I still can’t believe that Twilight got a good review in School Library Journal. Well, if the review had merely said that the book would be popular with young girls then that would be both unsurprising and accurate, but the reviewer describes it as “Realistic, subtle, succinct, and easy to follow”. I can agree with only the last of those. The book is so repetitive that you could skip huge sections of it and still follow it well enough.
I used to read a lot of teenage vampire literature. This was because I was a teenager who was into vampires. While I honestly can’t say that I wouldn’t be into Twilight were I a teenager now (I don’t think I would, but I once thought that the All-4-One was awesome, so who knows), the books, upon a cursory inspection, seem very different from the books that I was into as a teenager.
In the books I read as a teenager, the female characters were strong. Yes, they generally embodied one stereotype or another, and they had their moments of idiocy, but, overall, they were the ones calling the shots. Also–and this is important–they had almost nothing to do with sex.
Yes, really. It just wasn’t mentioned one way or the other–and somehow that made the books feel more mature. Putting it front in center in Twilight serves only to highlight its absence early on. Moreover, I think that mentioning the sex gives the text a hint of some of the other things that go along with sex (control, power, obsession). Presented in a proper sexual context, it’s fine–hell, it’s the stuff of numerous BDSM-type books–but presented as part of a series meant for teenagers written by a woman who, IMHO, comes off as a little repressed, it’s just creepy.
Also, it’s longer. The writing in the books might not be inherently worse than in the ones that I read, but it draws out the pain. Bleh.
(bolding mine) I think you’re referring to Kathy Reichs, and I pretty much agree.
Haven’t read the books and doubt I ever will, and while I do think it’s perfectly reasonable to expect even young, dumb (in love) girls to read them without having their minds and expectations warped, they’ve got to have other examples and guidance from somewhere else. And I think it’s a bit naive to assume that they are, especially when you’ve still got people (of both genders) commenting on Chris Brown’s videos wondering what Rihanna did to ‘make him’ hit her.
This article may be of interest. Basically it points out that Twlight’s fans aren’t all tweens or crazy cat ladies.
I will never read Twilight, so I can’t comment on it, but I will agree with Dr Fidelius that your choice of escapist entertainment doesn’t really say alot about who you are.
I actually think it’s hilarious that people (mostly the big fans) really think of Edward as a “bad boy”. He’s Bad Boy Lite - sure, he’s a vampire who desires to drink Bella’s blood, but even when he was killing people in a fit of rebellion as a young vampire, he sought out bad guys (like Dexter, only shinier). And now as a good vampire, he doesn’t want to turn Bella because he’s worried it’ll destroy her soul, then he wants to marry her, and he won’t turn her OR sleep with her until they’re married, and is incredibly anal about not putting her in any danger.
Stalker-ish and creepy, yes - but bad boy? Not so much.
Idiot fangirls: they’re more common than you think. Hell, Cassandra Clare is apparently a bestselling author now, and she’s a scum-sucking plagiarist.
Is it really so hard to write easy-reading books that a book can become a blockbuster by mere virtue of steering clear of symbolism and metaphor? I agree that simplicity is a prerequisite for popularity, but there isn’t exactly a market shortage of such books, and you need some sort of distinguishing characteristic to be as popular as Twilight is.
Sort of a tangent branching off of this post…That’s another one of my problems with this whole series. Putting the entire questionable nature of the abusive relationship aside (difficult though that may be), just what sort of vampires are these?
*Are they going around slaughtering the townsfolk?
*Are they grappling with the moral dilemma of requiring murder of innocents to survive themselves?
*Does garlic have any effect on them?
*Do they have to avoid the sun?
Unless I’m off the mark here, the answer is all of these questions is “no.” That would be like a Batman movie in which Batman didn’t wear a black costume, or fight crime. It would be like Catch 22 where Yossarian has no issue removing himself from the battlefield.
How about “potentially dangerous”?
athelas, I don’t know what the distinguishing characteristic is in these books. I think part of it is the package. The covers are attractive. They look like something an adult would read. The books are thick. Some readers equate that with depth – they’d rather be seen reading a big fat book than a small one, which equates with easy. Little kids read little books. Big kids read big books. “It was 450 pages and I read the whole thing in two days!”
Yup, pretty much no. The only reason they avoid the sun is the sparkling effect that’s been mentioned - it won’t hurt them, but it makes them sparkly so they avoid it to avoid being found out.
Of the main characters, a couple of them have, in the past, lived on humans, though they now live on animals. But while they do want human blood more, it doesn’t seem to affect them negatively, like in other vampire lore. For example, in The Vampire Diaries, the “good vampire” lives on animals, but as a consequence, he’s weaker than vampires who feed on humans.
Edward is the perfect bad boy for the tween set. He is strong, dangerous, and animalistic, yet still perfectly safe. He allows the reader to have her cake and eat it too. (Twilight readers love cake) He is sophisticated and desirable yet approaches the relationship like a teenage girl with self esteem issues. Everyone is in love with him yet he seeks out Bella and will never cheat on her because she has special blood that attracts him. He makes all the decisions and yet they are the correct ones because he is so smart and loves her so much.
He is a character that has as much in common with real men as the actresses in porn have to do with real women.
