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Tag Archives: literary criticism

Random Twilight Rant

09 Sunday Jun 2013

Posted by IfByYes in Life and Love, TwiBashing

≈ 17 Comments

Tags

facial expressions, humor, literary criticism, Twilight, writing

I am rereading Twilight, possibly out of self-hatred but ostensibly because I want to make sure that my Zombie Anti-Twilight story fully opposes it in every respect.

It’s mind numbing; I am reading it in bed at night only… to help me fall asleep.

What’s bothering me the most this time around are Edward’s looks. Bella, who forgets to breathe and doesn’t notice when she has come inside out of the rain, seems able to interpret the most complex facial expressions.

Like in the second chapter, when Edward looks at her with “unmet expectation” on his face.

Tell, me, WHAT DOES THAT LOOK LIKE?

I keep twisting my face around trying to create this painfully specific expression, and I end up feeling like Joey Tribbiani doing his “I have a fish hook in my eyebrow and I like it” look.

joeyfishhook

And then, a couple chapters later, Edward looks at her incredulously, but his face is also “hard” and “defensive” at the same time.

I’ve been working on it. What do you think?

20130609-072338.jpg

Rowling vs Meyer, Round 4 – How Can I Describe Meyer’s Writing?

18 Wednesday Apr 2012

Posted by IfByYes in TwiBashing

≈ 23 Comments

Tags

adjectives, adverbs, books, characterization, characters, criticism, description, Harry Potter, jk rowling, literary criticism, literature, reviews, Stephenie Meyer, Twilight, writing

Remember how I talked about cramming the universe into a teaspoon when it came to comparing J K Rowling with Stephenie Meyer? Well, when I actually started on discussing the writing, I discovered that I had to split it into two. This is the second half of round 3. The reason it took so long was that it was STILL getting out of hand. Therefore, there will also be a Round 5. It’ll probably stop there. Probably.

In this round, we will look more closely at the way these two ladies write – specifically, their use of description and their ability to create unique characters… or the lack thereof.

(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.)

Continue reading →

Round 2: Twilight in the Garden of Good and Evil

10 Wednesday Aug 2011

Posted by IfByYes in TwiBashing

≈ 38 Comments

Tags

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…

Me, according to “Twilight”

“Good” means: Friends with Bella.

“Evil” means: Not friends with Bella and/or has red eyes.

Therefore, I am evil, and so are albino bunny rabbits.

Continue reading →

Round 1: In Which Stephenie Meyer Confuses Feminism With Kung Fu.

31 Sunday Jul 2011

Posted by IfByYes in TwiBashing

≈ 64 Comments

Tags

books, characters, feminism, Harry Potter, j.k. rowling, literary criticism, literature, protagonists, Stephenie Meyer, Twilight, women in fiction

(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.)

The main protagonist of Harry Potter is a boy, while the protagonist of Twilight is a girl, so you’d think that Twilight would be more feminist in its message.

But anyone who has read that series would laugh hysterically at the suggestion that it was anything other than unempowering anti-feminist sludge. Well, anyone except the author.

Can you FEEL the girl power?

Stephanie Meyer doesn’t agree with the rest of the Western World that Twilight is sexist codswallop.

Sure, Bella is pretty weak and useless. And sure, Edward tends to make all of the decisions. And yeah, Edward frequently ignores Bella’s preferences (drags her to the car/prom/house/birthday party/altar against her will, hides information that he doesn’t think she should hear, steals the engine out of her car to keep her “safe” from his rival…) in the name of knowing what is best for her.

Well, and ok, she is constantly needing her butt saved by someone, and she does do all the cooking and shopping around her house (because her father, after being a bachelor for 16 years, can’t even cook pasta, apparently). And she does attach all of her life’s value to the presence of a man.

But, Meyer doesn’t understand why we make such a big deal of all that.

Just because she doesn’t do kung fu and she cooks for her father doesn’t make her worthy of that criticism.

Ok, Steph.

Meyer has also pointed out that there are other strong female characters in Twilight other than, er, Bella.

