Why Twilight is Evil

This review was originally published on Goodreads. As you can see, it's of our absolute most favorite book in the world, Twilight by Stephenie Meyer. As is also evident, I was really pissed when I wrote this. So enemies beware: when Ellen is annoyed, she goes crazy [and writes 6-7 paragraph essays with too many supports and sometimes even a cliche anecdote. For no reason at all]. But Twilight was just so terrible, it had to be done. 

Rating:

1 Kiss: This book should not exist. 

Spoilers: Yes

Recommended: Definitely not. You're lucky to have escaped. 

*** 

In the beginning, there was nothing.

And then, God said, "Let there be light!" And there was light, and it was good.

And then, He proceeded to create the earth and seas and skies and fill them with living creatures, and all of these were good.

Venture forward in time some 4.6 billion years to the year 2005, and God said, "Let there be no Twilight!" But Twilight was, and it was not good.

***

Twilight lovers will hate me for that statement, and Twilight haters will back me up, but the fact remains that Twilight and Stephenie Meyer, in Stephen King's words, are "not very good".

Twilight is nothing but a plot-less piece of garbage, unwanted by most and worshiped only by poor teenage girls and depressed older women who yearn for any consolation that "perfect" guys do exist. They glaze over the less-than-wonderful, voiceless writing and are blind to the darker implications this character Edward Cullen shows. But those who read more deeply into, or even reflect on at all, Twilight find it truly appalling.

The writing alone is enough to make any intelligent reader cringe. Thanks to the vicious editing any author has to endure, Twilight’s flaws do not lie in simple grammatical errors or misspellings. No. The true horror resides in the actual content. "He lay perfectly still in the grass, his shirt open over his sculpted, incandescent chest, his scintillating arms bare,” Meyer writes. (Scintillating? Even if you know what that means, it still sounds like some sort of fatal disease…) See? Even Microsoft Word knows a run-on sentence fragment (not officially a term, but I think it suits the majority of the Twilight books quite aptly) when it sees one. Those who believe this to be a wonderfully descriptive, brilliantly structured work of art are sadly disillusioned. Meyer is like a fool who throws a deflated party balloon on the street and calls it a masterpiece. No, this is not good writing. It is a sentence that any six-year-old could come up with, just decorated with colorful SAT words randomly placed to make one think the author is actually intelligent. Hell, she probably even used a thesaurus. “He lay in the grass, his shirt open, and his sparkly arms bare,” it reads. And that’s actually a grammatically correct sentence. This statement of Bella Swan’s (whose name is such a boring cliché that it’s surprising people didn’t start throwing rotten tomatoes at Meyer in the first place) is also highly unlikely to ever come out of the mouth or pen of a girl who has many times proved herself a complete idiot.

It seems that while in the process of writing the Twilight books, Stephenie Meyer mixed up some of her notes. In the first chapter (a chapter that drones on for about 30 pages talking about Bella’s totally mundane crush on Edward Cullen, the magical boy who SPARKLES in the sun), Meyer expresses quite clearly that Bella is a bright young woman who is ahead of all her new classmates in studies. How, then, does this supposedly smart girl let a one-hundred-and-something-year-old man take over her life to the point that she actually lets him kill her? Granted, she is already proved insane by even wanting to be killed by him; if not earlier when she decides she would rather kill herself than be without her precious creeper. And so Bella Swan remains a sad excuse for a girl with a lower ability to reason than probably 75% of the United States. And that’s saying something.

How someone such as Edward, sparkly vampire who has lived for one-hundred-plus years, suddenly decided to fall in love with a human as boring and dumb as Bella is beyond me. Maybe Angela IS a witch and she happened to slip him some Amortentia with Bella’s essence in it. That would certainly explain his infatuation with her smell… But Edward has surely met kinder, prettier, smarter, more interesting girls in his time. Why, then does he choose Bella? Does he wish to prey on her like the LION he likens himself to? “And so the lion fell in love with the lamb,” he claims on page 274 of Twilight. (And you can’t say that someone over the age of seven and who is not your child sneaking into your room to “watch you sleep” is not creepy…) Getting back to Bella, she does not take any offense when called a lamb. Instead, she further diminishes herself, calling herself stupid. What happened to the smart, self-esteemed young woman who first appeared to us on page 1? Is the message that it only takes 274 pages for a potentially strong character to deteriorate completely? What does this mean for us that we so easily accept such utter crap?

Twilight, if categorized as fanfiction is, would fall under three main genres: Angst, Romance, and Plot? What Plot? As becomes evident by the time the reader reaches page 100 out of 498 or, in the entire series, 2,443, there is absolutely no plot. And that would be fine if it were a 300 page chick-lit installment, but wandering aimlessly for about 2.5 thousand pages is pretty damn stupid. Of course, Meyer tries to insert some sort of point into her writing, but the Volturi turn out to be disappointing and fairly pathetic. To make matters worse, all encounters eventually lead back to more sappy romance between the Beauty and the Creep.

Twilight presents no educational value whatsoever except, perhaps, to teach teenagers how NOT to use their SAT words. Honestly, I don’t see the appeal of the first book, let alone the other three tomes. But even those who are drawn to read Twilight will realize, as long as they have a fraction of intelligence, that it is NOT a good book. And should they decide to read on, they will discover even more so why they should NEVER speak the words “Edward Cullen” and “amazing”, “Stephenie Meyer” and “brilliant”, or “Bella Swan” and “my role model” in the same sentence unless they have a huge-ass IS NOT between them.

~Ellen~