Twilight is an Intellectual Black Hole
Josh Cleary
There is really no debate here. The faecal smear on the literary canvas that Stephanie Meyer enthusiastically fingerpainted is terrible. The woman’s grasp of the English language is comparable to a lobotomised single-cell organism. (Thank you biology nerds, I’m aware you can’t lobotomise something without a brain. Follow this through to its logical conclusion for me, would you?) The narrative, if one could apply so strong a word, is mediocre. At best. I mean honestly, in a series about teen sexuality, it takes three books of an average 587 pages each for them to actually fuck. 1760 pages of foreplay. This is just stupid.
Onward stupid soldiers. The series itself is a heady combination of that which attacks intellectualism on two fronts.
Front one: It encourages women everywhere to throw away a century of courageous battling for women’s rights. The underlying message of the Twilight saga (Meyer’s term, not mine) would seem to be: the worse he treats you, the more he loves you. Don’t worry if he up and leaves you for another woman, he’s doing it because he loves you. When he watches you sleep without your knowledge or consent, that’s love too. Not creepy. Not at all.
Speaking of creepy.
Front two: If, in our modern enlightened age, there was a 40-year-old man who appeared to be 17 and was hanging around a high school with the express intention of picking up underage girls, we wouldn’t even bother calling the cops, would we? The fact that the ‘love interest’ is over a century old does nothing to improve this situation. It means that this creepy weirdo has been watching girls sleep and hanging around in high schools for at least four generations. How does this idea not send you running for the hills screaming? He could have been dribbling on your great grandmother’s pillow while she slept. And now he’s dribbling on yours.
Look, the bottom line is this: the Twilight saga is a poorly written attempt to suck in the gullible and exploit their deep-seated childhood issues. The fact that people have fallen for it speaks more of the number of people affected by childhood abuse of one form or another and less about the quality of the writing. Or it’s an attempt by the Anunnaki or lizard people to brainwash the world.
Twilight might be an intellectual blackhole, but whatevs yo
Haimona Gray
Ohai! Soz for Josh Cleary, his childhood upbringing with David Koresh has left him immune to the charms of Twilight—he also hates kittens, but I digress.
According to Wikipedia, Twilight is about a 17-year-old girl who falls in love with a 104-year-old vampire, but what is age really? To quote the character Dennis Duffy from the erotic docudrama 30 Rock—“That girl said she was 16, but I swear to God I could tell she was 22!”
As for the literary merit of the Twilight, WELL! The fourth book in the epic saga Breaking Dawnn\\ won the British Book Awards Children’s Book of the Year award. You know who else has won this award? Of course you do—you too have read the Twilight Wikipedia page for 20 seconds while a tad drunk like myself—none other than Ricky Gervais. Does this make Stephanie Meyer the next David Brent? Yes, yes it does.
The Twilight saga is more than just an award-dominating feat of writey—yes, it’s a word [Ed—no it’s not]—genius, it’s also wholesome family entertainment. Don’t be fooled by the feminist rhetoric, aspects of sex and sexuality are deftly handled by Ms Meyer: she didn’t win the Bad Sex in Fiction award for 2005, that was some guy Gilles Coren. Nor has she stated that a friendly acquaintance was raised by cult leader David Koresh.
Her only sin has been to not pander to the effete literati, with their ‘narratives that go somewhere’ and their ‘lack of spine-shattering babies’. They make me sick.
While not technically cannon, the unofficial Twilight cookbook, Love At First Bite, introduces Twilight-reading dames to the value of baking to appease their aged suitors.
In conclusion, the Twilight extravaganza is far from the abomination that Mr Cleary has made it out to be. “Mediocre”? More like media ogre (puntastic), more like Josh Cleary is a media ogre, more like Josh’s face is… Anyhoo. It teaches young girls valuable life lessons, such as the relative nature of age, and the implications of glitter abuse.