Several Reasons The Twilight Saga Pisses Me Off

 Several Reasons The Twilight Saga Pisses Me Off

By Isa H.

DISCLAIMER: I use a lot of sarcasm in this blog, if you get confused about what I’m being serious about, please ask me. Also, there is referenced severe mental illnesses, murder, pedophillia/pederasts, rape, etc. If you are uncomfortable with/sensitive to any of these, please read another blog. There’s also lots of talk about sex/sexual things, as well as reproductive systems and practices, so beware. If you finish reading and think I should add something/edit this disclaimer, please email me or let me know in the comments.

DISCLAIMER 2: I sometimes call Bella Swan with other variations of her name (Butter Pigeon, Boat, Bark, etc.) so assume anything that starts with a capital B and is referred to with she/her pronouns is Bella. 3rd: I had a lot to say on this topic so the actual blog is about 20 pages long; you don't have read all of it.

I first read the book series The Twilight Saga by Stephanie Meyer for the first time in 6th grade, and I've ranted and raved at length about the things about Twilight that bother me, like the racism, sexism or the whole "If you don't have a man, your life is worthless." But there are some things that piss me off that don't fit so neatly into the riffing. Here are some of the reasons Twilight pisses me off.

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The Relationships

Okay, this is not going to be about the usual relationship issues with Twilight, because I rant about those plenty in my regular snarks. You know, the pedophilia, the stalking, the "I wuvs you so much I'll commit suicide if you move away!" melodrama, the fact that the "romance" is entirely hormone-based, the gay-but-still-somehow-homophobic overtones, etc. Those topics have been talked about to death, and so there's really no point in making a separate rant about them but they will be mentioned later in this blog.

No, this is more about the fact that everybody in this series - even some of the most minor of characters, even the villains - are hammered into a romantic relationship. Monogamous, heterosexual ones.Forever.

Now I have no problem with love, romance and marriage, and I can even (sometimes) stomach the literary concept that you have one special person in the world who is just right for you. But EVERYBODY seems to have that in the Twilight series. It is the norm to have a star-crossed soulmate forever-and-ever relationship that you just instantly know about as soon as you meet that person, without spending any time with them.

I mean, the werewolves have that creepy imprinting thing, guaranteeing that all of them will find the girl of his dreams, and they will be Fated To Be Whether They Like It Or Not Dammit. Sometimes Smeyer creates random minor characters who have no other purpose in the story except to be imprinted upon. And if she rejects him, he'll just mutilate her until she Stockholms herself into loving him… which is another rant for another day.

And every vampire who has ANY actual impact on the plot has these Fated Destined Dramatic Romances of Twoo Luv, and they never even think about anyone else. Even better: if a vampire's mate dies, they never get over it. They just mope for eternity, never hooking up with anybody else even temporarily. How likely is it that every single person would react exactly the same way?!

And nobody does anything else. I mean, no character in this series dates multiple people to find out who they're compatible with. Which makes no sense - if a person became a vampire and retained their sexual drive (despite the lack of sexual reproduction), they probably wouldn't sign up for one-person monogamy for the rest of eternity ASAP. If you had an eternity in which to mess around, and no apparent religious beliefs to hold you back, you probably would.

I mean, wouldn't you expect at least SOME vampires to have a lot of sexual flings with other vampires? Maybe serial monogamy, breaking off the relationship when it gets dull and moving on to the next one? Even some same-sex experiences, since you would probably find yourself attracted to a lot of varied people over an immortal life? Wow, that explains a lot, doesn't it?

And nobody is ever attracted to anyone except their Speshul Soulmate Forever-And-Ever Happily-Ever-After. No vampire guy looks at a woman and thinks, "Wow, she’s really my type"; no vampire gal looks at a hot guy and drools. Same with the werewolves. I'm all for fidelity, but this just gets smothering and boring. No suspense. No change. No effort. It's stagnant. Like a rusty bucket of haunted bog water.

I think there is exactly one vampire with a semi-normal sex drive in the entire series. That would be Tanya, a Denali vampire who apparently used to seduce human men and then feed off them. Meaning that instead of sitting around pining for a hubby, she had sex with men in the past and pursued a vampire guy when she became romantically interested in him. Imagine that!  And what are we supposed to see her as, according to Smeyer? A hopeless slut who isn't "pure" enough to be loved.

On the flip side, there's only one werewolf who doesn't get the Twoo Luv treatment. Again, it's a girl who dares to have had a real, normal relationship based on mutual liking and not imprinting. What a pervert!

Smeyer tries to act like she likes the character of Leah Clearwater, but she really heaps a lot of sh!t on the character. She makes her infertile for no reason (except that we must worship Badger Seagull for her amazing ovaries), her boyfriend dumps her ass for her cousin who he imprinted on, and she ends up with nobody. To make matters worse, Smeyer seemed to be setting up a potential romance based on mutual liking and respect with Jacob… and then screwed Leah over again.

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Sexuality

Smeyer features vampires from 1000 B.C. to the present, from various cultures and countries. And not a single one of them is gay or bisexual. Now, I'm not a fan of shoving in token gay or bisexual characters just to make a point, but she crams in so much romance that it seems unlikely that ALL of it would just happen to be between heterosexuals.

And it's... just not realistic. The whole idea of hetero/homo/bisexuality as actual labels or a restricted pool of sexual partners is a very recent phenomenon. For most of human history, people's sexuality was classified by what they DID, not with pat labels - partly because in most of them, it just wasn't a big deal to be bisexual. People cared more about whether you were begetting heirs or bottoming than who you found attractive... mainly because when the societal stigma of bisexuality is removed and people are open to it, people tend to go with that. According to Lisa Diamond, the majority of LGBT people are bisexual, and a lot of people have interests that veer outside of "all straight" or "all gay" (even if a lot of people repress that because they don't want to be "outside" straight or gay). Personally, I don’t really agree with this because it implies that most people who identify as straight or gay are just bisexuals who lean heavily to one gender, but it does kind of come in to play when we’re talking about the time periods some of these Sparklepires were born in.

