The Host

No, not that one, this one.

That's right, it's the new awful film adapted from the latest female disempowerment classic of the greatest setback to women's liberation since Ann Coulter, our own Stevenie Meyer.

The world of The Host is a peaceful paradise, with no suffering or want or discord of any kind. Everyone is perfectly nice and beautiful and healthy. According to the opening narration of Jeb Stryder (A Wooden Plank), "there is no hunger. There is no violence. The environment has healed. Our planet has never been more at peace." I knew it! Mormonism wins out and converts the planet. You heard it here first.

No, it turns out that nearly all of humanity has been wiped about by parasitic clouds of glowing sperm. These aliens take over host human bodies when surgically implanted into the back of the neck while the hosts, after a certain amount of time spent trying to win the psychic war for their own bodies, just "fade away", which sounds suspiciously like "die" to me. Think of a Trill symbiont, only instead of a slug that melds its memories and personality with yours, it's luminous ejaculate that kills you

Just when you thought "Bella Swan" was embarrassingly hamfisted in its symbolism, Meyer tops herself by naming this story's protagonist central character "Melanie Stryder" (Waify McBlankexpression). Get it, strider, because she goes on a journey? (Never mind that Meyer's characters never grow or change in any way.) We meet her fleeing in terror from the aliens as she leads them away from her younger brother (Typical Child Actor) so he can escape. In accordance with the most noble feminine virtue in the Meyerverse, Melanie sacrifices herself by leaping from the building to her death. She doesn't die because if she were killed by a seven-storey plummet to the concrete below, the movie would be over. Instead, she's captured and implanted with an alien that calls itself Wanderer. No, I don't know why the aliens exclusively use English and even give themselves English names like Wanderer. Oh wait, yes I do, because coming up with alien-sounding words is, like, hard, and if there's one consistency of bad writing, it's laziness.

Our Bella Melanie is able to resist Wanderer's mind mojo, so she spends the rest of the movie talking in voiceover while Wanderer talks back to her out loud. Why does Wanderer have to speak to Melanie aloud instead of communicating through thought, as Melanie does? Because having the same actress doing both roles in voiceover would be impossible to follow. Instead, Melanderer just comes across as a girl with severe schizophrenia, and the voiceover only gets more annoying as the film drags (and I do mean drags, Oh My Brothers and Only Friends) on, especially since 90% of Melanie's dialogue consists of her mentally shouting at Wanderer not to do something which Wanderer then proceeds to do. Yeah, the alien ignored you the first 300 times, but if you keep shouting at it to stop, no, don't, STOP!, it might actually listen the 301st time!

Wanderer has access to all Melanie's memories, so it reveals the name of Melanie's boyfriend (Trunk Slamchest) to the chief antagonist alien (Diane Kruger). I don't know what position this alien has, if it has any. It just hates and pursues Wanderlanie through most of the film. Later Kruger tells us that this information has been of great help in crushing the human resistance, though I have no idea why. All the aliens wear godawful blue contact lenses, making humans identifiable on sight, and there appear to be no humans who aren't part of the resistance (i.e., collaborators). Nor do the aliens appear to care to spare human collaborators if there were any. So why would the spermaliens need to know Trunk's name?

Wanderer starts to sympathize with Melanie and the humans because...um, and so it steals a car. (Well, it asks a passing motorist if it can just have the car. Being Mormon an alien, the motorist happily hands over the keys and wishes Wanderer on its way.) It drives toward where the human resistance is hiding, until it realizes Melanie is leading it the wrong way. It turns the car around, but before it can head back, Melanie uses her ability to control her body whenever it's convenient for the writers and intentionally crashes the car. Wanderlanie gets up and wanders (hey!) randomly in the desert until she/it/they are found by her/its/their uncle Jeb (the aforementioned Wooden Plank, making its first appearance onscreen) and a small group of humans. Everybody wants to kill Wanderer because of its ugly contact lenses, but Wooden Plank overrules them because if they killed it the movie would be over. He gives it some water and they take it back to the humans' little community hidden under desert rocks. So I guess Melanie was leading Wanderer to the humans, since she let it get more or less within walking distance of the resistance settlement before deciding to wreck the car.

And now the movie gets weird. In the humans' spacious and idyllic underground desert caverns, where they have a river of rushing water complete with bathing pools and a towering waterfall and an entire field of planted wheat, Wanderlanie reunites with Melanie's boyfriend Trunk Slamchest, but Wanderer finds itself falling in love with Another Guy (Smoke Manmuscle). Come on, it's a Meyer work. You knew there had to be a love triangle with absolutely no tension or drama because a brain-damaged centipede knows exactly who will end up with whom.* And do I even need to say that, like Jacob, the "loser" of the triangle gets a happy ending deus-ex-machinaed to her? (Well, it.) In fact, as soon as it became clear that Melanie wanted Trunk and Wandererererer wanted Smoke, I guessed that Kruger's "bad" alien would be removed and Wanderer transferred to its host body, because she was the only other hot girl in the movie and that would wrap everything up in a nice neat bow with no negative consequences whatever. That's how things work in the Meyerverse, where the good guys never really get hurt and no true sacrifice is ever made. The joke's on me, though, since that doesn't happen. No, what Meyer pulls out is even dumber.

