Feeling guilty for liking "Twilight" series...

[Fool_of_a_Took]

I know that there's one other thread on here about Stephanie Meyer's "Twilight" series, but I was wondering what everyone's opinion on the actual quality of the work was. While my favorite books of all time are, in fact, LOTR (hence being a member of the site) I do enjoy works of lesser quality from time to time. Yet I almost feel ashamed for enjoying a novel that is so poorly written. I admit, her story lines up until book three were great, yet I thought that book four tried WAY to hard to shock us, and that all throughout the series, her grammar and sentence structure was that of a middle schooler's. Thoughts?

PS- I mean no offense to any present who are huge fans of her work

[Tessar]

If you like Twilight you really are a fool of a Took .

I kid. But only slightly. I have a severe dislike of Twilight which is why I refuse to read it. I have my guilty pleasures, but this will not be one of them. I'm sorry... I can't -allow- myself to even have the possibility of enjoying a story that is all about a girl who wants to abandon her family and drop out of school mainly because she wants to have sex with a guy who glitters in the sunlight.

[feawen]

Originally Posted by Tessar

If you like Twilight you really are a fool of a Took .
all about a girl who wants to abandon her family and drop out of school mainly because she wants to have sex with a guy who glitters in the sunlight.

oh no plot spoiler ive not got there far yet!

first off i thought this was not a book for me. i saw the film and was not overly impressed by it. i dont normally go for the love story unless it involves bows and arrows or its writen by Dickens, which is ok because at least one person will die at some point in the story!
however, i was prestered by my work mates and my sister into reading it, so i came at the first book with a closed mind. And to my amazement i got really into it. I am a very slow reader at the best of time but after only 2 days of reading it im nearly finished and ive been working inbetween reading! i like the writing style, its like reading the thoughts of a 17 year old which is i guess the way it was ment to be. saying that i do pull 'but why' faces at times. but why would you go to a house full of blood suckers! but again i have had that kinda head of heels feeling of first love at a young age and though i cringe at the way i was in them by gone days, i know the strange things it makes you do.
this book is not for everyone. but then again, what book ever is!

[Fool_of_a_Took]

I guess you're right, feawen, this book isn't for everyone. I got roped into reading the books much the same way you did. I was pestered by my sister and friends into reading it until one boring evening last winter when I had literally nothing else to read.

I guess I'm a bit of a literary snob for disliking her writing style, yet I must admit, she does tell an exciting story at times.

[feawen]

now im not saying this book is any where near my fav book list but it is a good read! ive just finished reading the first one and by the end i was really feeling that i dont like belle, here i agree with Tessar. although love makes you do strange things i think even i would draw the line at getting bite very a blood sucker!

[Fool_of_a_Took]

I'm not a huge fan of Bella myself, but I do like that the books manage to remind us of crazed, obsessive teenage love.

Feawen, when you get into the second book, I'd like to know what you think- are you Team Edward or Team Jacob?

[hectorberlioz]

Originally Posted by Tessar

If you like Twilight you really are a fool of a Took .

I kid. But only slightly. I have a severe dislike of Twilight which is why I refuse to read it. I have my guilty pleasures, but this will not be one of them. I'm sorry... I can't -allow- myself to even have the possibility of enjoying a story that is all about a girl who wants to abandon her family and drop out of school mainly because she wants to have sex with a guy who glitters in the sunlight.

You just have no romantic view of life. Cold hearted and cruel.

[feawen]

well ive just started reading the second book now. so i will tell you which team i fall into!

[D.Sullivan]

Originally Posted by Tessar

If you like Twilight you really are a fool of a Took .

I kid. But only slightly. I have a severe dislike of Twilight which is why I refuse to read it. I have my guilty pleasures, but this will not be one of them. I'm sorry... I can't -allow- myself to even have the possibility of enjoying a story that is all about a girl who wants to abandon her family and drop out of school mainly because she wants to have sex with a guy who glitters in the sunlight.

I agree. That book sends some really strange messages to young girls. You have to ask: is a stranger sneaking into your room every night to watch you sleep really all that romantic, or is it just really creepy? I feel bad for any young girl who somehow finds that sweet and romantic.

