ethics | If By Yes

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books, ethics, good and evil, Harry Potter, literary criticism, literature, quotes, reviews, right and wrong, Twilight

Harry Potter is about confronting fears, finding inner strength and doing what is right in the face of adversity… Twilight is about how important it is to have a boyfriend .

The above quote has been mis-attributed to many, including Stephen King and Andrew Futral (who re-blogged it) but was actually written by someone named Robin Browne. Whoever she is, she hit the nail on the head.

(A note about spoilers: I will keep Harry Potter spoilers to a minimum, only letting go the kind of information that you could pick up from your standard movie trailer and have probably picked up on already, unless you live in a world without other people. Twilight spoilers, on the other hand, abound, because I can’t “spoil” Twilight any more than I can “spoil” a compost heap.)

Harry Potter is an epic tale of good vs evil.

One of the things I most appreciate about the Harry Potter series is its rich exploration of right and wrong, good and evil.

In Harry Potter, good guys and bad guys are not clearly defined. Good people sometimes do bad things, and bad people sometimes do good things. The person you percieve as a villain in the beginning of a book is rarely still a villain by the end, and some of the people you thought were good turn out to be pretty damn evil.

What if your intentions are good, but your actions are bad? Does that make you good, or bad? What if you do something bad “for the greater good”? What if you do bad things by accident?

Harry Potter addresses all of these questions, and answers them as well. Rowling’s answer?

No one is all good or all bad. You can even be on the side of “good” and still be deeply evil.

We’ve all got both light and dark inside us. What matters is the part we choose to act on. That’s who we really are.

Twilight is… not.

One of the things that intrigues me most about Stephenie Meyer is the divide between what she thinks Twilight is, and what it actually is.

On Meyer’s website, she talks about the apple on the cover of Twilight and the quote that opens the novel.

I used the scripture from Genesis (located just after the table of contents) because I loved the phrase “the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil.” Isn’t this exactly what Bella ends up with? A working knowledge of what good is, and what evil is.

Really? She does? Because I am not convinced that Bella would recognize evil if it tried to kill her.

Literally.

On top of that, Bella herself is a right bitch.

Quick – what’s the first thing you think of when you think of “good”?

If your answer is “Bella Swan”, congratulations! First, you fully agree with what Stephenie Meyer thinks, and second, your medication dosage needs to be reviewed immediately.

Meyer certainly seems to percieve her own work as a thrilling tale about the nature of good and evil, choice and fate.

I see it as a story about a whiny brat with absolutely no morals, who never learns that she is not a good person.

So I can only form the following conclusion: Stephenie Meyer is seriously confused about what constitutes “good” and what constitutes “evil”.

The funny thing about good and evil in Meyer’s books is that they don’t seem to be largely correlated to right and wrong, being nice or being cruel.

As far as I can gather, having read the Twilight Saga…