But first we have to have some fake drama that we know will immediately be resolved with everybody happy and loving and with no bad things ever XOXO hearts unicorns. Melanie's brother Typical Child Actor is with the survivors, and he gets an infection. Everybody's worried because Doc (Token Black Guy)--come on, you've got to have an older, somewhat grizzled guy called "Doc" in these things--doesn't have the medicine to treat him. Of course Wanderer likes humans now because...erm, right, and she deliberately injures herself so that she can be treated by an alien healer and their magical "fix any disease or injury" device, which she steals as soon as the healer leaves the room. Wow that was...too close. There isn't even a scene where the alien equivalent of cops (yes, they have such, even though they've established that the vastly superior alien race has no crime or disease or bad things of any kind, apart from the deliberate and systematic genocide of entire sentient species for the sake of their own self-empowerment) appear and the audience worries if she'll be able to get the medicine past them. In fact, since the aliens don't use money (we see Wanderer go into an alien store and simply take what she wants and leave), can she even be said to be stealing the medical doohickey? Of course, Wanderer, despite not being a healer, knows both how to operate the thingamabob and how to implant an alien parasite into a human host, the only two things we ever see these "healers" do. So what the hell does it mean to be a healer when the other aliens are just as capable of doing their jobs as they are?

Later there's a highly silly scene that has Wanderer having a fit at discovering the humans have been removing the alien parasites from infected people, effectively killing both alien and whatever's left of the person. Err...what did it think we'd do? Wanderer implies the aliens have conquered at least 12 planets. Has there never been an attempt by conquered species to combat them? And it's okay for the aliens to kill us, but not for us to kill them?

I'm not saying Wanderer should be okay with people killing the aliens or that it shouldn't be angry or upset, but I am saying it shouldn't be so omg SHOCKED! and HORRIFIED!. Let's see, we invaded their planet and murdered literally billions of them, and then when I see two or three of our guys dead, I can't believe it's happening! And this from an alien that has supposedly lived for more than 1000 of "our" years. Why do all Meyer's characters come across as mentally stuck in middle school?

I'm not even going to get into how Meyer once again can't separate herself from her characters. They're all the same as each other, and so are the same as all the Twilight characters, because Meyer doesn't create actual characters, who have their own personalities that emerge in such a way that they move the story in ways she didn't expect it to go. She invents ciphers to march her story to its predetermined conclusion.* This naturally means the characters in this film know things they couldn't possibly know from what we've seen onscreen, but they know because Meyer knows, and having people just know things when they need to know them sure makes the whole writing thing a lot easier.

Let's just get to the end. Kruger gets captured by the humans and her alien parasite is removed by Wanderer in a way that doesn't cause harm. (Wanderer coaxes it out by directing loving thoughts at it. I so wish I were joking.) Kruger, like Melanie, turns out to be resistant to the mind mojo, too, but since this is the Meyerverse, she exhibits no psychological trauma from years of her will being subjugated by an alien presence that invaded her very mind and controlled her own body while she struggled futilely against it, to say nothing of being completely cut off from communication with anyone but her controller, if it ever bothered to communicate with her at all. But with Kruger the human saved, there's no hot young white women for Wanderer to inhabit so it can be with its man Smoke Manmuscle! Oh noez, mild disappointment!

As it turns out, Doc didn't kill all the people he de-parasitized. He's got one braindead human left. (So they can't treat an infected wound, but they can perform invasive surgery and keep a braindead person on full life support.) And that human just happens to be a young, attractive white woman! Just like Melanie! What are the odds? At least 3 to 2 against, gotta be.

So Melanie gets back with Trunk, and Wanderer can be with Smoke without any clutter, like her being in the body of, say, a man, or an old lady, or *gasp* a woman with a high melanin content. And so The Host just sort of limps off the screen, letting everything intriguing about its premise go utterly unexplored, its major characters all blissful and happy (a couple of humans died, sure, but they weren't major characters and are quickly forgotten), safe and consequence free.

Supposedly, Stevenie Meyer doesn't want to write any more Host novels because that world is "a dangerous place" and she doesn't want any of the characters to die. I don't know what's more absurd: that Meyer is so attached to her "characters" that she'd rather not write about them at all than see anything bad happen to them,** or that Meyer actually thinks anything bad would happen to any "characters" in one of her stories.

Forget it, Jacob. It's the Meyerverse.

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* Meyer claims that Another Guy (the one played by Smoke Manmuscle) had a small part in her original workup of the novel and that his "character" demanded additional attention, including involvement in the romance stuff. I find it hilarious that this "character" who supposedly had his own voice such that she had to alter the story led her to exactly replicate the Bella-Edward-Jacob triangle.