Remember Shakespeare? He lived in a time when bisexuality was extremely common, because it just wasn't seen as a big deal to have emotional/sexual relationships with men, but also marry women. t's even reflected in his work. Just read The Merchant of Venice - it's abundantly clear that Antonio is madly in love with Bassanio, but he's also willing to help Bassanio get a wife. Both men spew the kind of dialogue that would easily fit lovers. And Portia is clearly aware of this attraction of Antonio's, because the first thing she does when she meets him as herself is make him swear to uphold her marriage. Or As You Like It. We could classify Orlando as pansexual, because he seems to be attracted to the same person in the guise of both a man and a woman.

So how realistic is it that a number of people who have lived for MILLENNIA would be completely hetero in every way? I mean, the Volturi leaders lived in a time when people had very fluid sexuality. Bisexuality was the NORM when Aro was living his human life - it was literally institutionalized in some Greek societies like Sparta, where having male-male relationships was a part of growing up. It's why the love of Alexander the Great's life was a man (Hephaestion), but he also fell in love with and married Roxana. So why would anyone from that time period - or many of the ones that followed, like in ancient Rome or medieval Europe - have only had ONE relationship in their life? 

And if she just left it up to our imaginations, that would be fine. But she doesn't. She just has to assure us that everyone in the cast has only ever had one paramour, and it's their Forever And Ever Hetero Soulmate. Away from that person, they are utterly celibate. The only person who has more than one relationship is just faking to get someone to do what she/he wants.

And it wouldn't bother me so much if there wasn't SO much homoeroticism in these books. But it's downright distracting sometimes how many people come across as enamored of the same sex, while assuring us that they are SO not doing anything sexually unless they are several times married to a member of the opposite sex.

So in conclusion: do not try to depict the world as totally devoid of same-sex attractions while also having Carlisle and Amun keeping pretty teenage boys that they seem to find more interesting than their wives, or having Bell Goose wrap herself around Alice to sniff her hair and ogle Heidi's sexy legs. 

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Bella Being the Center of the Universe

I've always said that Bayleaf is a narcissistic, obnoxious, dumb, whiny, spoiled little twit who looks down on everyone else (including her own parents), thinks she's too smart for everyone around her, stalks the object of her affections, and becomes literally suicidal if he leaves. And no, I am not misusing the word "literally."

And some other people (more thoughtful than the more die-hard fans) have replied by saying that they considered her less-than-flattering portrayal to be a pretty realistic portrayal of a teenager's mind. Well, I cannot disagree with that. Bark has a lot of the rotten characteristics that crop up during everybody's teenage years, and it would be just fine and dandy if a character were depicted as such. I mean, Holden Caulfield is a fictional teenager with a lot of personal defects, yet people enjoy reading about him. So if Bread were being depicted as being melodramatic, whiny, narcissistic and stupid becasue she’s a teenager and hasn't yet learned enough about the world and herself to be otherwise, I would be fine with that.

Here's the problem with this theory: Smeyers doesn't think that Bandana is any of the above. She repeatedly reiterates that Bird is an Old Soul who is not only more mature than her peers, but also her PARENTS. She reiterates that Bike is uber-selfless, supersmart, suffers in silence, humble, and is enamored in a way that will last forever and is based on Destiny and not Edward's sparklepeen and fat wallet.

"But Isa," you may be thinking, "it's a first person narrative! So of course Battery would think that about herself."

I'm not talking about Bank's self-perception. I'm talking about how other people act towards her.

• In Midnight Sun's first-person narrative from Edward, he attributes all sorts of virtues to Butter Pigeon and is repeatedly staggered by how wonderful she is compared to other mortals. Just the way she sees herself.

• In fact, he does the same in Twilight. And the other books. So does his "perfect" family except for Rosalie (who is Just Jealous™ of her uterus, of course).

• Everybody in Forks is rabidly interested in her. She sees this as perfectly normal, if annoying. And nobody treats newer students the way they treat her.

• Nobody ever calls Boat out or reacts to her as if she were a melodramatic, selfish teenager. Nobody rolls their eyes when she says cheesy crap, nobody ever tells her to get over her own pretentious ass, nobody ever shrugs her melodrama off, and nobody is even remotely disturbed by how crazy and obsessive she is about Edward. Just the way she sees herself.

• Most of the cast is very, very old and you would expect them to be emotionally far beyond Bella's "deep tortured" self. Not so. They still think she's just wonderful.

So basically, Smeyers actually thinks that Banana Duck is a smart, humble, selfless Wiser Than Her Years teen who is destined for a Twoo Luv better than anything you could ever have, and that she deserves it too. It's not just in her head, but ingrained into the reality around her. Is there anything more lOvEly than that?

I'd also like to point out that Bucket has a lot of classic codependency signs, and Edward has most of the ones she doesn't have.

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The (Lack of) Math in the Twilightverse

I know I've probably ranted about this before, but it bears repeating, because it's one of those things that nobody seems to notice about the Twilight universe: mathematically, there is no way the vampires could actually exist.

So I'd like to introduce you to Daybreakers. Daybreakers is a vampire movie, set in a world where vampirism actually exists, and the majority of the population is made up of vampires. To remain "normal," the vampires must ingest in a certain amount of human blood regularly. If they don't, they turn into berserk batlike abominations that kill everyone and everything around them. Animal blood can sustain them for a short time, but it's not a great solution.

Another important aspect of these vampires is that it takes just ONE BITE, one nonfatal bite, to turn you into a vampire. That's why there are so many: if a vampire bites someone, his victim becomes a vampire. And so it goes on, until there are only a few humans left in the entire world, most of whom are being drained of their blood to sustain a doomed vampire population.

So why am I bringing up this movie? Well, Smeyer's vampires work on the same principle. Her vampires have only two ways of drinking blood: they kill their prey, or they turn them into fellow vampires.

And sadly, that doesn't work. Her books imply that there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of Sparklepires just roaming around the place, and each one needs to feed at least every couple weeks, probably more frequently. Maybe ten or twelve of those vampires drink from animals instead of humans, which introduces its own logical problems.

