Prator the Legendary
Member
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Well, let me think... I suppose, if I have to be honest, I do not hate Twilight itself (I actually enjoyed reading the book), but I do hate all of the characters on a personal level. So much so that I refused to continue reading after the second book. Bella is contemptible. Nevermind whether or not her character has actual depth, I just can't get around the fact that she is so overwhelmingly WEAK emotionally. She has just enough of a spine to make you feel really frustrated that she doesn't attempt to ever control her feelings. I keep wondering when she's going to start cutting herself. I know women like that in real life, and I generally either ignore them or try to make them angry on purpose in the hopes that maybe driving them berserk will unleash a little inner strength. Bella is joining Scarlett O'hara and Cattie Brie in the "Generally Useless Female Protagonists" garbage bin. Bella is often accused of being a Mary Sue, but I'd despise her even if that were completely untrue. Edward loses major points for liking Bella. Besides that, he seems like an okay guy, for a vampire that avoids consuming humans. That said, there's two very serious problems with Ed and all the other vampires in the entire series. The first is their "over-powered-ness" as mentioned by some other people here. The Vampires are just short of gods in terms of power, given that any one of them basically is superman, minus the ability to fly and with the addition of shiny, reflective skin. Having a superhero as the main character isn't a bad thing, but Ed is NOT the focus of the story. Bella's pathetic emotional issues are. So Ed is left as a ridiculously strong supporting character, essentially a walking Deus Ex Machina, and the same can be said of all the other vampire characters, to some extent. The second problem with the vampires is directly related to their power: why don't they rule the world? Seriously now, why not? They're immortal. They're almost impossible for any being to kill that isn't also endowed with supernatural powers. They can reproduce an indefinite number of other vampires as long as there are humans to feed on. It seems easy, under the circumstances, for a ruling class of vampires to dominate all of mankind. The second book demonstrated that they ARE organized enough to pull something like that off, if they felt like it... So, what, they're just going to lurk in sewers and at the boundaries of human civilization, eating only the folks that won't be missed, for all of eternity? That would make sense if the vampires were more vulnerable, but as the situation stands, it feels like Meyer has not adequately explained her own setting. I take a similar issue with the later Harry Potter books, but that's another story. In spite of the potentially cool "werewolf" thing he's got going on, Jacob also loses major points for liking Bella. He loses even more points for declaring a war with the vampires over Bella. When I read that, I felt conflicted. I couldn't decide whether to throw up, burn the book, scream in agony, or just slam my head on my desk. I eventually decided that I'd never read anything by Stephanie Meyer ever again. Most of the other characters are largely undeveloped, serving primarily as a supporting cast. If I ever start writing Twilight fanfiction, it will be all about a secret division of the US government that exists only to hunt down and destroy vampires. Actually, that brings to mind a potentially interesting setting; what if you took Twilight to its natural conclusion, and created a world where humanity is continually at war with the powers of the night? Whole countries could be devastated by nuclear weapons unleashed in the hopes of taking out any vampires in their blast radius... Volterra would be the first place to get bombed, naturally...
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