** I mean, not everybody has to be George R.R. Martin, but yeesh.

Twilight: Get Thee to the Google!

Twilight, pp. 132-135.

Bella, after a shower that "didn't last nearly as long as [she] hoped it would" (uh...doesn't a shower last as long as you want it to last?), uses her dial-up modem to discover Edward is a vampire with the power of Google (even though Jacob already told her this). Dial-up. In 2005. This just keeps getting better and better.

Now I know some of you occasionally leave your basement and hike the 8 miles into "town" so you can use Jed's 2800 baud modem to read this blog because you live too far from civilisation to have access to the cutting-edge technology that is "cable". So maybe Forks also lacks this city-folk knickknack, and dial-up is all Bella can get on Mustache Dad's old computer. Nice theory, my hog-calling friend, but like post-structuralist theory, it's fractally wrong.(Unlike post-structuralist theory, it makes sense on its own terms and isn't a collection of jargon designed specifically to obscure the fact that it's completely meaningless.) There are two main problems with it:

Bella refers to the modem as her modem. It seems we're to believe that in 2005 a teen-aged girl in Phoenix used a dial-up modem. The second problem is that even if we discount that, Bella doesn't even complain about the service. She doesn't compare it to Phoenix. Considering how much she supposedly hates Forks, that should be happening. What kind of emo chick passes up a chance to complain about how much her life sucks due to various minor inconveniences? Bella certainly wouldn't. She doesn't complain because Meyer had a dial-up modem in high school, so Bella does--are you seeing a pattern here? I really don't get why Meyer didn't just set the books circa 1990. Sometimes I think that all these technology oddities are subtle clues to the reader that this is in fact when they are set, but every time I try to give this novel credit for subtly, it blows up in my face. It's more likely that Meyer's handle on pop culture really is on the level of the Butabi brothers.

So we get a full two pages of hot, steaming search engine action, and it's even more exciting on the page than it is in the Twilight film. Bella finds the scholarly rigourous site Vampires A to Z(!), which claims there is a species of good vampire that Meyer made up to explain why the Cullens aren't evil despite being soulless monsters. Then we get this gem:

Overall, though, there was little that coincided with Jacob's stories or my own observations. I'd made a little catalogue in my mind as I'd read and carefully compared each myth. Speed, strength, beauty, pale skin, eyes that shift colour; and then Jacob's criteria: blood drinkers, enemies of the werewolf, cold-skinned, and immortal. There were very few myths that matched even one factor.

And then another problem, one that I'd remembered from the small number of scary movies that I'd seen and was backed up by today's reading--vampires couldn't come out in the daytime, the sun would burn them to a cinder. They slept in coffins all day and came out only at night.

It's clear Meyer expects us to regard this web site as generally correct (its text being "academic-looking", and it tells us about the good vampires), yet once again, she reveals that she hasn't done her homework. I assume she actually did a Google search, found a site about vampires with a stupid name, and spent a half hour paging through it, randomly throwing into her novel alleged vampire myths from the Philippines, Romania, and Poland, but I'm sorry, that just isn't going to cut it. I'm hardly a vampire expert, but I've seen my share of vampire films, read Dracula, and know a little bit about at least European folklore vampires. Even a relative neophyte like me can immediately see problems.

First, the stuff she gets right. It's true that beauty, speed, pale skin, and "eyes that shift colour" aren't going to show up in many vampire myths, especially the eye colour thing since Meyer just made that one up for...some reason. Vampires traditionally aren't fast (or beautiful, for that matter) because they're dead. It's only in the 21st century that our old undead stand-bys have to bounce off the walls like a bunch of skater punks who drank too much Surge. (I'm looking at you, I am Legend.) Forget the undead staggering toward us with the inevitability of the grave. Now they charge at us like tweeners at a Justin Bieber concert. That's why traditional vampires were mostly believed to kill children and other vulnerable people.

European vampires also weren't pale, because they were supposed to be full of blood. But Meyer says over and over again that few vampire myths involve blood drinking. I'm going to call bullshit here, simply because blood drinking is one of the core aspects of the creatures originally called vampires. If it doesn't drink blood, I don't see how you can call it a vampire. We call it a vampire bat because it's a bat that drinks blood. It isn't destroyed by sunlight and doesn't turn you into a bat when it bites you , but nobody has a problem with calling it a vampire bat because drinking blood is what vampires do. So as much as I love the hopping Chinese "vampires", they aren't, really. They're animated corpses that draw out of you something you need to keep on living (and I guess they're not into the whole religion thing), but that's where the similarities end.