So there are two possible scenarios: Her vampires are killing at least two humans a month. Apiece. That is a lot of dead bodies. I mean, look at Volterra. Are we seriously supposed to believe that Volterra, a real-life CITY with a population of only 11,000 in the popular vacation area of Tuscany, has a vast organization of vampires hiding there WITH NOBODY NOTICING THEM?!I mean, that is simply not possible. Say there are 500 vampires hiding in Volterra. That is at least A THOUSAND PEOPLE DEAD EVERY SINGLE MONTH. That’s TWELVE THOUSAND PEOPLE A YEAR. Rock bottom minimum, assuming that nobody just eats when they feel like it. And nobody has noticed the disappearance of MORE people than the actual city holds?!

And that's just in one city. These creatures are roaming all over the entire planet, allegedly. I'm pretty sure that with normal mortality and birth rates, the earth's population of humans would be dropping sharply all the time. It wouldn't take long before the human race was extinct. And again, nobody notices the sudden disappearances, the large number of dead bodies, and the large number of deaths. Because, you know, it's not like that sort of thing gets investigated.

And it wouldn't be a problem if the sparklepires were more like Anne Rice's vampires. Rice's vampires are far more plausible because they don't HAVE to either kill or turn their victims. They're capable of just drinking a smaller amount from a human victim, then letting them go. They also have a certain mesmeric quality that allows them to befuddle their victims into not remembering. They only kill if they WANT to, and they only TURN people if they want to.

In fact, Smeyer's vampires are pretty shitty parasites (and yes, they are parasites, not "predators''). The most successful parasites are the ones that keep their hosts/victims alive and well. Take actual real-life vampire bats:

Now, like the Daybreakers vampires, these creatures need blood. They actually NEED it - they'll starve if they go for more than a couple days without it. They mostly feed on cattle and other big animals, by making a tiny bite and lapping up a small amount of blood. The only physical threat to the victim is the possibility of rabies; the blood loss itself and the cut made for it is inconsequential. That way, the same beast can be fed on multiple times by multiple bats, and can CONTINUE to provide delicious blood.

The Twilight vamps kill their victims, so those victims can’t provide enough food, and cannot produce offspring to continue the species. And what would happen once the humans and large mammals were all gone?

Great design, Smeyer. Your vampires would wipe themselves out along with the human race.

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The All-Male Werewolf Pack

You may have noticed that Twilight is not so much a story as a very long sexual fantasy, where a lily-white vampire and exoticized Native American werewolf are constantly fighting over Smeyer's baby doll character while she ogles both of them. Personally I think there was a lot of porn in Smeyer's early drafts, but that's just me.

You may have also noticed that Smeyer doesn't really seem to like other women. All the female characters in this series fall into three separate categories:

1. Murderous b!tches

2. Mean girls/sexual competition

3. Worshipful servants of Bonfire

So yeah, the only female characters that Smeyer has any liking for are characters like Alice, Emily and Esme, who exist solely to dote on Brick and/or the men who serve Brick. The rest of the time, she seems to avoid writing about female characters whenever possible, and nowhere is that more evident than in the werewolf pack. 

Actually, that's not accurate. In all the centuries of werewolves of the Quileute tribe, there has been one single female werewolf, and she's regarded as a freakish aberration.

That's right: an active, strong female character who knows her own mind is treated as a freak. I don’t even need to  make a joke about that.

But it actually makes a lot of sense. After all, in real life, wolf packs are known for being all-male affairs, with icky girls kept far away... oh wait, no they're not. Wolf packs are very co-ed, and females get to be as alpha as the males. I swear, this is almost as stupid as Laurell K. Hamilton creating a lion pride with only hot males. Not quite as stupid, but pretty close behind.

Well, I can think of only two reasons why Smeyer would have her werewolves be all male with one token Smurfette. Both of them are really offensive and/or stupid.

1. Smeyer appears to be heterosexual (well, probably), so she decided to make the werewolves all hot, muscular, semi-naked, exoticized males even if they're not interested in Bubble. Because of course, she can still fantasize about them even if they don't actually want to be with Binary code.

2. Smeyer doesn't like the idea of female werewolves because that means the female characters are out doing badass, actiony, buttkicking stuff instead of staying home and cooking for the menfolk, like all women should be doing.

I have no idea which one of these reasons was Smeyer's motivation for making the werewolf pack all male or whether it was both of them, but either way, it doesn't give a satisfactory explanation for why she wrote it like that,

Which leads me into...

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Leah Clearwater

I feel so, so sorry for this character, especially since in a better-written series, she would be the protagonist and Bacteria would be the weird girl who ends up doing evil things on behalf of the villains.

As I mentioned before, Smeyer tends to talk about Leah as if she likes the character, but she actually treats her worse than any other supernatural creature on the "good" side in the entire series. Hell, there are villains who get less sh!t in their lives than she does, and most of them are centuries old.

And I think it boils down to one thing: Leah is an action chick. She works alongside the males, does the same things as them, and is not excluded in any way because she is female. That is honestly what makes her the most likable female character in the entire fucking series, especially since she isn't inclined to just sit around suffering and silent because a male (Sam) tells her to. And that's not what Smeyer thinks a woman should be. I mean, consider the female characters that Smeyer glorifies - women like Baguette, Esme, Kebi and Emily. What do these women have in common? Well, they do most if not all of the below.

1. Domestic stuff(cooking and cleaning for Da Menfolk)

2. No fighting and/or action

3. They don't interfere with the Manly Man activities

4. The men are in charge, and the women do as they say

5. They tolerate anything the men do Cuz They Luvs Them.

6. They don't bother the men with their petty little problems (crippling negative self-image, suicidal depression, trauma, etc.)

7. Except for Bella, they hardly ever speak.

8. They really don't have any kind of REAL social life outside the home/surrogate family. You never hear about Esme going on a trip to go skydiving, or Emily leaving Sam to cook his own damn dinner so she can go out with the girls.

In fact, Smeyer symbolically denies that Leah Clearwater is even a female, because a woman like Leah defies everything that Smeyer glorifies in the feminine sex. Just consider:

• First, she makes Leah infertile. Because if Bella and Rosalie teach us anything, it's that a woman's purpose is to have a functioning uterus so she can pop out at least one kid. If she can't do that, her life is hollow and empty.

