My Twilight paper!
Dec. 15th, 2009 11:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
splinteredstarY'all wanted to see it, so here it is. I fear the formatting went a bit strange, but oh well.
Well, to me, armed with my years of experience writing and critiquing various forms of fiction, Twilight is a horrifically written story – and much of the problem lies in the heroine and focal point of the series, Bella Swan. She is called the heroine, but she almost single handedly twists the story out of any workable shape. Bella is magnificently unwise to the point of regularly and unnecessarily putting herself at personal risk; moreover, she gets a free pass form the universe and never has to suffer for her mistakes, and this has the effect of greatly weakening the story.
Twilight, for those who do not know, is the story of Bella Swan and how she falls in love with a pretty vampire boy named Edward. Edward is a vampire that refuses to drink human blood, and he is a member of a makeshift family of vampires that includes two sisters, Rosalie and Alice, and two other brothers, the super strong Emmett and the young, still bloodthirsty Jasper. Somehow, Bella finds a place for herself in this mixture of people.
Bella is – according to her creator, Meyer, in the prose – selfless and clumsily endearing. She seems to almost be the classical good-girl type, almost, all innocent and oblivious – like a kitten tripping over her own feet or a lamb made out of legs more than anything else. She is supposed to be pure and humble, and somehow different, more mature, than from the other people her age and unable to connect to anyone ‘normal’. She is presented as a female ideal, and her special, natural perfection, makes every boy she meets fall head-over-heels for her.
Despite this portrayal as some sort of Disney princess, Bella is incredibly reckless. No, let me rephrase. Bella Swan is an idiot.
Now, Bella’s idiocy is far reaching and overarching, with numerous examples in nearly every chapter in every book. It is an essay in and of itself. However, since this is, after all, an analysis of the strength of the story let us focus on the stupidity that drives the plot. Namely, the foolishness that is Bella’s incredibly hasty and borderline suicidal relationship with Mr. Sparkles himself, Edward Cullen.
…Fan girls, please listen to me before you break out the flamethrowers.
With four books and the half draft of Midnight Sun behind us, we can see that Edward is indeed a sparkly white knight, perfect – at least supposedly - for Bella in every way. But if hindsight is 20/20, the reader’s perspective is often even better. Going into this relationship Bella has absolutely no reason to expect the squeaky clean, perfect boyfriend that she ends up having for eternity.
What did she have reason to expect, then?
Well, she eventually realizes that she is involved with a vampire. The vampire most familiar to the Western world, and the one many American vampires are based off of, is Count Dracula. Even if Bella had never seen any vampire movie or read any vampire book, the basic information about Dracula would have been absorbed into her mind by sheer force of cultural knowledge. She clearly has heard some of the basic facts, once asking if Edward would turn into a bat (Meyer, 131).
So she expects that she was getting into a relationship with a classical, Dracula-style vampire. Dracula, for the few that are not familiar with the story, involves a distinctly sparkle-less vampire count stalking and murdering one young woman, turning her into a murderous monster herself. The vampire then begins to stalk the woman’s best friend, and nearly succeeds in killing her as well before he is killed and the woman’s soul is saved from the abyss of being a monster. (Stoker) This is what Bella apparently expects when she pursues this relationship.
Well, perhaps she has reason to expect something else – after all, she spends some time researching other kinds of vampires (Meyer, 65) and Dracula, for all his influence, is not the whole of vampirism. But with all her effort she only manages to find one kind of vampire that is not actively dangerous to humans. There is a reason for this.
Overwhelmingly, in almost every culture that has a vampire mythos – and the vast majority of them do – the vampire is a creature of evil and suffering. Their very definition is of something that preys on human beings in one way or another – either the common blood drinkers, to psychic vampires, to one particularly unique type that drinks the spinal fluid of the victim. (“Vampire”) There may be the occasional vampire that does not see humans as food, but odds are not in Bella’s favor.
Fictional and cultural vampires – and what other kind would Bella know, before she falls into Edward? – are, with very few exceptions not friendly. They see humans as prey and playthings –amusing snacks to be destroyed by the unstoppable power of the vampire whenever the vampire wishes. To expect a vampire to act otherwise without any safeguards in place is not only foolish but almost actively suicidal. Vampires are monsters.
