David Newgreen (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
4thofeleven) wrote2008-12-18 10:04 pm
4thofeleven) wrote2008-12-18 10:04 pm
Some Final Twilight Thoughts
Covering a few things about the Twilight series as a whole in a rather rambling fashion…
Alright, so the wish-fulfilment aspect of Twilight is fairly clear: Suddenly the perfect guy comes out of nowhereto secretly watch you sleep and you get an awesome relationship without any effort on your point. I think a lot of the problems in the later novels regarding the Isabella/Edward relationship come from the problem of the wish-fulfilment scenario. If your dream guy comes out of nowhere and initiates the relationship, he needs to be a pretty assertive kind of guy. But it’s your fantasy, so you should be the one controlling the relationship. So we end up with a relationship where Edward is stalker-creepy, while at the same time it’s clearly Bella who’s driving the relationship. (One of the rather fun aspects of the series is that it’s Bella who’s constantly pushing for a sexual relationship over Edward’s objections. Granted, the sex results in the demon-child Renesme being unleashed on an unsuspecting world…)
I wonder if the real reason Meyer has abandoned Midnight Sun is realising that it’s pretty much impossible to write a wish-fulfilment series from the fantasy’s point of view. If nothing else, Edward really doesn’t have enough personality to sustain an entire book; his entire motivation is “Be Bella’s perfect man”, and in support of that, he really doesn’t have any independent goals of his own. What are his interests? What’s he been up to for the past century? Apparently, he’s been spending his whole life moping around and waiting to run into his perfect woman – which is perfectly fine, for a fantasy image, but if you actually think about what a person like that would be like in real life… well, Edward’s got creepy aspects to him already, you don’t want to write a whole book that does nothing but draw attention to them.
(Granted, Bella doesn’t have much of a personality either – but you can get away with that if they're the audience surrogate.)
Next point: I think it’s kind of funny how carefully the series avoids any mention of religion. We get maybe a page or two of Edward insisting he’s concerned he lost his soul when he was vampirised, which Isabella dismisses as ridiculous… and then, that’s it. Isabella doesn’t seem to be a member of any sort of church, neither is anyone else. It’s seems a curious omission for a series about vampires – but then, everything about the portrayal of vampires in Twilight is unusual. Bella isn’t too far off when she comes up with her theory that the Cullens are Spiderman-style superheroes; they might have a couple of the superpowers of traditional vampires, but they present no more of a spiritual threat than the X-men. I’m all for creative interpretations of classic monsters, but in this case – one has to ask how exactly are they still vampires? I don’t need to see them flinching from crucifixes or anything, but I do think they need to be portrayed as being somehow… removed from the natural order of things. Or at least, have someone somewhere act as if they are. The werewolves almost do, but their main concern about the vampires seems to be more that they’re a physical threat to their community, not that they’re unnatural.
(I do find it amusing, in light of how the Cullens seem to be nothing so much as regular people with superpowers, that they apparently don’t actually have any real problems with vampires who still drink human blood, as long as they don’t cause problems. It’s rather appropriate that they call themselves ‘vegetarians’ – since their reaction to more traditional vampires is closer to the reaction of a vegetarian to a meat-eater than to the reaction of a normal person to a serial killer…)
Having read all the books, I’m wondering why Twilight, and to a lesser extent, New Moon, spent so much time detailing Bella’s school friends and their activities. I was assuming one of them would end up being threatened by evil vampires or werewolves or something, or maybe they’d start getting suspicious about the Cullens, and there’d be a whole bit with Bella trying to throw them off the trail. But no, they’ve pretty much vanished by the fourth book, having never done anything to affect the storyline at all. I dislike it when I waste time remembering the names of characters who turn out not to be important…
On that note, what’s up with Bella’s mother? Bella says she’s her best friend in book one, then they speak to each other maybe twice in the next four books. Granted, that’s more than she talks with her school friends, but still… Is she ever planning on letting her mother know what’s happened to her?
There’s a lot of potentially interesting characters introduced in the last section of Breaking Dawn, when the Cullens and the Volturi are both drawing together their allies. I like the two evil Romanian vampires who side with the Cullens because they’ve still got a grudge against the Volturi for destroying their vampire empire fifteen hundred years previously. The Egyptian vampire whose child can control elements is an interesting character too – I like that he always seems vaguely irritated by everyone around him. Still, I’m not sure if the last few chapters of a four book series is the best place to start introducing new characters – especially when you include so many characters that you need to provide a checklist of them in an appendix in the back…
I also think it’s a little odd that in practically the last chapter, the Volturi suddenly feel the need to announce that Jacob’s werewolves aren’t ‘real’ werewolves, they’re just shapechangers, and that they’re totally different to the ‘Children of the Moon’, a more traditional race of werewolves… which, I must emphasis, are not mentioned anywhere else in the series. It’s like Meyer suddenly went on a world-building binge just before she finished the series.
