There Will Be Blood… or, At Least, Some Angst… And Maybe Tears

I’ve been mocking Twilight and its sequels rather mercilessly for a while now. First, I should explain for those of you who don’t know me that I mock everything.  I mock things I love (see Star Wars), things I hate (see Washed Up Former Music Star of Questionable Fame of Love), things I think of as guilty pleasures (Total Recall comes to mind), and even things I’ve never actually experienced, except vicariously, as is the case with the beloved saga of star trial patient for clinical depressants Bella and her creepy as fuck stalker beau Edward.

However, I know several fans of the series, who tend to ask me what, exactly, I have against this tale of a tragic love between a mortal and a vampire.  As answer, I am going to address several of my concerns with the series, as well as some armchair analysis.  So sit tight and enjoy the ride.

First, some disclaimers:

1. I have not actually read Twilight or any of its sequels.  Nor have I seen the movie.

2. While the purpose of this post is not to mock, my blogging voice will shine through and make fun of the subject even as I analyze it.  I can’t help this; it’ll hopefully make what would otherwise be a totally lame, dull post into one that’s, in a word or two, crazy awesome.

3. Much of this post will draw heavily on what I’ve heard from people who’ve read the books, as well as my own independant research (mainly the Twilight wiki).

Ok, disclaimers done.  I have several primary problems with the Twilight series (aside from Ms. Meyers’ writing style, which makes me want to reach for my red pen and is largely responsible for why I haven’t read at least the first book in its entirety).  Problem one: Bella, Edward, and their relationship (this is technically three issues, but I’m combining them for brevity’s sake).  Problem two: the core messages of the book.  Problem three: the ideas that the book is conveying to the young women who read it.  Problem four: the way vampires are treated in the work, and what it implies for everything else.

Of Mary Sues, Stalkers, and Abusive Relationships
Bella is a Mary Sue of the worst kind.  Keep in mind that everyone loves her, no one can stop talking about how pretty she is.  Aside from a lack of self awareness and a certain amount of clumsiness (both acceptable “drawbacks” for Mary Sues, as neither is really a negative trait), she has no negative traits.  I think it is also worth mentioning that the Twilight wiki spends one line describing her non physical characteristics, when a lengthy paragraph is devoted to her looks.

I should add one negative trait to her: she’s stupid.  This will become more evident down the line, but make no mistake, the girl is missing something upstairs.

Anyway, even though Bella is beautiful, supposedly intelligent, and beloved by everyone in school, she’s miserable.  She hates all the attention and just wants to be left alone, but those damn admirers won’t go away (maybe I should list ungrateful as a character flaw).  She just can’t find any peace and quiet, at least, not until she encounters ultimate bad boy Edward Cullen (played by Cedric Diggory with a terrible accent in this movie).

I’m going to take a moment to talk about Edward (just a moment).  First and foremost in the fans’ eyes, he is beautiful.  When there’s no sun, his pale skin, full red lips, and deep eyes draw mere mortals in, and when the sun comes out (or maybe just on an overcast day?  never really was sure what degree of sunlight these vamps could stand) he glistens like a beglittered raver in a strobe light.

I could argue that his beauty is really his only true positive trait.  He’s obsessive, controlling, abusive, manic-depressive, brooding, possessive, and far too overprotective.  From what I can tell, he is frequently deciding things for Bella, and then manipulating or bullying her into accepting his decisions.

This leads to my issue with their relationship.  In essence, Bella is an abused spouse: she is attached to a manipulative, controlling stalker who resents allowing her to be a complete individual on her own.  More disturbingly, the author endorses this relationship as an ideal one.

If you were to take away Edward’s vampirism and write a novel that applauded this sort of relationship, I doubt you could get an agent to touch it.  Nowhere else in our society do we tell young women that it’s ok for men to stalk, bully, manipulate, kidnap, and emotionally abuse them into doing whatever the man wants.

We are not in the fifties, and I’d like to see our popular literature reflect that.

I’ll leave this section with one thought for you: Edward is 90 years old and hitting on a 17 year old girl.  Again, take away Edward’s good looks and vampirism, and this scenario gets a whole lot more creepy.