Edward even tells her that he is a monster, and frankly of all people involved he should probably know. Edward tells her, again and again, to get away from him and protect herself from the monster that sleeps under his skin – the monster that thirsts for her blood and longs to destroy her soul. Of course, this was mixs in with friendly conversation and offers to take her on trips away from everyone she knows and trusts (Meyer, 41).
Fan girls, now you can ready the flame throwers. I will not be kind.
Edward is presented as the classic bad boy that every girl – supposedly – falls for at least once. He says that he’s not a hero, asking Bella once, “What if I’m the bad guy?” (Meyer, 45) He is dangerous, exotic and entrancing. And ‘dangerous’ is indeed the right word for this twisted romance.
Edward’s behavior is at best unsettling and at worst draped in the red flags of abuse and mental disorders. In her essay on the series titled, “A Dangerous Boy”, author Susan Vaught details how Edward displays almost all of the diagnostic criteria for Antisocial Personality Disorder (New Dawn) – a disorder present in 50% to 80% of incarcerated criminals (“Antisocial Personality Disorder). Of course, there is no reason for Bella to know how to diagnose such a disorder – for all of her supposed maturity, she is no psychologist - but even she recognizes the red flags when they are waved in her face.
What does she do with them? She ignores them, or worse – uses them as decorations.
In chapter eight, when she finds out that Edward followed her to Port Angeles, Bella realizes that she should be worried about this and immediately dismisses the idea. She says, “I wondered if it should bother me that he was following me; instead I felt a strange surge of pleasure.” (Meyer, 83) In chapter fourteen, she finds out that Edward has been sneaking into her house and spying on her every night, she responds with…oh, let me just quote this.
“‘You spied on me?’ But somehow I couldn’t infuse my voice with the proper outrage. I was flattered.” (Meyer, 138)
Yes. She is flattered that he was spying on her. She is completely ignoring one of the greatest warning flags in a relationship and considering it a good thing. There is being obsessed with a guy, and then there is actively courting one’s own end. The girl – she is an idiot.
Well, okay. The girl may be few pints of blood short of a quart. That cannot be so bad, can it? People everywhere have to make do with what they have been given in life, and it is hardly fair and frankly rather mean to criticize a character simply for her…peculiar… sense of self-preservation. It is not like I can make a point of tearing apart every character or person that I come across that would not qualify for MENSA – where would I find the time to do anything else?
No, the problem is not in that she is an idiot – the problem is not even that she has a flaw of recklessness and obsession. Flaws are good things in a character – flaws are, more often than not, what starts the story in the first place. A great many stories, from after school specials to sweeping epics, have followed the basic plot line of, “The main character does something stupid, and then spends the story trying to correct or live with the consequences of the stupid act. Eventually the main character succeeds, and learns something about self in the process.”
Bella, unfortunately for her and the story, apparently gets to stop at the first step. Consequences do not seem to affect her – and if they do, then they are erased or ignored quite quickly. Nothing sticks to her, so nothing really matters. Events that should cause serious damage or at least make her pause and reconsider never do – and things that the reader is told will happen do not. The world she lives in lets her get away with it.
She manages to be unavoidably attractive to one of the few vampires in the entire world that is trying to not eat people. This one vampire that finds her unavoidably attractive and wants to eat her –only to learn how to resist the burning need he feels half way through the book. While I am mostly ignoring the later books for the sake of simplicity, the best example comes in the last book.
We spend four books hearing about all the horrible things that would happen when Bella was turned into a vampire: she would lose her soul, she would become a blood-crazed monster until she learned how to control the bloodlust – if she could – and she would have to break all contact with everyone who knows her in real life. We hear about how unstable newborn vampires are – especially the poignant example of the still blood thirsty Jasper, Edward’s brother who can barely control his desire for human blood.
If Bella was going to make this eternal choice, then it would hurt – as such severe choices with such dramatic consequences should. Changes and choices always involve giving up something – even if that something is simply tranquility. Instead, as Anne Ursu describes in her essay, “My Boyfriend Sparkles”,
But for other readers – usually, I have found the less experienced ones - that does not bother them as much. It is fantasy, after all. It does not matter if there is no realism – it is fiction! It does not have to make sense! Well then, if people do not care about it, why should it matter? Because the reason they do not care many times is because they do not know what could be. This story could be so much better than it is, but it is crippled by Bella’s free pass from everything.
