Twilight Series

[ButterflyWoman]

My daughter (who has informed me that she loved the Twilight series even though it's literary crap - and she has a degree in English, so she'd know ) shared this with me:

http://twilightsnarker.blogspot.com/

I thought I'd pass it on for posterity.

[CFTraveler]

That's what I'm talking about.
Sparklepire speeds.

Just bookmarking it for further reading.
http://twilightsnarker.blogspot.com/

[ButterflyWoman]

http://www.thesmokingjacket.com/enterta ... heat-sheet

The Definitive Twilight Parody Cheat Sheet

[Ouroboros]

Still to decry the church by turning heros into vampires is a strange assbackward step.

I don't have a hard time with understanding that, really. Having been raised as a hardcore non-denominational semi-evangelic Christian, I know how easy it is to romanticize and idolize the things that Christianity decries.

I heavily romanticized Lucifer in my mind...the Angel of Light, the one being brave enough to form and lead an opposition against the Tyrant God Yahweh. I loved inverted crosses and pentagrams, images of Baphomet and depictions of demons. Some of those still do have an aesthetic appeal to me, but as time goes on it gets easier to separate the emotional fulfillment of defying a former belief system from the actual intents and purposes of the symbols I turned to for comfort. I very rarely actually desire harm to another, and most imagery of that type is bound with the intent to inflict harm. Still, sometimes there's just no getting around the fact that evil can look REALLY awesome.

I've never read the Twilight series and do not plan to. Just commenting on that one aspect of things.

[TheLawOfOne]

I agree, I've gotten up to Eclipse too and I'm getting sick of this Bella character (modeled after the writer herself). I hope that teenagers don't look at her as a role model. Here is a list of things in these books which I think is messed up.

1. Love in these books is portrayed as an obsession, with quotes like "I can't live without you" and "You are my top priority" even over family. Like there is no other reason to live except for your perfect mate.
2. Bella uses her human friends at school. She never cares about what they talk about, she just lets them ramble on while she thinks of other things. She only hangs out with them when she needs something or when she doesn't have vampires to hang out with. She walks away from them mid-conversation or interrupts them to tell them she has to go.
3. Bella constantly lies to all her human friends and to her father.
5. Bella doesn't care about leaving her father behind to become a vampire. The excuse they give for this "Well, everyone will be dead in a decade anyways" lol
6. Bella uses Jacob with the pretense that he is "a friend". She constantly leads him on.
7. It seems like the moral of the story is diss all the human friends and family for the wealthy, beautiful, powerful people aka vampires.
8. 2 beautiful powerful men fighting for a dull girl, actually a bunch of vampires and werewolves protecting one girl because bad things always seem to happen to her. Classic damsel in distress story.

The problem with these books is that there are never any bad side effects to Bella's selfish behavior, almost as if the author thinks it's ok to be like this and act like this towards other people. Anyways, I'm not wasting my time with the last book. I was reading them because a friend was urging me to, and frankly I don't see what it the big deal.

[ThePoliteSkeptic]

To the original poster.

As a novelist, myself, I have to sympathize with Stephanie Meyer. I don't suspect she actually believes in vampires, and if the series were to be interpreted the way one might interpret a dream (and you can sometimes tell a lot about authors this way) it's about a girl who's out of place, that keeps falling headfirst into destructive relationships, and goes from being somewhat innocent to becoming the same as the monster she originally fell for, and becoming irreversibly alienated from her friends and family in the process. I've met women like this a couple of times, and it's a heart-breaker.

Good or bad, right or wrong, novelists write only what they can write, because writing fiction is like emptying out an old closet. You get what you get.

As for the publishers...

[CFTraveler]

http://www.robertisbothered.com/

[Korpo]

Hi.

and if the series were to be interpreted the way one might interpret a dream (and you can sometimes tell a lot about authors this way)

That makes an interesting connection with the literature interpretations we did at school. Of course, this only works if the author is a bit unconscious to the symbolism she or he choses. By just writing it out you get an interpretation of what was "in the closet." However, the more an author tries to intellectually control the process, the outcome and the reader, the more thinking mind, design and control is involved, the less this become true, I'd say. The cerebral kind of author is not as "interpretable" in this way, as he or she tries to control the message too hard.

In this case it is more a game of guessing what the author wanted to convey than what elements of her or his unconscious made it on the paper. So, an overdesigned book would yield less to interpretation of this kind. Dreams are never "overdesigned" from the way I see it. Whatever creates the dream does not have to "try hard," therefore it cannot try too hard. The creation of the dream is effortless, while too much effort in creation can create cerebral and sterile outcomes.

Anyway, I find the idea very interesting. Interpreting works of fiction in their symbolism and structure like dreams - very good idea.

Cheers,
Oliver

[ThePoliteSkeptic]

However, the more an author tries to intellectually control the process, the outcome and the reader, the more thinking mind, design and control is involved, the less this become true, I'd say.

There is also an assumption of self-awareness there, though. An individual can be very ignorant to even the most simple truth about themselves. For instance, it might take someone more than a month to realize that they've developed the habit of drinking every day. The mind can guard very firmly against the realization of some things. I expect that these things will still come through in a work of fiction that is over controlled.

[CFTraveler]

Gave it it's own thread in this same forum section.