… Everybody runs around for two hours, nobody scores and a billion fans tell me that I “just don’t understand!” [nb - I stole that line directly from Daniel's Facebook feed but I don't feel guilty since I'm pretty sure he nabbed it from somebody else].
It’s been a while since I’ve had a good old fashioned whine about how atrocious the Twilight Saga [nb - "Saga"? Really? I think not!] is, and with a new movie coming out, now seemed an opportune moment to introduce Mark – because Mark reads Twilight so you don’t have to.
He reviews all of the books chapter by chapter in various hilarious, often desperate styles. Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 1:
Forks is terrible and Bella, who’s moving in with her father, makes no qualms about complaining about absolutely everything. She whines about the car her father, Charlie, buys her. She whines about having to share a bathroom. She whines about starting a new school. She whines about crying. It’s like those stupid Xzibit memes: I’m whining inside my whine so I can cry while I cry.
Shut the fuck up, Bella Swan.
And her day at school is irritating. Everyone MAGICALLY LOVES HER. Despite worrying about being an outcast, every person (except Edward Cullen, who we’ll get to) accepts her. Right off the bat. It’s a work of complete fiction and delusion, yet Bella is an outright asshole to virtually everyone who is nice to her. That’s a great way to be accepted, you moron.
Mark does a fantastic job of de-constructing Stephanie Meyers’ work and commenting on exactly why she is a woman-hating, religiously obsessed, paedophile promoting Mormon moron. I highly recommend him.
PS – He also did Mark reads Harry Potter, which is also hilarious – partly because he envisages Hagrid as a cross between Lemmy from Motorhead and a giant leather-daddy, and falls hopelessly in love with the character.
I’ve always thought that Twilight got a raw deal by coming at the tail end of Pottermania and daring to be popular amongst the young, thus making everyone feel they had to be super-cool and ‘totally over that’ by constantly, constantly talking about how terrible it was. The only thing that seemed to be more ubiquitous than Twilight’s hype seemed to be the whining about the hype. Yet unlike with so many things that seem to draw the ire of everyone just because everyone loves it, I noticed people actually laying real charges against the series. It wasn’t a case of “it just sucks!” it was “Bella Swan is a Mary Sue of epic proportions”. It wasn’t just “the characters are terrible… because they are” it was “the characters are terrible because most of the things they do make no freaking sense and here’s why”. As a writer myself I feel bad kicking another when they are down (though I imagine with the amount of money she’s made, she can’t be too down about people pointing out the flaws of her work), but it really sounds like poor writing and I am shocked it got published in the first place. Not shocked it became popular, but that’s another story.
There’s a lot in that. You can level a lot more substantive criticism at Meyers’ writing than you can at a lot of others: She romanticises having a much older man creep into a teenage girl’s bedroom and watch her while she sleeps – he is a paedophile stalker, plain and simple. Let’s not even get into the gaping plot holes, the woman hating or the shitty standard of writing!
Wait, wait. That sounds like your average soap opera plot, nothing out of the ordinary, nothing people wouldn’t happen to like. I’m not condoning it, I haven’t read it, and would probably hate it, but soaps are popular for a reason, dramatic fantasy with no depth. I guess we’re here to wonder why people eat this shlt up the way they do.
Look, though. Pedophile or not, teenage girls do find older men a lot more attractive than their peers. Pedophiles like to use that to their advantage, and minors aren’t legally able to give consent, but that’s not the end of the story, just the legality. I don’t know for sure how many teenage girls realize how naturally attractive they are to grown men (look, don’t touch, they just are), some try to look that way and some just feel so immature they might think he’s out of her league from the age difference, but she gets the crush anyway.
I’m not condoning it, and we can say all we want about pedophilia being wrong, but we’re not talking about how people really feel, what goes on in their head. I don’t know how the stalker fits into this particular plot, but when you’re a teenager you might not want just any guy watching you sleep, but if it’s a guy you like, it seems like he obviously likes you! When you’re young like that all you want is a sign he likes you. It’s immature, it’s adolescent insecurity and awakening sexuality. At my age, if I liked a guy that much, I’d rightly be scared if then he crept in my room and watched me sleep. If he had a key already and came over, I would like to wake up to that though.