Obviously, if it were not a big deal then I would not spend so much time and effort explaining how it is messing things up. I do not have that much spare time – I am a college student, after all. If this free pass she gets affects the story so much, then how? It does so in two ways, really.
First of all, it means that Bella never really has to struggle for anything. If she does struggle, then we do not see it. She has absolutely no objections to Edward being a vampire – in fact, she says that she does not care what he is without a moment of reflection or consideration. When she does complain, she appears self-centered and whiny – because the reader can tell that she never really has anything to complain about.
It is not just irritating – it is incredibly boring to read. If we know that she will survive – if we can see her free pass flashing in the background of the story – then there is no tension and no reason to fear. Why should we worry about her fate, if we know that things will work out in the end? Most authors do not have the guts to kill off the heroes, or even cause lasting damage to their precious creations – especially their first creations. It is so common in fiction that most readers come into a story, assuming that all of the heroes will come out mostly unscathed – unless, of course, the author demonstrates otherwise, something that Meyer never does.
Tension is interesting. Conflict is interesting. We need to know that there is risk, that there is a chance that there will not be a happily ever after for everyone we care about. Struggles are what make interesting stories, struggles and pain and hard choices. Bella never has to face a hard choice, and the things that should be hard choices are ignored or passed over – and what is left is much a much less interesting story than it could be. If it could be called a story at all, which some people do not.
Some argue, like a particularly eloquent member of a forum dedicated to trashing everything awful in the world, that what little tension and conflict does exist is only padding to turn it into something that looks like a story. The poster, who goes by Lysander, says, “They merely exist so that there is something between "Once upon a time, there was a girl who fell in love with a sparkly vampire", and "they lived happily ever after", which seems to be the actual story that Meyer wants to tell, but is hindered by the fact that it's not really a goddamn story (“Twilight: The Death of Feminism”).”
It does the character herself a disservice, as well. Struggle is how humans learn things about themselves and the world. Because Bella never has to make those hard choices and is never faced with a real challenge, she never learns anything about herself and she never grows as a person. Bella at the end of the book is much the same as she is at the beginning, except that she now has a pretty boyfriend. She has not changed as a person at all, which leaves the book feeling incomplete and frankly a bit pointless.
Why should we care about her at all? Why should we sympathize with a character that never grows or learns anything, but instead coasts through life on a sparkly wind? Most readers – even the ones that fawn desperately over one boy or the other – do not, and the fact that even fans do not care about the main character is, I think, rather telling.
So, to recap. Bella is an idiot for getting into a relationship with someone she knows is dangerous, and ignoring all of the very obvious warning signs in the relationship. The world she lives in make things easier for her for absolutely no good reason, and erases consequences so she has very little conflict. Because of this, there is little tension in the story and the entire story is rather bland and pointless – and Bella herself comes off as more whiny than sympathetic when she complains about her life.
No, my dear female cohorts. I did give the book a chance and I do understand the story – perhaps better than many of you do if your reactions are anything to go by. It is a bad story, and it would always be a bad story as long as Bella was written the way she is. She twists a story with some potential out of shape, into a vortex of tensionless blandness and smoldering irritation. The story has potential – but alas, few people will ever be able to imagine it and will think the mess that this is counts as good fiction.
Just think of what this story could be, in better hands. Imagine this story, instead of the one we ended up with: Bella moves to a new area to give her mother space, but is stung but the small-town cliques and the awkwardness of living with her distant and busy father. Her only respites in a lonely world are her dreams of her beautiful lab partner, but even that is cracked when she realizes that his erratic behavior and insane schedules make him a less than perfect fantasy partner. Still, she can’t seem to stop watching him – and she wonders if she’s imagining his lingering stares on her.
Then, one day after school – Edward snaps, unable to resist her blood calling to him. Fortunately, one of his siblings stops him in time, but the encounter leaves Bella injured and terrified, and Edward horrified at himself. Bella is furious and considers having her police chief father arrest Edward – but stops, confused by the grim resignation of Edward’s siblings and Edward’s obvious grief and self-hatred.
