I originally heard about Twilight from fans of another vampire author, who I will reference in this section. These fans claimed that they loved the book, especially because the author did something so original with the vampire mythos. This is absolutely true, and while I have no problem with changing pre-conceived notions of mythological creatures, I dislike the way the author did it, because she basically left us with invulnerable creatures who drink animal blood, in order to moralize them. I am aware that the author has strong religious beliefs, but creating these perfect beings is not, in my opinion, the way to go about moralizing the characters. Neither did I find the conflict the vampires felt about drinking human blood very convincing. Allow me to compare a passage from one of my favourite vampire novels, Shattered Mirror, to a piece from Twilight's sequel, New Moon:
“There was a noise, a grisly snarling sound that seemed to be coming from deep in Jasper's chest. Jasper tried to shove past Edward, snapping his teeth inches from Edward's face. Emmett grabbed Jasper from behind in the next second, locking in his massive steel grip, but Jasper struggled on, his empty eyes focused only on me."
New Moon, pg 29
“’Damn it, Nikolas!’ Christopher shouted, spinning sharply away so the blood was not in his sight. ‘Don't do this to me!’
‘Please, Brother. For me, kill the pain.’ Holding Sarah by the throat with one hand, Nikolas reached out and turned his brother around with the other. Christopher's eyes immediately fell on the blood that was dripping from Sarah’s hand.
‘Christopher, no-’
‘Shut up, Sarah!’ Christopher shouted when she tried to argue, his voice strained. He turned to his brother. ‘We're both damned. You know that, don't you? Please, Nikolas, let her go.’
‘Why?’ Nikolas's voice was childlike. ‘You were the first one,’ he reminded his brother, ‘to pick up a knife.’
Sarah felt Nikolas’s hold on her wrists lessen as he focused on his brother; if he continued to be distracted, she stood a chance of getting out. She had lost hope that Christopher would help her- he wasn’t strong enough to ignore his bloodlust.”
In the scene from Shattered Mirror, Christopher is thinking, and in control of his actions. He may or may not give in to temptation (much in the same way as a child may steal a candy bar even though they know it's wrong) but if he does no, it will be at least partially his fault. Now, granted I cut a bit for length, the second paragraph still rouses more emotion than the first. Why?
Because the characters are more relatable to the reader. In the passage from “New Moon”, the vampire is absolved of moral responsibility for his attack on the narrator (Bella). His “empty eyes” seem to prove that he is not in his right mind, that his thirst for Bella's blood has overtaken his ability to reason. This does, in essence, make sure the reader thinks “oh, it's not his fault- it’s the thirst taking over.” In situations where this character (and all of the “good” vampires, for that matter) is not being tempted, he exhibits model behaviour. The “evil” vampires, on the other hand, are just that- evil, with no redeeming qualities. In the black-and-white Twilight universe, there is no room for questioning. The Cullens are good. Friends of the Cullens are good. All other vampires are bad. Period, end of discussion. How does that make for an interesting, believable story?
Now that we've established my problems with the way the author handled the “conflict”, let's move on to the characterization. Or rather, the lack thereof.
A common phenomenon in fanfiction- less common in original fiction- is the type of character called a “Mary-Sue”. Wikipedia defines a Mary-Sue as follows:
“…a fictional character who is portrayed in an idealized way and who is generally lacking in any truly noteworthy flaws (or having his/her flaws romanticized)… characters labeled Mary Sues, as well as the stories they appear in, are generally seen as wish fulfillment fantasies on the part of the author”.