• Secondly, she also robs Leah of the one thing that every other person in this series has: a romantic relationship. Hell, even CHARLIE ends up with a girlfriend, and he's a lifeless corrupt lump. Previously, Leah was seriously involved with Sam Uley, but he leaves her to marry her cousin Emily. Emily is a domestic doormat who happily does nothing but silently serve Sam and his friends, even though Sam ripped open her face. 

So yeah, if you're a woman who wants to do the same things as men and not be restricted by a bunch of sexist conventions, you might as well be a man. Nobody will want you, and you'll never have kids. Such a wonderful message to all the very young tweens reading these books.

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Esme And Carlisle

A lot of people hate Twilight, but most of them have a sort of sneaking fondness for Carlisle and Esme. This may be because they are among the few characters in the whole series who actually act like GROWN-UPS... which means that Smeyer must be deliberately making everyone else act like annoying 12-year-olds.

But I don't like them. Why? 

1. They're boring. 
2. They uphold the misogynistic ideal of "woman as subservient housewife who is just there to support the man and never have a thought in her pretty little head." 
3. They're both creepy.

Anyone who has the patience and emotional capacity to listen to me talk badly about books probably has noticed that I make a lot of jokes about Carlisle being a pederast. I wouldn't make those jokes if he hadn't chosen a pretty teenage boy to be his life companion. Remember, he was a doctor in a major urban hospital during a plague, yet he found no pretty young ladies to make into his life companion. He chose a teenage boy, whom he then forced into vampirism, and whisked away to a secret place so nobody would know what he did. Are you creeped out yet?

If not, there's Carlisle using his, Esme's and EDWARD's name for their little made-up corporation, like they're a ménage à trois. And having their bedroom right next to his, being the only ones on the whole floor. And the fact that of all his "children," Edward is the only one he waxes lyrical about. And if we're counting the movies...

Remember: turning someone into a vampire is supposed to be a metaphor for sex. Even after marriage, Bella and Edward don’t have that experience, but Carlisle DOES turn Edward. So yeah, my comments about him being a pederast? THEY ARE SUPPORTED BY THE TEXT. I don't think Smeyer meant to do that, since her vampires are "perfect," and Carlisle seems to be her Vampire Joseph Smith analogue. Plus, she doesn't want to acknowledge any sexuality except super-ultra-squeaky-clean heteros, which makes it especially funny when she keeps accidentally implying that Carlisle is secretly trying to tap that nice Edward bod.

It doesn't just apply to Carlisle. One of his buds, Amun, kidnapped and forcibly turned ANOTHER pretty teenage boy whom his wife is extremely jealous of, but she tolerates his presence because her husband is more interested in the boy than in her. Sound familiar?

I can only assume that Esme was introduced to make it seem that Carlisle was totally not gay and/or having sex with his "son," and to maintain the whole perfect nuclear family thing that every single social gathering must be modeled on. But Esme is creepy too. I've touched briefly on her weird, weird behavior before, but the more I think about it...

First, backstory: before she became a vampire, Esme was unhappily married to an asshole that she ran away from, and she had a baby who died a few days later. So she tried to kill herself, and was turned into a vampire by Carlisle because... well, she'd fallen in love with him when she was a teenage girl. Another "father/daughter" romantic relationship... ew.

So now, because her only biological child is long-dead, Esme has the other Cullens as her surrogate children and accepts Bandage as a new "child" even before it's decided that Bear will join them. This sounds okay at first. Then... you sort of realize that Esme is actually YOUNGER than at least half of her "children," and that ALL of them are grown adults... and they were all grown adults when she MET them.

Isn't that kind of weird?

The answer is yes. It is weird. It is very weird to "adopt" fully grown people who are only slightly younger physically than you, and treat them like your actual children. And while I might be able to swallow this if she were physically the same age but much older chronologically, or substantially older physically... it becomes downright bizarre when you consider that she isn't. Physically, she's maybe five or six years older than most of her "children," and not much older chronologically. And what really creeps me out is... this is not an "act" for the purpose of blending in. She is regarded as if she were their actual mom, and acts like it too.

And it's not like these were lonely orphans who might cling to Esme as the mother figure they've never had. Breakfast, Edward, Rosalie and Emmett all had their own families whom they presumably loved. Bowl has parents. Edward had parents. Rosalie had parents, brothers and a fiance. Emmett had a huge family that he apparently loved a lot. 

So why the hell would they just accept being "adopted" by Esme and Carlisle, and accept them as parents? Especially since Esme does this before actually having a reason to think they'll join the cult?

When you add in the loss of Esme's baby and her inability to have another biological child... it makes Esme seem less like a font of maternal love... and more like one of those sad crazy women who snatch babies at the supermarket so they can be a "mommy." Except she tries to "collect" grown people who had their own lives until Carlisle isolated them from everyone they knew and loved.

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Inconsistent Sex Metaphors

Vampirism is a metaphor for sex. 

Now, I don't have a problem with Smeyer using vampirism and blood-drinking as metaphors for sexual activity. That is something that authors have been doing since the 19th century - Carmilla was used to depict a lesbian/bisexual vampire. Dracula was pretty obvious about blood-drinking = sex, some bisexuality and the title character even metaphorically raped Mina Harker. Interview With The Vampire used it as a metaphor... again for same-sex attractions and bisexuality.

And in Twilight, it's a metaphor for sex too. Straight, missionary, lights-off sex only, of course. Edward won't turn Bella until they're married, because he's old-fashioned and crap like that, so Bella has to marry him (horrors!). And it's also extended to the Denali sisters, where sex and vampiric feeding are one and the same until they convert to Mormonism become pseudo-vegetarians. And of course, Bella wants Edward to take her metaphorical virginity instead of Alice. . 

Think about it. Edward doesn't just have the cravin' to drink Bella's blood. We're explicitly told that he wants to KILL her. A lot. In other words, Smeyer is metaphorically equating sex with death. Heck, even the VICTORIANS weren't that bad, and they thought sex was the most shameful despicable thing ever.