From there, things get even stranger. The Cullens – to Bella’s horror - argue over whether or not to just kill her there and remove the conflict, but Edward argues that she has done nothing to deserve that. Bella demands an explanation, and her half-formed suspicions are confirmed: They aren’t human. They’re vampires – vampires that try to avoid drinking human blood, but vampires nonetheless.
Even though, or perhaps because she is in on the secret, Bella tries to avoid them – both for the sake of her own safety and out of respect for Edward’s temptations. But wait - complications arrive in the form of another vampire with his eye on Bella, and this one has no objections to killing her. The Cullens try to protect her, and she finds herself struggling, torn between her sympathy for Edward and her fear of him, even as she dodges the wiles of the hunting vampire, even as Edward tries to avoid her and protect her at the same time – proving himself worthy of her loyalty while calling himself a monster.
That is a hastily thrown together premise by me, and I will be the first to tell you that I am not good at stringing together a plot. However, I think even that would have more tension and interest than the lackluster story we ended up with. There would be some sort of internal conflict in Bella, and much more action.
It is truly a pity, both for the sake of the story and the sake of the reader, that the story we ended up with was not so strong or interesting. Bella was too passive, too favored by the world, and she sapped all the potential out of it. Perhaps if she hadn’t – if she had reason to fear and if she did something about her fear – then there would be something other than this limp waste of print.
Bella Swan is a Whiny Idiot
Or,
You Think this is a Good Character?
The book Twilight is an international phenomenon, and everywhere I go I seem to run into the bloody thing. In high school classes almost all of my female friends tried to throw the books at me, sometimes repeatedly, and my quiet objections were always met with the belief that I had just not given it a chance, or that I did not understand it or was prejudiced against it somehow. It is a good story, I would hear over and over. Or,
You Think this is a Good Character?
Well, to me, armed with my years of experience writing and critiquing various forms of fiction, Twilight is a horrifically written story – and much of the problem lies in the heroine and focal point of the series, Bella Swan. She is called the heroine, but she almost single handedly twists the story out of any workable shape. Bella is magnificently unwise to the point of regularly and unnecessarily putting herself at personal risk; moreover, she gets a free pass form the universe and never has to suffer for her mistakes, and this has the effect of greatly weakening the story.
Twilight, for those who do not know, is the story of Bella Swan and how she falls in love with a pretty vampire boy named Edward. Edward is a vampire that refuses to drink human blood, and he is a member of a makeshift family of vampires that includes two sisters, Rosalie and Alice, and two other brothers, the super strong Emmett and the young, still bloodthirsty Jasper. Somehow, Bella finds a place for herself in this mixture of people.
Bella is – according to her creator, Meyer, in the prose – selfless and clumsily endearing. She seems to almost be the classical good-girl type, almost, all innocent and oblivious – like a kitten tripping over her own feet or a lamb made out of legs more than anything else. She is supposed to be pure and humble, and somehow different, more mature, than from the other people her age and unable to connect to anyone ‘normal’. She is presented as a female ideal, and her special, natural perfection, makes every boy she meets fall head-over-heels for her.
Despite this portrayal as some sort of Disney princess, Bella is incredibly reckless. No, let me rephrase. Bella Swan is an idiot.
Now, Bella’s idiocy is far reaching and overarching, with numerous examples in nearly every chapter in every book. It is an essay in and of itself. However, since this is, after all, an analysis of the strength of the story let us focus on the stupidity that drives the plot. Namely, the foolishness that is Bella’s incredibly hasty and borderline suicidal relationship with Mr. Sparkles himself, Edward Cullen.
…Fan girls, please listen to me before you break out the flamethrowers.
With four books and the half draft of Midnight Sun behind us, we can see that Edward is indeed a sparkly white knight, perfect – at least supposedly - for Bella in every way. But if hindsight is 20/20, the reader’s perspective is often even better. Going into this relationship Bella has absolutely no reason to expect the squeaky clean, perfect boyfriend that she ends up having for eternity.
What did she have reason to expect, then?
Well, she eventually realizes that she is involved with a vampire. The vampire most familiar to the Western world, and the one many American vampires are based off of, is Count Dracula. Even if Bella had never seen any vampire movie or read any vampire book, the basic information about Dracula would have been absorbed into her mind by sheer force of cultural knowledge. She clearly has heard some of the basic facts, once asking if Edward would turn into a bat (Meyer, 131).
