The Twilight Saga

Alright its first post time. Lets see how I do.

The thing with blogs is, they’re essentially useless. Unless you take great enjoyment out of reading about the grievances of other peoples lives there’s really no logical reason for you to bother with a blog. That said there are plenty of people who for some reason like to argue with these ‘bloggers’ under the assumption that not only should the blogger in question care what they think, but that they should care what he/she thinks to begin with.


The topic I’m about discuss is going to attract a lot of these people (provided anyone ever finds this and bothers reading it, which is highly unlikely), so if you insist on arguing with anything I’m about to say, you should know that unless your argument is presented intelligently I will not bother with it. Hell I probably wont bother with it anyway but try your luck, you never know.

The Twilight Series by Stephanie Meyer


Alright I’ll put my hands up, I have a problem with the way character designers and writers in nearly every medium treat vampires. For some reason, girls cant control their hormones when within five feet of the word vampire so the idea of the glamorous, handsome, eloquent vampire has become the standard model. I don’t personally understand the attraction to a ..’thing’..that would just as soon eat you as rape you, but hey I don’t get chocolate ice cream either, it’s just not for me to understand.

What I do understand though is that this formula for vampires has become so popular with girls (some guys too, it has to be said) that there is absolutely no incentive for anyone to try and write a vampire character with any real depth anymore. These days you can just shite on for 400+ pages about how devilishly handsome this guy is and the chicks will be queuing round the corner stamping on each others faces to get their randy hands on it.


I’m getting a little misogynistic here aren’t I? Okay I apologize for the generalization but you have to understand how confused I am by this new fad to even veer into that potentially fatal theme of discussion. One by one, all the intelligent women in my life have fallen for this twilight thing. They’re no less intelligent for it, one of them actually acknowledges that the books are horribly written but none-the-less ploughed through the four books in the space of a week.
All that said, there's absolutely nothing wrong with literature that appeals to teenage girls in this way. It’s a market that needs to be filled and twilight does it in excellent fashion. Plus the key demographic for these books is not men of my age, so its safe to assume I was never going to understand their popularity (or existence) before the first word was pressed to the first page.

In this spirit, I’m not going to look at the objective quality of these books. I’ve already made my opinion on that well known to plenty of people(against their will, i apologize). What I wish to illuminate to you dear reader is the inherent problem with products that do not know what demographic they want to aim for. ‘Conflicting Demographics’ if you will.


Twilight is essentially the perfect book series’ for girls aged 16-19/20. The characters are likable (to an extent, i guess…maybe…except Bella), the plot is simple and there's a love story between a human girl and a vampire who sparkles in the sun at the center of it all. Perfect holiday fodder for girls of the aforementioned age group.

*Spoilers coming so if you haven’t read all four books skip to the very end now.*


However, I was watching the late late toy show last night and saw a girl who couldn’t have been more than 12 years old talking about how amazing these books are. Let me break down some of the more prominent plot moments for you:

Book 1: Absolutely nothing happens.


Book 2: Edward and his whole family bugger off leaving Bella alone and suicidal despite the fact that he spent the entirety of book 1 making her absolutely dependent on his and his families protection. His excuse for buggering off? To protect her from himself.

Book 3: Bella begs Edward repeatedly to fuck her. Edward steadfastly refuses to spoil her
‘virtue’ despite the fact that once a girl begs you to fuck her more than once, she has signed away her virtue to the Italian mafia in exchange for condoms and bondage rope.


Book 4: Edward finally caves in and fucks her (only after they’re married of course) and lo and behold Bella somehow gets pregnant to a lifeless fluid less being of 107. If this wasn’t fucked up enough, the baby grows within her unbelievably fast, breaking Bella’s spine and pelvis in the process (an extended metaphor for Meyers feelings on abortion perhaps?) and the only logical conclusion to all of this is that Edward naturally tears her uterus open with his teeth to get the baby out. No, I’m not making this up.

If I got the chronological order of these events wrong, they still happened so shut up.


Now my question at the end of all this is simple. Should 12 year old girls be reading about these things? The relationship between Bella and Edward is abusive to say the least (at one point Bella actually uses the wife beater line,"he only does it cause he loves me"), Bella is shown to be many things, one of which a teenage girl desperate for some fucking, and book four sees an agenda against abortion and the abusive male tearing his pregnant wife open with his teeth to save their child that shouldn’t really exist in the first place.

Oh and the werewolf character ‘imprints’ on the baby. Meaning that he has basically bought her, and when she turns 6 (apparently at 6 she will look and behave like an 18 year old or something) he will fuck her. This is met with mild, jovial disapproval from the childs parents.


SPOILERS OVER

These books are dangerous. Meyer does not understand her audience. If pre-pubescent girls are reading these with limited understanding of whats going on, they’ll still inevitably empathize with the main characters and believe it or not, stuff you read at that age does leave an impression on you for life, or at least your adolescence.


Nothing can be done about it now, the film has happened (and apparently is better than the books from what I’ve heard although I can’t imagine that would have been difficult) and the merchandise is rolling out as quickly as the money is rolling in. There are enough fans to form a small army and Meyer has already published another book that despite being terribly written (again) her ‘twilighters’(their term, not mine) have lapped up hungrily. She is no doubt set for life.

I should thank the twilight fandom really, they’ve certainly made the final fantasy fandom seem less crazy. I don’t think any of us thought that was possible.


TL;DR: Twilight: turning girls into whores and final fantasy fans into Kayne west.

Andy