failing like never before

The Vampires of Twilight

(This could be a little confusing if you haven't read Twilight before, or have no idea what its about.)

I had to see what all the fuss over Twilight was all about, so a few weeks ago, instead of studying, I decided to read Twilight. My literary background isn't exactly amazing, and the fact that I'm an engineering student probably does little to add credence to my literary analysis, but I'm still going to attempt a brief rant against Stephenie Meyer's Twilight.

It seems to me that Stephenie Meyer isn't exactly overflowing with literary prowess, although I will conceded that she is a better writer then me (Face it, who isn't better then me?). Meyer has this thing where she feels she has to insert an awkwardly large number of adjectives into a sentence in order to describe one thing. I don't actually own a copy of the book so I don't have it in front of me and can't quote from it, but I think that anyone who has read the book can understand what I'm talking about. Maybe Meyer was just going for a dark, super-descriptive style, but if that was her goal, then she overshot it by a few hundred yards and ended up with something that reads like a grade schooler's attempt at a "descriptive writing" assignment.

I told a friend that I managed to read through Twilight in about an hour and thirty minutes. He was a little surprised to hear that (and rightly so) and asked me how I managed such a (almost) Herculean feat. The reasons behind my speedy-reading time is two-fold: firstly, I've had a lot of experience speed-reading through books, and secondly, (the big secret) I skipped all the parts where Bella expounded upon Edward's god-like attributes. I realize that Edward is supposed to posses inhuman beauty, and that Bella, as a teenage girl, is of course going to be admiring the physical attributes of her vampire boyfriend, but I think the description's of Edward's hotness are a little much. It seemed to me that every time Edward was mentioned, Bella immediately starts thinking about how beautiful and perfect Edward is (his perfect skin, teeth, scent, muscles, voice, etc.), and I started skipping whole lines of text at a time. Forgive me for not being a teenage girl (or a homosexual teenage boy) , but reading about Edward's god-like proportions brought me pretty close to my retching point, which is why I simply started skipping after I realized the descriptions were never going to stop.

While the plot line certainly didn't bring me to retching, I wasn't too fond of it either; it was pretty much just a funky, boring, romance with some fighting tossed in at the end. I'm not going to bother too much with this point, since I've got little else to say about the plot, besides the fact that I didn't like it very much.

But now we get to something that I can really rant about: the vampires. Every author that has written a book with vampires in it has always taken some liberty with modifying vampire lore in order to make it better fit the story, or just to appease the author's own personal tastes. There is of course no "official" vampire lore, so some picking and choosing of vampiric attributes should always be expected. Stephenie Meyer however, has managed to change so many things that her vampires are more like a blood-sucking Superman then anything else.

When Edward is driving Bella around it is revealed that the vampres in Meyer's world do not suffer from common vampire weaknesses, including garlic, a lack of a reflection, holy symbols such as crosses or bibles, holy water, a stake through the heart, and sunlight. The only way to kill Bella's vampire boyfriend is complete and total inmolation. So basically, Edward the Perfect's only weaknesses is a thirst for human blood and napalm. An oh, by the way, the reason vampires stay out of the sunlight isn't becase it burns them or even discomforts them, its because it makes them shiny. Yeah...

The incredibly stupid idea of shiny, glittering vampires took me a little while to come to terms with. But after reading Twilight I would not be surprised if Meyer revealed in one of her Twilight sequels, that vampires also possess such powers as the "Care Bear Stare" or the ability to fart perfume. And as though the idea of glittering, inhumanely beautiful, almost unkillable vampires wasn't hard enough to swallow, Meyer's had to go ahead and give each of her vampires a special mutant power. Powers like the ability to read a person's mind, see the future, control the emotions of a crowd of people, or track a person almost anywhere.

It seems to me, that with the plethora of amazing powers a vampire possess, people should be queuing up in hordes to get bitten and become a vampire. In my various readings and viewings of vampire fiction, I have always been led to believe that there is something abhorable, or unlikable about becoming a vampire. That vampires are either inherently evil, lack a soul, or in some way suffer from some condition that does not allow them to fully enjoy their inhuman existence, but this not seem to be the case with Meyer's world. Her vampires are too perfect, too happy with their charmed life that makes them so much better then mere humans.

So that is my rant in a nutshell. As always, feel free to comment.