So it's fine that "enemies of the werewolf" didn't come up since European tradition isn't based on two 12 year old boys arguing over who would win in a fight between Dracula and the Wolfman. "Immortal" is also not characteristic of traditional vampires (even though Jacob didn't say the Cullens were immortal). And though I'd think a walking corpse would be "cold-skinned", I guess I'll let that one slide, too. But blood-drinking ought to be there, and strength. Most monsters are stronger than people, since anything physically stronger than you is automatically threatening. And what shouldn't be there is what Meyer remembers from the "small number of scary movies" that are "backed up" by this highly accurate web site. Traditional vampires were not destroyed by sunlight. They just didn't come out during the day because it was easier to spot and escape from them. The notion that vampires were harmed by sunlight doesn't even go back to Dracula but to the film Nosferatu (1922). The creators of that film simply made it up to differentiate their film from Dracula so they wouldn't be sued by the notoriously litigious Bram Stoker estate. So this "academic-looking" site should not "back up" the myth that vampires are destroyed by sunlight, because there is no such myth and never was. I didn't even have to look that up! Simply being a fan of the horror genre is enough to know this.

But as I said on the day I started this blog, Meyer is not a fan of horror. Meyer doesn't know or understand vampires, and she doesn't care to. She has no love or respect for the genre she's working in. She just stole the term vampire to sell more books, and nobody's called her on it.

Well, I'm calling her on it. Stephenie Meyer, you're a hack writer who was lucky enough to somehow tap into the cultural zeitgeist despite your utter lack of talent, drive, and dedication to the craft of writing. You're the literary equivalent of Uwe Boll, except everyone knows Boll sucks and we love him for it. Your novel claims to be a vampire romances, but it has neither vampires nor romance. If I had to sum up the novel Twilight in one word, it would be contempt. Contempt for your readers, contempt for women and girls, contempt for American Indians, contempt for the horror genre and everyone involved with it.

Stephenie Meyer, your novel is bad and you should feel bad.

Twilight: Paging Mary Sue

Twilight, pp. 127-128.

Now that Bella has had the plot explained to her (the plot being "Edward is a Good Vampire"), it's time to get back to her favourite activity that doesn't involve Edward: humiliating Mike!

"There you are, Bella," Mike called in relief, waving his arm over his head.

"Is that your boyfriend?" Jacob asked, alerted by the jealous edge in Mike's voice. I was surprised it was so obvious.

"No, definitely not," I whispered. I was tremendously grateful to Jacob, and eager to make him as happy as possible. I winked at him, carefully turning away from Mike to do so. He smiled, elated by my inept flirting.

You know, with all the big bad going on in this book, I find myself continually surprised by how much the little things get to me. Relief? What, he thought he'd lost her? She and Jacob walked along the beach for all of 20 minutes! Mike could still see them from where he was. It's not like they disappeared into the woods. And if he really did lose her, he can just call or text her. Oh wait, he can't because Bella apparently doesn't have a mobile. In 2005. It's inexcusable. Again, maybe I could buy this if Bella grew up in Forks, but are we to believe Bella almost finished high school in Phoenix without a mobile?

Of course, the reason Bella doesn't have a mobile is that Stephenie Meyer didn't have a mobile when she was in high school. This goes back to a writer's need to think about what a character would do, not what she would do. Novice writers are often told "Write what you know." Like a lot of simple, commonsense advice, it's misleading. What it ought to mean is "Don't write about stuff you haven't taken the trouble to learn about beforehand." That way you won't be embarrassed by having people or events in your story that are utterly unbelievable. However, it's often used to mean "Write about experiences that you yourself have had", the idea being that this will make your writing sound authentic to the reader.

But that only works if you're pretty much fictionalising your own life. This approach worked for Oliver Stone, whose Platoon is a fictionalised version of his experiences serving in the Imperial military during the Vietnam War. He was writing about his own life, and Platoon does carry an air of authenticity. What Stone couldn't have done was set Platoon during the Persian Gulf War, because everything about it is different. The Vietnam War was a protracted low-intensity conflict fought primarily in the jungle and primarily against guerillas. The Persian Gulf War was a short, high-intensity conflict fought in the desert against a conventional military force. Not to mention the character of military service in the Empire had changed quite a bit, as the army serving in Vietnam was a mixed volunteer/conscript force, as against the Persian Gulf's all-volunteer military. If Stone had thought to himself, "Well, I was in the military during Vietnam, so I can writing authentically about the Persian Gulf", he'd have looked like an ass. If Stone ever decides to make a film about the Persian Gulf War--or the Iraq War, which in some ways resembles the Vietnam War--he'll start out by doing lots and lots of research on that war.

That's right, research. Fiction writers--well, the good ones--do research. A lot of it. That way, when their doctors start talking, they sound like doctors. When their firefighters need to do something, they do what actual firefighters do. If you don't research this, if you just wing it on what you've picked up through cultural osmosis, your lawyers will sound unprofessional, your business people will make decisions guaranteed to make them fail, and your scientists will be wealthy eccentrics who do Science! by pouring coloured liquid from this beaker into that beaker. And your readers will know you're lazy, because even if they aren't cops themselves, they can tell if a character sounds like a real cop or not. Those readers who actually are cops will be laughing uproariously at everything you get wrong.

