It’s about time I fully explained my feelings towards The Twilight Saga. If you’re not familiar, it’s Stephanie Meyer’s series of four books for ‘young adults’ about the diffident Bella who falls in love with the equally diffident and vampire-y Edward Cullen. And, mayhem ensues.
I love Twilight.
I know what you’re thinking: ‘it’s badly written’ and ‘it’s for teenage girls’.
1) It’s not badly written. It’s certainly not a wonderful work of literature that will go down in history as a perfect piece of prose, but it isn’t bad. I feel that people who ‘hate’ Twilight do so because it’s so popular and people like disliking things which many others like. But, Meyer is a good writer and the books are enjoyable to read.
2) I can’t argue with the teenage girls point…
But what I love about Twilight is the story. It’s that impossible love thing which is present in most all love stories. A vampire and human? Golly. And, mashing my three of my favourite genres (impossible-romance, coming-of-age and vampires) really is lovely.
But it’s all so wonderful how it works out. And, gosh, didn’t it make vampires the new, sexy item of the moment? Book after book and TV show after TV show seems to feature the new style sexy vampire rather than the middle aged neck-sucking Dracula version.
For some reason, the whole vampire love thing really connected with me. At this point I realise that I’m making myself seem most odd, so I’ll move on.
The movies. They’re most enjoyable. I think that all the actors are perfect for their roles. Especially Kristen Stewart. Gosh, I love Kristen Stewart. They’re well produced, exciting, a little over the top and generally very fun viewing. Suffice to say, they are the only movies that I’ll actually go to the cinema to watch rather than just wait for the DVD.
Unfortunately, the fourth book sucked and we’d all be better off if it’d never have been written. It changed a lot about the character of Bella and make me sad. Meyer didn’t really think carefully enough about it. If it would have been half the size, it would have been good, I reckon. But, hardly enough to ruin an entire series, of course.
But, vampires. I also want to clear up a common misconception: vampire novels are not a fad. In fact, they’ve been consistently popular since the 1800s.
This Google Ngram (a graph which represents the times a word appears in a book from the 1700s through to now) shows that vampires have always been in books (and, some of the best books, for that matter).
Even the vampire-romance genre has been exceedingly popular throughout the years. In fact, vampires really have been seen as sexy as well as scary for many, many years. The sub-genre of “vampire lesbians” even has enough references to warrant its own Wikipedia article…
So, there it is. I heart Twilight and I heart vampires.