It's redundant. Le Fanu, Stoker and Rice all used vampirism to depict sexuality that was not okay in the time, whether it's ANY sexuality in the Victorian era (Stoker) or bisexuality in the Victorian era/1980s (Le Fanu, Rice). But Smeyer lives in the 21st century, no matter how much she clearly wishes she lived back when women were chattel and had no rights. For the most part, it's kind of unnecessary to pretend that sex doesn't exist and only express it through some non-threateningly fictional act like vampiric blood drinking. I mean, one of the most lauded networks in existence has a boob/sex quota for almost every show they have.  So no, Smeyer doesn't need to veil this in metaphor.

But it's not just kind of useless, it's downright redundant. Why? Because sexuality (or a bland, flavorless knockoff brand of sexuality) is actually dealt with OPENLY in the series, in Smeyer's really prudish teehee-don't-say-the-S-word way. Bella and Edward also have to negotiate sex and when they're going to have it and when they AREN'T going to have it, etc etc. And Edward's attitude towards sex and becoming a vampire is pretty much the same.

And finally... because it's inconsistent. Consider this: Edward and Boise have the whole vampirism/sex metaphor thing going... fine, okay. Redundant as it is, it's a classic metaphor. But... we're not meant to extend the metaphor beyond hetero married sex. The metaphor begins there, and STOPS there.

Consider:

1. Bella is assaulted and bitten by James. Apparently we're not meant to interpret this as a metaphorical rape, the way Stoker did. She doesn't even suffer trauma from it. 

2. The Cullens drink blood from animals. Does that count as bestiality?

3. The fact that forcing someone to be a vampire is not really seen as a big deal. EVER. 

4. Vampiric bites are NOT interpreted as sexual if they occur between people of the same sex.

5. Carlisle has that highly romanticized story about turning a dying Edward into a vampire and carrying him off to be his life companion. But it's a FATHERLY kind of rape. 

6. Alice offers to turn Beaver into a vampire. Again, we're not supposed to interpret this as anything sexual. It barely even seems like a friendly gesture as much as "I'm sick of Edward whining."

So vampirism is a metaphor for sex... but only when it applies to hetero married people. ???

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The Too-Straight Love Triangle

I know I've already ranted about the strong bisexual vibes of this series with no actual acknowledgement of the non-straight people of the world. But it makes even less sense when you consider the gross and weird love triangle.

Okay, Bongo lusts after Edward. Edward lusts after Bandit. Jacob also lusts after Beam. And Bean, in defiance of the You-Are-Asexual-Except-For-Your-Troo-Luv rule, lusts after Jacob. Got that? It's a simple enough love triangle that spewed out a thousand more bad love triangles in bad supernatural fiction.

But then Breaking Dawn ... hoo boy. 

Yes, in Breaking Dawn we discover that Jacob's happiness-inducing personality and the days he spent getting to know Bonett weren't the REAL reason either of them liked each other. How silly, to think that spending time around each other has anything to do with love! No, they only liked each other because Jacob could sense that an ovum in Boomerang's ovary was going to be his true love someday. And in turn, that ovum was manipulating Bangkok's emotions.

Got that? Let me repeat. A gamete, a single cell, that doesn't even have the full genetic information of a human being, is capable of CONTROLLING THE EMOTIONS AND INFLUENCING THE BEHAVIOR OF TWO PEOPLE. 

It kind of blows your mind how stupid that is. And of course, we have a woman being literally controlled by her reproductive organs. Of course. Because she hasn't become infertile perfect and sparkly yet. And it suggests that if Jacob had screwed Burlington, he might have ended up ditching her to be in love with his own kid because “sOuLmAtE TrUmPs aLL.

But on topic, this is handled the same way Smeyer handles everything else: half-assed, sexually-repressed and without any kind of logical thought. Because she doesn't actually think about how this works. Think about it: if Bridge's ovum is capable of forcing Jacob and Blade to feel sexual and emotional attraction to one another because it will one day form half of his Forever And Ever Soulmate... shouldn't the same apply to Edward too?

I mean, Edward is producing the single sperm cell that will one day be half of Jacob's Forever And Ever Soulmate, just as Bella is producing the egg. They have the exact same amount of input into the human genetic code. So logically, Jacob should feel the same overwhelming attraction to Edward, and Edward should be controlled into loving him by the contents of his testicles. Which I'm pretty sure you can find on a million slash fanfics.

And lest anyone claim that Edward hadn't produced that sperm cell and THAT is why... remember, he meets Jacob on his wedding night, shortly before he abuses and rapes lays with Bella. So yes, he should have the same effect on Jacob that Bella does. And according to Smeyer, her vampires don't change and have NO bodily functions, so the sperm should have been there all alone.

Maybe all the animosity between Edward and Jacob is basically a couple of biphobic guys insisting, "NO HOMO! NO HOMO!" way too hard, and compensating with extreme nastiness to hide their secret attraction to each other. Makes much more sense than the alternative.

And this: the male gamete is the one that determines the sex of the child, not the female. The ovum has no input on the child's gender. So... Jacob would have been destined to fall in love with Hellspawn Resume... if she had been a boy.

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Science, Because It Does, in Fact, Matter

Maybe I'm expecting too much, but I am amazed by the constant scientific failure in these books. It's weird to pick on that, but I just keep boggling at how many times basic errors are made that could have been easily edited out.

• A species with 25 pairs of chromosomes COULD NOT reproduce with humans. 

• Extra chromosomes do not give you superpowers. They give you birth defects.

• And logically that means that the vampire "venom" is infiltrating and REWRITING THE DNA of every single cell in the human body. 

• Smeyer presents lycanthropy as being a Y-linked condition... which is extremely unlikely because Y-linked conditions are rare. 

• Smeyer refers to a new moon as an eclipse. No. It's not.

• The insistence that vampires are capable of making a car instantly slow down or change direction because... they have better reflexes. Never mind that a car will just start skidding if you do that... and that two tons of steel and plastic will NOT change direction when it's hurtling at a hundred miles an hour. 