So Oliver Stone would do research. He wouldn't just assume his own experiences from 20 years earlier will suffice. Meyer, on the other hand, couldn't be bothered to put any effort into writing this novel. Research? P-shaw! Ten years ago, she was a high school girl. Write what you know! I know what it's like to be a high school girl. Authenticity!

That's what's going on here. Meyer didn't bother to find out what a teenager's life is like now, and so Bella is firmly trapped in the magical land of early '90s angst.

I've got it! Twilight is My So-Called Life fanfiction!

Meyer is also lazy with her first-person narrative, telling us matter-of-factly why Jacob did something. Bella doesn't have access to Jacob's mind. All she can do is guess that he's asking his rather odd question because of how jealously Mike says, "There you are, Bella." (That's quite a feat, by the way. How do you make such an innocuous statement sound jealous?) But it would've been harder to write this scene if it were actually confined to Bella's perspective, so Meyer just breaks the fourth wall and lets her fauxtagonist know what she knows. Beats the heck out of that "writing" stuff.

Also, it's rather appalling that Bella is so grateful to Jacob and so concerned with making him happy that she doesn't stop flirting with him. Which makes a crock out of her next lie...err, statement:

"You should come see me in Forks. We could hang out sometime." I felt guilty as I said this, knowing that I'd used him. But I really did like Jacob. He was someone I could easily be friends with.

Not guilty enough to stop using him, I guess.

The Forks kids are leaving, so it's time for Bella to depart. Jacob taunts Mike over Bella's flirting with him instead of Mike (what a guy!), and Bella makes sure to sit with people who won't talk to her so she can be think about Edward, despite her claim that she's trying not to. (If you're really trying to avoid brooding, how about, I don't know, talking to your friends?) And with that, Chapter 6 comes to a close.

Twilight: Mirror Universe

Twilight, pp. 25-28.
This week on Twilight (alternate title: Everybody Loves Bella), we're introduced to Mike, who loves Bella. This poor kid makes you feel bad for him from his very first appearance, because, clearly unprepared for Bella's manipulations, he has no idea what's in store for him. He's friendly and polite--already a bad sign--though a little lacking in tact.

I looked up to see a cute, baby-faced boy, his blond hair carefully gelled into orderly spikes, smiling at me in a friendly way. He obviously didn't think I smelled bad....He was the nicest person I'd met today.

But as we were entering the gym, he asked, 'So, did you stab Edward Cullen with a pencil or what? I've never seen him act like that....He looked like he was in pain or something.'

'I don't know,' I responded. 'I never spoke to him.'

'He's a weird guy.' Mike lingered by me instead of heading to the dressing room. 'If I were lucky enough to sit by you, I would have talked to you.'

I smiled at him before walking through the girls' locker room door. He was friendly and clearly admiring.

That's our Bella--keep it vague, keep 'em guessing, never let them pin you down to anything. The number one rule of emotional manipulation is never let anyone know your true motives.

So, despite Mike's entirely inappropriate reference to Edward's absurd behaviour and his rather too eager 'I woulda talked to you', he's 'the nicest person I'd met today', and Bella likes him because 'he obviously didn't think I smelled bad', as Edward seems to. So from Mike she seeks validation of her attractiveness, a boost to her self-esteem that her abusive boyfriend has shaken, but Bella will set him up with Jessica because, as Jessica's good friend, Bella will allow her to take a partner she herself has rejected. Mike is attracted to Bella because, well, everyone is, but he's lacking something, that sort of open contempt for her and indifference to human emotion that Bella finds so captivating.

This is where the author's lack of touch with anything resembling a normal teenage experience comes out. I've no idea if Mrs. Meyer had such an experience, but if she did, her writing shows no evidence of this. My high school experience was typical (summers in Rangoon, luge lessons), though I share neither the joy of having escaped it nor the nostalgia for it that seem to comprise the two most common American attitudes towards high school.

But I do remember that high school was all about cliques. You were in one whether you wanted to be or not. No-one reading this is going to be surprised which clique I ended up in: the gamers. I was one of the first at my high school to have Internet access (and before that, local bulletin boards). In computer programming class, I was the unofficial teaching assistant. I played Dungeons and Dragons on the tabletop, wrote fantasy fanfiction, and sparred occasionally with swords.

One of the hallmarks of high school cliquishness is that cliques rarely crossed lines. The smokers had their area of the school, and everybody else made fun of them...from a distance. I had a middle school friend who ended up in their clique, which essentially marked the end of the friendship. None of his friends would've welcomed me, nor mine him. (I'm sure they made fun of us, too.) The jocks had their clique, and gangsters theirs, and the 420-friendly smokers theirs.

So the most popular girl in school was really the one who appealed to the most cliques. I remember not being at all enamoured with my high school's Most Popular Girl. I was much more interested in the salutatorian and, before that, the eventual valedictorian of the rival high school in our district. That is, girls who were closer to my clique. (My high school was sadly lacking in gamer girls.)

