In which the shit continues its eternal war with innumerable devices of an air-circulatory persuasion. Interested? Then, my fellow red-headed step-children, let us rock.
Plot: Stephenie Meyer talks about three vampires walking in to the baseball field. Your blogger contemplates holding his breath until Stephenie Meyer learns the difference between showing and telling. He decides against it. Asphyxiation is a bitch. Carlisle requests that the strangers not kill anyone in the vicinity of Forks. Because, obviously, they're allowed to commit murder as long as he doesn't hear the victims scream. Wonderful role-model, that Carlisle. The wind shifts, and one of the new vamps goes all feeding-frenzy in Bella's direction. Edward makes angry noises. He, Alice and Emmett hustle Bella back to the jeep and make tracks for the Swan residence. Emmett, who can count and therefore realises that the Cullens have a tactical advantage, wants to terminate the strangers and get on with their lives. Your blogger nods approvingly. Edward, naturally, wants to do something convoluted, which is not at all a way for his incompetent author to shoehorn a pre-determined ending into her barf-puddle of a novel. Bella, meanwhile, wants to be involved in planning her own escape from imminent death. Edward ignores her. Because, obviously, ovaries are fickle things and anyone in posession of same is being made stupid by overactive hormones at all times. Anyways, Bella and some vampires are going to Phoenix. Yay. Or, you know, not. Finis.
Rant: Somewhere, at the core of an alternate-universe version of this book written by someone whose worldview includes things like complex morality, lies a fascinating dilemma. In that novel, vampires can't survive without drinking human blood. Human, not animal. There, you see, we have a real problem. If all lives are to be valued equally, then vampires have as much right to vital sustenance as anyone else. Therefore, they have a legitimate case for killing with a clear conscience. That's my little thought-experiment of an alternate world. In Stephenie Meyer's world, the Twilight world, vampires don't have to kill in order to survive. They have no case, none whatsoever, for laying fang on any human being. There are seven Cullens, and three strangers. The new vampires laugh about have eaten recently, about having taken human life. And Carlisle lets them walk. The great Carlisle, the humanitarian, the paragon of all virtue, lets three remorseless killers walk away without a scratch because…. Anyone?
Emmett is fun. Completely cliched (muscle-bound, reckless, hot-tempered etc), but at least he's been written to bring something resembling humor into this little wrist-cutters convention. He want to fight, to do something active and dynamic instead of standing around and bitching when things happen to him. This is a massive improvement over… well, everyone. I wonder if Stephenie Meyer realises that her supporting characters are vastly more interesting than the leads? Probably not, but I'd read the hell out of an an Alice/Emmett spinoff series.
Someone else wants to eat Bella. Awesome. Seriously, the book suffers from a massive lack of narrative tension. Does anyone doubt, really, that the tracker will die and Bella will be fine after a dramatically close call or two? Thought not. And the less we say about Edward's plan, the better. Great plots create drama from the organic action of complex characters. This book creates plot from deux-ex-idiota. That, probably, is what bothers me most about the tracker. He has no reason for wanting Bella's blood. Yes, she smells nice, but winds change and there plenty of women without vampire bodyguards, just waiting to be exsanguinated. The hunt starts because without it, the book would end in a wet fizzle of lukewarmly murmured passion. The whole thing is so… toothless (sorry, I've had a long day).
Oh, and Stephenie Meyer is a misogynist pig. The entire scene in the jeep makes me ashamed for my gender, just on the off-chance we're anything like as horrible as SM clearly believes. But that's a conversation for another day. Be good, interweb.
You know, when the first Twilight movie came out and the news talked about these "vegetarian vampires", my dad asked me what it was about.
ReplyDeleteI said, "They're called vegetarian vampires because they won't drink human blood. Instead, they hunt big animals and drink their blood. Bears, for example, or mountain lions."
My dad (shaking his head): "So the author thinks bears and lions are, like, salad?"
I know. The hypocrisy is really pretty mindblowing. Stephenie Meyer has such a complete lack of self-awareness.
ReplyDelete