So she expects that she was getting into a relationship with a classical, Dracula-style vampire. Dracula, for the few that are not familiar with the story, involves a distinctly sparkle-less vampire count stalking and murdering one young woman, turning her into a murderous monster herself. The vampire then begins to stalk the woman’s best friend, and nearly succeeds in killing her as well before he is killed and the woman’s soul is saved from the abyss of being a monster. (Stoker) This is what Bella apparently expects when she pursues this relationship.
Well, perhaps she has reason to expect something else – after all, she spends some time researching other kinds of vampires (Meyer, 65) and Dracula, for all his influence, is not the whole of vampirism. But with all her effort she only manages to find one kind of vampire that is not actively dangerous to humans. There is a reason for this.
Overwhelmingly, in almost every culture that has a vampire mythos – and the vast majority of them do – the vampire is a creature of evil and suffering. Their very definition is of something that preys on human beings in one way or another – either the common blood drinkers, to psychic vampires, to one particularly unique type that drinks the spinal fluid of the victim. (“Vampire”) There may be the occasional vampire that does not see humans as food, but odds are not in Bella’s favor.
Fictional and cultural vampires – and what other kind would Bella know, before she falls into Edward? – are, with very few exceptions not friendly. They see humans as prey and playthings –amusing snacks to be destroyed by the unstoppable power of the vampire whenever the vampire wishes. To expect a vampire to act otherwise without any safeguards in place is not only foolish but almost actively suicidal. Vampires are monsters.
Edward even tells her that he is a monster, and frankly of all people involved he should probably know. Edward tells her, again and again, to get away from him and protect herself from the monster that sleeps under his skin – the monster that thirsts for her blood and longs to destroy her soul. Of course, this was mixs in with friendly conversation and offers to take her on trips away from everyone she knows and trusts (Meyer, 41).
Fan girls, now you can ready the flame throwers. I will not be kind.
Edward is presented as the classic bad boy that every girl – supposedly – falls for at least once. He says that he’s not a hero, asking Bella once, “What if I’m the bad guy?” (Meyer, 45) He is dangerous, exotic and entrancing. And ‘dangerous’ is indeed the right word for this twisted romance.
Edward’s behavior is at best unsettling and at worst draped in the red flags of abuse and mental disorders. In her essay on the series titled, “A Dangerous Boy”, author Susan Vaught details how Edward displays almost all of the diagnostic criteria for Antisocial Personality Disorder (New Dawn) – a disorder present in 50% to 80% of incarcerated criminals (“Antisocial Personality Disorder). Of course, there is no reason for Bella to know how to diagnose such a disorder – for all of her supposed maturity, she is no psychologist - but even she recognizes the red flags when they are waved in her face.
What does she do with them? She ignores them, or worse – uses them as decorations.
In chapter eight, when she finds out that Edward followed her to Port Angeles, Bella realizes that she should be worried about this and immediately dismisses the idea. She says, “I wondered if it should bother me that he was following me; instead I felt a strange surge of pleasure.” (Meyer, 83) In chapter fourteen, she finds out that Edward has been sneaking into her house and spying on her every night, she responds with…oh, let me just quote this.
“‘You spied on me?’ But somehow I couldn’t infuse my voice with the proper outrage. I was flattered.” (Meyer, 138)
Yes. She is flattered that he was spying on her. She is completely ignoring one of the greatest warning flags in a relationship and considering it a good thing. There is being obsessed with a guy, and then there is actively courting one’s own end. The girl – she is an idiot.
Well, okay. The girl may be few pints of blood short of a quart. That cannot be so bad, can it? People everywhere have to make do with what they have been given in life, and it is hardly fair and frankly rather mean to criticize a character simply for her…peculiar… sense of self-preservation. It is not like I can make a point of tearing apart every character or person that I come across that would not qualify for MENSA – where would I find the time to do anything else?
No, the problem is not in that she is an idiot – the problem is not even that she has a flaw of recklessness and obsession. Flaws are good things in a character – flaws are, more often than not, what starts the story in the first place. A great many stories, from after school specials to sweeping epics, have followed the basic plot line of, “The main character does something stupid, and then spends the story trying to correct or live with the consequences of the stupid act. Eventually the main character succeeds, and learns something about self in the process.”
