flat.
I sat at the old square oak table in one of the three unmatching chairs and examined his small kitchen, with its dark paneled walls, bright yellow cabinets, and white linoleum floor… The engine started quickly, to my relief, but loudly, roaring to life and then idling at top volume.
Yeah. No one cares about the kitchen, and I’m pretty sure we all know what an engine sounds like when it starts up - did that description really merit that much of a waste of ink? Please to be getting to the point?
Once I got around the cafeteria, building three was easy to spot. A large black “3″ was painted on a white square on the east corner.
… are you -serious-, Ms. Meyer? Are you freaking serious? Can I interject a very blunt “no effing shit” here?
Okay, so I maybe a bit harsh, spoiled by the characteristically blunt style of the nonfiction texts I read. Some of you romance-lovers probably like to be able to envision the environment, to step into a new world, to experience the fantasies in perfect clarity, so on and so forth with your fancy fictional excuses. Even if I was to forgive Meyers’s annoying descriptions about trivial items, I must blatantly point out the fact that she spent no less than seven paragraphs letting the protagonist agonize about her new kid syndrome.. and not in any sort of literary structure either; it just kind of jumps from thought to thought, remaining only vaguely connected to the plot at hand by the repetition of the same boring cliched idea - “I’m an ivory-skinned freak who won’t fit in.”
Yes, Bella. You’re an ivory-skinned freak but somehow all the guys like you (and you shoved them all away except for Insta-Hottie Edward). You’re a major clutz but for some reason that grants you a certain kind of charm that makes girls want to “step into your shoes”. You are the world’s most sorry excuse for a reverse-psychology Mary Sue (being loved for what’s -inside- the imperfect body, cliched blah blah random gobbledygook). You meet some sparkly vampire who appears to hate you, and then all of a sudden you’re both zomg-passionately-in-love… just because you smell nice and said vampire is somehow misogynistically hot. Mmmm, yes. I can just hear the Nora Roberts fans screaming in agony.
Reading a few chapters of this book was already enough to make me want to gouge my eyes out with a spoon. Cue fangirls rallying up their favourite warcry of, “But you didn’t even traverse the entire novel, you biased and unreasonably spiteful anti-vampire cynic!” Oh pardon me, are any of them capable of such vocabulary? Maybe I need to rephrase it in Bellanese: “I felt enraged. My pale not-really-albino self shook with rage. I felt anger building up. I looked around for my sexy uber-hot boytoy Edward so I could sic him on these anti-fans who hate me. And I’m not a Mary Sue. I’m a freak. I’m not perfect. I’m a little dot in a sea of three thousand. What are you talking about. The engine sounds nice today, it’s starting up nicely and roaring to life only to decrescendo at a rate of 20 Hz/s, letting the waves of sound caress the air molecules before coming to rest in my delicate ears that twitched ever so slightly at the gentle hum of the engine. And did I mention I have a sexy boytoy?”
Shoot the girl in the head, Stephanie Meyer. That’s the only one way to redeem the horrendous level of cliched purple prose you’ve shoved mercilessly into the confines of your books; I’m sure you’ll get the approval of many anti-fans as well if Bella meets her well-deserved end at the finale of Breaking Dawn.
As for the fans using the “you didn’t even read the entire book” argument against critics of the precious quartet, let me just kindly point out that if your beloved book was so brilliant, I would’ve been captivated long enough to make it through without feeling the need to resort to self-harm to restore my faith in modern literature.
P.S. For various other anti-fans’ opinions and sarcastic takes on the issue, feel free to read through some of the opinion pieces from Twilightsucks.com =D