Rammi

I found this on Facebook.

honksfortonks:

Okay, Twilight is revered as the worst fiction book to hit the shelves in the past few years because of the sheer number of twitard fangirls who think that Edward is the best thing ever. But this is not a reason to hate twilight. This is actually Twilight’s greatest triumph over teenage girls.

People often pick at Twilight for having a Mary Sue character and the over-saturation of description of Edward’s perfect looks. This is in fact not a badly written book, but a satirical attack on the entire teenage culture of girls. Take note that the main character is a teenage girl. Despite Edward’s obvious flaws (which we’ll get to later), she falls entirely in love with him and believes that he is a destined part of her life. This is an attack on the nature of teenage relationships and how quickly an infatuation is taken to be true love and is treated as such. The over-descriptive writing is emphasising teenage girls’ dangerous obsession with boys and the previous point of over-the-top infatuation.

Haters also often mock the book, saying that Edward is a controlling boyfriend who is clearly manipulating Bella without any regard for her feelings. They also denounce him as a stalker. But they forget the writing style. When they say that nothing is added in first person and no emotion is displayed, they are entirely wrong. The whole point of the book is the first person view. Remember that the speaker is a teenage girl. She looks past his controlling nature and shrugs off his stalking, insisting that it’s true love. Mayer is not pandering to the teenage girls, she is attacking them.

Building on the last point, let’s look at New Moon. Bella is abandoned by her boyfriend, who removes all traces of his existence from her life, again demonstrating his controlling personality. Again, Bella does not notice this. In fact, even him telling her to get lost to her face isn’t enough to drive her away. She considers him to still be the boyfriend of her dreams, and even spurns the advances of many of her friends, telling herself that Edward is the only one for her and that he is better than everyone else. Bella jumped off a freaking cliff to hallucinate about him for [insert deity of choice]’s sake! She almost accepts Jacob, then Edward returns and she takes him back without a second thought. Meyer has gone beyond merely jabbing at teenage girls and is now grinding their culture with a millstone. She is mercilessly attacking their culture, parodying their gullible, accepting nature.

Bella constantly believes throughout the books that she is very intelligent, and better than everyone else at school. She constantly tells the reader that she isn’t interested in her classmates, and looks down upon them. They later resent her for choosing Edward, but Bella colours it in her favour. This is Meyer showing the effects of hormones on teenage girls, and how ridiculous the whole idea of drama is.

Of course, all of this must be very confusing when you realise that her later books show a happy ending for Bella and Edward. This is able to be explained. Meyer did not expect her satire to be taken seriously by the audience she set out to ridicule, but when it was, she decided to test their endurance. She builds up conflict that has no climax and makes a werewolf fall in love with a baby, all the while prattling on about the couple’s perfect love. She even makes Edward chew through Bella’s womb, and the fangirls still lap it up, provided there is purple prose about Edward’s perfect nature.

That is Twilight’s greatest victory. It has made the very people it set out to mock into a fanbase. The satirical, controlling boyfriend has become loved all over the globe. The fanbase couldn’t even see the true nature of the book when Meyer made the plot ridiculous. The movie got released and had a lead actor who hated the books, and the fanbase STILL loved him. Twilight didn’t only comment on the hormone-clouded teenage girl’s mind, it became an example of it.

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Patrick Larsen wrote this. He hits on a lot of fantastic points. :)