Twilight's high school is, thus, a completely foreign place to me, where the rules are all different. I'm half-recalling a line from an episode of Mystery Science Theatre 3000, something like 'A perverted world, where the spazzes make fun of the cool guys.' That's what Forks High is, high school turned upside down, where the geeks are popular and the cool kids can't get dates. Bella is not the kind of girl who should be the darling of the school, because she's in the angsty-emo-goth clique. There she would be highly sought after (with her manipulations being just another part of the package), but outside of it, she'd be...well, she'd be regarded precisely in the way Mike views Edward. 'She's a weird girl' he would say to Jessica not long before he asks her out, because Mike and Jessica are in the same clique, and so he would actually find her attractive. He shouldn't need Bella to point this out, and he shouldn't be interested in anything Bella has to say on this or any other matter.

This is where Meyer wants to have her cake and eat it, too. She wants her fauxtagonist to be quirky and deep but also widely popular, forgetting or ignoring that depth and quirkiness aren't popular. The good-looking pretty types (Mike) aren't interested in moody, antisocial types like Bella. They're more interested in people like themselves. People closer to, or in, their own clique.

Of course, high school romances are often about love that jumps cliques. In fact, the story might have been interesting if Bella actually did end up with Mike, with Edward being the one everybody (including Edward himself) assumes she'd go for. Bella and Mike could run into constant trouble because their expectations and the worlds they inhabit are so vastly different. Edward and Jessica would be the obstacles here, representing the safer, conformist alternatives to the difficulties of making their relationship work. But Bella just has that something that Mike can't ignore (just pretend that, in this alternate universe, Bella actually has something), and even though he finds it easier--more practical--to be with Jessica (just as Bella finds her relationship with Edward easier), love keeps drawing them back together, and the story ends with the beginnings of their finding a way to engage in each other's worlds and with a new appreciation for each other's distinctive outlook.

But enough about a potential good story. Instead, we've got to get the emo princess hooked up with the emo prince, with no real obstacles, and we've got to stretch it over four books.

Good lord.

Even according the rules of Meyer's parallel universe, Mike's reaction to Edward's shenanigans is all wrong. This is part of Meyer's persecution complex (hmm...Mormonism popping up?). Everybody must love Bella, because she's fabulous, but they must also look at her in awe and regard her with suspicion, because she's so, like, deep and different and stuff. So when a man she has never seen before in her life flips out when she shows up, not only does she immediately have to blame herself, but so do other people who already regarded the Cullens as freaks. This just doesn't make sense on a human level. If I'm a high schooler who sees the school's nutjob have an episode when the New Girl sits next to him, how could my first reaction be I wonder what she did to him? It's nonsensical. I'd think something more like God, that Cullen's got serious issues.

This is how that exchange would've gone in the real world:

He was the nicest person I'd met. Just as we got to the gym, he said without looking at me, 'I, uh, saw what happened with Edward Cullen.'

'Oh.' My cheeks turned a little red. Just a little. 'You did?'

'Yeah.' He looked at me now. 'Look, he's really strange. I don't know what his problem is, but he acts like that sometimes. Don't let him get to you. Who knows what was going on in his head?'

Or something like that. Mike should be blaming Edward, since Edward is so clearly in the wrong here. Now, it might work if Edward was the small-town boy who had lived in Forks his whole life and Bella was the big-city newcomer that all the students resented for her contempt for their small-town customs. But in Twilight, it's already been established that Everybody Loves Bella and the Cullens are regarded as weirdos. So why is the nicest person Bella has met today immediately siding with Edward, accusing Bella of having done something to cause Edward to react as he did?

Bella comes upon Edward in the school's main office, trying, and failing, to get out of the class he shares with Bella. (How, oh my brothers, could this 'vampire' stand to attend high school every day for decades?)

Edward Cullen's back stiffened, and he turned slowly to glare at me--his face was absurdly handsome--with piercing, hate-filled eyes.

Makes a girl's heart melt, don't it?

Twilight: What are Little Girls Made of?

Twilight, pp. 3-11


Chapter one, the beginning of our story. Throughout this series, I will endeavor to give credit where it's due. (Thanks go out to Ken Begg of Jabootu.) To be fair, this first section of the book, before the first break (indicated by a few lines of white space), isn't half bad. As long as the story is focused on Mary Sue--err, Bella, such being Mary's name--it's a fair portrait of a typical small-town high school girl. That's a little strange, considering Bella grew up in Phoenix, but the simple fact is that she seems more at home in the small Washington town of Forks, a place she loathes (at least until the real main character invades the book and takes over the story).

I would point out that author Stephenie [sic] Meyer grew up in Phoenix, but really, does anyone here doubt Bella's a Sue?

Let's start with that name. Bella Swan. I don't want to blow your mind, here, but that would make her name 'Beautiful Swan'. Subtle.

It was to Forks that I now exiled myself--an action I took with great horror. I detested Forks.

