=

Why Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight is Bad Literature

A Comprehensive Analysis

Prelude

I originally wrote this analysis a decade ago, and even then mocking Twilight was beating on a dead horse. With maturity and insight from watching Lindsey Ellis’ video essay, I’ve grown more reluctant to desecrate the carcass. However, I still stand by my initial impression: Twilight is bad literature.

Introduction

I hate Twilight. I also hate Hitler. Everyone else seems to mirror those two opinions. But unlike everyone else, I hate Twilight for legitimate reasons, not because my thirteen-year-old sister loves them too. If you hate Twilight even though you’re never read the book, you’re no better than the conformist who voted Hitler into office because his Nazi buddies told him to.

It’s pretty incredible how little literary analysis goes into Twilight. Many people hate it, but they are completely unable to explain why. Many justifications are pretty pathetic: who cares if Meyer made vampires glitter as if they survived an orgy at a Ke$ha concert? That’s called artistic license. Yes, it might seem silly and out of cultural context (and indicative that Meyer is a shitty author), but she’s the one to choose how her characters are. Anna Rice even made all her vampires bisexual. So while you’re at it, why don’t you bitch that J.R.R. Tolkein didn’t make his werewolves shapeshifters? Shut up.

If you’re one of those “TwiFans” arguing that Meyer “revolutionized” some genre of literature, go fuck yourself. Sheridan Le Fanu hinted “forbidden love” with vampires through lesbianism in Carmilla, and that predates Stoker’s Dracula by 25 years. And don’t even try to assume my gender to disqualify the impartiality of this review; I read Sophie Kinsella and Jodi Picoult with my eyes, not my penis.

But I digress. Here’s the book review for Twilight, the greatest romantic tale since Clinton face-fucked Lewinsky.

Characterization

Characters are by large the main reason why Twilight should be universally hated, because they have so little to offer. The Byronic hero and shrinking violet are shadows of their full potential, because, despite the veneer of intentions, the craft is still noticeably poor.

Isabella Swan

Bella as a character is insufferable because she is a cringe-generating factory. Attempts to make her likable and relatable fall flat, because even her clumsiness and shyness doesn’t compensate for her worst traits. Bella’s shallowness, lack of backbone, and pathetic dependence on Edward makes her come off as annoying, especially when her capabilities extend only to whining and performing idiotic theatrics.

There is no basic description of her appearance. Even more unsettling, Bella is described as “plain” even though several classmates fawn over her. This makes Isabella Swan not only an example of a shitty female protagonist, but also the epitome of the Mary Sue character.

Bella’s insecurities and awkwardness make her easily relatable to someone undergoing puberty or a class of hopelessly romantic women that includes female neckbeards, yanderes, and sexually-frustrated suburban housewives who never outgrew their teenage years. Now, people inform me that Bella is supposed to be less of a person and more of this “empty shell” so a reader (typically female) can put on and wear. This apparently makes Bella more relatable to her readers.

That, my children, is HORSESHIT. What makes characters relatable is their humanity and personality — not because we could adapt the perspective of a sociopath as our own. Capturing our basest human souls is what makes great literature great. For an example, let’s turn to Charles Dicken’s The Tale of Two Cities.

In this Dickensian novel, there are two prominent characters who look alike yet are so different — Sydney Carton and Charles Darnay. Novelist E. M. Forster famously criticized Dickens’ characters as “flat” because they seem to lack the depth and complexity that make literary characters realistic and believable. This is particularly the case for Darnay: a boring, two-dimensional archetype of the hero who seems handsome and noble just because his virtue perseveres. Carton, on the other hand, is bitter and sardonic. His humor borders on rudeness, but he exhibits an inner struggle and undergoes such a drastic character change that cumulates to self-sacrifice and redemption. Who do you think ended up as the most distinguishable character? Carton was so fucking amazing that his soliloquy is plagiarized, verbatim, by Commissioner Gordon’s eulogy for the Batman.

To recap, Bella is not relatable, she’s a marketing franchise to exploit the minds of impressionable young girls. She’s a horrid heroine for the teenagers who read it. If you’re one of those fangirls, for God’s sake, read something sensible. I’m not a romantic person — most of former loved ones end up in city dumpsters — but even I can tell the difference between Jane Eyre and a hormonal dumbass.

Edward Cullen

Physically, Edward is the shit. He is the God of Sexy. I’m not even kidding: Meyer constantly compares him to Adonis. The level of detail that the author goes into while describing Edward’s appearance is remarkable. Excruciating details rant about his muscular pecs, clothing, hair, breath, and even his goddamn driving skills. The culmination of which comes off as unnecessary and a tad excessive.

