Whenever me and my friend E.Lynn talk about Twilight, the one thing that always gets us more than any other thing is the lost potential. Our dislike of the books is mostly because every once in a while, we glimpsed a little bit of gold, a tiny bit of what might’ve been before the story collapsed under the weight of itself.
On paper it sounds like a great idea; a young, unsuspecting girl unwitting stumbling upon the knowledge that vampires existing? Finding her true love despite said true loves desire to devour her? Vampires and werewolves and secret organizations, love triangles, family tension–all these things could’ve and should have ended up something so much better. So where did everything go wrong?
We already talked about Edward and Bella, but they’re only small parts of bigger overall problems with Twilight. Most of what’s wrong with Twilight has less to do with the numerous, somewhat big flaws of the two MC’s, and more to do with the overall badness of the writing itself.
One of the main reasons I’m so put off of most adult contemporary fiction is because it’s overly wordy and too pretentious. In an vain effort to appear more adult worthy and more intelligent, it seems like a lot of authors pull up the Thesaurus app on their iPhones and start looking for fancy words. They’re more concerned about the words than they are on crafting the actual story.
This is ultimately how Stephanie Meyer writes Bella–Bella speaks like no teenager that I’ve ever heard. No teenager uses the word iridescent. No teenager describes anyone as having liquid topaz eyes, nor do I think anyone would want to kiss anyone’s lips who felt like marble. Half of the problems in Twilight could’ve been fixed if Bella had been written like she was sixteen, and not a 35-year-old woman projecting her thoughts on said sixteen year old girl.
Good stories can always be ruined by bad dialogue, and by bad prose. The Twilight Saga is a prime example of taking a good thing and bogging it down in unnecessary bits of fluff. Why does Edward need “liquid topaz” eyes? Why not just say “his light brown eyes”? The greatest thing about YA and those who write it is that they realize the immediacy of adolescence. There isn’t a lot of YA where the MC’s fuck about or go into near soliloquies–there’s no time for that. Teenagers in real life and in YA talk the way the do not because they’re dumb or because they have a lack of language skills, they talk the way they do because saying “Oh-em=gee, I love my boyfriend,” is way quicker and much less ridiculous than “About three things I was absolutely positive. First, Edward was a vampire. Second, there was a part of him-and I didn’t know how potent that part might be-that thirsted for my blood. And third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him.”
Also, irrevocably is totally a thesaurus word. Just saying.
And what’s more frustrating is that Bella is surrounded by people who actually do speak like they’re supposed to, and in dialogue Bella speaks as a teenager should. But her narration is very clearly written from the viewpoint of someone much older than Bella. No teenager talks the way Bella does, and the only time I spoke the way Edward does is when I wrote my girlfriends in high school really bad poetry that they were supposed to swoon over.
And not only does no one talk that way, but having Bella narrate the way she does makes the story dry and dull and otherwise uninteresting. It’s possibly the most boring, sanatized romance novel ever in the history of ever. Nothing happens. In Breaking Dawn, the big battle that’s supposed to end the entire series doesn’t even happen–Bella Mary-Sue’s herself a giant brain bubble that she projects to protect everyone. So now Bella is supposed to be Jean Grey? When does the Dark Phoenix storyline start?
No, I have no idea how I managed to work that reference in.
Plotting in Twilight is pretty much absent, because the story itself doesn’t move anywhere unless Bella and Edward are together. All four books have the same problem–there’s lots of Bella kvetching about not being with Edward, or being with Edward and Edward not paying her any mind either way. Bella continues to complain and moan and groan about Edward. Jacob shows up, but Bella rather be with Edward. Then there’s more complaining/worrying/loving Edward…and then there’s so more of that.
Then near the end of the book, someone realizes something has to happen for the story to technically be a story. The bad guys show up, then Edward defeats them in an anticlimatic battle, and it’s all about how Bella loves Edward again. This is the plot to every book in the series, Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, and Breaking Dawn. It’s all the same book, kind of, only the last two have a love triangle. None of this is done in a dynamic, new, interesting way–it’s like watching Degrassi, if Degrassi were half as interesting and the actors are worse, and the two leasts interesting people on the show get all the screen time.
It’s deriative plotting at it’s worse. We’re told there’s forces that more or less don’t want Bella to exist, but each time those forces are beaten back with little effort. The whole gang gets almost entire army thrown at them, but Bella “Brain Bubble” Swan is able to thwart them. The rest of the time is spent meandering around, with Bella saying and doing the same ol’ things, waiting around for Edward to come to his senses and love her the same way.
There is so much potential–SO MUCH POTENTIAL–for Twilight to be good. I think that’s why writers who don’t like the books react the way they do; there’s so much lying there, right on the surface, so much that could’ve been explored and it wasn’t, so many exciting things that could’ve happened but didn’t. Me and E.Lynn talk about that being the biggest disappointment at all.
It’s like going into a 3D movie and wearing the goofy glasses the whole time, but the only part of the movie that’s in 3D is the end, and all that happens is that a hand sort of awkwardly reaches out of he screen. You leave the theater disappointed, not because everything about the movie was bad (though there were probably some bad parts), but because you’re left unsatisfied. You were promised an epic, grand adventure–you ended up with something that ended up being kind of boring, and maybe even a parody of itself.
KC
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