I think it’s the facial expression. Clearly he’s meant to look brooding, but he looks more like Dieterfrom Sprockets.
As for whether Twilight features “vampires” or not. Well, I agree that a fictional construct has no objective real-life model to compare to. That said, you could go so far beyond the agreed-upon features that a fictional creature no longer fit the category, no matter how desperately you try to slap the label on it. In this case, I think it’s still fair to call them vampires, as they drink blood, and lust for human blood, they live indefinitely, and they can turn other people into creatures like themselves. But I grant that Meyers made them pretty stupid by excising almost every drawback of being a vampire, while keeping the positive aspects.*
But then again, as was demonstrated above, fictional vampires in the Stoker tradition were a huge departure from folklore vampires. I think the main subtext of fictional vampires is sex. Count Dracula was a swarthy foreign man who came to England and penetrated virgins, thus stealing them away from the proper men who were to marry them. In more modern iterations, vampire biting is a great metaphor for situations where having sex is probably a bad idea, but also irresistible. Meyer almost did something cool and different with that idea - in her books Edward is not the seducer, he’s the one holding back. But sadly it comes off as Edward being a classic controlling boyfriend, or a treatise on how Mormon men must govern both their own lust and that of the silly, susceptible women they court.
*But I can see if you’re a real vampire fan, you might have higher standards. I love zombie stories, and it pissed me off no end in Land of the Dead that the zombies started to have sentience. Zombies are mindless. If they’re not mindless, they’re scary living dead monsters, but they’re not zombies!
Upon reflection, I think there’s yet a newer take on vampires that is going back to the old tradition - Let Me In is not about sex, and the vampirism is not sexy at all. It’s a story about love contending with a monstrous nature. And The Strain goes a step further - the vampires are not characters. They don’t have sympathetic attributes at all, and the made ones are practically automatons. They are just monsters preying on humans, much like the folklore stories.
I had thought I was being clever when I said (several Twilight threads back) that the Twilight vampires were basically superheroes with disgusting diets, but it turns out I had actually hit upon what Meyer had in mind. I found this quote from an interview with her: “I am much more drawn to superheroes than I am to vampires. And I really think there’s a closer connection with my vampires, between superheroes and them than traditional vampires and who they are.” Meyer has said elsewhere that she had no previous interest in vampire fiction, had never seen a single vampire movie, and that the only vampire book she’d ever read was Anne Rice’s The Vampire Lestat. So that would explain why her vampires don’t seem all that much like vampires.
I’d almost have to give her credit for managing to do something original with the centuries-old idea of vampires (I’m pretty sure no one else has made them SPARKLE), except that everything original she’s come up with is stupid and she can’t even stay consistent with her own stupid rules of vampirism. Also, as you say, by eliminating all drawbacks to being a vampire she’s eliminated everything that made stories about vampires interesting and killed any real conflict or tough moral questions Bella might otherwise have had to deal with. Why shouldn’t Bella want to be a vampire if she’ll gain eternal youth, beauty, and superpowers, with absolutely no downside?
It’s sort of like a fuse in a house. Your fuse is designed to burn out first, so that your plasma TV, or the wires in your walls, don’t burn out instead. Similarly, your computer has crashed to spare you your brain crashing from beholding those abominations. Be grateful.
Ah, but Twilight vampires apparently do have souls. I don’t remember this point being addresses directly, but I’m certain we’re not meant to think that Edward “Mr. Perfect” Cullen doesn’t have a soul.
Unless you meant “soul” as in “soul music”, in which case Bella didn’t have much to lose. She wasn’t giving Aretha Franklin any serious competition to begin with. But this does lead me to wonder if there could be a sub-genre of blue-eyed soul for performers so white they literally sparkle. Red-eyed soul? Gold-eyed soul?
This is pushing it, but there is a Bulgerian myth that a dead man that is destined to become a vampire (obour) will return 9 days after burial. In this form he will be invisible, yes, invisible, except that he either casts a shadow (in light) or sparkles (in darkness). I highly doubt Myers (or damn near anyone) was aware of this.
Well you were talking about there being no downside to becoming a vampire in Twilight, and I was in turn jokingly referring to the so-called dilemma of Edward not wanting to change Bella because that would mean she wouldn’t have a soul; she wouldn’t get a chance at eternity (beside the obvious).
It was Meyer’s weak attempt at adding drama to the concept of transformation. I did rather appreciate another bit of drama about becoming a vampire in that series, in that Bella was dismaying over the possibility that she would lose her closest friends, Angela, Ben, and more specifically Jacob.
I suppose the upside to Meyer is that she adds a new term for melodrama; “Meyer-esque drama” I call it. You might remember me using it in my first thread.
~S.P.I.~
Having read that Cracked link, I think we can certify that Meyers hasn’t read enough Prattchet. If she’d read him, she’d know that the eighth color is octarine. D’uh!
Or maybe Bella (and seriously, “Bella Swan” has got to be one of the worst character names I’ve seen in decads) is supposed to be too busy learning Wuthering Heigths by rote to bother with Guards, Guards!
As a writer myself, I am curious: what is bad about this name? I prefer names that are smooth to read, like “Daniel Branch” or “Hermione Granger”. Do I make any sense at all?
Which, honestly, wouldn’t be horrible - Rowling does that sort of thing constantly. And A.S. Byatt does it and is a really respected writer - if Meyer supported the ‘meaningful name’ with consistently decent writing so it didn’t come off as ‘look at me, I’m so clever.’
Oh, I wish, I really, really wish. But the vamps in Clan Cullen are all wholesome, heteronormative WASPs who don’t have sex before entering into holy Stepford matrimony.
I’ve thought some about how the Twilight series could be improved, and I think my favourite idea is to remake it as a black comedy cross between Buffy, Third Rock from the Sun, and The Addams Family, where the new-in-town vampires believe that their best bet to blend into society is to behave exactly like a 1950’s TV show family, while bitching endlessly about it among themselves. It turns out that the only one that buys their act is an idiot girl who falls in love with young Edward, so everyone gets in a panic in case it turns serious and they’d have to roleplay 24/7.
This could have been an interesting dilemma if even one character took it at all seriously. Not even Edward really did. Once the Volturi got a load of Bella’s awesome shieldy powers, they said, either you turn her or we will. The fact that everyone in the vampiric world seemed to want either to kill her or own her really forced the Cullens’ hands in this matter, though if I thought my true love’s immortal soul were going to be lost forever, I’d have resisted more forcefully.
Then, it becomes this coy waiting game: you have to do it after college… Bella says, noooo, I will be 21 then and sooo oooold! Yuck! Then Edward uses it as a lever to get her to marry him. She is all balky about getting married. What, you’ll let the guy kill you and spend eternity with him as a blood sucking freak, but marriage is just too much commitment!