People eventually grow up and women stop looking for bad boy who is actually good and men stop looking for a woman who enjoys giving oral. But some still enjoy the fantasy and that is fine as long as it does not get in the way of real life.
Exactly
I like to call that “the emasculated bad boy”. It lets the little girls have the thrill of the bad boy without the actual danger. He quite literally has his fangs pulled.
(I entirely get the spirit in which that quote was originally intended.)
As Stoney321 on LiveJournal has charted, the Twilight series is full of words over one syllable: ghosted, beautiful/beauty, obsessed/obsessive, chagrin, perfect, sparkles, and dazzling are used more than 500 times (total, not each) in the 4 released books, and additional excessive amounts in the unfinished Edward-perspective book.
I haven’t read the books, but I have seen both movies and I agree with you. The whole discussion about that one wolf guy “losing it” and smacking his girlfriend around, permanently deforming her, made me quite uncomfortable. I like how Jacob explains this and Bella’s like, no biggie!
So, let’s see: Bella either has the emotionally abusive vampire or the physically abusive wolf. Decisions decisions. . .
I screwed up there, huh? Good thing I have no writerly ambitions. 
I try not to judge people for their “guilty pleasures”, because goodness knows the house I have in that neighborhood is made of glass. I do have one adult friend who enjoys the Twilight books as escapist reading, but she is well aware that the romantic relationship depicted in the series is an unhealthy one.
What troubles me about the series is that the intended audience is adolescent girls, an age group that often does not have the maturity, experience, or good judgment to recognize an unhealthy relationship. If the Twilight series was targeted at adult women I wouldn’t be as bothered by it, but these books are telling young girls that when a guy they think is cute starts tracking their movements and isolating them from their friends then this is romantic and a sure sign that he genuinely loves and wants to protect them. Heck, according to Twilight the appropriate response to a guy who tells you himself that he’s bad for you, that he could hurt you easily and there’d be no hope of your getting away, and that he constantly feels the urge to kill you, is “I trust you. Let’s go someplace alone together.” :smack:
That said, there are some other things that a reader might like about Twilight (see below) even if they don’t find the romance appealing or at least don’t think it would work in the real world. It’s the fans who think that Edward really is the perfect guy and are hoping to find someone just like him that worry me.
The covers are brilliant, and I think whoever was responsible for them deserves (and has probably already won) whatever the appropriate industry award is. I remember seeing Twilight displays in airport bookstores several times, and they definitely caught my eye. In fact, had the dust jacket blurb for the first book seemed even slightly less stupid I probably would have bought a copy for myself. I’m happy I escaped the tragic fate of being trapped at 30,000 feet with nothing to read but Twilight, but they are lovely covers.
Thinking of the actual text, there are several elements of Twilight that, although I found them insufferable as an adult, would appeal to many younger readers. First, there’s some obvious wish fulfillment going on. Bella is basically a nobody at her old school with no real friends, but as soon as she moves in with her dad and starts at a new school she’s instantly Miss Popular. All the girls want to be her friends, and all the guys want to go out with her – including the hottest guy in school, one who had not previously deigned to interact with mere mortals. This is all despite the fact that Bella has no special skills or attributes. Edward is attracted to her because of the way her blood smells (no, really), and all the other kids in school like her because…well, because. She’s special without having to actually do or be anything special.
Bella is also portrayed as basically the parent to her own parents. She nobly sacrifices her own happiness to allow her mother to leave the nest and enjoy her second marriage. When she moves in with her dad she takes over running the house, and even makes a point of leaving dinner for her dad if she’s going to be gone for the evening. I’m sure this appeals to many young girls because many young girls (Young Lamia included) have a greatly exaggerated idea of their own maturity and think that they’re overworked and underappreciated by their parents.
Although she keeps this to herself, Bella has a very high opinion of herself in comparison to her classmates. She spends much of the early part of the book thinking about how much better she is than her new “friends”, kids who’ve gone out of their way to be nice to her from day one but who she considers barely tolerable. This is another way in which the series lets Bella have her cake and eat it too. She’s not only welcomed but admired by the local in-crowd, but at the same time considers herself separate from and actually better than these bourgeois popular kids. She winds up being the first outsider to be accepted by the exclusive Cullen clique, who by virtue of being vampires are all much more attractive, mature, and sophisticated than the other kids.
As obnoxious as I found all this, it seems harmless enough and I’m not surprised that many young girls identify with or envy Bella. I personally thought she was the least likable protagonist of any book I’ve ever read, and that includes A Clockwork Orange, Crime & Punishment, and even Mansfield Park, but had I read the book at age 13 or so I might have felt otherwise. Since I didn’t (and still don’t) care for romances I probably would have found Twilight pretty boring, but considering how much I enjoyed the Xanth series at that age I don’t know that I’d have recognized that Twilight was both creepy and badly written.
Very nice post, Lamia. I think you nailed it – the book’s attraction for young girls. Thanks for taking the time to lay it out.
I don’t know about that, but you might enjoy this.
Thanks, AuntiePam. Considering how much time I’ve spent thinking and talking about Twilight, I’m afraid I may now count as a kind of Twilight fan myself. Maybe I love to hate it? 