Not to mention it is obvious that their relationship is purely sexual. He, for some reason he does not understand, loves the scent of her, and only her. Deep. And she likes him because vampires have the special ability of making the opposite sex swoon so as to make it easier for the vampire to suck their blood. On both ends, the attraction is sexual due to supernatural forces. Their attraction is super-sexual! Great! But lets not mistake that for true love. How sad.

I think it would have been awesome if the first book ended with them consummating the relationship and Edward eating Bella alive. Not because I love dark, sinister endings or because I think it would have been so cool and unique, but because it would have actually reflected the nature of teenage love. Teenage love is typically carnel at its core and very self-destructive, ending usually especially badly for young women. The Twilight series really only reinforces the delusions young adults have about their own sexuality.

That's just me, though. I over-analyze everything!

[feawen]

ok finished new moon. and i now live in the jacob camp. i cant stand bella i just want to slip her. the books have a twisted view on relationships. i know this is me changing my mind from previous posts. im 24 and can see the obsessiveness of the whole bella/edward thing i dont think a 14 year old ish child would.

[Ingwe]

I just gotta wonder about how much about relationships Stephanie Meyers really knows. I've read only bits and pieces, most of what I've heard on it were along the lines of what I read in this thread so far. If my wife acted like most of the characters in Twilight acted, I'd fear that she's a potential axe murderer! Any sane relationship, within reason, will not be based on such obsession.

If you like Twilight you really are a fool of a Took

Seriously...agreed...if I read Twilight anymore than I have tried, I'd probably end up in a padded room surrounded by visions of human-sized chocolate chip cookies with arms, robotic legs, red eyes that shoot laz0r beams, and vampire teeth.

[Insidious Rex]

'Twilight,' the love that dare not speak its shame

Good, smart, literary women tried to resist the romantic-vampire phenomenon. And then, alas, they bit.
By Monica Hesse
Thursday, November 19, 2009

We know. You hate "Twilight." You don't want to hear anything more about "Twilight." That's why this is not another story about the "Twilight" or "New Moon" mania, nor will it rhapsodize on the vampire craze, nor does it contain any interviews with Robert Pattinson.

This is a story about shame.

All across the country, there were women who managed to avoid Stephenie Meyer's series about a star-crossed human/vampire teen couple. (Vampire Edward lusts for mortal Bella, but also for her blood; the books are less plot than endless yearning). They resisted the first three books -- refused to read them, didn't know they existed -- and the lunacy that was "Breaking Dawn."

"Twilight" came for the tweens, then for the moms of tweens, then for the co-workers who started wearing those ridiculous Team Jacob shirts, and the resisters said nothing, because they thought "Twilight" could not come for them. They were too literary. They didn't do vampires. They were feminists.

Then something happened: the release of the "Twilight" movie, which last year introduced $384 million worth of audience members to Kristen Stewart as mortal Bella and Pattinson as lust incarnate.

"Prior to 'Twilight,' my favorite books were by Anthony Burgess" and Ayn Rand, says Jenny West, 32, who had never heard of the series until she saw ads for the movie last year. "I bought 'Twilight' [the book] with the full intention of ripping it apart." Then she read it. In one night. Bought "New Moon" the next day. "I was kind of horrified with myself, and I had to keep going." When she finished the last book, she reopened the first one and started again.

She founded the blog Twitarded, to process what had happened to her. She and co-Twitard Debbie Connelly were last spotted soliciting donations to win a charity benefit date with Peter Facinelli, the actor who plays Edward's dad.

Beware the dark side
People, be warned. "New Moon," the "Twilight" movie sequel, opens on Friday. Everyone is vulnerable.

One minute you're a functioning member of society, the next you're succumbing to the dark side, wondering how deep you're willing to go -- and what that longing says about you.

In "Twilight," Edward Cullen waffled between wooing and eating new girl Bella Swan. He chose love. In "New Moon," the darkest installment of the series, Edward becomes convinced that his girlfriend would be safer without him, so he dumps her in order to protect her and then vanishes. Bella, catatonic from the pain, finds solace in Jacob Black, the devoted friend who has just learned he is a werewolf, and their relationship grows deeper, and this description is utterly, utterly useless because none of it gets at what the "Twilight" series is actually about, which is being 17.

