Conclusion: Tweenporn

This should be my last post on the subject. I’m not as sadistic as you might think – I could subject you to Midnight Sun, but…I won’t.

Instead, I’m just going to…talk about this…mad, gibbering horror of a series. Get it out of my system; say a few things I forgot to cover in the…well, they’re not reviews, are they? And they’re too long to be called summaries. I don’t know what they are any more.

See, I can’t review things. I’m either ‘that sucked’ or ‘play by play of suck’. I haven’t found a proper balance, and I probably never will. It’s something I just can’t be good at.

Who cares, though? This is my website. I’ll put stuff here, and, if it displeases you, that’s really not my problem. I’m actually comfy with sitting here, rambling to myself.

If you do want to read them, you should probably read them in order. Here, have a list:

As with all things on the internet, this post will be waiting here for you when you get done.

If you’ve read them, you’ll know that I made no secret of my dislike for the entire series. I’ve technically read the entire thing twice now, and that’s more than enough to have a reasonably informed opinion regarding degrees of suckitude.

Other readers will have formed their own opinions, of course. When you read something, you see what you want to see, or what you know. With a series like this, it’s incredibly easy to read into what’s there, because there’s so little.

Yes, it borrows heavily from so-called ‘classics’ – but what doesn’t? It’s nearly impossible to write something without referencing another work, even inadvertently. This series does it clumsily, though. There’s no subtlety, with ‘references’ coming across more like a very ham-handed product placement. The best thing that can be said about them is that, when their appearance slams you out of the already stuttering and sluggish flow of the story line, it’s a kindness.

That the story itself is unoriginal can’t be held against it; so many stories are. The trick is to take that same old plot and make it your own, if not in a unique way, then in a way that doesn’t seem tedious because it has interesting characters. I’m not sure that Stephenie Meyer has done that here. I’m not even sure that she was interested in doing that.

The story itself comes off as if Meyer were following the instructions off a store-bought box.

Place into bag:

  • Tortured, conscience-having vampire(s).
  • Other fantastic, shape-shifting beings.
  • Antagonist.
  • Subjects of ‘social commentary value’ – racism, abstinence, et cetera.
  • A main character serving as an idealised representation of the author.*
  • Everyday locations.

Shake, mixing thoroughly. Bake. Adjective and adverb to taste, and serve.

*For a more palatable dish, exclude this ingredient.

It’s Shake&Bake: Fanfiction [G-PG rating].

I suppose I could be falling into the same trap everyone else does, but…really. Vampires living off animal blood? They might even have souls? The uncommon, endearingly-clumsy female – whose clumsiness ends up drawing in the vampire, who feels the need to protect her. He stalks her, watches her while she sleeps, and, eventually, they get married and have babies? I overthought the recipe. All you have to do is take the Buffy/Angel relationship, reduce it so that no redeeming qualities are left [shouldn’t take long], and dive right in.

Maybe I’m too old – maybe I’ve always been too old – to understand what sort of appeal these sorts of stories hold for anyone. Shallow, fluffy romance where you know everything will come out fine in the end. A little too fine, with everyone surviving.

These are exactly those sorts of books. A fake tension hook in the beginning – and, if you were fooled by the first one, the second one really shouldn’t – and a resolution that leaves everything but your faith in a good, plausible story [even if it is about the supernatural] alive and well.

Why can’t a secondary character die? Yes, it hurts; yes, if you’ve done your job as an author, we’ve become emotionally attached to the character. It should make us cry. We should be left feeling something. Anything that can’t be fixed with a dose of pepto and The Talisman.

I don’t care what you think of Stephen King’s ability as a writer, or if it instantly makes you question my qualifications to even have an opinion on anything anyone’s written, ever. When he killed Wolf in The Talisman [and I’m sure it was him, and not Straub, because he does it all the time], he made me cry. Yes. I cried. Because I fucking cared about Wolf; King made me care about Wolf.