On Sex, Abortion, and Broken Backs
Ms. Meyers’s core message in the first book is laudable.  Distilled to a single sentence, it would be “Don’t have sex until you’re married.”  I would personally amend it from “when married” to “when ready.”  I think premarital sex is important; many many marriages (forgive the lack of a citation) have ended almost as soon as they began because the two partners weren’t sexually compatible, and so the marriage ends in a shambles.

But that’s not what I’m here to argue.  My main issue with this first message is the heavy-handedness with which it’s delivered.  According to Twilight, sex=death; from what I understand, Edward doesn’t want to have sex with Bella because if he does, he’ll lose all control and eat her (in the bad way).  This, in some strange fashion, seems to fuel Bella’s lust; something about the threat of death from a guy just gets her (and from what I’ve heard, the readers) all tingly.  So we’ve got three books (I think), of Bella obsessing about Edward and his hot, hot love, and Edward obsessing about Bella but not doing anything about it (“I’m not gonna do anything with her, but she’s MINE”).

Then they get married, and there’s love, joy, undead, happiness, and SEX.  LOTS of sex.  Like fifty straight pages of True Blood-Style Vampire Humping.  See, kiddos, once you’re married, sex is ok.  It’s actually a good thing to spend whole days humping while you ignore other responsibilities.

Don’t use birth control or condoms, though; those are still evil.

So after their sexual marathon, Bella finds out that she’s pregnant with a devil-spawn that is trying to kill her.  Moreover, it WILL kill her to give birth to it, but she won’t abort it.

I’m sorry, but that’s just dumb.  I like to think that the women I know are a bit smarter than that; having kids is relatively easy.  On the other hand, surviving to reach maturity without a mother is a hell of a lot harder of a thing to do.  Look to nature: if a mother wolf and her cubs are starving, the mother will let her cubs starve, not because she doesn’t care, but because if she dies, they’re dead anyways.  If the mother lives, she can always birth more pups.

Oh, and then the baby breaks her back and she gets turned into a vampire.  So I guess all is good, since someone was around to save Bella’s ass.

Submission, Stupidity, and Weakness: What Twilight is really saying
So, if you’ve been reading carefully, in these novels, Ms. Meyers is saying that the ideal relationship is one where the man protects the woman, makes all her decisions for her, tells her exactly what to do, lets his undead baby break her back, and then turns her into a vampire so she can enjoy an eternity of cooking and cleaning for him.

Seriously, that’s what seems to be going on here.  And everyone seems to love it! “Oh,” I hear fangirls croon, “it’s so romantic how Edward protects Bella.”  No, it’s not.  There’s a difference between protecting and coddling; he’s doing the latter.  It’s not being protective to prevent you from deciding who to hang out with; it’s being a douchebag.  It’s not romantic to break into a girl’s room to sit and watch her sleep; that’s just being a stalker.

On the other hand, it IS being protective for him to rescue Bella from her attention-grabbing suicide attempts (which, considering her antipathy for attention seem counter-productive), so he gets a point there.  However, Bella loses fifty for being a fucking idiot.  I’d like to pull in a passage from Mark about Satan tempting Jesus to jump off a mountain to see if the angels would catch him, but that’d be giving the author too much credit.

So girls, according to Twilight you need to find a man who will provide, think, and decide for you while lavishing you with enough attention; if you ever feel like he’s neglecting you, go try to kill yourself, and he’ll come save you.

Just don’t do any fucking until you get the ring on his finger.

Oh, and it’s TOTALLY okay to hang out with the minions of Satan, as long as they’re dreamy looking.

Seeking Closure
I’d like to close with my complaint that these vampires are totally neutered, but I’ve done posts about neutered villains before, and I just don’t have the time or the energy to do it again.

Long story short: vampires should be terrifying creatures, the corpses of the damned who want nothing more than to drain the blood from your body.  Vampires are not lovers; they’ve forgotten how (hmm… I sense a decent post in that sentence).  I don’t care how strong Edward Cullen is, or how many girlfriends he beats up; the dignity and ruthlessness of Count Dracula would smack him and his hippy family down in zero flat.

Vampires are all about lust, which is one thing that Ms. Meyers seems truly against.

Finally, let me know how I did.  Like I said, I haven’t actually read the books, so if you can give me a compelling argument as to why I’m wrong, I’ll promise to at least consider it.  Alternatively, if you can get me a version of the book that keeps the plot, characters, and themes intact while making the actual writing bearable, I’ll give that a shot, too.