I am all about girl power—look at Alice and Jane if you doubt that.

Okay, let’s run through your other female characters, shall we? We’ll start with Alice and Jane.

Continue reading →

Rowling vs Meyer: As Requested

29 Friday Jul 2011

Posted by IfByYes in Shhh, I'm Reading, TwiBashing, Well, That's Just Stupid

≈ 21 Comments

Tags

book reviews, Children's literature, feminism, Harry Potter, literary criticism, literature, sexism, Twilight

   VS   

Much like the Bella Swan vs Jane Eyre post, this is one of those posts that seems (on the surface) to be completely unnecessary.

I might as well make a post about why Saturday is better than Monday, or why music is better than construction noises.

And yet, there IS a need (not the least because people seem interested in it).

Harry Potter and Twilight are often lumped into the same category by two groups of people: People Who Haven’t Read Harry Potter and Idiots.

The reasoning?

  1. JK Rowling and Stephenie Meyer are both thirty-something mothers who wrote a story and hit the jackpot.
  2. Neither of them was a professional writer before they hit it big, unlike authors like Stephen King, who carefully carved their way into the writing business short story by short story, edited paper by edited paper.
  3. Both of them got the idea for their story seemingly by divine inspiration: Rowling with a mental image of a boy wizard on a train, and Meyer with a dream about a horny vampire.
  4. Both series deal with fantasy.
  5. Both series are attractive to young readers, and were excellent at getting 12 year olds to turn off their Xboxes for a while.
  6. Both series have spawned a set of hardcore fans who are, quite frankly, a little odd and fanatical (although Harry Potter fans argue that they use much better grammar than “Twihards”).
  7. Both series have spawned extremely popular and high-grossing movies, moving the phenomenon out of the bookstores and deeper into pop culture.

The exterior similarities are such that those who have read neither series tend to view both as pop culture nonsense; so much litarary slush blown far out of proportion to their worth.

These people are only half right.

Twilight is all of that. With writing reminiscent of fan fiction, and less polished than you would find in your standard Harlequin romance, Twilight is slush. I congratulate Stephenie Meyer on her success, but slush it is none the less.

The Harry Potter books, on the other hand, are modern classics which belong on the shelf next to The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Chronicles of Narnia. If anything, I find them more entertaining than Tolkien and richer (and less didactic) than Lewis.

The only thing that Stephenie Meyer shares with C.S. Lewis and (sometimes) Tolkien is sexism.

So that will be my focus of my first rant.

“First rant?”

Oh yeah, well, I tried to write a single post about all the ways in which Harry Potter is amazing and Twilight is not, but it was like trying to cram the UNIVERSE into a teaspoon.

This is the best I could do:

[vimeo vimeo.com/26881967]

So… yeah, I’m going to be breaking this up into several rants.

Hope you’re cool with that.

Next: In Which Stephenie Meyer Confuses Feminism With Kung Fu.

Freaking Dawn

17 Sunday Jul 2011

Posted by IfByYes in TwiBashing

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

book reviews, books, Breaking Dawn, idiocy, literary criticism, literature, Stephenie Meyer, Twilight

I’m not sure exactly how to review Breaking Dawn. It is like reviewing a train wreck.

I mean, I could go through it point by point and indicate everything wrong with it, but then it would look like this:

p. 6

(NB: These are the pages according to my E-reader. They may not correspond perfectly to the print book)

Preface:

It seemed oddly inevitable, though, facing death again.

There is nothing “odd”, Bella, about death’s inevitability. Death and taxes, Bella, death and taxes.

Like I really was marked for disaster.

Bella, you are not “marked for disaster” just because you keep surviving dangerous situations. You’re goddamn lucky. 

“If you loved the one who was killing you, it left you no options.”

It isn’t noble to sit there and let someone you love kill you just because you love them. You can still call the cops and then love them from effing afar. 

Also, chiming in with some hindsight glasses – given that this rant most likely pertains to your life-sucking pregnancy, this is risking your life for your child, not just letting someone you love kill you.

