The Twilight Saga: Bastardising the Myth with "Sparkles"

Now, before I get into this, I would like to just clarify one point. I actually enjoyed the Twilight series, despite what I'm about to talk about. But then again, I also enjoy Neighbours as a no-brainer after work, or Rick Astley as a blast from the rather shameful past, or Ace Ventura: Pet Detective or those terribly cheesy 'minimal plot covered by CGI' world destruction movies. I don't pretend that they are quality productions, nor would I ever talk them up as being so in their respective mediums. Twilight is low quality pulp appealing to the mass of screaming pubescence and nothing more. It will likely not be remembered in 10 years.

Twilight is bad on so many levels: from the basics of writing style and grammar to the more complex aspects of plot and character development and the deeper issues of the messages it sends out. Here are some of its (many) potholes which, unfortunately, haven't stopped this latest teenage craze from saturating book store shelves and movie screens.

1. Stephenie Meyer can hardly string two sentences together (or apparently spell StephAnie either.) without a writing no-no of some description. The ability to use the 'Thesaurus' function on Microsoft Word does not a writer make. Aside from the purple prose, mindless repetition of the same point 800 times and the use of words in the wrong context (using chagrin as a verb is a personal favourite), Meyer substitutes simple words for bigger ones to make herself seem a more intelligent writer. For example, instead of saying big dog, she'll write something like Brobdingnagian canine. Sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? Meyer is obsessed with writing mundane details about what Bella is wearing and what she ate for breakfast and how many times she went to do Number Twos. Spare us! And what the hell is wrong with 'She said' or 'He said'. NOOOOO, of course not! It has to be 'She requisitioned ' or 'He asseverated'. Anything but plain old 'said'! Bad bad writing.

2. Nothing happens in the Twilight saga. Aside from a girl falling in love with a guy, is there really anything else to this? All the action happens in the last 30 pages of each book and usually it poses no real threat to the lead's love story. They have no real obstacles because they would be hard to write. Even the Volturi's threat to the Cullens' lives in the final book is a complete fizzer because the Volturi 'miraculously' give up on the whole idea of hurting them, therefore the Cullens win a battle that we knew and they knew they were always going to win. ZERO CONFLICT CREATED. Because killing off any of her beloved flawless characters or writing the actual battle would be hard to write. We don't have any story for any other characters – the minimal backstory we are given on the Cullens tells us little about the character itself and mostly is only there to help Bella and Edward on their unimpeded journey.

3. For a four-book series with a considerable number of supporting characters, you'd hope to get some kind of alternate action to the puke-inducing soppiness of Bella and Edward but Meyer doesn't offer any of that to us. Even when Jacob is the narrator, it's still all centred around the two others. Alice could be an intriguing character but she is reduced to a 'crystal ball' character whose only purpose is to keep the lead character alive. Alice and Bella's friendship is shallow and under-developed.

The first book is 400 pages of 'OMG, look at Edward – he's, like, so beautiful, *screams*, he really is, like, the hottest thing eva!' Strangely enough, I can't even seem to work out why Edward and Bella love each other – what could they possibly have in common? She's seventeen, he's one hundred and something (He he....necrophilia rears its ugly head!). She's a boring nobody. He's a vampire. She has no ambitions, hobbies or personality. He has no...oh, hang on, he has no personality either so they DO have something in common!

Bella likes him because he's some kind of Adonis (really?! I hear you say. I never heard his looks mentioned in the books! LOL). He likes her because she has an odour. Superficial? I think so! I swear, after a ream of paper's worth of dribble, if I had heard about the 'topazed topaziness of Edward's topaz-y eyes' one more time.....!!!!

4. Meyer sets women's lib back to the dark ages. In Meyer's world, it is perfectly acceptable to construct your female protagonist as a co-dependent angsty victim who has no goals or ambitions outside of staring into Edward's topaz eyes and needs to be 'saved' every time she steps outside the house. She had no ambition before she meets Edward but then it was made even worse by her abandonment of her schooling, her family and friends (who she treats badly, especially her father – again, another completely two-dimensional, undeveloped character), ambitions (or lack thereof). All for a teenage crush, most of which, we all know, fail. Those that do survive are built on respect for each other's hopes, dreams and ambitions and friendship, of which Edward and Bella are devoid. And yet, this 'role model' for young girls gets married and knocked up at 18. Great example you're setting for our teenage girls, Stephenie.