It's a time capsule to the breathless period when the world could literally end depending on whether your lab partner touched your hand, when every conversation was so agonizing and so thrilling (and the border between the two emotions was so thin), and your heart was bigger and more delicate than it is now, and everything was just so much more.

"I noticed in that first week of reading that I was feeling things I hadn't been able to feel in a long time," says Lauren Ashlock, 27. She'd avoided the "Twilight" series ever since the 2005 release of the first book, because when she saw the passion of so-called TwiHards, she thought, Wackos.

She relented last year only because she wanted to be an informed hater. She snuck the books into her house, at first reading them in the bathroom so her husband wouldn't laugh. The floodgates opened. "I'd locked away a lot of emotions," she says. "I'd numbed out." It had been a terrible year, with unrelenting job stress, and yet suddenly she was feeling alive again.

The behavior that followed will make perfect sense to someone who has read "Twilight" and seem bat-crazy to anyone who hasn't: Ashlock got three dogs and named them after "New Moon's" werewolf pack. She and her husband traveled to Forks, the two-bit town in Washington state where Bella and Edward fictionally live. When the Ashlocks have a child, they will name it from the novels: "If it's a girl her middle name will be Renesmee, and I don't care if you hate the name because I love it."

The people who have not read "Twilight" do not get it. Worse, they think that what happened to Ashlock could not happen to them. They're so smug, talking about how they once read a chapter of "Twilight" in a bookstore and the prose was just awful. Meyer never uses one adjective when she could use three, and most of the time that adjective is a hyphenate combining "dazzling" and "chiseled."

The people who have not read "Twilight" think they are astoundingly brilliant when they point out the misogynist strains of the series, like how Bella bypasses college in favor of love, like how Edward's "romantic" tendencies include creepily sneaking into Bella's house to watch her sleep, like how Bella's only "flaw" is that she is clumsy, thereby necessitating frequent rescues by the men in her life, who swoop in with dazzling chisleyness and throw her over their shoulders.

In response: We know. We know.

The women who have succumbed to "Twilight" have heard all of these arguments before. They wrote those arguments. This self-awareness is what makes the experience of loving "Twilight" a conflicting one, as if they had all been taught proper skin-care routines but chose instead to rub their faces with a big pizza every night.

A love most 'exquisite'
It's embarrassing, to love something you wish you hated.

Witness the progression experienced by West's mother, who agreed to read the books after her daughter's site went gangbusters:

E-mail 1:

How many times does Bella describe Edward's face as "exquisite?" . . . and that whole scene with Bella riding on Edward's back as he races through the woods . . . cooooorny.

E-mail 2:

Dad and I just finished watching "Twilight" and I must say we both liked the movie.

E-mail 3:

I have a serious problem with ["New Moon"]. My problem is I can't put it down.

E-mail 4:

Where the heck is Edward? The suspense is killing me!

Oh, Mrs. West. Welcome.

Witness the downfall of Sarah Seltzer, a freelance literary critic who also writes for a reproductive rights Web site:

"I wanted to write about the abstinence subtext," Seltzer says, which is why she read the books to begin with. She planned on questioning the allegorical "abstinence only" theme that runs through the series. "But the books are kind of hypnotic, so it's very much that while you're reading them you're sucked in, and then you take a step back and you think, this is kind of troubling. She jumps off a cliff because she misses her boyfriend?" What?!

"New Moon" shows Bella at her most pathetic, and so the grown women who love "Twilight" have methodically come up with rebuttals to the accusations that the character is anti-feminist. Perhaps her single-minded desire for a relationship is actually a Third Wave feminist expression? Maybe it doesn't matter that she's choosing Edward over everything else, as long as it's her choice? Maybe her wish to become a vampire is really a metaphor for asserting her rights over her own body?

Is Bella regressing or progressive? The past or the future?

And Edward -- Edward might be imperfect, might be too possessive, but then why does he still seem so insanely dreamy?