There is a difference. The fact that you can’t distinguish that difference is one of the many reasons why I think that you are a complete twerp.

Chapter 1:

Two pedestrians were frozen on the sidewalk, missing their chance to cross as they stared. Behind them, Mr. Marshall was gawking through the plate-glass window of his little souvenir shop.

But this is a town where the Cullens regularly drive sport cars about. Bella is supposedly driving a Mercedes Guard, but here’s the thing – the car may be a tank, but it’s not that flashy. That makes sense if you think about it – it’s meant to protect people, not look cool.

I sincerely doubt that this car is stopping pedestrians on the street and making people gawk out of shop windows. Bella is a paranoid weirdo, as usual, who thinks that everything is about her. Probably there’s a flamingo walking up the street and Bella has totally missed this bizarre occurrence because she’s such a self-obsessed whack job.

If I hadn’t been running on vapors, I wouldn’t come into town at all.

That brings up a good point. Bella, you live in small town America. If you don’t like driving your crazy new car, why don’t you walk like a normal person? You’ve obviously been driving this car, since it is “running on vapors”.

Either walk, or stop whining.

I had been going without a lot of things these days, like Pop-Tarts and shoelaces, to avoid spending time in public.

Not Pop-Tarts and shoelaces! How long-suffering is our heroine? The starving children of Africa don’t know how good they have it. If only there was someone else in the household who could do shopping, oh right, her father, but he can’t shop because he’s just a man, you know.

Of course, there was nothing I could do to make the numbers on the gauge pick up the pace. They ticked by sluggishly, almost as if they were doing it just to annoy me.

Bella, I realize you have paranoid and narcissistic tendencies, but try to get a grip. EVERYTHING is not about you.

p. 7

It was stupid to be so self-conscious, and I knew that.

Do you? Do you REALLY?

I briefly contemplated my issues with words like fiance, wedding, husband, etc. I just couldn’t put it together in my head.

I realize that it must be exhausting to try and make both neurons fire at once.

I just couldn’t reconcile a staid, respectable, dull concept like husband with my concept of Edward.

WARNING, WARNING – if you can’t imagine your intended behaving in a reliable, respectable way as a husband, then DON’T MARRY THAT PERSON. As much as teenagers want to believe that romance remains exciting forever, the fact remains that a few years down the road, it’s going to be much more important to you that your husband is the kind of guy who comes home and helps out with the dishes than whether or not he sparkles in the sunlight.

p. 8

I swiftly put away the nozzle and crept into the front seat to hide while the enthusiast dug a huge professional-looking camera out of his backpack. He and his friend took turns posing by the hood, and then they went to take pictures at the back end.

If someone is taking photos of the hood of your car, the front seat is a really stupid place to hide. Even if your side windows are tinted, the state of Washington doesn’t permit tinting on the main body of the windshield, so YOU ARE IN THOSE PICTURES. Especially since we have already established that it is “a typical drizzly day”, so the reflection of the sun won’t save you.

And missile-proof glass? Nice. What happened to old-fashioned bullet-proof?

There is no such thing as missile-proof glass, Bella, unless you count “missile” literally, meaning anything someone has thrown, like a rock or maybe a grenade. Then again, you believed that Edward was a vampire without much persuasion.

p. 9

I hadn’t seen the ‘after’ car yet. It was hidden under a sheet in the deepest corner of the Cullens’ garage. I knew most people would have peeked by now, but I really didn’t want to know.

Let’s get this straight. Your reason for not “peeking” at your gift is not because “it’s wrong to peek”, it’s because you just don’t want to know. You also think that “most people” would have peeked, which means that you either think that “most people” are bad people, or you actually don’t understand that it is wrong to peek at a gift. That makes YOU a bad person. But I knew that already.

No matter how many times I drove down the familiar road home, I still couldn’t make the rain-faded flyers fade into the background.

Are you incapable of naming a noun without slapping on an adjective? Also, why did you just use the word “fade” twice within a single word of each other? It’s called a Thesaurus, Bella. USE IT. Or even better, let the occasional noun pass undescribed. It won’t kill you.