I mean, it’s in the genre of romance and fantasy. Teenage boys have their fantasies, women with some experience, and the general realization girls pretty much still think they are dorks. The whole pedophilia concern seems to ignore that girls have fantasies as well, of being seduced and protected, shown the world, teenage boys really can’t fill that role very well. That’s why I think this series is so popular.
Also, given my limited awareness of it, I think it qualifies as a saga in the definition that it covers several generations of a family. I picked that up from a baby name forum (I like names) of all places. Someone has a baby in the story who is named a mush of two other characters’ names, and is called Renesmee.
What part of a soap opera takes a female character and describes her as not being a real woman because women’s sole purpose is to bear children, and she cannot bear children, ergo she is not a real woman? Because that’s some pretty f*cked-up writing right there – and for a woman to have written it just makes it even more f*cked-up.
I guess you don’t watch soap operas? There’s also a common theme where a guy rapes a woman, and for a while he’s a villain and goes to jail, and a few months or years later, they fall in love and get married.
I think you’d be horrified by the sort of occasions and attitudes that are ok in soap opera world. Last time I ever watched any, a girl would get obsessed with a guy, and spend the plot agonizing how unfair it is he is with someone else, this crappy dude with no personality is simply all there is in the world, and goes past the point of obsession and drugging and pretending he’s the father of one’s child. All the time.
Several characters have also felt utterly destroyed because they weren’t able to have a child, to credulize your incredulity, and been divorced as a result. Eventually, perhaps decades later, we get miracles. If not that, someone pretends to be pregnant and later has to kidnap someone else’s baby. Once I saw one where the biological mother was imprisoned in a dungeon until the baby was born because the captor loved her prisoner’s boyfriend, and then killed and dumped in the bay, only she wasn’t dead but she had amnesia. Within two months, give or take, any baby born on a soap is in high school so the teen generation audience has someone to relate to. Sometimes babies come back from wherever they went, older than another character who was already an adult when they were born.
People eat this shlt.
You guess right – I don’t have a TV. Well, I have one for X Box, but I have no cable or aerial or anything, so I can’t actually watch TV.
Wow, soaps over there are a lot more hardcore than here – here it’s usually the tripe about business intrigues, cheating, that kind of stuff – sometimes there’s some crazy ass dude who kidnaps a baby or kills someone but it’s always a Bad Thing.
Because watching overweight guys attempt to hit a ball, and fail, for 3 hours, is incredibly interesting. Baseball ftw.
Er?
I believe that’s a poignant commentary on the way we’re all worried about pop culture trash while the world falls apart around us.
Either that or you mocked soccer, which means that you must be a baseball fan, which means that the correct response to your post is to mock baseball. It’s the rules of the internet, don’tcha know?
I’m English. We’re allowed to mock soccer. We invented it.
I question your Englishness. It’s called football, you friggin’ Scotsman.
BTW, you wouldn’t happen to be DrCustos from Youtube by any chance?
I am not, no.
Oh, sorry then!
‘Salright, no harm in asking!
I think the “Twilight’s like soccer” comment came from this guy: http://twitter.com/bretterlich/status/17345184766 It was on the Favstar leaderboard a while back.
And Cleolinda took the “saga” part seriously: http://cleolinda.livejournal.com/886601.html Heh.
Ok, yes, I admit I’ve read them, and if you’re going to bring them up, I’m chiming in.
Brilliant work of art? No.
Creepy older guy stalking high school girl? Yep.
No “getting down” until marriage? Yep, it’s in there.
Plot holes the size of Texas? Absolutely.
However, these are all adult perspectives. My inner 15/16-year old gets it. Because all though she wouldn’t have been friends with Bella, there was the older guy thing, and most high school girls are looking for the “one”. It’s basically Harlequin Romance pre-lusty wench. And if you’ve ever bothered reading some of THOSE books, SM is damn near Shakespeare in comparison. Not that I am defending the hype, THAT part I don’t get, but they are not the worst or best books in the world, and I see the attraction for young girls. You may as well give them their fantasy before they hit the real world.