Let us examine both Bella and Edward with this definition in mind. Bella is a seventeen-year-old girl, who has just moved in with her father, and is dating a vampire (Edward). The only “flaw” she is admitted to possess in the book is extreme- to the point where it challenges the imagination- clumsiness. This trait is idealized by Edward, and serves to endear her to the other characters. “Wish fulfillment”? Let’s see: Bella is dating a vampire, who the author describes on every other page as “perfect” “flawless” “Godlike” and even “seraphic” (I’ll get to that in a moment). In Twilight, there is at least one snag in this relationship- Edward's immortal and Bella's not- but at the end of New Moon, Edward caves in, and promises to change her, and in Breaking Dawn, she not only gets the man of her dreams, she gets to have a perfect child who requires almost no discipline. The series ends with the sentence "And we continued vlissfully into this small, perfect piece of our forever." So, Bella is going to live forever with the man she worships on a daily basis. If that isn't wish fulfillment, I don't know what is. And the sad thing is, Bella has virtually no character. The only personal detail we know about her is that she loves the classics (as does the author) and that boys flock around her on the first day of school (which is exactly what happened to the author on her first day at a new high school, which she mentions on her website) And yet, Bella attracts the attention of the most coveted single in the school, despite being described as "plain". This does not happen. It just doesn't. That being settled, let’s move on to Edward. As has been previously noted, Edward is described as perfect by almost every character. He has Bella, who practically licks his boots and grovels for affection from him, affection which he gladly bestows- with a smug smirk on his face the whole time, I might add. He is also immortal. The author never acknowledges within her books that Edward might be flawed (on her website, she admits that he's “a bit of a know-it-all”) but otherwise never suggests that there is anything wrong with her hero. And why should she? Edward is a Gary Stu- the male counterpart of a Mary-Sue- and he is the author’s fantasy lover, as is evidenced by the excess of adjectives she uses to describe him. Returning, for a moment, to romanticized flaws-on her website, the author mentions that Edward ripped a sixty inch plasma television in half because he was angry about his family voting to change Bella into one of them. The television, by the way, had been shipped in from Korea. He then proceeded to stomp around the room yelling “No!” repeatedly, much like a child throwing a temper tantrum- which is exactly what he is doing. This behaviour is frowned upon in a three-year-old, let alone a hundred-year-old. And yet, the author refers to another character being “a bit annoyed” in a joking tone. If someone had destroyed an expensive object that my parents had ordered in for me, I'd be more than “annoyed”. At the end of the day, Bella and Edward do not behave “maturely for their age” as is suggested in the text. Rather, they are Mary-Sues to end all Mary-Sues, and I am at a loss to see why so many people find them attractive. As additional proof, I ran both Bella and Edward through a Mary-Sue litmus test. Edward recieved a 75:
71 points or more: Irredeemable-Sue. You're going to have to start over, my friend. I know you want to keep writing, but no. Just no.
Bella, the narrator, recieved a 45:
36-55 points: Mary-Sue. Your character needs some work in order to be believable. But despair not; you should still be able to salvage her with a little effort. Don't give up.
I, personally, was inclined to feel sorry for Bella's human "friends". Then I stumbled across the first chapter of a work entitled "Midnight Sun"- Twilight, written from Edward's perspective. As Edward is able to read minds, this provides some insight into the heads of other characters, including Jessica, the girl who initially offers to show Bella around the school and introduce her to others. As the excerpt reveals, Jessica welcomed Bella with open arms only to increase her own social status, and become popular by association with Bella. Lauren, one of the other girls in Jessica's clique, is portrayed as being bitchy from the beginning. According to the excerpt, during which Edward scans her thoughts, we discover that she is jealous of Bella's popularity, and of the fact that all the boys are fawning over her, despite her reported plain looks. In other words, the other girls in the school are foil characters- characters inserted to make the viewpoint character look better or worse by comparison. The only female classmate of Bella's who is not protrayed as an immature, shallow teenager is Angela. Angela is a quiet, shy girl, who is dating the acne-scarred chess club geek, Eric. This gets him away from Bella, and leaves her free to pursue Edward. Except for this, Angela gets very little screentime, in comparison to the vampire characters. Humans in the book- humans Bella's age, at least- serve only to make Bella look good, and "mature" in comparison to the other shallow, immature girls.
