Eclipse is Creepy As Hell
Dec. 12th, 2008 04:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
4thofelevenA random observation: It occurs to me that I imagine Twilight’s Isabella Swan looking and sounding exactly like A Game of Throne’s Sansa Stark. Of course, there’s some fairly major differences between the two characters – for example, Sansa is becoming less clueless and naïve as the series goes on, while Isabella seems to be regressing.
Anyway, Eclipse is where I start to see where the hate for this series is coming from. Twilight and New Moon are largely inoffensive. I’ve mentioned that I find Edward creepy as hell, but it was possible to ignore his stalker behaviour or dismiss them as the result of inept plotting. Here, Edward seems to have jacked his creepy factor up by an order of magnitude. Before he was ‘only’ a creepy stalker. Now, he’s a full on controlling bastard, intend on restricting or eliminating Isabella’s autonomy wherever possible. He sabotages her car to stop her visiting her friends, and when that doesn’t work, he gets the other vampires to imprison her in their house. “It wasn’t so bad, except for the fact that I was being held against my will.” Isabella comments, apparently willing to accept this situation as regular ‘boys will be boys’ behaviour.
Adding to the creep factor, we get another detail about the vampires – one of them can control or erase the emotional states of others, and is pretty casual about doing so. So you really can’t trust the actions of behaviours of anyone in this series, since they could all be brain-washed puppets of the vampire cabal…
Oh, extra creepy message while where here: Isabella’sstrongarmed persuaded the other vampires to vampify her. Now a few of the vampires aren’t too happy about this, and try and talk her out of this. One of them decided to tell Isabella the story of how she became a vampire, to convince her that she’s better off remaining human. The story is that she was gang-raped as a human teenager and then left for dead in an alley. She would have died there, had the head vampire not found her and made her a vampire, gifted with eternal life and the strength to bring bloody vengeance to those that had harmed her. Um. And that’s why Isabella shouldn’t want to be a vampire. The only possible message I can get from the story is that she’d have been better off dead than raped, unless the point of the story was “vampires like to tell stories that undermine the point they’re trying to illustrate”…
Anyway, moving away from the creepy aspects, I think this book still allows for my “Isabella only cares about immortality” reading. See, all the books are written from Isabella’s viewpoint. Up until this point, Edward’s been a little creepy, but hasn’t manifested any of these sorts of outright abusive behaviours. The two of them seem to be barely on speaking terms at the start of the book, and they’re arguing almost constantly. Did he suddenly turn into a jerk? Or does he just now seem less perfect to Isabella, now she’s got a date set for her vampification, and he’s no longer a symbol of her potential apotheosis? She seems horrified by the idea of marrying him, though she later explains that that’s just because she doesn’t want the bad reputation that would come with being married as a teenager. Of course, that’s really not much better – if he’s really her one true love, should she really value her reputation over him? Besides, once they’re both vampires, they’re planning on disappearing into Alaska anyway – the people who’ll look down on her marriage won’t be a factor in her life for more than a month or two…
Isabella gets to show a bit of her creepy side in Eclipse as well. Back when I read Twilight, I was thinking that it was a real shame that the final showdown between Edward and the evil vampire happened off-screen; it struck me that that really should have been the dramatic centre of the storyline. Can Isabella still love Edward after seeing him kill a man by tearing him apart then burning the – possibly still living – remains? Well, in Eclipse, we get the answer, as Isabella witnesses the death of another evil vampire at Edward’s hands. Not only is she unphased, she seems baffled as to why Edward would be concerned about her seeing him at his most brutal.
I know I’m going to be disappointed, but I can’t help but feeling that the most logical ending for the series would be if Isabella went mad with power on becoming a vampire, destroyed most of the Cullens and exterminated the town of Forks in her bloodlust, forcing a last-ditch alliance of Werewolves and the Volturi to band together to stop her…
Other notes:
- The stuff about vampire history in Latin America is interesting; I’d rather like to see more information about that. Were there vampires in the Americas pre-Columbus? Have the brutal Mexican vampire gang-wars attracted the attention of mortal vampire hunters? Do native Mexicans have werewolf powers too? Hey, Meyer? Stop with the boring romance - I want Aztec werewolves battling the vampire hordes of Latin America!
- Jacob ‘jokes’ about Isabella and Edward that ‘[he] saw this story on the news about controlling, abusive teenage relationships’. How do you write a sentence like that without pausing and realising that the relationship you’ve written really is a controlling abusive one?
- Of course, Jacob isn’t a great guy either; he’s the archetypal Nice Guy, and spends most of the book apparently annoyed that he wasted all that time being friends with Isabella when she’s going to insist on dating someone other than him. It’s a sign of how creepy Edward is in this book that Jacob comes across as the sympathetic character.
- We get, I believe, the first use of the word ‘creepy’ in the books themselves! P. 176, Isabella thinks it’s creepy that one of the werewolves has ‘imprinted’ (read: fallen in love with) a two year old. And… yeah, that’s pretty creepy. On the other hand, at least its acknowledged as being creepy by everyone, unlike everything else in these books…
Only one more of these things to get through!