I have to admit, I ended up enjoying the series more than I thought I would – mainly because of the barely controlled insanity of the last instalment, but still…
Alright, so the wish-fulfilment aspect of Twilight is fairly clear: Suddenly the perfect guy comes out of nowhere
I wonder if the real reason Meyer has abandoned Midnight Sun is realising that it’s pretty much impossible to write a wish-fulfilment series from the fantasy’s point of view. If nothing else, Edward really doesn’t have enough personality to sustain an entire book; his entire motivation is “Be Bella’s perfect man”, and in support of that, he really doesn’t have any independent goals of his own. What are his interests? What’s he been up to for the past century? Apparently, he’s been spending his whole life moping around and waiting to run into his perfect woman – which is perfectly fine, for a fantasy image, but if you actually think about what a person like that would be like in real life… well, Edward’s got creepy aspects to him already, you don’t want to write a whole book that does nothing but draw attention to them.
(Granted, Bella doesn’t have much of a personality either – but you can get away with that if they're the audience surrogate.)
Next point: I think it’s kind of funny how carefully the series avoids any mention of religion. We get maybe a page or two of Edward insisting he’s concerned he lost his soul when he was vampirised, which Isabella dismisses as ridiculous… and then, that’s it. Isabella doesn’t seem to be a member of any sort of church, neither is anyone else. It’s seems a curious omission for a series about vampires – but then, everything about the portrayal of vampires in Twilight is unusual. Bella isn’t too far off when she comes up with her theory that the Cullens are Spiderman-style superheroes; they might have a couple of the superpowers of traditional vampires, but they present no more of a spiritual threat than the X-men. I’m all for creative interpretations of classic monsters, but in this case – one has to ask how exactly are they still vampires? I don’t need to see them flinching from crucifixes or anything, but I do think they need to be portrayed as being somehow… removed from the natural order of things. Or at least, have someone somewhere act as if they are. The werewolves almost do, but their main concern about the vampires seems to be more that they’re a physical threat to their community, not that they’re unnatural.
(I do find it amusing, in light of how the Cullens seem to be nothing so much as regular people with superpowers, that they apparently don’t actually have any real problems with vampires who still drink human blood, as long as they don’t cause problems. It’s rather appropriate that they call themselves ‘vegetarians’ – since their reaction to more traditional vampires is closer to the reaction of a vegetarian to a meat-eater than to the reaction of a normal person to a serial killer…)
Having read all the books, I’m wondering why Twilight, and to a lesser extent, New Moon, spent so much time detailing Bella’s school friends and their activities. I was assuming one of them would end up being threatened by evil vampires or werewolves or something, or maybe they’d start getting suspicious about the Cullens, and there’d be a whole bit with Bella trying to throw them off the trail. But no, they’ve pretty much vanished by the fourth book, having never done anything to affect the storyline at all. I dislike it when I waste time remembering the names of characters who turn out not to be important…
On that note, what’s up with Bella’s mother? Bella says she’s her best friend in book one, then they speak to each other maybe twice in the next four books. Granted, that’s more than she talks with her school friends, but still… Is she ever planning on letting her mother know what’s happened to her?
There’s a lot of potentially interesting characters introduced in the last section of Breaking Dawn, when the Cullens and the Volturi are both drawing together their allies. I like the two evil Romanian vampires who side with the Cullens because they’ve still got a grudge against the Volturi for destroying their vampire empire fifteen hundred years previously. The Egyptian vampire whose child can control elements is an interesting character too – I like that he always seems vaguely irritated by everyone around him. Still, I’m not sure if the last few chapters of a four book series is the best place to start introducing new characters – especially when you include so many characters that you need to provide a checklist of them in an appendix in the back…
I also think it’s a little odd that in practically the last chapter, the Volturi suddenly feel the need to announce that Jacob’s werewolves aren’t ‘real’ werewolves, they’re just shapechangers, and that they’re totally different to the ‘Children of the Moon’, a more traditional race of werewolves… which, I must emphasis, are not mentioned anywhere else in the series. It’s like Meyer suddenly went on a world-building binge just before she finished the series.
I have to admit, I ended up enjoying the series more than I thought I would – mainly because of the barely controlled insanity of the last instalment, but still…