A Reflection on the Twilight Craze

It started out so harmlessly, so innocently. You heard about it from a friend, who heard it from twenty other friends. You decided to give it a chance. Everyone was talking about it.

It had to be good.

Eventually, the engrossing tome begins to absorb you. Its suffocating grasp tightens around your conscious mind. You can’t put it down. You can feel your very being sucked into its universe.

And then you finish reading “Twilight”. You come to realize three more books come after it. You hunt them down, a lustful glint in your crazed eye. The very environment around you twists into your new reality.

The transformation is complete. Another “TwiHard” walks our hallways eternally, with a taste for the undying works of Stephenie Meyer, and sometimes, a lust for Edward Cullen and/or Jacob Black.

(Editors note: but more lust for Jacob.)

This isn’t exactly how a TwiHard is born, but it’s more dramatic and fun to write, as opposed to a fair, unbiased assessment of the nature of the typical fan of Twilight and a critical assessment of the Twilight series in general. Who am I kidding? I’m exceptionally biased.

In case you’ve been living under a proverbial rock for most of the school year, I’ll give you a quick catch-up on the Twilight series. Twilight depicts the relationship between Isabella Swan (also known as Bella), a girl whose family has recently moved to Forks, Washington, and Edward Cullen, a member of a vampire family that drinks animal blood instead of human. They fall in love, and their relationship spells disaster for human-girl Bella, who is in a constant state of danger, being in a relationship with a vampire. Twilight capitalizes on the teenager’s feelings of sexual tension and alienation.

The series was written by Stephenie Meyer. It has won a variety of honours, most notably Publisher Weekly’s “Best Book of the Year”. It has been translated into over twenty different languages, is a #1 Bestseller on the New York Times, and, according to USA Today, is the best selling book of 2008. As you are probably aware, it has even been made into a movie.

Today, in our beloved Bell High School, the series has entered a recurring trend of popularity. It is so well-known, and it only becomes more popular as word of it is passed around. People are introduced to the book, and they can’t stop talking about it, whether they love it or hate it. It becomes a consistent cycle, and in most facets of school life, you cannot help but be introduced to the series. It has become a part of most cliques and groups, including the Globell Roar news team.

We have issued a total of three issues previously, and in each one, Twilight has had its place in our newspaper. I shouldn’t say that happened because the editor-in-chief (Meaghan Wray), co-editor (Brooke Delcorde), and comic artist Yuka Sai are all massive TwiHards (even though they are. They’re also darn good at their jobs, and I don’t make enemies with people I respect.) It was supposed to cater to the relevant social trends at the time. That, I had no qualms with. Aside from some exaggerated whining and crying, I could live with it. It wouldn’t last.

Then Yuka’s third comic came out in our last issue, poking some fun at Star Wars. I was obligated to go into rabid Star Wars fan boy mode, having wasted a significant part of my childhood watching the Death Star blow up for the umpteenth billion time, and having constructed enough LEGO models to form a small galactic fleet of plastic nostalgia. We hadn’t heard from Twilight in quite a while, the move just seemed regurgitated, more than anything.

Sometime after that, something completely absurd occurred. Twilight had spawned its own religion: Cullenism. I had no idea devotion to a novel could have gone this far, but I‘ve been proved wrong on numeous occassions. Twilight had brought a group of people together for worship.

Cullenists are also expected to read some of the books on a daily basis, “like the Bible” and make a pilgrimage to Forks. They have a base set of beliefs everyone in the cast of Twilight is real. They believe that if you are good in life, you will be blessed to live eternally with the Cullens. Cullenists are expected to read Twilight everyday like the Bible and make a pilgrimage to Forks.

It’s not hard to question the validity of the religion, but its most devoted members have an almost zealous obsession. Hating Twilight may be bad for your health, especially if you come across one of its insanely devoted fans. Message board “Twilight Sucks” has been cataloguing attacks on people by the TwiHards that violently respond to the haters of the literature and movies they love. The list is expansive. Attacks have ranged from being bricked by the book, to being whipped by a cord, to phone harassment, even to an attempted throat slitting and attempted drowning, not to mention a lot of stuff in between. No murders are on record. Yet.

I’m not enough of a bigot to assume everyone who likes Twilight thinks or responds to people this way, so don’t assume I’m inferring anything like that. I do believe that when a sappy, cheesy teen novel becomes infamous enough to have its own religion, or when criticism is a matter of life or death, that’s where I believe the line should be drawn.

So now we’ve regurgitated the cultural influence of Twilight (took long enough). On to actual literary criticism.

The most common reason to like Edward Cullen among fan girls is “Oh my gosh, he is so hot and dreamy! He is my boyfriend forever!” This is usually followed by a collective “Squee~!” by the members of the group. Given I am not the most attractive writer (although I can try), I will concede, Edward Cullen may have perfectly flawless features. However, this is about all he’s got going for him, outside of being a super-powered bloodsucker. His character is bland and mostly unattractive, spending far too much of his time whimpering about his own immortality. His depressed conversations with himself are absolutely grating to read.

Thankfully, we focus more on Bella. There’s a distinct lack of realism here, however. For being the new girl on the block, it seems peculiar to me how she can become instantly popular among lonely, adolescent males. My guess is that she has amazing looks, among other assets (Bow chika wow w- sorry). It seems to me that the power of love would be much more influential, if the superficial qualities of Bella and Edward weren’t so heavily glamorized and descriptive. Friends have theorized Bella is merely a Mary-Sue version of Meyer.

Fiction allows a certain degree of… well, fiction, but some of it is quite far-fetched. For one, the vampires in the novel sparkle in the sunlight. Let it be said that there is a large directory that demonstrates the qualities in the different varieties of vampires. After research, we found that none of these vampires sparkle. At all. And who the heck names a town “Forks”?

My biggest criticism? The book tries too hard to be two different things. It tries to be a teenage romance, and it tries to be a vampire thriller. But, in its attempts to succeed in both directions, it only stretches itself, not quite succeeding at either genre. The bare-bones characters do not help. It is not a terrible series by any means, but for the critical acclaim it brings to itself, it really seems quite overrated.

People have been quick to claim Twilight is the Harry Potter of this generation of teens and tweens. I disagree full-heartedly. Harry Potter is perhaps among the most influential pieces of children’s literature of our time, and undoubtedly it will live to be passed on to future generations. Twilight has enjoyed its immense popularity, and with the frivolous cash-cow spending that came along with it, I won’t say ‘boo’ to its economic stimulus. However, outside of Edward’s good looks, it lacks the structure and writing style that made Harry Potter such an endearing series. It’s great that Twilight has been pumping money into our precious economy for so long, but it won’t have the legacy the boy wizard enjoys. On an unrelated note, at least some of the Harry Potter movies were nominated for Academy Awards.

The first novel has found its way into my innermost sanctum of security: my bathroom, the last place I believed would never be left. My sister had returned from university and brought it with her. I was frightened, because I didn’t think it would end up in my own home. I’ve given up attempting to fight its seductive lure, but I can still criticize its hollow legacy. It seems that it has hit that one moment of sheer greatness a long time ago; all that followed is only an anticlimactic afterthought.