To paraphrase, I know this is the Optimus Prime of young adult relationship-abuse vampire romance stories; and I know nothing I do or say will stop it. Or convince you that it's trash. That there are better stories out there. Better characters. Better writers. Better young adult relationship-abuse vampire romance stories. But here's my top 10 (or so) reasons why Twilight sucks, for those of you just going on instinct, and who didn't torture yourself with the actual reading.
SPOILER ALERT. There, you've been warned.
10. Vampires don't sparkle. No. That's too easy.
9. Every rule Meyer (and every better, more esteemed author who came before her) set up for vampires is broken by the end of the series.
8. Bella has no goals and no future. Her life revolves around Edward.
7. It's predictable and childish. Also, Edward is HOT, we get it.
6. Zero. Character. Development. I guess perfect characters don't really need that much development though, so - okay; I'll let that slide.
5. Flawless main characters (clumsy isn't a flaw if it's endearing and there's always someone there to catch you) result in too little actual conflict. There were actually a couple of interesting characters (Jasper and Alice, anyone?) who were ignored to focus on Mary Sue (look it up) and her perfect boyfriend.
4. If Bella is so "plain," why do so many guys fall for her within the first two chapters?
3. Bella can't do anything without Edward; and when he leaves she attempts suicide. If she leaves, he will. That's a co-dependent relationship, and it's not healthy.
2. Bella teaches women to let the men handle everything, which is pretty much a huge step backward for women everywhere, who have fought for equality.
1. "T.Pain would totally win Bella's heart and beat up Edward because he's on a boat."
And falling in love with a baby is just fucking creepy.
A lot of people are saying, "at least it's got kids reading." But it's no excuse. It's got kids reading sappy pap that has no business on my bookshelf. Here's a short list of books that are better than Stephanie Meyer's:
Not Eragon.
There you go. Go out and get you one of those amazing stories and have a blast. What? Okay, okay. For those of you looking for something along the same lines as Twilight but written by someone who wasn't a halfwit (as in "no one who reads my blog so why am I adding this link anyway?"), Amazon suggests Five books better than Twilight.
Of things that I've read and can actually recommend, the Narnia series are actually great books. If you haven't read Harry Potter, do it. Much better than Twilight. Stephen King's Dark Tower series is remarkable, there are even a few Vampires here and there. Snow Crash, Lord of the Rings, His Dark Materials, Ender's Game, Ender's Shadow, Wheel of Time, Three Musketeers, Redwall, Dune, Neverwhere, the Scarlet Pimernel, The Color of Magic, The Last Unicorn, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass, Good Omens, American Gods, hell, even the True Blood books, Anne Rice, damn man, Dracula, any other book who's main message isn't that a regular girl cannot protect herself without her supernatural stalker hanging around - that perfect relationships contain no anger or disagreement, and that it's perfectly okay to feel so utterly attached to someone that you accept it as your fault when they hurt you utterly and irreversibly, A Game of Thrones. Like I said, not Eregon.
Les Miserables is a very hard book to read but is really quite good and one that I think a Twilight fan would really get into once Cosette shows up and starts batting her eyelashes.
Anyway. I'm done complaining about this abortion of Literature and her all to serious dalliance with pop. I'm actually very sorry that I read these books; and that's saying a lot. I read a book once in the 80's that was about giant green space bunnies who crashed their ship in the grand canyon ten-thousand years ago and it wasn't that bad. My only consolation is that I pirated the e-books instead of shelling out my all-to-limited funds for this trash.
I'm done ranting. There are probably a hundred other (maybe better?) books I could have added, and I feel like I'm just wasting bandwidth here now that I've reread this; but I wrote it and now you've read it.
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