Well friends, there’s a lot of extra Twilight-mania bursting on to the stage with the approaching Eclipse movie premiere. As the third installment of the four-part series, Eclipse picks up (if my memory serves me right) a few weeks after New Moon leaves off: Edward is back, Bella is grounded because Jacob exposed her motorcycle rendezvous, Jacob is obsessed with Bella but hates Edward too much to be her friend anymore. The evil Victoria is on the hunt for Bella and the Volturi clan are coming back at any given moment while Bella’s vampire coven and teenage werewolf pack families begin clashing violently. What’s a girl in love supposed to do?
Now, there is– on the surface– nothing wrong with the Twilight books. There’s a teenage girl caught up in mythical battles while being hopelessly selfish and whiny. Nothing wrong with that, and it was rather original until the first movie premiere, albeit at a fourth-grade reading level. But as you get deeper in to the Twilight saga, you begin to notice some problems, such as the ones listed below.
1) The relationship between Edward and Bella is emotionally abusive.
2) Bella has absolutely no redeeming qualities to make her a lovable character.
3) The story line gets more and more unbelievable as the series goes on.
4) The end of Breaking Dawn. Enough said.
1) Edward and Bella’s relationship.
Okay. Let’s pretend, for one second, that all these characters are ordinary teenagers. Edward will actually become a legal adult because he is a human and not a Greek god-like creature. Jacob is not a hormonal teenage boy that will turn in to a horse-sized wolf when he gets pissed off and Bella has not, for some ungodly reason, been chosen to be Edward Cullen’s destiny. They are now everyday people, the kids that myself and many people who love Twilight so much socialize with for hours on a daily basis.
Edward is an ordinary teenage boy who is so possessive and insecure that he will not allow his girlfriend to see her best friend, mainly because he is afraid that said girlfriend will leave him for the friend. He also will not leave her side for more than a few minutes or hours each day and bribes his sister with sports cars to keep Bella as a hostage when he has no other way of watching her, because he will not allow socializing between Bella and Jacob to take place.
Anyone else see how this could be unhealthy?
2) Bella’s Character.
Since we’re still playing the Twilight-characters-are-normal-teenagers game, I will admit right now that every teenage girl is selfish, whiny and overall kind of a bitch. We all have a side to us like that, even me. But in every classic piece of literature, even Twilight, all the main characters have something we love about them. Alice’s quirky personality, Charlie’s small-town gentlemanliness, Renee’s childlike charm, Carlisle’s assumption of fatherhood, Edward’s selflessness, Jacob’s brashness. We could name at least one good thing about all the major Twilight characters, even Rosalie, except for the “most important” one– Bella Swan. She is ordinary. She drives the speed limit. She does her homework. She doesn’t get tattoos or body piercings, she doesn’t change her hairstyle, yet she complains about every little thing. She keeps Jacob around so that she remains happy and so that she will always have someone in her life that loves her unconditionally, as she admits in the second installment of the series. So why exactly is this imaginary world in chaos over this girl that no one would give a passing glance to, or even like for that matter, in real life?
3) Story lines.
Installment one: Bella and Edward meet in the halls of Forks High School and, after Bella’s near-death experience chasing the evil James in Arizona, the two teenagers fall in love. Installment two: Edward decides that either he can do better or Bella just needs some alone time to grow up, so he takes off and leaves Bella to spin in to a depression. Now, I’ve done something like that, and it really sucks. When you have so little of a life that you will even do your calculus homework or sleep early because you’re trying not to think about that special guy who dumped you, yeah, that’s hard. But roughly 300~400, maybe even more, pages of the book is Bella talking about how much her life sucks and how sad she is now that Edward’s gone, as if now she’ll just have to go do dangerous things like ride motorcycles and chill with teenage werewolves and not date ever again because no one else will be good enough. Installment three: Edward spends the whole book trying to talk Bella in to marrying him while the evil Victoria could come and avenge her lover, the evil James (who Edward killed in installment one), by killing Bella. There’s a bunch of fight scenes and gore and you learn what makes Rosalie such a bitch (it’s not her rockin’ body, by the way), but that’s the entire plot of the 500~600 page book. SPOILER ALERT! Installment four: Edward and Bella have a picture-perfect wedding, have violent vampire sex and end up with a half-vampire baby that would have killed Bella if Edward didn’t turn her in to a vampire at the last second. Whew, close one there. Then Jacob imprints on the baby, whose name is a combination between Renee and Esme and ends up nicknamed after a mythical sea creature, and the vampire covens of the world and the evil Italian Volturi come to town to say, hello. And have a vampire-powers battle. The end.
4) Dude. Whatthefuck.
Basically, Meyer has thoroughly dug herself in to a hole by the end of book three by making Bella, a selfish whiny bitch with nothing lovable or even likable about her, perfectly compatible with two completely different mythical creatures, so she gifts Bella a baby with an accelerated growth rate to attempt to satisfy vampire and werewolf fans everywhere.
Really? Rather than tying up the loose ends, you’re just going to appease the masses and not kill off any of the major characters? I had so much more faith in that book.
Thus, I leave you to Eclipse midnight premiere tickets. Happy mass conformity!
Tags: Bella, Eclipse, Edward, Jacob, media, popular culture, Twilight, vampires