Why is she leaving Phoenix? We don't know yet, but it must be something terrible considering her 'great horror' at where she has been forced to go. After all, Bella is seventeen, a high school junior. She will either be in college or on the job market in about a year, so the remaining time she has to live at home is short. It must be a horrible situation she's fleeing. Witness her final conversation with her mother.

"I want to go," I lied. I'd always been a bad liar, but I'd been saying this lie so frequently lately that it sounded almost convincing now.

"Tell Charlie I said hi."
 
"I will.

"I'll see you soon," she insisted. "You can come back whenever you want--I'll come right back as soon as you need me."

But I could see the sacrifice in her eyes behind the promise.

"Don't worry about me," I urged. "It'll be great."

So she's leaving her mother's home and going to live in a place she hates rather than finishing out her high school years and then going off to college, all for her mother's sake.

Remember what I said about Bella's Noble Sacrifices?

Really, this doesn't make sense. She'll be out of the house in a year or so. Surely she can wait. Now if they'd had some horrible argument, I could see her storming out with a shrieked "I'm moving in with Dad!" Or if she were fourteen and had four more years to look forward to in this situation rather than one. The answer is that Bella is fourteen, despite her chronological age of seventeen and her occasional flashbacks to being thirty-two. Once the main character shows up, Bella will behave exactly like the freshman girl who's never "gone steady" with a boy when she first lays eyes on the coolest guy in the senior class. See if I'm wrong.

Oh, and the statement about lying is suspect, given how often Bella will lie throughout this novel, and what she will lie about. Considering the whoppers she drops like f-bombs in a Chris Rock stand-up routine, her skills should be razor-sharp from constant use.

Bella's father, Charlie Swan (or, 'Charlie' to his daughter), has bought her a truck to use

the kind that you see at the scene of an accident, paint unscratched, surrounded by the pieces of the foreign car it had destroyed.

There's a good Mormon girl, Stephenie. Foreign stuff sucks.

But then, that was a bit on the nose, hmm? It's more effective to keep your rabid patriotism cloaked in a veneer of internationalism. Too bad Mrs. Meyer weren't a man, because then she would have gone on a mission and become immersed in a foreign language and culture. That's a much better way to demonstrate the superiority of America, learning about those other cultures and how American they're not.

I suppose it's just too bad not being a man in general.

Charlie bought this vehicle from one Billy Black, who, along with his son's washboard abs, becomes a focus of later books. For now, though, Bella doesn't remember him because he used to go on fishing trips with her and Charlie when she spent summers at her father's home in Forks.

That would explain why I didn't remember him. I do a good job of blocking painful, unnecessary things from my memory.

I suppose I must lack this power. How else can we explain my memory of the Highlander sequels?

And now, oh my Brothers, we get to the, like, brilliant part of the story. This is where the producers in the US film industry who wouldn't hire a young Clint Eastwood get to point and laugh at the fourteen agents who rejected Twilight. I'm willing to bet cold, hard cash that most if not all of these agents were men, despite the fact that I don't have any money. (The publishers smelled money, though, which is why eight of them competed to publish Twilight and the one Meyer chose signed her to a three-book deal.) This is why the book became huge, and this is why It Must Be Stopped. It's this passage right here:

I didn't relate well to people my age. Maybe the truth was that I didn't relate well to people, period. Even my mother, who I was closer to that anyone else on the planet, was never in harmony with me, never on exactly the same page. Sometimes I wonder if I was seeing the same things through my eyes that the rest of the world was seeing through theirs. Maybe there was a glitch in my brain.

Hundreds of thousands of fourteen seventeen-year-old girls read this paragraph, gasped, and said, "Me too!" I mean, what message could resonate louder and clearer with young adolescents than "I'm special, and no-one (especially my mother) understands me"?

Hey, I'm not ragging it. Like I said, it sold lots of books. I fell victim to it myself, with Raistlin Majere. Small, sickly, unpopular, freakish-looking, smarter than everyone else? You just described my adolescent vision of myself. (I've since discarded this portrait. Well, except for that last bit.)

The difference is, DragonLance didn't suck.

Okay, I'll do better. The difference is, Raistlin was the villain.

Even before his heel turn, he isn't liked by the other characters, characters the reader is intended to like (and does). So we like the character and find him interesting, but he isn't a role model. The authors are sympathetic to his plight, but his actions are never excused. The focal characters condemn his bad behavior, and you get the distinct impression they only tolerate him because of their love for his twin brother, a likable character who suffers constant and undeserved abuse at his hands. Once Raistlin does become a villain, he does all sorts of terrible things, and at the end of the story (big spoiler here), he loses. The Raistlin arc in the Chronicles and Legends trilogies is essentially this: If you're a big jerk, eventually you lose out, no matter how brilliant you are or how powerful you become, and nothing about how other people treat you excuses the choices you make.

A lesson Ted Turner doesn't seem to have learned. Maybe I'll post him a copy of those books.