Honestly, I’m not sure where my problem is. It could be with Meyer for this saccharine little Mary Sue dreamworld she conjured for herself, and foisted onto an undeserving public; It could be with the fact that, as it turns out, the public does deserve it, after all.

I suppose I can’t blame young, immature females for lapping up this godawful swill. They’re probably looking for something safe and comforting, and a fictional world in which even the nightmare creatures are safe, where nobody ever dies, is probably the safest thing they can get their too-clean little hands on. What the fuck is up with the older women, though?

Why the fuck do we have things like this:

Seriously? Seriously? What the fuck is wrong with you people? Does your love for this series stem from a history of reading Harlequin Romance? I hope so, because that’s all these books are. Harlequin Romance novels lacking ‘turgid manhoods’ and breasts springing forth like startled pheasants when loosed from their restraints. If the USA Network were to get ahold of and edit your standard bodice ripper, you’d have Twilight.

If only Lifetime had gotten it, instead. Then, we’d have Bella escaping, pregnant, to a shelter for abused women, desperately fleeing her past, possibly reconnecting with estranged family and putting them at risk while they try to protect her from her abusive stalker of an ex that she married [against their advise] fresh out of highschool. She might even lose the baby.

It’s a movie done a hundred times over by Lifetime, but it’s still better than Twilight.

I think I’ve run out of things to say. When I post this, I’ll probably think of a few dozen more things I’d intended to say, but I think I’ll leave it here. I’d like to repeat my heartfelt thankyous to the person who leaked Midnight Sun [you’re a real-life masked superhero, whoever you are], and to everyone who actually read the other six posts. It’s been an ordeal [60 pages now; I’m so proud of myself]; thanks for suffering with me.

If you’d like, we can all meet up for cake and suicide. I promise, the cake isn’t a lie.

3 thoughts on “Conclusion: Tweenporn

  1. I knew I’d forget something.

    Dhampirs. A child of a vampire and a human. A creature with all of the benefits, but none of the bad things [or, sometimes, the opposite]. Something that would’ve been on that stupid website in the first book.

    I suppose this fictional universe had that gaping hole to try to manufacture a tense situation stemming from lack of knowledge.

    I think I’ve already beaten the lack of originality and the clumsiness into the ground, though. And, if I make any more comparisons to Angel, people might start to think I liked the show more than I did.

  2. I think the problem with the series has to be the kind of cuddliness of it since when have vampires ever been lovable like people want to cower not be like hey your my best friend. the point of the vampire was to kill you simple as that put a little fear into kids you cant go out at night the nosferatu will get you so behave or we will put you out there. no now a days the kids would be like cool i wonder if its like edward and like all shiney and *giggle giggle* id blast myself in the head kind of just thinking about it. i say if you say vampire that should cast fear for your life not oh there just misunderstanded fuck that and coming out at day give me a break what ever happened to being set asunder from the sun and bursting into flames it kills the entire myth of vampires cause the wake during the night to feed off the living and sleep during the day hell if they sleep whenever like a human does how the hell are you suppoused to bust up in that bitch and kill you some zombies the edward way from the anita blake series. that is all

  3. I have no problems suspending reality in order to appreciate certain types of fiction. Vampires, werewolves, dragons, uncomplicated lesbian relationsips? Sure, I have enough of an imagination to wrap my head around fictional concepts…but only under certain circumstances.

    I can even accept throwing hundreds of years of vampire lore out the window in favor of sparkling, vegan vampires and Native American (shock) wolf-men. What I cannot accept, however, are regular, human characters who don’t act like real fucking people. That’s not creative license, it’s bad character development.

    I have a feeling that this was a story that Stephanie Meyer has had brewing since high school. I once wrote a novel that had my idealized self roaming around on horseback saving idealized versions of Renee O’Connor. My books are better, in my own opinion. Better than this bullshit, though, doesn’t mean much. But I’ll take it.

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