Bella, unfortunately for her and the story, apparently gets to stop at the first step. Consequences do not seem to affect her – and if they do, then they are erased or ignored quite quickly. Nothing sticks to her, so nothing really matters. Events that should cause serious damage or at least make her pause and reconsider never do – and things that the reader is told will happen do not. The world she lives in lets her get away with it.
She manages to be unavoidably attractive to one of the few vampires in the entire world that is trying to not eat people. This one vampire that finds her unavoidably attractive and wants to eat her –only to learn how to resist the burning need he feels half way through the book. While I am mostly ignoring the later books for the sake of simplicity, the best example comes in the last book.
We spend four books hearing about all the horrible things that would happen when Bella was turned into a vampire: she would lose her soul, she would become a blood-crazed monster until she learned how to control the bloodlust – if she could – and she would have to break all contact with everyone who knows her in real life. We hear about how unstable newborn vampires are – especially the poignant example of the still blood thirsty Jasper, Edward’s brother who can barely control his desire for human blood.
If Bella was going to make this eternal choice, then it would hurt – as such severe choices with such dramatic consequences should. Changes and choices always involve giving up something – even if that something is simply tranquility. Instead, as Anne Ursu describes in her essay, “My Boyfriend Sparkles”,
“As a vampire, Bella is suddenly gorgeous. And she is fast, graceful, strong – even stronger than Emmett. Where she was once helpless, she is suddenly given the power to save everyone. Every consequence we’ve been told to expect is negated: Being a newborn is not so bad for her, and Charlie gets to stay in her life because he doesn’t ask too many questions. The only real consequence for her is the inability to satisfy her sexual thirst for Edward – but even that will be okay, with time. At the end of the book, their relationship is “perfect,” Bella gets everything she wants, and this vampire love story does, impossibly, end happily ever after.” (New Dawn)
“Impossibly” is the right word, indeed. All of her suffering and all of her painful choices are erased easily, without lasting damage to her or her relationships. This is not merely unrealistic and ridiculous, though it most assuredly is. This is magnificently, fantastically sloppy writing.
Okay. She is an idiot and she gets away with it against all logic. To some people, that would be enough to doom her and her story – to some people, such questionable logic and offenses against realism would be enough to call the story a failure. After all, even in fantasy it is expected that people still act like people. They might not be human, but they would still be people, and the world does not irrationally make things easier for one person for no reason. “Impossibly” is the right word, indeed. All of her suffering and all of her painful choices are erased easily, without lasting damage to her or her relationships. This is not merely unrealistic and ridiculous, though it most assuredly is. This is magnificently, fantastically sloppy writing.
But for other readers – usually, I have found the less experienced ones - that does not bother them as much. It is fantasy, after all. It does not matter if there is no realism – it is fiction! It does not have to make sense! Well then, if people do not care about it, why should it matter? Because the reason they do not care many times is because they do not know what could be. This story could be so much better than it is, but it is crippled by Bella’s free pass from everything.
Obviously, if it were not a big deal then I would not spend so much time and effort explaining how it is messing things up. I do not have that much spare time – I am a college student, after all. If this free pass she gets affects the story so much, then how? It does so in two ways, really.
First of all, it means that Bella never really has to struggle for anything. If she does struggle, then we do not see it. She has absolutely no objections to Edward being a vampire – in fact, she says that she does not care what he is without a moment of reflection or consideration. When she does complain, she appears self-centered and whiny – because the reader can tell that she never really has anything to complain about.
It is not just irritating – it is incredibly boring to read. If we know that she will survive – if we can see her free pass flashing in the background of the story – then there is no tension and no reason to fear. Why should we worry about her fate, if we know that things will work out in the end? Most authors do not have the guts to kill off the heroes, or even cause lasting damage to their precious creations – especially their first creations. It is so common in fiction that most readers come into a story, assuming that all of the heroes will come out mostly unscathed – unless, of course, the author demonstrates otherwise, something that Meyer never does.