Bella, on the other hand, is the story's ostensible protagonist, the audience's identification character. The protagonist doesn't have to be (and shouldn't be) perfect, but she should learn from her mistakes and grow as a character, at least if she's going to come out all right in the end. Bella isn't perfect, but she's treated by the author as if she is. Her only flaws are the pseudo-flaws of your standard Mary Sue, like being endearingly clumsy and introverted. All of her behavior is rewarded, no matter how morally reprehensible or punishingly stupid it is. In the end, (big spoiler) she wins. She gets everything she wants and rarely suffers the negative consequences of her actions, except for the guilt the author claims she lays on herself.

Bella's flat line (in no way is it an arc) is essentially this: Find yourself a much older man (the better to replace your father as the authority figure in your life, my dear) and do whatever he tells you to do, no matter how controlling or condescending he is, including lying to your own father and using sex to manipulate people who are nice to you, and no matter what absurd situation you get yourself into--even if it's entirely due to your own stupidity--your Man will testosterone his way through the situation with his superpowers and get you out of it.

This is what young girls are taking away from this book. And that is why It Must Be Stopped.

Twilight: Appetizer

Twilight, p. 1

Twilight doesn't start out with nearly as juicy a paragraph as Left Behind does, what with the subtle-as-defenestration name of Tim LaHaye's Mary Sue, the immediate invocation of the authors' twisted notion of sexuality, and the self-gratifying assertion of male virility. It does, however, start out with an absurd half-page entitled 'Preface'.

I'd never given much thought to how I would die--though I'd had reason enough in the last few months--but even if I had, I would not have imagined it like this.

Already we're in trouble, since the author doesn't know what a preface is. What she has written is, in fact, a prologue--a kind of introduction to the story--and that not very well. A prologue is supposed to give some background or context for the main story to follow. Twilight's preface--i.e., its prologue--is, in fact, a flash-forward to the climax of the main story.

This is an example of why I wonder if the book was edited. Even a bad editor would immediately realize this should be part of the main text. It should be chapter one, or if it simply must come before the main text, placed before chapter one with no label, since it is definitely not a preface and really not a prologue, either.

Moving on, how preposterous is this as our introduction to a 17-year-old girl? "I'd never given much thought to how I'd die"? Honey, if you had, your parents would have had the kid shrink on speed dial.

There are lots of little moments like this in the book. Like most hack writers who write about children and teenagers, the author didn't really try to get back into the mindset of the young character. This is all the more depressing since this particular young character is Mary Sue. (Hmm...the main characters of Left Behind were Mary Sues, and Wesley Crusher was Gene Roddenberry's Mary Sue....I'm noticing a pattern here.) Stephenie Meyer was a less-idealized version of this character only fifteen years before the novel was written, but she can't escape a few moments in which Mary comes across as older than she is. If this thinking about death were portrayed as some sort of depression or adolescent angst, it could work, but it isn't. It looks like what it is: Meyer's thoughts around the time the book was written, thoughts of a woman of thirty-two, not a girl of seventeen. (Of course there are also moments in which Mary comes off as unbelievably naive for the savvy girl of seventeen Meyer wants us to think she is, but those show up a bit later.)

Surely it was a good way to die, in the place of someone else, someone I loved. Noble, even.

Here we are introduced to what will be a recurring theme throughout the novel: how Stephenie Mey--err, I mean, the main character reveals her nobility through sacrifice. In the tradition of passive heroines right out of the Victorian era, Mary doesn't actually, you know, do stuff. At best, she gives up something (her autonomy, her purity, her life) for the men in her life. Mary here exists to be fought over. She is a prize, awarded to the finest example of male power in her vicinity. She can be called the protagonist, but she isn't, really. Usually the protagonist drives the plot in some way, with the antagonist trying to thwart her goals. Our Mary doesn't take action, doesn't move toward goals. The book's actual protagonist hasn't shown up yet, but once he does, the story immediately becomes about him.

What's that sound? A sort of low buzzing? Oh, that's right, it's Betty Friedan spinning in her grave.

It's no accident that the first part of chapter one is the best part of the book. That's when Mary is the central character, and because she is a stand-in for an intelligent, educated, experienced lady, there's some interest there. Once the actual protagonist shows up to take Manly Action, interest evaporates and the writing decays into Kevin J. Anderson territory, because Actual Protagonist is a cipher, a collection of ideal traits who doesn't make sense even on his own terms.

But that's for next week.

The Not A Preface goes on like that for a while, ending on this gem:

The hunter smiled in a friendly way as he sauntered forward to kill me.

Really, Stephenie? Really? Sauntered? I defy you to read that sentence and not picture a laid-back cowpoke, spurs jangling, walking over to the bar to demand a shot of cheap whiskey and some banter with the hero of the Western we've suddenly been jerked into. This is what happens, people, when thesauruses are just out there, lying around where anybody can pick them up and use them. We need government regulation. We need thesaurus control.

Sauntered.