Having said all that:
“…then Buffy staked Edward. The End”
As for the “everyone loves Bella” portion of the report, I think that is another common fantasy of people. To compare here, I’ve watched House only once or maybe twice, and try to understand why anyone likes this show. He’s mean, and maybe nobody who works with him likes him, I’m not sure. But as a character on TV, he’s all, “oh no he didn’t just say that.”
People wish they had those kind of nards to say what they’re thinking and still keep their job and have the respect I’m given to believe the other characters on the show have for him. Deep down, a lot of inarticulate angry people want to live the dream of saying out loud what pisses them off about everyone and everything and still have love and friends, and/or people who can’t wait to do favors for you. At least when I try to watch a show like House, I cannot suspend my disbelief enough. I live a minute fraction of vocalized anger and people already think I’m nuts. I think people also think the man House would be their friend, because they’re not as stupid as everyone he hates, but I think they are deluded. I think the comes from Happy Days where Fonzie was friends with ordinary schlubs, cool by association.
I could talk about this all day. I wish I could get a job doing it, grouch at people who are stupid, and still have that job the next day.
Ah, that would be called Self-Employment. Some jobs that are available are Freelance Tech Support, Comedian, and Blogger, just to name a few.
I cannot stand House. I watched all of one episode of that tripe and wanted someone–anyone–to put a bullet through this moron’s skull (I’m not sure there’d be anything to impede the bullet once it penetrated the skull). Even the commercials make me wonder, “Why hasn’t anyone killed or at least severely beaten this fool?”
Actually, they have. Multiple times.
Once he was beaten, another time he was shot. Once someone pushed him into a wall.
Dammit, why didn’t it take, then? (just kidding…mostly)
Get hold of some Black Adder DVDs and see Hugh Laurie at his funniest. He wasn’t bad as Bertie Wooster to Stephen Fry’s Jeeves, either.
I don’t really have a problem with Twilight. I mean, it’s a book series aimed at young adults and when aren’t those terrible? The thing that gets me are the 20 and 30-somethings that treat them like the greatest works of literary fiction that they’ve read in their lives.
Or the fifty something woman behind me at the theater concession stand wearing a T-shirt bearing the image of Jacob Black. Oy, vey!
Do you know Meyers wrote Jacob as a temporary filler character and designed him specifically to be everything she thought of as evil and repugnant in men? The publishers loved him and insisted he stay, and he’s now the most popular character. What does that tell you?
That tells me that she’s a racist cow. Here’s the shorthand: Jacob Black is a Native American whose tribe just happens to turn into wolves…and has some kind of beef with Edward’s folks (who are whiter than mayonnaise). I’m gonna borrow from sci-fi site io9 here:
Jacob represents humanity, warmth, frank eroticism . . . and an interracial relationship. Though Jacob’s tribal identity has played a part in previous films, it’s in Eclipse that we learn what that means. At one point, Jacob brings Bella to a tribal meeting where one of the pack leaders tells us a story that unfolds in flashback like a cross between Dances With Wolves and Dark Shadows. “When the cold ones came,” he explains, they fought the native wolves. We see a white vampire in European garb slaughtering native wolves. Then when the wolves kill him, his wife comes to their village, destroying everyone in a blaze of fire and imperialist nastiness.
In case you had any doubts before, it’s now abundantly clear that “the cold ones,” the vampires, are the Europeans who destroyed the lives of innocent natives. Most of the vampires are blond to the point of absurdity (seriously – they couldn’t afford decent wigs?). One of the Cullens fought for the South in the Civil War, and it doesn’t get whiter than that.
To infuse this character of color (after a fashion) with all the negative traits of men, but to have Edward the White embody all the positive traits of men is both sloppy writing as well as indicative of yet another part of Meyer’s reprehensible politics.
Dude, she’s a Mormon. Aren’t they the ones who think non-whites are evil/lost/fallen/whatever?
Yes, but it was “revealed” to them that black people are alright after all about a month before a law was enacted that would have enabled any would-be black Mormon to sue them into oblivion for racism if they hadn’t changed their policy. Funny, that.
How deliciously convenient.