Finally, rain doesn’t fade things, you everlasting moron. THE SUN fades things, and you’re always moaning about how little sun there is in Forks. Rain melts things, or washes them out, it doesn’t fade them. The only thing that rain can fade is radio waves. You fail at adjectives in every way possible.

He was more disappointed with Billy, Jacob’s father – and Charlie’s closest friend. For Billy’s not being more involved with the search for his sixteen-year-old “runaway.” For Billy’s refusing to put up the flyers in La Push, the reservation on the coast that was Jacob’s home. For his seeming resigned to Jacob’s disappearance, as if there was nothing he could do. For his saying “Jacob’s a grown up now. He’ll come home if he wants to.

Why are those periods there, particularly that first one, between “closest friend” and “For Billy’s”? That period should not be there. I realize, Bella, that you have a real hate on for writing normal sentences, preferring either nonsensical sentence fragments or multiple sentences that have been conjoined like Siamese twins, but this is a particularly atrocious example.

Let me play the part of editor, for a moment, since yours seems to have been on a smoke break through the publication of this entire series. Here are some ways you could have worded this in a way that didn’t suck balls and make the God of Grammar want to smite you from above:

[My father] was even more disappointed with Billy – Jacob’s father and Charlie’s closest friend – because he was not more involved in the search for his sixteen-year-old runaway. Billy refused to put up the flyers in La Push – the reservation on the coast where they lived. He seemed resigned to Jacob’s disappearance and kept saying, “Jacob’s a grown up now. He’ll come home if he wants to.

Was that so hard? Doesn’t that read better? Christ on a waffle, Bella, full sentences are your friends.

[over four hundred pages omitted for length reasons]

Continue reading →

Jane Eyre Versus Bella Swan – Let the Bash Begin!

20 Thursday Jan 2011

Posted by IfByYes in Shhh, I'm Reading, TwiBashing, Well, That's Just Stupid

≈ 48 Comments

Tags

books, characters, grammar, heroines, Jane Eyre, literary criticism, literature, Twilight

VS

Now, to anyone who has read Jane Eyre, this comparison may seem ridiculous… and it is.

But there is a need, mostly because Stephenie Meyer has put Jane Eyre in the same sentence as Twilight several times (trivia I could have lived without: originally she named Rosalie “Carol”). She said that she got Edward’s name from Mr. Rochester, and has listed Jane Eyre as one of her “inspirations” for Twilight.

“I read it when I was nine,” says Meyer, ”and I’ve reread it literally hundreds of times. I do think that there are elements of Edward in Edward Rochester and elements of Bella in Jane.”

You heard it right folks – literally hundreds of times. So, she must know Jane better than I do, because I’ve only read it a couple of times a year since I was 13 years old; sometimes I read it more often and sometimes less. That means I’ve probably only read it between 20 and 40 times, but Stephenie Meyer has read it literally hundreds of times. Yikes! She must read it at least seven or eight times a year to get that number.

There is a parallel between the creation of both characters:

  1. It is said that Charlotte Bronte wrote Jane Eyre to prove that a heroine doesn’t need to be rich or beautiful to be interesting. Similarly, Meyer has said that Twilight was based on an idea about a “normal” teenage girl and a vampire.
  2. They are both teenage (17 and 18, respectively) brunettes who are exceptionally pallid in complexion.
  3. Both Bella and Jane have somewhat weak constitutions, with a tendency towards fainting episodes.
  4. Both Bella and Jane closely resemble their creators. Bella looks like Stephenie Meyer and Jane looks like Charlotte Bronte.
  5. Both of them get to experience the fantastical love of a Byronic hero which their authors never had in real life. I feel fairly safe in saying that Meyer probably never actually got to be worshipped by a vampire and I also know that Bronte’s real-life Rochester, Constantin Heger, probably never loved her back and definitely never married her.

When I list it like that, it seems like they’re practically sisters, doesn’t it?

Nevertheless, Jane could kick Bella’s ass from here to eternity using the sheer force of her awesomeness.

[Beware of spoilers]

Continue reading →

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