Tension is interesting. Conflict is interesting. We need to know that there is risk, that there is a chance that there will not be a happily ever after for everyone we care about. Struggles are what make interesting stories, struggles and pain and hard choices. Bella never has to face a hard choice, and the things that should be hard choices are ignored or passed over – and what is left is much a much less interesting story than it could be. If it could be called a story at all, which some people do not.
Some argue, like a particularly eloquent member of a forum dedicated to trashing everything awful in the world, that what little tension and conflict does exist is only padding to turn it into something that looks like a story. The poster, who goes by Lysander, says, “They merely exist so that there is something between "Once upon a time, there was a girl who fell in love with a sparkly vampire", and "they lived happily ever after", which seems to be the actual story that Meyer wants to tell, but is hindered by the fact that it's not really a goddamn story (“Twilight: The Death of Feminism”).”
It does the character herself a disservice, as well. Struggle is how humans learn things about themselves and the world. Because Bella never has to make those hard choices and is never faced with a real challenge, she never learns anything about herself and she never grows as a person. Bella at the end of the book is much the same as she is at the beginning, except that she now has a pretty boyfriend. She has not changed as a person at all, which leaves the book feeling incomplete and frankly a bit pointless.
Why should we care about her at all? Why should we sympathize with a character that never grows or learns anything, but instead coasts through life on a sparkly wind? Most readers – even the ones that fawn desperately over one boy or the other – do not, and the fact that even fans do not care about the main character is, I think, rather telling.
So, to recap. Bella is an idiot for getting into a relationship with someone she knows is dangerous, and ignoring all of the very obvious warning signs in the relationship. The world she lives in make things easier for her for absolutely no good reason, and erases consequences so she has very little conflict. Because of this, there is little tension in the story and the entire story is rather bland and pointless – and Bella herself comes off as more whiny than sympathetic when she complains about her life.
No, my dear female cohorts. I did give the book a chance and I do understand the story – perhaps better than many of you do if your reactions are anything to go by. It is a bad story, and it would always be a bad story as long as Bella was written the way she is. She twists a story with some potential out of shape, into a vortex of tensionless blandness and smoldering irritation. The story has potential – but alas, few people will ever be able to imagine it and will think the mess that this is counts as good fiction.
Just think of what this story could be, in better hands. Imagine this story, instead of the one we ended up with: Bella moves to a new area to give her mother space, but is stung but the small-town cliques and the awkwardness of living with her distant and busy father. Her only respites in a lonely world are her dreams of her beautiful lab partner, but even that is cracked when she realizes that his erratic behavior and insane schedules make him a less than perfect fantasy partner. Still, she can’t seem to stop watching him – and she wonders if she’s imagining his lingering stares on her.
Then, one day after school – Edward snaps, unable to resist her blood calling to him. Fortunately, one of his siblings stops him in time, but the encounter leaves Bella injured and terrified, and Edward horrified at himself. Bella is furious and considers having her police chief father arrest Edward – but stops, confused by the grim resignation of Edward’s siblings and Edward’s obvious grief and self-hatred.
From there, things get even stranger. The Cullens – to Bella’s horror - argue over whether or not to just kill her there and remove the conflict, but Edward argues that she has done nothing to deserve that. Bella demands an explanation, and her half-formed suspicions are confirmed: They aren’t human. They’re vampires – vampires that try to avoid drinking human blood, but vampires nonetheless.
Even though, or perhaps because she is in on the secret, Bella tries to avoid them – both for the sake of her own safety and out of respect for Edward’s temptations. But wait - complications arrive in the form of another vampire with his eye on Bella, and this one has no objections to killing her. The Cullens try to protect her, and she finds herself struggling, torn between her sympathy for Edward and her fear of him, even as she dodges the wiles of the hunting vampire, even as Edward tries to avoid her and protect her at the same time – proving himself worthy of her loyalty while calling himself a monster.
That is a hastily thrown together premise by me, and I will be the first to tell you that I am not good at stringing together a plot. However, I think even that would have more tension and interest than the lackluster story we ended up with. There would be some sort of internal conflict in Bella, and much more action.
It is truly a pity, both for the sake of the story and the sake of the reader, that the story we ended up with was not so strong or interesting. Bella was too passive, too favored by the world, and she sapped all the potential out of it. Perhaps if she hadn’t – if she had reason to fear and if she did something about her fear – then there would be something other than this limp waste of print.