So we determined Edward is flooded by tsunamis of frothy loins wherever he walks shirtless. His personality, however, is downright disappointing. He’s selfish: he stays near Bella despite the risk to her safety. He’s creepy: he watches her sleeping, before she really knows him. He’s volatile: his mood swings are aggressively sinusoidal. He’s immature: for someone who lived a hundred years, he doesn’t seem to have experienced it. He’s controlling: he doesn’t want to let her out of his sight for a couple seconds. (Granted, her stupidity might justify the supervision). He’s insulting: he treats Bella like an incapable, silly little girl. (He’s right, but it’s still insulting).

If Edward wanted the best for Bella, he’d stay away from her, period. (That’s a menstruation pun). The core element of the story sucks like a leechlike proboscis. It’s like a script collaboration between George Lucas and M. Night Shyamalan. Speaking about Lucas and Shyamalan, this conveniently moves on to the next topic at hand…

The Plot

There is no plot. The majority of the book is nothing but sappy cringeworthy fluff until late in the book, when something outside their isolated relationship finally occurs. Nonetheless, it was still rushed and confusing, no thanks to Bella conveniently fainting during it.

The romance between Bella and Edward is not the plot, because I really fail to see the conflict and resolution. For those who disagree, please explain to me how this novel should have ended without the arrival of James’ Coven.

The amour itself is not the conflict. I suppose Edward’s element of danger is occasionally compelling, but this is overshadowed by the fact that Bella is completely oblivious to it. The absence of her fear comes off as sheer stupidity rather than as self-sacrificing love.

Plot holes

Plot holes are like assholes: everyone has one (or else a disgruntled reader would tear one open), and they stink. The trick here is to make your plot hole stink less than another’s. Unfortunately, to have a plot hole, a plot is needed. That’s why Twilight doesn’t have plot holes: just inconsistencies.

Now, the listed items below are some inconsistencies from Twilight. This is not complete set.

• Edward, despite his incredibility, is a 100-year-old virgin. Perhaps this does fit in context of this book because he is bloodless, and therefore incapable of getting an erection.
• Bella has a bad case of selective syncope. She faints in her biology class during a blood typing session because she can’t stand the “smell” of blood. Yet earlier in the book, she ends up in a hospital next to a patient with “soiled” bandages on his head.
• Understandably, Meyer refuses to address menstruation. Irritably, she tries to explain this away in an interview by characterizing menstrual blood as “dead blood” instead of admitting her distaste for the subject. Alas, blood is blood wherever it spurts from. Unless it’s coagulated or pus.
• Bella runs away from two vampires that are protecting her to meet up with someone the vampires are trying to shield her from. One of the vampires protecting Bella can see the future the moment someone makes a decision, but she did not stop Bella, despite presumed foreknowledge of Bella’s escape.

From what I have provided, there are two forces at work here. Lack of verisimilitude (inconsistencies with reality) and character error (inconsistencies with characters).

Many fangirls would probably contest my first accusation by pointing out that Twilight is fictional. Yet a great writer named Mark Twain once said, “It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.” Meaning a fictional genre does not justify a story to be illogical. Unless a writer is purposely trying to establish an unrealistic tone (like humor), the story has to stand by reason and logic (and hence reality). A character must not be exempt from certain laws of nature and physics without explanation.

I don’t mind if Meyer’s vampires light up like disco balls in the sunlight — vampires are fictional, and not bound by reality — so this silly detail is not an inconsistency with reality. But the inconsistency here is that the vampires could come out in Forks because of the clouds. What. Is the Elephant Graveyard from The Lion King based off Forks, Washington? Clouds, mists, and fog do not deter the sun’s rays. You can get sunburn on a cloudy day. Let’s say that the UV rays are not the problem, but rather the bright light. Well, that would explain it, if the vampires did not hang out in a school cafeteria, which is presumably well lit, without any glowing effect whatsoever.

Character errors are basically inconsistencies with the character — like how a character unexplainably acts differently in similar scenarios. This fallacy is pretty self-explanatory.

Writing Style

Meyer’s writing style is like my drunk personality: disappointing, repetitive, and full of contradictions. Her primary attribute is constantly force-feeding information rather than letting the readers read between the lines.

One way Meyer does this is through ostentatiousness and regurgitation. We’ll come back to this later. Repeatedly.