• Venom does not transform anything. Ever. If it transforms something into something else, then it's not venom.

• Venom also cannot replace ALL bodily fluids. Bodily fluids are different for a reason. Mucus and bile do very different things. So do tears and blood. Replacing any of these things with another fluid would probably either kill you or at least leave you in agonizing pain.

• Apparently Twilight vampires do not have a functioning digestive system... which makes you wonder exactly where the blood goes. There is NO explanation for this.

• Nothing in blood smells like freesias.

• Nothing in the body smells like freesias.

• Freesias do not make carnivores hungry.

• The blood of animals is not that biologically different from humans. Yes, it's not so similar that it could be transfused or anything, mainly because of antigens, but there's not a huge difference in structure and content between them. So there's no reason why all animal blood causes golden eyes, and human blood causes red eyes.

• The Sparklepires have nice even human teeth instead of fang    you know what happens when you try to bite someone with those teeth? All of them will bite and cut at the same time. Actual blood-drinking creatures have FANGS so they don't cause their prey to instantly spray blood all over.. 

• And of course, the werewolves have high body temperatures ALL THE TIME. Which of course causes no damage to the body whatsoever. And despite being only about 109 degrees Fahrenheit, they apparently RADIATE such strong heat that they insta-melt all snow floating around them. Because that is apparently how heat works, which is why campfires regularly turn snow to rain because OH WAIT NO THEY DON'T.

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Silly S3x...

You know, if I didn't know better, I would think that Smeyer was an 11 year-old who thinks dogs poop out their babies. There are SO many weird, inaccurate things written about sex and pregnancy in these books, it's almost mind-blowing.

One thing is the idea of Edward having all his fluids replaced by venom. If Edward ejaculates venom, shouldn't he have turned Botany into a vampire as soon as he had sex with her? 

Speaking of sex with vampires... who in hell would want to? These vampires have "crystalline" skin and are ice cold. Would you like to stick a frozen popsicle covered in icy sandpaper into your hooha over and over and over? Would you like to repeatedly jam your pp into a rough, prickly hole in the ice? That sounds as pleasurable as... well, attacking your genitals with ice and gravel.

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.... And Silly Pregnancy

Can you believe that Stephenie Meyer has multiple children? I barely can. In the books:

• Stephenie Meyer apparently thinks that babies start breathing as soon as the mother goes into labor. If that were so, then the human race would be extinct because... labor takes a f*cking long time, and it would mean that every single baby would be dead by the time the mother squirted it out. Babies receive oxygen through the placenta until they are actually born, when they start breathing with their lungs.

• One of the ongoing dilemmas in Breaking Dawn is that the moment Edward finds out Ball is pregnant, he decides she's getting an abortion in his usual enlightened way. He keeps pestering her about aborting their hellspawn until it snaps her spine like a twig.

Moral issues aside, how would they do that? We're told constantly that the Sparklepires are totally indestructible, so exactly how would one abort a vampire baby? Certainly none of the usual methods would work! And I'm pretty sure any method that WOULD kill a vampire baby would... um... probably kill Barney too. Which defeats the whole purpose.

To make the whole thing even sillier, we're also told that the placenta is rock-hard... which would make it very difficult for Bella to walk. Or breathe. Or not have organs smashed into paste. So.... that adds an extra level of "nope, not happening." I don't know why people act like this is even an option.

• The demands for an abortion are even more bizarre because Blue is apparently at full term when Edward has to chew their hellspawn out of her belly. And yet until the very last minute, Mr. Perfect keeps trying to emotionally blackmail her into aborting the kid, instead of... I dunno... having Carlisle give her a Caesarian.

I mean, God forbid that they extract the perfectly-viable baby from her in a controlled, low-risk operation, with anesthetic and a trained MD. They have to WAIT for her to go into labor, spew blood and have her spine snapped in half... and THEN extract the kid in a rushed, incredibly uncontrolled Caesarian done by a noob who does it WITH HIS TEETH. It's like Smeyer doesn't know that there are options other than full-term vaginal delivery, or that high-risk pregnancies aren't usually allowed to go all the way to that point. Any doctor with more brains than a rock would have opened Bella up and yanked out the kid as soon as it was viable. 

Also, when Bella is pregnant, she is sick because her hellspawn wants blood. So they give her a sippy cup filled with blood, and suddenly she's just fine. Uh, babies don't get food from the stomach. The way it works is that: 

1. Food is eaten by the mother

2. The food is absorbed into the small intestine's villi, as usual.

3. The baby absorbs nutrients from the bloodstream through the placenta.

So... if the baby needed ANYTHING, it would just suck it directly from Bracket via the placenta. So I could understand giving her a transfusion, but having her DRINK it is idiotic.

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The Good Ol' Days

A lot of people out there have a nostalgia for the "good ol' days." They may be the "good ol' days" of their youth (which is why you hear older people talking about the good ol' days of the 1950s... sexism, gay-bashing and political oppression :D) or the "good ol' days" of a time they never lived in, but have heard glowing stories about how great it was back then for someone.

I don't really buy into this. Every era of human history, no matter how glamorous or inspiring, has a dark underbelly that people don't want to think about. Think of the young people of the 1940s, who fought against Hitler's tyranny and were called the "Greatest Generation"... except that period and the subsequent 1950s had a lot of political corruption, racism, and sexism. And not everyone from then was originally anti-Hitler and pro-save-France-and-England-and-stuff. All time periods are like that - the chivalric medieval periods, the Regency period, ancient civilizations like Egypt or Greece. 

So it automatically rubs me the wrong way when people describe Edward Cullen as "old-fashioned," like that's a good thing and “don't you dare question it”. The assumption is that "old-fashioned" means something good, presumably that he has better manners or something like that. The problem is "old-fashioned" usually has some nasty side-effects. 

Now, I'm not saying that these periods have no merit. They do. Ancient Greece was one of the most disgustingly sexist civilizations in human history (f*ck Aristotle), and one city practiced regular infanticide, but they also produced great political, artistic and philosophical advances that are still relevant to us today. So it's not about pretending that old things are BAD because they were flawed, but you need to not pretend that the bad didn't exist. And when people hold up "old-fashioned" as being a virtue... they're doing just that.

