Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Series: Fangirl
Hope everybody had a lovely Easter!
Last Thursday I went with my best friend Junebug and her sister to see WICKED in Houston.
Oh, so fabulous. XDDDD DeFYing GRAVITY!
After hearing about it all over livej, I picked up a copy of Stephenie Meyer's "Twilight" last week. I usually avoid anything of the "Teen Vampire Romance" genre (3 novels of Amelia Atwater Rhodes' Mary Sue glorifications having finally pushed me over the edge of disgust with anything with the word 'vampire' in it), but all the fangirling and some very warm recommendations got me curious. After visiting Stephenie Meyer's website and discovering that she is an LDS mom who graduated from BYU (whoohoo!), that she also pays warm and friendly attention to her fanbase, and is a-round adorable and fabulous, I just had to read it.
Bella, awkward, shy, angsty and depressive, is a very sympathetic character midst all the angst and I quite love her. Edward, as I expected, is too perfect, and I wasn't entirely convinced as to why he would fall in love with Bella, (me being one who has lost all credulity when it comes to beings with an almost incontrollable urge eat something ever being able to be sexually or romantically attracted to that thing, and also being one who doesn't find wanting to be eaten a turn on. :} ) We WANT Edward to fall in love with her, however, and he does everything to show that he is in love, so, like with all happy shippy fanfiction, we go with it.
The Cullens rock in general, Alice in particular, and I want more of all of their characters. Twilight is wonderfully written, a fun, enjoyable ride, with many scenes that fill my heart with girly glee. At the end I felt it was great stuff, but not fandom (or fangirl) inducing to myself. I had had plenty of spoiler warnings about the 2nd book from a friend who despises it, so I was going to wait for the library copy to become available before I would read New Moon.
After two days I caved and went out and bought it.
Yep, I've been caught.
Having been so warned and spoiled about most of the plot of New Moon (reading the 3rd book summary teaser spoils one of the major mysteries of book 2), I was able to take its turns in stride and actually enjoy it. It is quite wonderful. After reading through all the online info available about why Stephenie did what she did, I think the major plot weakness of the book was...
...Bella's "hallucinations". I understand what Stephenie was doing, and how she needed to get Bella to be reckless enough to do the cliff thing, to bring about the Romeo and Juliet thing with Edward in Italy (Aro is fabulo, btw), and that she tried to make it clear that even Bella knew the entire time that what she was hearing wasn't real, but this is a FANTASY NOVEL. A fantasy novel where it is already established that Edward, et al, have special powers. And Edward's are mental.
In fantasy novels, "hallucinations" are never just "hallucinations". And you can't expect your audience to accept that it ISN'T really Edward, when we have no good reason to think otherwise. Perhaps if we were also seeing Edward's pov every once in a while, and he definitely wasn't speaking telepathically with Bella, we could accept that she was actually just making it all up in her subconscious. But it's in Bella's pov, and romantic fantasy readers will always know that the "hallucination"/"dream"/"freaky weird magic thing" that the main character doesn't believe in is actually true.
This is the same reason why flowery metaphorical language has to be avoided in fantasy fiction. "His fiery green orbs seared her soul with their passion" can work in a romance novel set in some semblance of the 'real world', but in a fantasy, his eyes very well could be green balls of fire. Writers, don't do that. Don't even try. (Okay, I've read maybe ONE thing where metaphorical language worked in a fantasy novel, and it was brilliant, but it's extremely hard to do well.)
It would have been better if some other device got Bella doing the reckless things, even if it was just her need to feel alive again, which was the the whole root of it anyway. (I LOL ADORE the scene where she watches a zombie movie and realizes which characters she resembles. Total crack up. XDD)
Speaking as a human girl: as beautiful and wonderful as Edward and the Cullens are, being with them happily and comfortably requires being a vampire. And this type of vampirism, with constant resisting and "soymilk and tofu" diet required to be a decent person, is just too much work to be appealing. No, give me JACOB and his yummy werewolf boys ANY DAY. Yum yum, yummity yum.
/end spoilers
So, after reading the first two books everyone, head over to Stephenie's website and read the 4 fabulous chapters she has up from other characters' pov's, including 2 in Edward's point of view. They are WONDERFUL and make everything that mysterious pretty boy does make so much more sense. Generally I wouldn't go for it, but I'm really looking forward to reading her version of Twilight in Edward's pov, Midnight Sun. He's hard to understand, and just chapter 1 made everything click just so much more.
ANYways. Yup, I'm a total fangirl. I happily await everything you write in the future, Stephenie! ^__^
I have this painting of Edward IN my HEAD that I've been trying to get out and it's not coming. GWAH!!!
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purplerebecca) wrote,
