I wrote this for my school's newspaper... enjoy!
So listen, it is time we have a talk. There is an issue on campus I feel it is my duty as a concerned member of society to address. There is an epidemic so filthy that has spread itself across this beautiful campus—something grotesque that has marred the students and created an appalling mess in its wake. And no, I am not talking about another round of the Puma Plague.
I’m talking about this repulsive obsession everyone seems to have with Twilight.
That’s right. This is an intervention. I am sick and tired of seeing well-respected individuals reduce themselves to such smutty levels of ignorance. It is time we reclaimed our honour and return our lives to a state of normalcy that has nothing do to with glittery, sparkling vampires and jailbait werewolves.
Don’t try and deny it. On the nineteenth of November, almost the entirety of my facebook live feed consisted of people’s laments that they still had to wait another day to see the newest movie or people’s exclamations of joy because they were going to a midnight showing. It took all I could not to just vomit all over my keyboard. People I know, people I love and people I respect were losing their minds—and their dignity, for that matter—over this awful movie-adaptation of one of the worst book series ever written.
These movies have created a media frenzy and made quite a bit of money from ticket sales. Why, I wonder, when ever single review I have seen has said it is downright awful? For the same reason Miley Cirus has an album that has gone triple platinum. Because corporate monsters live to make money at the expense of naive, gullible and tasteless tweens who can control their parents’ pocketbooks; that’s why.
But wait! To make this sad story even more grotesque, these films have also taken advantage of another appalling demographic—that of the American housewife. A friend of mine recounted her experience at the midnight showing of the film. She said there was a gaggle of older women sitting in front of her speaking quite candidly and explicitly about their feelings for the movie’s star, Taylor Lautner.
Lautner, who plays a topless werewolf in the movie, is an actor of only seventeen. That’s right, seventeen. More proof this Twilight crap has gotten out of hand: a 40-year-old woman approached Lautner and removed her underwear for him to sign. You read that right—removed her underwear! And, if that’s not wildly inappropriate enough, Lautner said that his name was printed on the aforementioned undergarment.
Now, some people will try to defend themselves by claiming a level of awareness that the movies are, in fact, steaming piles of elephant dung. However, they claim to only watch it because the books are so good, and they want to see them come to life.
Fail. That is still not okay. You want to know why these movies are steaming piles of elephant dung? Because the source material they were created from is also a hot mess of pachyderm poop.
In an interview with USA Weekend, prolific writer Stephen King was asked about Stephanie Meyer, the author of the Twilight books, and J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series. According to King, “Both Rowling and Meyer, they’re speaking directly to young people… The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good.”
I personally feel like if one of the most successful fiction writers of our generation says you suck at writing, there’s probably some truth in the statement somewhere. It’s like LeBron James telling you you’re bad at basketball. At that point, it may be advantageous for you to throw in the towel.
I have heard people claim that the books redefine vampire fiction and elevate the archetype to a new generation. Really? So, if you make something sparkle, it then becomes redefining. No, not only do they sparkle, but they all have special and unique superpowers, to boot. I’m sorry. Let’s be real. What Meyer has done is taken something established, and trivialized it to appeal to an entirely inappropriate audience.
Also, from what I can tell, the books are just overindulged pieces of smut you would find on some sleazy fan fiction website written for little tweeny-geeks to get off to. I’m sorry if you find that vulgar, but seriously. Every male character in the story is hyper-exaggerated and superfluously described to be ideal in all physical appearance. The female character is an emotionless snot who obsessively swoons over the aforementioned super males and four annoying books of worthless storytelling later, the vampire eats the baby out of her stomach.
He lay perfectly still in the grass, his shirt open over his sculpted, incandescent chest, his scintillating arms bare. His glistening, pale lavender lids were shut, though of course he didn’t sleep. A perfect statue, carved in some unknown stone, smooth like marble, glittering like crystal.
That is an excerpt from one of the books that I copied from a website—I refuse to even touch one of the miserable books, let alone read enough of it to quote it. However, reread that little passage. Do you remember writing sentences like that? I know I do; except I wrote like that when I was in third grade and discovered what a thesaurus was! There is no need for anyone to use that many adjectives, especially because so many them are ignorantly unnecessary.
I now also need to stop for a minute because I’m going to have people defending it jump down my throat. “What gives you the right to say these things about the book if you’ve never even read them?!” Well, let me just say this. I don’t need to snort a line of cocaine to realize that it’s a bad life decision; I don’t need to put my face into a pot of boiling water to realize that would hurt my face. I have this mental capacity that I’ve been developing all my life—it’s called common sense!
I don’t need a degree in English literature to realize that everything about these Twilight books are nothing but worthless. If it walks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it’s a duck.