There were many reasons why I never wanted to read the book Twilight, and now after reading it my predictions were all correct. I knew that it was going to be some sappy love story where the "pretty boy" Edward Cullen would make the "self-conscious school girl" Bella Swan fall in love with him with using the corniest lines possible. Then in the midst of all this they somehow make it a story about vampires. This book simply takes advantage of the average adolescent problems that teenagers go through. The author Stephanie Meyer takes the average teenage love story and adds twist of vampires on the top. By doing this she has attracted young women AND men to read these books. All in all I guess my biggest problem with the book is that I have never been the average teenager or had the average teenage problems.
Edward Cullen is described to be beautiful and not handsome. He has the features of a woman but is still an attractive person to women. Bella Swan is an average looking, clumsy, self-conscious girl, who would never expect to be found as an attractive girl. When Edward expresses interest in her, she does not hesitate to show her interest right back. This is where the book lost me. I do not want to hear about how good her new boy toy smells, or hear the two of them have dialogue for what seems an eternity where all they do is ask questions. Before I even knew what was going on they started telling each other how much they love one and other. They barley know each other, he is a vampire who has feminine features, and she is an average adolescent girl who has a crush on a horror movie monster. The whole thing is just way to far-fetched for me to get into.
Even after the love story, I still have trouble finding interest in the vampire part of the book. Yeah, it is cool to be really fast and really strong, and especially cool to like driving fast in cars, but the fact that Edward is a good vampire and tries as hard as he can to not drink human blood just softens up the coolness of being a vampire. But then what really boggles my mind is that the first time he truly has an urge to drink human blood is with his new little girlfriend just makes no sense to me. I mean how could he not want to harm just some random human, and then when he actually likes one, that is the one he wants to hurt. I guess this could make sense if drinking blood was correlated with sexual passion like we talked about in class, but the idea of that just seems rather odd.
I could see why a bunch of people would be very into these books, but it just really isn't up my alley. I mean I love horror movies with monsters, but Edward is not really that scary. Bella has a role that makes girls seem too easy be manipulated, which is not the truth in the slightest. I tried as hard as I could to keep an open while reading this book, but had trouble finding interest in it. I hope this was not my sub-conscious telling me that I would never like it, but even at that I gave it a chance and it just didn't work out for me.
I totally agree with you on the whole blood-drinking thing. Not only does it take away a lot of coolness of being a vampire, but it makes them weak and constantly hungry. And yes, Bella is weak and allows herself to be manipulated way too easily. I have a hard time with weak female characters myself-I've never been that weak, and I want to smack girls like that!
ReplyDeleteI know what you mean. I wanted to hate Twilight even before I read it, so that probably had an effect on my ability to enjoy it. But as you said, there really isn't must there to like. It's marketed specifically to a certain part of the population, and if you don't fit into that category it will seem a lot less credible. Especially if the main character is completely spineless and uninteresting.
ReplyDeleteI think we all really felt the same way. The book is a good contrast to other characters we get to see in vampire story's but god was it agonizing.
ReplyDelete