"I remember when the movie first came out," says Mindy Goodin, 36, a special needs teacher in Stafford. "I remember thinking," whoever that boy is, "he really needs to brush his hair."

How things have changed. Recently, when Goodin's 10-year-old daughter wanted to lash out, she did so by yelling the words she knew would cut her mother to the core: "I don't even think Robert Pattinson's cute, anyway!"

For mothers of tweenage girls, there are added complications. Is it sweet or twisted to share the same crush as your 14-year-old? (Taylor Lautner as Jacob. Ahhhhhhh. Only 17. Ewwwww.) How do you reconcile cooing over an on-screen relationship that, if your daughter had it in real life, might be worth a restraining order?

What women want
It's just a movie. It's just a movie. It's just a movie.

It's just a movie -- well, movie and books -- but it's a movie that's come to represent such big things, from the future of girls to what women really want (they want men who will shut up and come to watch "New Moon," and not ask how many points they're getting for the evening).

Men feel perfectly comfortable slathering their chests in greasepaint and screaming like half-naked ninnies at football games, but women too often over-explain their passions, apologizing for being too girly or liking something too trashy.

The grown women of "Twilight" will no longer apologize. They will go to those midnight "New Moon" screenings.

But as for telling them how silly they're being, how Edward is not real and neither is Jacob, how their brains are rotting and their sense of reality is being distorted and this obsession is crazy, just crazy? There's really no need.

They already know.

So it taps into some female need to acknowledge their inner 17 year old? Interesting. I guess that could explain why three generations of females in my family cant stop talking about this formulaic, simply written, plageristic, festering sore of smarmyness and angst that insists on reducing vampires to the level of a Ken doll so they can exploit every last ounce of teenage hormone driven love obsession that beats deep within the tortured wanna-be-prom-queen souls of every female above the age of say 15 or 16 (we are to assume the millions of tweens and preteens that go gaga over this phenomenon are just into it because their older sisters seem to think its cool or because of the hot guys).

Amazing that such simple minded obvious bad writing could be so powerful to so many. I guess it succeeds for a lot of the same reasons why females cant get enough awfully written tabloid romance books as adults. Even Volvo has recognized the marketing power of this vehicle and is pushing their cars in conjunction with the release of the second movie... Go figure...

[feawen]

well that was interesting! i want to hate the books. i dont think they are the most well writen books and they are not my favourate books but i still have to read all of the books!

[Earniel]

Sooo Twilight is for the ladies what Catcher in the Rye is for boys, or something...? I'll think I'll just pass then. My inner seventeen-year-old is not that needy.

Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure I have had my required handsome vampire crush some years ago already.

[feawen]

would that required crush have involved buffy at all!
i read catcher in the rye once didnt get a word of it!

[Earniel]

Guilty as charged, on both accounts.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer could, I suppose, be reckoned as one of my own guilty viewing pleasures.

Although, Angel had more than enough creepy streaks too. I do remember him being seen more than once in Buffy's room, watching her sleep. (From what I have heard of Twilight, I somewhat suspect Meyers has seen Buffy too. Only she seems to consider it romantic behaviour? Wouldn't know.)

So, I guess I'm already doomed either way.

[Amanda]

Twilight is teh bombz!!! Just kidding. I got to see the new movie, but it just dragged on and on and on and on and on about details, many of which won't even become relevant later on in the saga. And I can understand someone being a little clumsy but OMG Bella is the clumsiest hipster I've ever seen!!!

[GrayMouser]

Originally Posted by Eärniel

Sooo Twilight is for the ladies what Catcher in the Rye is for boys, or something...? I'll think I'll just pass then. My inner seventeen-year-old is not that needy.

Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure I have had my required handsome vampire crush some years ago already.

No, Twilight is for girls what Conan, exploding helicopters, shoot-em-up games and superheroes who have to rescue helpless girls who then madly throw themselves at their feet, are for boys.

[feawen]

oh what! im a girl and you should see my wii games! all involve shooting people!

[Earniel]

Well, I'm not into shooter-games, but I'm not impartial to a nicely done exploding helicopter myself...

Maybe we should try and refine the statement. Hmm, how about... Twilight is for girls what Princess Leia's slave-outfit is for boys?