Another way is informed ability, or “telling without showing.” For example, Meyer informs us of Bella’s intelligence by explicitly stating her speed in completing her homework and her love for classical literature. A better author could have shown Bella studying, working, and carrying books between classes. Instead we get a self-diagnosed bookworm who says she read all these famous books, and one of them has a character named Edward in it.

Compare this to Josephine “Jo” March from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Jo’s intelligence is on full display through her rebelliousness and her sharp tongue. Her love for literature is consistently expressed through her composition of short stories and plays for her sisters to perform. She even pursues a literary career in her adulthood life. Like Bella, Jo chooses love, but trading her professional aspirations for domestic life feels much more of a sacrificial loss than what Bella has to offer.

Purple Prose

Never heard of purple prose? Here’s Deb Stover’s essay, The Purple Prose Eater, to explain it to you.

Purple prose consists of words and phrases that sound stilted, overly descriptive, or cliché. Now that doesn’t mean we should never use beautiful, descriptive language. Not at all. What it means is the overuse of it irritates your reader and can mutate into the dreaded purple prose.

Yet this isn’t just annoying your audience through literary rococo, as Paul West discusses the limitations of purple prose in his own essay defending it.

Purple is immoral, undemocratic and insincere; at best artsy, at worst the exterminating angel of depravity… A writer who can’t do purple is missing a trick. A writer who does purple all the time ought to have more tricks.

Peppering every sentence with adjectives and adverbs adds nothing of substance except uninspired artificiality. Salad dressing adds flavor, but the customers are asking for salad, not a soup of mayonnaise. It’s also the stuff that erotica is written in, and shitty erotica at that.

Grammar

Sometimes I reach a sentence phrased so awkwardly that I can’t help but do the slow blink of incredulity. Here’s an example:

Charlie had really been fairly nice about the whole thing.

How about another?

But I could see the sacrifice in her eyes behind the promise.

Meyer also an unfortunate habit of overusing dashes when other punctuation can be substituted instead.

“Oh — Dad, I don’t really know anything about cars.”

And I never looked a free truck in the mouth — or engine.

It was too green — an alien planet.

Those were the only kind of days their marriage had — the early ones.

Dashes are meant to denote strong interruptions, and overusing them gives off a disjointed appearance. If you don’t find them too jarring, consider the fact that I pulled these examples out within the same page.

Thesaurus Abuse

Meyer rapes the thesaurus like there’s no tomorrow. For an example, let’s turn to the infamous sparkling scene:

His skin, white despite the faint flush from yesterday’s hunting trip, literally sparkled, like thousands of tiny diamonds were embedded in the surface. He lay perfectly still in the grass, his shirt open over his sculpted, incandescent chest, his scintillating arms bare. His glistening, pale lavender lids were shut, though of course he didn’t sleep. A perfect statue, carved in some unknown stone, smooth like marble, glittering like crystal.

Now let’s replicate the same passage by removing the synonyms:

His skin, white despite the faint flush from yesterday’s hunting trip, literally sparkled, like thousands of tiny diamonds were embedded in the surface. He lay perfectly still in the grass, his shirt open over his sculpted, sparkling chest, his sparkling arms bare. His sparkling, pale lavender lids were shut, though of course he didn’t sleep. A perfect statue, carved in some unknown stone, smooth like marble, sparkling like crystal.

So basically Meyer told the reader that Edward sparkles. Five times. Within a paragraph. This is an unbelievable combination of purple prose and thesaurus abuse.

Diction

Sometimes there are hints that Meyer never checked the meanings of the words she found in the thesaurus.

But it was sure to be awkward with Charlie. Neither of us was what anyone would call verbose, and I didn’t know what there was to say regardless.

Verbose — adj.: using or expressed in more words than are needed.

Bella’s default stream-of-consciousness is purple prose, so that’s a fail for her self-reflection. Not being wordy is not equivalent to not being talkative.

“Yeah, it’s an off day when I don’t get somebody telling me how edible I smell.”

Edible — adj.: fit or suitable to be eaten.

Cheese maggots and soft-boiled anatine fetuses are edible. Hell, all humans are edible. Digestibility does not necessarily indicate ripeness, nourishment, or — as it’s supposed to be used in this case — palatability.

I choked back the hysteria that threatened to explode, but a small giggle managed to get out despite my efforts.

Hysteria — noun: exaggerated or uncontrollable emotion or excitement, especially among a group of people.

Um, is this a typo for hysterics? Surely if you’re able to “choke back” on your frenzy of hilarity, it’s not really hysteria at all. Mania is not equivalent to laughter.

Conclusion