Anyway, Eclipse is where I start to see where the hate for this series is coming from. Twilight and New Moon are largely inoffensive. I’ve mentioned that I find Edward creepy as hell, but it was possible to ignore his stalker behaviour or dismiss them as the result of inept plotting. Here, Edward seems to have jacked his creepy factor up by an order of magnitude. Before he was ‘only’ a creepy stalker. Now, he’s a full on controlling bastard, intend on restricting or eliminating Isabella’s autonomy wherever possible. He sabotages her car to stop her visiting her friends, and when that doesn’t work, he gets the other vampires to imprison her in their house. “It wasn’t so bad, except for the fact that I was being held against my will.” Isabella comments, apparently willing to accept this situation as regular ‘boys will be boys’ behaviour.
Adding to the creep factor, we get another detail about the vampires – one of them can control or erase the emotional states of others, and is pretty casual about doing so. So you really can’t trust the actions of behaviours of anyone in this series, since they could all be brain-washed puppets of the vampire cabal…
Oh, extra creepy message while where here: Isabella’s
Anyway, moving away from the creepy aspects, I think this book still allows for my “Isabella only cares about immortality” reading. See, all the books are written from Isabella’s viewpoint. Up until this point, Edward’s been a little creepy, but hasn’t manifested any of these sorts of outright abusive behaviours. The two of them seem to be barely on speaking terms at the start of the book, and they’re arguing almost constantly. Did he suddenly turn into a jerk? Or does he just now seem less perfect to Isabella, now she’s got a date set for her vampification, and he’s no longer a symbol of her potential apotheosis? She seems horrified by the idea of marrying him, though she later explains that that’s just because she doesn’t want the bad reputation that would come with being married as a teenager. Of course, that’s really not much better – if he’s really her one true love, should she really value her reputation over him? Besides, once they’re both vampires, they’re planning on disappearing into Alaska anyway – the people who’ll look down on her marriage won’t be a factor in her life for more than a month or two…
Isabella gets to show a bit of her creepy side in Eclipse as well. Back when I read Twilight, I was thinking that it was a real shame that the final showdown between Edward and the evil vampire happened off-screen; it struck me that that really should have been the dramatic centre of the storyline. Can Isabella still love Edward after seeing him kill a man by tearing him apart then burning the – possibly still living – remains? Well, in Eclipse, we get the answer, as Isabella witnesses the death of another evil vampire at Edward’s hands. Not only is she unphased, she seems baffled as to why Edward would be concerned about her seeing him at his most brutal.
I know I’m going to be disappointed, but I can’t help but feeling that the most logical ending for the series would be if Isabella went mad with power on becoming a vampire, destroyed most of the Cullens and exterminated the town of Forks in her bloodlust, forcing a last-ditch alliance of Werewolves and the Volturi to band together to stop her…
Other notes:
- The stuff about vampire history in Latin America is interesting; I’d rather like to see more information about that. Were there vampires in the Americas pre-Columbus? Have the brutal Mexican vampire gang-wars attracted the attention of mortal vampire hunters? Do native Mexicans have werewolf powers too? Hey, Meyer? Stop with the boring romance - I want Aztec werewolves battling the vampire hordes of Latin America!
- Jacob ‘jokes’ about Isabella and Edward that ‘[he] saw this story on the news about controlling, abusive teenage relationships’. How do you write a sentence like that without pausing and realising that the relationship you’ve written really is a controlling abusive one?
- Of course, Jacob isn’t a great guy either; he’s the archetypal Nice Guy, and spends most of the book apparently annoyed that he wasted all that time being friends with Isabella when she’s going to insist on dating someone other than him. It’s a sign of how creepy Edward is in this book that Jacob comes across as the sympathetic character.
- We get, I believe, the first use of the word ‘creepy’ in the books themselves! P. 176, Isabella thinks it’s creepy that one of the werewolves has ‘imprinted’ (read: fallen in love with) a two year old. And… yeah, that’s pretty creepy. On the other hand, at least its acknowledged as being creepy by everyone, unlike everything else in these books…
Only one more of these things to get through!
no subject
on 2008-12-12 07:57 pm (UTC)Sounds like this book completely josses this interpretation of Twilight as about teenage autonomy (Bella can drive, decide where she lives, set her own schedule, etc.). That reader is in for disappointment, I guess. Isn't this also the book where Jacob forcibly kisses Bella? (Really must pry these books away from the kids so I can, you know, read them instead of just about them.)
I also hear that the fourth book takes the infant soul-bonds to new heights of creepy. As does Midnight Sun, Twilight from Edward's POV, in which he recognizes that he's a creepy stalker sneaking into Bella's room to watch her sleep and does it anyway.
no subject
on 2008-12-13 01:41 pm (UTC)because they'll think I'm deadand do whatever I want forever and ever" wish-fulfilment aspect...I didn't mention the whole Jacob forcing himself on Bella aspect because at least she hits him when he tries, and its treated as something that was completly out of line, rather than accepted as wonderful like all the dodgy stuff Edward does.
I'm actually alright with the stalking aspect of Edward, because - well, he is a vampire, as easy as it is to forget. The whole "I despise what I have become but I cannot resist my unnatural hunger" is pretty much what vampires are meant to do... The problem is nobody else seems to recognise that he's a monster.
no subject
on 2008-12-15 08:05 pm (UTC)I highly recommend My Soul to Keep by Tananarive Due if you'd rather read that book, actually. (Not the death baby part. The seemingly-perfect but really creepy immortal husband part.) The central question of the book is, "Are there any good monsters?"
no subject
on 2008-12-16 09:16 am (UTC)