Monday, February 6, 2012

Why Twilight Annoys Me



Okay, there are a lot of reasons. But the main one is that the plot consists of a whiny heroine getting everything she wants while everyone worships her. 

Basic structure: Someone wants Bella to have a good thing (aka the rose) There is some convoluted conflict where this good thing is perceived as a bad thing for absolutely no good reason (aka the lame thorn).This way Bella can have the cake and be seen as self sacrificing for eating it. (All those calories would have been bad for everyone else. Thank goodness she took the bullet. So typical Bella.) 

I made chart to illustrate my point (lots of free time on my hands):



Rose
Thorns
Reason this is a lame thorn
Edward
Might eat Bella
Despite every conversation between Edward and Bella being “I’m not good for you”, Bella is never eaten.
Becoming a Vampire (immortality, beauty, superpowers, super strength, et)
Can’t have children, might kill innocent people
Turns out Bella can have children and has super self-control. Surprise.
Presents for Bella
Not sure but Bella spends more pages whining about presents in general then she spent seconds thinking about on all those poor people who die at the Voltorri
Whining does not equal a good conflict  
Getting a free, planned wedding
Again, not sure why Bella is finding things to complain about
See above
Having a dangerous pregnancy
Might die
The venom only had to be inserted before heart stopped beating. This isn’t super hard if you ask me. No one did



You might be wondering why I would bother to read the books if they annoy me so much. The embarrassing truth is that I did like the first book when I was sixteen, and, a few years later, I got through the last book because I was kind of hoping against hope that everyone would be massacred.  

8 comments:

  1. it's hard to comment on here

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  2. So what did you think of "The Hunger Games"?

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  3. I liked them, especially the first book. The later books get a little repetitive, and the minor characters are kind of flat, so it's hard to care, or keep track of, who dies. But they are fast paced and action-packed, so they should translate very well into the movie format.

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  4. I only made it through the first book by sheer force of will. I thought it was vulgar and full of unnecessary gore. The characters were boring, the plot was obvious. I knew how it ended by the time I finished the first chapter. Overall I just felt like the author didn't try to write a story she tried to assemble a series of the most evocative and startling events with characters almost as interesting as my pinky toe into some sort of plot line. It was of all the books I've read, the most epic fail.

    I don't understand why more people don't see this. Anything that becomes that popular that quickly is RARELY even mediocre, this is definitely not an exception.

    If you would like specific issues I have with it I can provide them. Have a wonderful day!

    -Levi

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  5. Don't dis your pinky toe, I completely agree that a lot of the characters had no more development than their names. However, the author is allowed to engineer the most evocative events possible without it becoming unrealistic, because that is what the gamemasters would do - make the reality show as entertaining as possible. It's a gladiator show, so I felt the gore was justified, and I can't think of anything vulgar. Also, Harry Potter was great, and it became popular fairly quickly. Sure, go ahead and give specific examples.

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  6. The problem is not that she didn't make an evocative book, it's that the book is only evocative, it's nothing else, it has no plot, no characters, not even proper dialogue! It's dramatic for the sake of being dramatic. It's not a story in which evocative events occur the whole story is just an evocative event. It's the difference between an hour long action movie with lots of explosions and narrow escapes, and watching a single repeating explosion for an hour. One is cool for about an hour, the other is cool for about 10 seconds.

    SOME specific issues.

    -Peta is the son of a Baker. ie Pita Bread.
    -Why is a society that can completely overhaul the human body dependent on coal?
    -Has the author ever met a real life 12 year old?
    -Maybe she could have waited until the end of the first book to put big bright flashing lights over the little sister so we didn't know she was going to die.
    -Maybe a female author (J.K., Meyers or any other) could portray a male character as something more that a piece of meat with no thought other than that of one girl who "imprints" on him.
    -People in the capital don't get to simultaneously live nothing but lives of luxury, be super soldiers, political captors, and economic overlords of the world. By the same token, if the capital is dependent on the districts for all of it's production, the people in the districts don't get to manufacture everything the capital uses to enslave them without learning something about how to use it.
    -If you right a book about an arena style blood bath and are too unoriginal to flesh out a main character for it, please do not inflict that SAME character in the all to convenient different (but exactly the same) arena on us again in book two (in other words, she just rewound the previously analagized explosion and showed it again from a slightly different angle and a little closer up and called it something different.
    -As these are becoming progressively longer I will save the others for a chat in person.

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  7. Most of your points are valid, but I find it insulting that you used Rowling and Meyer in the same sentence. All of Rowling's main characters - male or female - are three, sometimes four, dimensional, while even Bella is nothing more than a place-holder for the reader.
    Besides, most male-orientated media depict women as either interchangable eye-candy or hags, so fair is fair.

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