Let's look at when Edward was born. He was born during the Progressive Era of American history, which roughly lines up with the start of the Edwardian era, and he became a vampire around the end of World War I. In other words, he came directly after the Victorian/Gilded Age period of history, which had a lot of great social achievements... and massive problems.

Side note: I think I've hinted enough that I think Edward is a sexist piece of shit. More precisely, he embodies a lot of the worst aspects of Victorian attitudes towards women. Women are inferior to men intellectually, they are supposed to be completely sexually ignorant, and attitudes from Ancient Greece were used to explain why they shouldn't do anything that men did. Two words: wandering womb. 

And Edward not only has these problematic attitudes, but he can't even fake the politeness that men were expected to show women of their own social class. He mocks and laughs at Bella all the time, including when she fell into a mud puddle. He tried to physically attack a little girl vampire. And oh yeah, his response to being told "no" by a woman is a stream of shrieked profanity. That’s definitely my dream man.

He also regularly shows that he has great liking for Emmett, who is a meathead with a fight boner, while heaping scorn on Rosalie for no particular reason. It comes across as disliking that Rosalie says what she thinks and does what she wants instead of smiling and saying nothing like Esme, or usually agreeing with him like Alice.

And his desire to marry Brace is often held up as a shining example of old-fashioned values.... except that when he was alive, marriage basically meant that a woman became an appendage to a man, with no legal rights of her own. Now, this had obviously changed a lot during Edward's lifetime, but can you imagine someone THIS hostile to women being supportive of women's suffrage? I can't.

In short, Edward's "old-fashioned" attitudes to women mean that he wants them to shut up, smile, and support the bois.

Another side note: He's also probably really racist. I'm not saying all rich white people from back then were racist, but that life kinda sucked if you weren't a WASP. Which Edward was.

This was a period where black people were lucky to be counted as second-class citizens, anti-Semitism was a cherished form of bigotry in many upper-crust people, and (as weird as it seems now) Italian and Irish people were also treated like trash to a somewhat lesser, but still notable, degree. Yes, apparently being descended from one Northern European island was good, but it was bad to be descended from its neighbor. Edward was a WASP from a moderately wealthy background and implied upper-class origins, which means he pretty much was on top of the world.

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I Need Some Action!

I've been handling some heavy analytical topics, so I'm going to deal with something that just bugs the hell out of me. Why are there no fights in this series? Or at least, nothing we get to read about:

• Twilight: The climactic battle between vampires happens while Beetle is semiconscious on the floor, keeping her eyes closed the whole time. 

• New Moon: An awesome scene of several werewolves ripping a vampire limb from limb totally happened, but we don't get to see it. Edward also attacks a little girl, but there's no fight because he immediately gets owned without even a hit.​​

• Eclipse: Baloney barely seems to know what's going on during the one fight scene she's present for, and all she can do is be a mild distraction. That epic clash between the newborns and the vampire/werewolf army? Who cares?

• Breaking Dawn: The most notoriously anticlimactic grand finale since the Matrix trilogy finished. Sadly, this one doesn't end with the main couple dying. No, the Cullens gather a bunch of mindless followers so they can face off against the Volturi and have a chance at actually triumphing in a battle.... only to have Alice and Jasper show up and announce that there's no reason to fight. So everyone goes home, allegedly because the Volturi are suuuper-scared of Bella's Magic Love Shield and don't wanna fight anymore. Nothing is resolved.

Look, I know this series is first and foremost a romance. So it's not surprising that the main thing that's going on is romance, and more romance, and bad romantic dialogue, and plot is a distant fourth. I don't like romance that much. Does it show? I can enjoy it if it's well-written and has a plot and good characters, but romance alone is boring to me. I like books where robots beat monsters with boats, people have actual personalities, and there’s actually character development with maybe a touch of fluff to top it all off.

The point is, I understand that a romance series won't have a huge amount of action, just like how an action movie won't have a huge amount of romance, but this is billed as a "saga." A saga is a long, complicated story with lots of characters, usually with a heroic focus. The Twilight series has villains, armies, alleged good guys, evil plots, revenge, murder, dismemberments, blood feuds - all the ingredients of a story that should have at least SOME action. And there IS action. A fair amount of action. There are actual action scenes where people are hurt and die. And you know what? WE DON'T SEE IT. Because Smeyer hates me and wants me to suffer, she always carefully averts her eyes whenever something un-prettyful and unromantic might be happening.

And lest anyone think this is my personal pet peeve, consider the movies. ALL of them had to amp up the action just so they'd have something, ANYTHING to keep the audience from slitting their wrists. Both Twilight and New Moon had extra fights that were not in the book, and Eclipse added as many fight scenes and newborn army scenes as they were able to do. Breaking Dawn? They added in a full battle scene as the grand climax of the movie.

And it wasn't a great battle scene, especially since I think there were about two dozen people on either size, and the "battle" mostly involved running across a field. But you know what? It was SOMETHING unpredictable and action-packed, until they revealed it was all a vision of a possible future courtesy of Alice, and nothing actually happened. In fact, there are parts of the movies where you can almost feel the directors straining because they want to make a battle scene so badly.

Really, Smeyer's resistance to ever writing action scenes is weird to me. She clearly has come up with scenarios that involve violence and action, but she doesn't want anyone to see them. The one action scene Bandaid is present for is so awkwardly written that I suspect the editor made her add the scene in, because "Bella swoons and is conveniently unconscious while the evil vampires are killed" is a lame finale for even this series.

Personally, I think she doesn't think women should watch or enjoy action/violence. Her female characters react to the idea of anyone fighting with fluttering, swooning dismay, because someone might get HURT and Proper Women are super-compassionate and gentle and useless. So I think she thinks that women should be reading sappy romances and dreaming about finding a husband and having a kid or 6. Not watching movies with explosions and action.

