My views are as follows:
1. Stephenie Meyer is not a great writer. In fact, she's not even a good writer. She's an ok writer. I didn't read the books for her brilliant prose. I read the books because I've always loved vampires and teenage vampire romance in general since I was a kid. I was predisposed to loving this series before I'd even opened the book. I think I've said as much in previous posts. I am sick of hearing her fans compare her to J.K. Rowling. Rowling is an outstanding storyteller and a great writer. The story of their successes are similar and they both write teen fiction but that's where the similarities end.
2. Fans keep insisting that Stephenie Meyer has taken the vampire mythos to places it's never been with the Twilight books. They usually give the following reasons: her vampires have no fangs, her vampires can walk in sunlight, her vampires eat only the blood of animals, its' a love story between a vampire and a human, and her vampires sparkle in the sunlight.
It's these examples that truly ignite the white-hot nerd rage in me. Allow me to break it down for any fans out there who still believe Meyer is a trailblazer in her genre:
a) There have been plenty of books and movies featuring vampires with no fangs prior to the release of Twilight. There have been variations on the theme for years including the fangless variety as found in Twilight, and vampires whose fangs only grow when they're about to drink blood. I even remember watching a movie as a kid in which vampires' tongues split down the middle at mealtime revealing a set of teeth like a shark's. Sadly, the only example of fangless vampires before Meyer's time that I can think of offhand is the movie Innocent Blood, which came out in 1992. But trust me, they're out there.
b) Vampires have been walking in sunlight forever. Seriously. There's this awesome little novel called Dracula. Yeah, it was written by some old dude named Bram Stoker. Maybe you've heard of it? Anyway, he totally has Dracula walking in the daylight all the time. Isn't that neat?
c) In almost every vampire story, a vampire drinks the blood of an animal at least once. Some do it all the time. A good example is Anne Rice. In Interview With The Vampire, she has Louis drinking the blood of rats, chickens, doves, all manner of things to avoid killing humans. This is old news.
d) Don't even get me started on it being a love story. Teenage vampire romance has been around since way before Twilight. I'll cite my favorite series as a kid for this one: The Vampire Diaries by L.J. Smith. It was also a four part book series about the doomed love of a mortal high school girl for a two hundred year old vampire. And guess what? These books were better than Meyers'. (Ok, maybe now I'm just being catty.) Also, don't forget Buffy!
e) As to sparkling in the sunlight, I guess I really have nothing to say. You win Meyer. You are the very first person to ever have your vampires sparkle.
3. I think my biggest complaint of the hour is with TwilightMoms.com. I am a member of this forum and I do read their blogs daily, but I've always felt their policy regarding posts on the site is ridiculous. It says in the rules that if you're going to post on their forums you aren't allowed to say anything negative. If you say anything they construe as negative about the Twilight books, Stephenie Meyer, or anything having to do with the movies your posts will be deleted. I've respected their rules for the most part, feeling that if I had nothing nice to say I wouldn't say anything at all. But with Breaking Dawn coming out and getting such poor reviews, I've had enough.
A Twilight Mom was recently quoted in this article as saying, "There's a very vocal minority (estimated at 10% of the hundreds posting) that doesn't like [Breaking Dawn]." But this just isn't true. Ten percent? I think not. If you go to amazon.com or goodreads.com or just about anywhere else, you'll see the ratio of people who hated it to people who loved it landing around 5:1. I myself am in the camp of those who really didn't like the new novel and felt almost betrayed by it, but that's neither here nor there. What really gets me is that I can't go to TwilightMoms and talk about it.
TwilightMoms posted this statement yesterday:
"We have decided to lock the forum down tonight and possibly each night this week. We have a lot of ... people posting right now. Our moderators are all married or moms or have jobs and lives and many of them (myself included) have been on the site all day. We need a break so we are going to take one. We'll lock down sometime after 9 pm Eastern tonight and we will open sometime after 9 am Eastern tomorrow. We'll keep this policy in place until things settle down. I for one don't want to wake up to a bunch of negative posts that need to be edited or deleted."
Apparently they're so protective of Stephenie Meyer and her books, and so determined to present an image of success no matter how poorly received they are that they're simply hushing up anyone who doesn't agree with them. This doesn't sit well with me.
I adore Twilight and Eclipse. New Moon was ok and Breaking Dawn sucked. I'm not afraid to admit how I feel about these things. I'm still excited to see the movie, I'm still going to eagerly devour any updates on it, and if Meyer does end up releasing yet another book in the series I'll probably go out and buy it eventually. But I never had any illusions about what this series was. It was a guilty pleasure, not high literary art, and Stephenie Meyer certainly isn't the intrepid genius her more loyal fans would have you believe.
So I suppose I'm done. If you've made it with me this far I commend you. I assure you the next post will have less acid.
7 comments:
Rage on, sister. At least someone is finally telling it like it is!
Wow, when we talked I knew you didn't like it, but I didn't realize just how much you didn't like it. I'm still holding to a 3 on the scale of 1-5--not great, but not horrible either.
I was definitely let down, but the fans are making me more angry than the book did.
Oh man, the twilightmoms thing sounds like some serious internet weaksauce.
"Don't say negative things about what we like! Our fragile little egos can't handle it!"
These are the same people who don't want their kids exposed to old children's stories because *gasp*, someone might die!
Fuck all that noise.
I know. Trust me.
fantastic... I still can't see properly from reading it all so quickly- that white on black makes everything stripy for a while, but I totally agree on the Twilight fans. I was sucked in by the books, I admit this with only a little embarrassment, but never have I been under the delusion that this is good literature. I know of people in our writing classes with a better handle on the language. And I think if your religion interferes with your ability to believable write 17 year olds in life or death situations (holy crow!) then maybe you should stick to the tamer stuff. Not to mention how incredibly alike her 17 year old female vampire and her (what? 16 year old) werewolf sound.
But you know, we could go on for ages about the flaws in her writing. And the flaws don't bother me all that much (truly). I'm with you on the fans, though. Meyer will not be remembered after twenty years... maybe ten.
Sad but true. They just put her on a pedestal, you know?
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