5. The characters are one-dimensional and grossly undeveloped and over the course of the books do some rather unsavoury things that we're supposed to accept and move on.

a) Edward is a possessive, intense stalker. Are we seriously supposed to think that slipping into a girl's bedroom to watch her sleep is romantic? Or sabotaging her car so she can't go see her friend?It's not romantic – it's creepy. And no self-respecting girl would think that was acceptable. He has little personality, humour or characterisation beyond being, like, so dreamy *giggles like a 14 year old*... He also uses sex as blackma... ahem... bargaining chip for marriage so that he can have total possession of her forever. Controlling enough?

b) Bella has no faults. She is what is termed a 'Mary Sue' character. Being clumsy is not a character flaw. And all the clumsiness does (I woud presume) is tell us that she is endearing. That's not a character flaw. Oh, unless you count treating Jacob like total shit as one. She is nothing more than a vacuous prick-tease and she has the emotional depth of a toenail.

c) Jacob imprints on a baby. Again, not romantic. I call that paedophilia. Imprinting = problems galore! It's like saying it's okay for you to cheat on/dump your current girlfriend if you've imprinted on someone else. And what if the girl doesn't want them? Are they stuck with some loser guy obsessing over them for ever? What a horrible thought! And Meyer has only put this whole imprinting thing in because it saves her the trouble of writing the hard emotional stuff about Jacob's pain about the 'love of his life' dissing him. Making the baby age at a rapid rate doesn't disguise the fact that it is still a NEWBORN BABY. And, while we're on the topic of babies, Renesmee is possibly the stupidest (and most horribly trashy) name I've ever heard!

6. Meyer has taken two of the coolest mythical creatures ever created and taken all the negatives out of being one, making them just perfect.

a) Vampires do not freaking sparkle. Fairies sparkle, dammit! The one common thread you will find in all vampiric literature from Nosferatu to Stephen King to Anne Rice is that vampires don't like sunlight. Not because they become glittering diamante jewellery from Diva in the blazing sun but because they fry up like a porkchop on a barbecue. But imagine trying to write a teenage romance between a school girl and a nocturnal vampire when the girl is only allowed out until 9pm on a school night – that would be just too hard.

b) Vegetarian vampires? WHY? Why would vampires care about humans? They're monsters. Making them eat animals instead of humans doesn't make them any less soul-less, blood-sucking fiends. And for Edward to not kill Bella is silly. She would be so tasty!

c) How could Bella get pregnant when her husband is, well, dead? How could sex even be possible with a vampire? You need blood to get the action happening down below, don't you boys? Not to mention other essential forms of bodily fluid? What's wrong with this picture? But then who would want to hear about bladder functions, heartburn and farting and all the less dignified parts about pregnancy? Solution: just have your heroine miss all that pregnancy nonsense.

d) Meyer didn't want to have to write the hard stuff about her Mary Sue heroine going through the nasty, evil, killing-machine newborn phase so she just had her skip that bit. What makes Bella so special anyway?? She seemed pretty ordinary and bland to me.

e) In Twilight, doesn't Esme make Bella dinner to welcome her? Italian food? I'm guessing she left the garlic out of the recipe.

f) I suppose in Forks, the school students are so stupid, they don't notice that their classmates are pasty white and have creepy yellow eyes. For that matter, if you're trying so hard to blend in, why wouldn't you get a fake tan? Surely that would hide your glittery goodness.

g) Meyer's werewolves are just big regular wolves who can change when they want. Once again, she's taken all the ugliness of transformation and involuntary changing at full moonlight out of it because it would just be all screwy with her timeline and the overall hotness of her other male fantasy object, Jacob.

h) How do the vampires get the blood out with no fangs? Gnawing like a beaver on someone's neck with ya li'l incisors for a couple of hours could be a little time-consuming. What do they use, a straw?

6. So it's not okay to show any form of sex in your books (I, with amusement, refer to the noticeable lack of description about his beautiful, um, manly areas...) but apparently it is okay to have, in great detail, your male protagonist EAT a baby out of his pregnant teenage wife's stomach? Have I missed something?

7. The movies made a bad series even worse. The dialogue made me laugh out
loud Bella says “I don't really like the rain. Any cold, wet thing... ” and Edward
laughs. (???) Was that supposed to be funny? Then again I laughed because the
first thing I thought was - well, you'd better not get TOO close to him then cos
that's all you're gonna get! Such mundane dialogue, it actually IS funny.

And Kristen Stewart and Rob Pattinson have no chemistry! She does, ironically,
have chemistry with that Taylor guy though. Well, as much chemistry as you
could get out of the walking mannequin that she is. Kristen Stewart is a bad
actress, looking pained most of the time, even when she's smiling, and for
someone who is supposed to be plain, she looks awfully 'made up'... The two
hours of long looks into each other's topaz-y eyes to the moody music and
deliberately hazy photography (although there are some pretty scenery shots)
sums up what can only be described as teenage angsty drivel.

One thing good that comes out of Twilight is that it has given every budding writer in the world some hope. If Stephenie Meyer could pass these books through a publishing house and not get rejected (or at least be forced into a drastic re-write), maybe, just maybe, there is hope for the rest of us. Time to get that thesaurus out....