Has it been ‘revealed’ to them yet that Native Americans are not a lost tribe of Israel as they claim? Except by science, of course, which doesn’t count.
As the Church Lady would say, “Weeeell, isn’t THAT special?”
I have a really hard time believing that Stephanie Meyer is smart enough to have actually thought of that while she was writing Twilight.
YA books don’t need to be terrible, and it is a shame when they are terrible. Folks should demand good literature, not vapid crud like Twilight or popcorn novels like The Da Vinci Code.
For choice I’d recommend Terry Pratchett’s YA stuff and Philip Pullman’s work.
Yes. In fact, some of the best books ever were written for the YA audience.
barely related to the topic, but my favorite “stupid Xzibit meme”.
http://cdn-www.i-am-bored.com/media/58345_exhibispoiler.jpg
FWIW, Twilight’s an entertaining bit of fluff.
It kept me alive — I shit you not — during my last severe depressive episode. I HAD to find out what happened next, and kept me distracted from my suicidal thoughts.
Yeah, it’s an anti-woman Mormon morality play with the ULTIMATE Mary-Sue, and serious characterization issues (they’re all two-dimensional), but the gnarly vampire birth was well worth reading through the rest of it.
I’d think that you of all people would be deeply offended by the story’s treatment of women.
You mean the gnarly vampire birth that wouldn’t have been written if Smeyer weren’t such a filthy hypocrite? She claims to not watch violent media because it’s harmful, and claims to keep it out of her writing….I call bullshit. Bella’s spine breaks, for Christ’s sake! Blood gushes from her mouth! Eww.
Y’know the thing that bugs me about Twilight – other than everything – is how superfluous their actual vampirism seems to be. It doesn’t seem to affect them at all – no weakness to sunlight, good looks, great powers, no downside. At all. It’s pointless – other than the occasional angsting, the fact they’re vampires is utterly irrelevant. It doesn’t inconvenience them in any way – other than depleting the local wildlife, that is.
And the sparkling. Dear Basement Cat, the sparkling!
Though the idea of vampirism being transmitted through venom is an interesting one.
Ya, it is. But seriously… sparkling?
Gah, I know! *banghead* Sparkling vampires….
The Count doesn’t sparkle. (He just counts.)
Neither did Dracula.
Or Angel. (Or any of the Buffy-verse vamps)
The vamps in Underworld didn’t sparkle.
Nor did Anne Rice’s vamps.
Where the hell did this idea of sparkly fairy vampires come from?!
Well bursting into flames, in the sweet heavy metal way they usually do, isn’t very romantic. And besides, that would just be one more thing for the main character to complain about.
Plus, how would they meet if he only went about at night?
The vampire goes to high school? *FACEPALM*
I never got that. This is presumably an adult male who was turned into a vampire about a hundred years ago… and who goes to high school. Where he meets, falls in love and marries a teenaged high school girl.
I can get the werewolves, who aren’t immortal, but what the fuck is a century old vampire doing in high school?!
Yes, Edward is fecking creepy if you really think about what he’s up to.
I’m less than half Edward’s age, but if I hung out at high schools hitting on the students, they would very rightly put me in jail.
“I can get the werewolves, who aren’t immortal, but what the fuck is a century old vampire doing in high school?!”
Screwing up the curve for everyone else. What a jerk.
Either that or he’s so dumb that even after trying for a 100 years he still can’t pass highschool.
He has low self esteem. I mean think of how much cooler you’d be if you could go back to highshcool with all the maturity and experience you have now.
Consider he’s also considered physically perfect, looks 17 and is, oh, immortal and super-powerful.
I am SO SUPER EXCITED to see this posted! I have read every single one of Mark’s Twilight reviews, regularly link my favourites on Facebook and recommend them to my friends. For some reason they seem to enjoy being subtly told that women are manipulative, whiny, backstabbing wastes of space by nature and that they should look forward to being stalked and possessed by males. That’s all before they force you to get married so they can have sex with you, of course.
just so you know I’m mormon, and mixed race and i think twilight is a sorry excuse for literature that drowns in failsauce. I hate the series and live Harry Potter. so please stop hating on mormons. BTW: i love fight scenes