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Punching people is obviously doing harm to someone else. But reading bad books might give you bad ideas that cause you to do harm to yourself.

Even though I agree it’s better to read than to not, I just thought I’d play Devil’s Advocate.

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Meh hardly a valid comparison. Punching people and reading bad books are hardly the same thing. Of course it’s good that they are reading something. No matter how bad it is because as someone else said you can always move up. Get em started with Twilight, move up to Stephen King and then start feeding them the really good stuff.

(Don’t get me wrong: I love Stephen King but he’s not exactly the pinnacle of modern literature)

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Yeah. The entire thing is based around a DREAM she had.

Now, I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with incorporating elements of a dream into a story. I myself created a character after having a particularly vivid dream about another character that featured this new man in an important role. But when the dream itself is the source of so much backstory and exposition, you’re bound to come up with a lot of elements that don’t make sense at all–like sparkly vampires.

So, in other words, she dreamed that vampires were sparkly, and instead of deciding to take the basic idea of the dream and rework it so that her story fit with the established mythos, or even changing the background completely so that Edward was some new, invented creature instead of a VAMPIRE, or even doing a little bit of godforsaken RESEARCH, she just started writing out her own little wish-fullfilment fantasy story. I very strongly doubt that she was intending to publish Twilight when she started writing. It was probably meant only for herself–it just got very, very out of hand, and thus the unresearched, badly written trash that is the Twilight “saga” now. What do you want to bet that she herself was in the role of “Bella” in the original dream?

Aside, this is a quote from a friend of mine regarding the attitude of “it’s better that they’re reading badly written books than not reading at all.” She said, “I hear so many people talking about the Twilight series and saying, ‘Well, at least they’re reading.’ NO! If your kids are going out and punching people in the face, you don’t say, ‘Well, at least they’re meeting new people!’”

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as for the reading argument. I worked in a Borders when HP fever was at its highest, just after the films started. the argument that only the avid readers will continue works, we’d sell the HP books and nothing else for a few weeks then back to the rest. Except for one factor, the majority of the books were from my section the true Genre fantasy SciFi section not the childrens section and were sold to … adults just like me. The children coming near there tended to walk away with well written horror, or over written (in my opinion) Tolkien.

and finally… arent vamps meant to be the footsoldiers of the dark, when they are given any kind of back story other than viral or “just generally dark” like Drac?

(btw I have read most of the major works including the anita blakemore, BTVS books, I am legend (the book is much better than the film but the films good) and some random works just NOT Twilight)

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If you become an apologist for crap, all you’re going to get is crap for entertainment.

Even the guy who plays Edward said reading the book to learn about the character was like reading an intimate fantasy from Stephanie Meyer’s personal journal.

Being happy because teenagers are reading uninspired, insipid, morally repugnant (which would be one thing if it actions were criticized in some way, but it’s just “OMG! Hot sparkly guy! I’ll do anything for you!”) characterless books is an ironic statement from anyone who loves to read. Or thanks to Hollywood, anyone who wants to see a good movie.

Dark and Light are synonymous with Good and Evil. This goes back for centuries. All the monsters come out at night because the night is a frightening place where the hunters have advantage and we humans are at a psychological and physiological disadvantage. Demons came for you while you slept, Dracula hunted at night, the Wolfman came out during the full moon, the zombies originally came out during the night (Night of the Living Dead). Meanwhile, everything can be seen in the daylight, those spooky shadows recede, all our senses are functioning at full capacity, all is well.

This is such an integrated thing in our minds that having the monster come out during the day time to terrorize used to be scary just by itself (read just about anything by Stephen King for some of the best of this; It, The Stand, etc.). Or, the daylight could be used to drag the monster out of hiding to show children that it’s nothing to be scared of and/or how to defeat it or our own personal demons that we’ve metaphorically turned into some spooky monster.

Stephanie Meyer didn’t try to follow nor reinvent any of these basic standards. She just threw them out the window because they made writing her erotic personal fantasy too hard. And while you might subjectively like it, objectively there is nothing at all to recommend these books as anything but crap.

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Meyers never researched her characters. She purposely didn’t, because she said she didn’t want to be influenced by what others have written. Bullshit. Stephen King said it best: “What, you think you get academic brownie points for purposely staying out of touch with your audience?”

My thought is she didn’t give her vampires (and thus her main ideal boyfriendI mean character) a sun weakness (or really, any weakness at all) is because she doesn’t know how to write to overcome them. Why write something with conflict or challenges when it’s easier to make them SPARKLY?

The whole thing is an elevated fanfic given book form. The main female is a self-insert (seriously, read the description of Bella and find a picture of Meyers; there is NO difference) the main male is domineering and controlling, and anything that should make sense is treated as not how things should be.

Check out this link: http://vampirely.wordpress.com/

The site disects the first two books, and it currently working on the third.

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