Excuse me. I have to go watch a robot's arm sprout a sword so it can slice the wings off a Lovecraftian clone monster from another dimension, while reading a book about a lesbian aristocrat who works for a secret society of warrior women. Because that’s real literature.

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Mind-Reading is for Lazy Writers

Ever watched the movie X-Men: First Class? It's about the youthful misadventures of Professor X and Magneto, and how they started the X-Men before splintering off into two groups. Professor X, in case you aren't a comic-book nerd, is a telepath. He can read the minds of everyone around him unless they take measures (like Magneto's silly-looking helmet) to shield their minds from him.

And one of the interesting things about the movie is that X is depicted as... stunted, socially. He's charming and able to communicate with people effectively, but he seems to have some problems with basic empathy because... he's grown up able to read minds. He hasn't had to develop the ability to understand people's feelings, emotions and their desire for privacy, because he can just read their thoughts and know instantly. And he has few moral compunctions about violating others' privacy, unless they specifically demand it.

And Edward is more of the same. He also can read minds... but since this is a BOOK series and not comic-books or movies or some other visual medium... it doesn't work just for plot convenience or characterization. No, it exists for lazy, lazy writing.

As a result, Edward is just as socially stunted as X... no, he's actually worse, because he can't even fake normal social skills for more than a few seconds. We NEVER see him interact with people in a semi-normal manner for even a few minutes, which is presumably why he spends so much time brooding in corners. If he had to have a real conversation with anyone, he'd be exposed as the weirdo he is.

And if you don't believe me, look at how Edward treats Bella when he wants to know things about her. He doesn't converse with her like a normal person - he interrogates her on shallow trivia for the next few days.

It's also lazy because it allows Smeyer to not have to develop any characters. Since Edward is "perfect" and has no unworthy biases or nastiness (in her eyes), he can just notify us about whether a character is good or bad, what their motivations are, and so on. There's no need to develop them, or have anyone's facets and complexities slowly revealed throughout the story. Who needs dimensions and depth when a character can just SAY that they are this or that?

Also, magine a person is kind and unselfish and gives their money to charity and volunteers at homeless shelters, helps their parents constantly, and is generally nice to people, but that person briefly thinks of Bento as a b!tch while in the cafeteria. According to Smeyer, NONE of that matters, because Edward read their mind and knows that that ONE THOUGHT (which, of course, is purely based on jealousy and not a justifiable dislike) is all that defines their character. And we're meant to actually think it is.

And thirdly, it's also lazy because it doesn't mean that Edward is fascinated by Box for what she is. He's only interested in her because he can't read her mind. He's like a bratty little kid who wants to look inside a wrapped present and becomes obsessed with it, but only because he's not allowed to know what it is, not because he actually thinks it is something he'll want. And like a little kid, he'd probably be really disappointed when he finds out it's a callus remover for Mommy.

I know that obviously Edward has other reasons to be interested in Barley, such as her weird flowery smell or her alleged attractiveness. But those are not about Brexit as a person. They are purely physical, and so the reactions to them are purely physical. Edward's inability to read Bugle's thoughts is the only aspect of her that he finds interesting personally, because it's such a novelty to him that he can't simply read her immediate thoughts and decide that she's not worthy of him. 

And before anyone says, "Well, he could have found out she's super-deep and smart by reading other people's minds.” 

Just don't. He doesn’t do that in Midnight Sun, and there's never the slightest hint that he does. Also, Barrette doesn't talk to other people, so they would have no way of knowing that she's roughly as deep and intelligent as a mud puddle. 

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Small Kids and Animals

This is one of those things that hit me when I was reading Eclipse: there are no children or animals.

I don't think I've ever seen a series with such weirdly implicit hostility towards animals. I fully admit that I might be wrong and perhaps Stephenie Meyer just loves all of God's furry/feathered/scaled animals. But, well, when people love animals, that generally comes out somehow in their books. 

For instance, I can make a wild guess and say that JRR Tolkien was very, very fond of animals. His story is not very animal centric, with only horses appearing through most of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. But consider that those horses are pretty much all named - Fatty Lumpkin, Hasufel, Asfaloth, Arod, and so - and their well-being is of interest to the characters (like Legolas soothing a frightened Arod). Shadowfax is the smartest and coolest horse alive. Theoden's horse Snowmane is given an honorable burial and carved gravestone. Hell, Bill the Pony has his own subplot about being rescued from an abusive master by the hobbits, and Tolkien made sure to give him. And the Rohirrhim - the closest to Tolkien's beloved pre-invasion Anglo-Saxon culture - are a society rooted in the love of their horses.

So I think we can assume that Tolkien loved animals by the way he wrote about them. By the same token, Stephenie Meyer almost NEVER writes about animals... at all. Not even in passing, and certainly no acknowledgement that they have personalities and likes and thoughts and experiences.

When do animals factor into the plot? When they're there to be killed brutally by vampires. 

Now, I am going to admit that I've read plenty of young adult books where animals played little or no part. But usually they do not incorporate animals for the sole purpose of having them be killed. But usually those authors aren't writing stories set in a temperate rainforest where the natural aspects of the environment are constantly emphasized. She's always babbling about plant life, but we never even hear about birds singing. In the small community of Forks or on the reservation, you'd think someone would have a pet dog?

But no, the only animals around that AREN'T pegged for death are actually the Native Americans, and only because three werewolves could kill a vampire. Which is also kinda racist. And another reason I think this may not be a misreading is because another thing is missing from the story.

Namely, CHILDREN. 

Like I've said before, you really wouldn't know that Stephenie Meyer is a mother of three just from her books, because these books  feel like the fantasies of someone who actually doesn't like kids very much. Or rather, likes them when they're perfectly behaved and always clean and reasonable. There are, as far as I can remember, only TWO children in the whole story. 

One of them exists just because Bella has to have a baby because she's a woman. The other one... exists as foreshadowing for the creepy pedo-Jacob subplot, so we'll know that imprinting extends to obsessing on toddlers.

I honestly don't remember any other children in the whole series, even as background characters. 

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I have other thoughts on this series, but I’ll rest my case for now. To rate it, I give it a 1/10, with the 1 being for the aesthetic-ness of the setting.