The way the human boys are treated can be seen as both better and worse. Mike, Eric, and Tyler are the three boys vying for Bella's attention in Twilight. Tyler is a jock, and while he isn't quite a stereotypical one, he's verging on it. He's egotistical and overly self-confident- an example being when he repeatedly assumed that Bella would attend dances with him. And then he gets neatly paired off with Lauren- the evil bitch we're all supposed to hate. Then there's Eric, who Bella describes as the "pimply Chess club type". How kind of her. Especially since he was offering to carry her books and show her around her new school. He ends up shuffled off with Angela, and we hear very little of him after that. Then there's Mike, who doesn't really fit into a stereotype like the other male human characters. He's a nice guy, pure and simple. When Bella gets sick in Science, he practically carries her to the nurse's office, only to be interrupted by Edward, who takes Bella, and basically tells him to run along. Ouch. And yet Mike doesn't go crazy, or do things like watching Bella sleep through her window like Edward does (which sounds pretty creepy to me, especially since they were virtual strangers at the time). I've heard some antis claim that they prefer Mike to Edward, and I can certainly see why. Mike has personality. He's jokey and fun, and sweet. When you put him next to Edward, who is cold, condescending, and overbearing, it's hard for me to see why Bella would choose Ed.
Jacob original appeared in Twilight as a minor character whose main purpose was telling Bella Native American legends about the "cold ones" aka vampires. Knowing that he has a crush on her, Bella flirts with him in order to get him to tell her the stories, which is forbidden in his comminuty. Edward's response on hearing this is, "Poor Jacob." My thoughts exactly. It only gets worse from there on.
In New Moon, after Edward leaves Bella, she sinks into a catatonic state for months. When she finally emerges, still very depressed, she discovers that she can hear Edward's voice in her head when she puts herself into danger. She promptly begins to search for ways to do just this. This says a few things about her feelings for Edward, and none of them good, but that's another article. In her quest to put herself in danger, she spys a motorcycle in Jacob's front yard, and realizes that motorcycle riding would be a great way of hearing Ed's voice. So she asks Jacob if he'll teach her to repair and ride motorcycles, and he agrees.
The next hundred or so pages of the book consist of Bella and Jacob hanging out together and developing a friendship. While it's still repugnant that she's basically using him to hear Edward's voice, the really nasty part comes later. Bella begins to contemplate hitting on Jacob. Not because she has feelings for him, but because, put bluntly, she wants to have a boyfriend, and Jacob's readily available. It's dressed up in talk about how she's Juliet, Edward's Romeo, and Jacob is Paris, but that's the gist of it. Bella wants a boyfriend. She knows that Jacob is in love wth her, and she readily admits to herself that she can't love him, but that's somehow okay. If she has any justifiction for this, it isn't shown. And it gets even worse. When she finds out that Jacob is a werewolf, she actually makes it all about her, wondering if "monsters" are attracted to her. Well, I can see calling Edward a monster, but what did poor Jacob do to deserve that? And then, when the Cullens come back to town, she drops Jacob completely so that she can run off and save Edward from his own stupidity. When she and Ed return to Forks, she ignores Jacob until he tells her father about the motorcycle, which she blames him for. Nevermind that it was Bella's idea- it can't be her fault. As vampires and werewolves are traditional enemies, Jacob can't stay friends with her if she marries Edward- and if he turns her, the werewolves will declare war on the vampires.
And then there was Eclipse.
Stephenie Meyer claims that Jacob is one of her favourite characters, but it doesn't seem to be working in his favour. In Eclipse, Jacob attempts to force himself on Bella, and then is congratulated on it (!) by Bella's own father. He sulks about her relationship with Edward, and behaves like a spoiled brat in Edward's presence. And all this wouldn't be so bad- seeing as how he wasn't so bratty and sulky in the previous books, watching his feelings for Bella change his personality would be an interesting form of character development- if it weren't for the fact that his behaviour is excused away by the author and other characters by saying that he loves Bella so much, and he can't help what he does. This excuse is used fairly often for the male characters- Edward's controlling because he's in love, Jacob's forceful because he's in love, etc. Curiously enough, the girls never get away with this excuse; Leah's a "bitter harpy" because she lost her boyfriend to her cousin, and now has to read his mind as he thinks about her on a daily basis. I can understand her being cranky just as much as- if not more- I can understand Jacob. But that's an essay for another time.
Bella says near the end of the book that she and Jacob are "soulmates" but can't be together because of her "addiction" to Edward. She even has visions of their potential future, complete with kids. I do feel sorry for Jacob to an extent- being led on by Bella only to be thrown over when her ex-boyfriend entered the picture again had to hurt. But Jacob seems to have proven that he's incapable of handling her rejection maturely. Instead, he's used it as an excuse to behave like a five-year-old whose toy was taken away. Soulmates? Hardly.
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