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Wait, wasn't Bella affected by Emmett's emotion changing power in the first book? So she's immune to all vampire powers except Alice's fortune telling and Emmett's ability to manipulate emotions? This kind of poo poo makes me really appreciate writers like Sanderson actually plotting out books and having some idea of what makes a character special rather than just making them the focus character and telling everyone they're special.
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Oct 25, 2019 07:14
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Part of me can't help but imaging vampirism in Twilight as basically a stand in for motherhood in many Christian circles. It's essentially a way of giving women an identity that they can view as overriding all their current shortcomings, that lets them join the 'higher' levels of society and also cementing whatever relationship they have with their partner simultaneously. Meyer isn't a good enough writer for me to think there is any intentionality with this but from a literary critique sort of view I can see a lot of parallels too draw.
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Jan 15, 2020 22:46
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I got to the point where Jacob asked her to kiss him and just loving skipped to the end. That was horrific in a John Ringo sense.
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Feb 13, 2020 22:47
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Bella's whole basis for her aversion to marriage is her mother's pathological hatred and the failure of her own parents' marriage. When she does reveal that she getting married, turns out her mother thinks it's awesome and that she's always thought Bella would need to be married and it's good for her. Charlie seems to be someone not overly scarred by his marriage falling apart and having to care for an elderly family member being used as leverage against him. So it leaves me concluding that Renée was such a selfish caregiver that Bella spent the last 15 years of her life being brought by someone who basically excoriated an institution to the point of giving her daughter a... Something beyond a complex about it, while also expecting her daughter to actually enter into easier institution. Either that or Meyer is a lovely writer who wanted some tension/comedy relief that no normal human would be able to deliver. Or the Mormon thing where a single woman would obviously view marriage as the single most important event in her life even when that life involves university, possible career, immortality, ancient vampire covens plotting to kill her, werewolves, etc.
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Apr 22, 2020 16:17
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The exploration of vampire society generally is just massively disappointing. There feels like a lot of potential and some really interesting ideas regarding how vampirism works and how they are forced to structure themselves to survive. And all Meyer wants to write about is teen melodrama. I really do get that take that it's romantic self insert fan fic set in a much richer world. That said based on her general ability I'm not convinced she wouldn't have turned Carlisle's time with the Volturi into one of the female vampires being super into him for a few centuries with chapters of dialogue about preparing for a ball followed by an off scene massacre of a renaissance era Italian army and some reference to Aro scheming to get a new pope appointed. Then 5 chapters of Carlisle feeling awkward at the ball because some vampire chick is totally into him but he knows his one true love is out there somewhere.
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Apr 24, 2020 10:12
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I was going to make a comment about how slightly worrying and normalising of domestic abuse situations the idea of a woman examining herself and just thinking about how to hide bruising would be. Then apparently 50 Shades author saw the same thing and decided that undertones of domestic abuse was too subtle and literally wrote deliberate abuse being equally accepted by the partner? Ugh.
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May 1, 2020 06:29
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Yeah, I definitely don't think Stephanie Meyer has any level of self awareness or general awareness regarding this. Combined with the total lack of editorial oversight I'd side with, 'she just didn't realise it could be read that way' unironically. Certainly I think any subtext in Twilight is more deconstructive psychoanalysis of Stephanie Meyer herself than understanding any message she's trying to convey.
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May 1, 2020 12:20
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I mean, that's literally these characters with some serial numbers filed off...
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May 12, 2020 18:17
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The Leah conversation reads a lot to me like an attempt at friendly banter but Meyer really undercuts it with references to some really genuine trauma. It also doesn't help that she doesn't seem to be consistent with formatting or expressing the dialogue for the wolves. Sometimes the PoV character seems to have some private thoughts and sometimes the others pick up on it. It would work well for having intentional and unintentional thoughts but some of the stuff that's fine for banter seem to be intended as private where it comes across as mean and genuine dislike. Has Meyer confirmed no one likes Leah and is just horrible to her because she's unhappy and they're all stuck in her head? Or did she just handle the dialogue really badly? Also yeah, there is 0 reason to support Bella's decision here and pretty much the only decision she's made that really drives the plot is only possible as a choice because Rosalie is equally insane. I'd actually be interested to read an alternate ending where the main characters survive the demon child: Jacob has to come to terms with being imprinted on a murderous creature with 0 ability to develop beyond infancy, Edward sees his one love gone and the Volturi called down and Carlisle has to kill half his own coven to stop the creature from wiping out Forks. Bella gets turned into a vampire by Edward and her child kills Charlie, wipes out half the pack and Jacob does trying to protect it. Basically everything I can imagine with how this could go is really loving bad.
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May 20, 2020 17:06
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Maybe she's terrified any kind of criticism will pricing a violent outburst and he'll tear her father's leg off. But then of course he'll see how upset that makes her and he'll feel real bad and she won't bear to be able to leave him because it's not his fault he got angry. It's the werewolf thing and she was really kind of harsh expecting him to not eat everything in the fridge. So she'll be extra super careful in three future because she knows he really does care. After all he's imprinted, that's love.
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Jun 2, 2020 00:06
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Honestly, it being some kind of horrifying vampire child that is able to dramatically affect other vampires and humans would be a really cool horror twist. Bella ending up being immune to it and slowly coming to the realization that no one else around her is acting anywhere near normal, watching as the Cullens start massacring the people of Forks to feed it, people offering themselves up happy to be drained by an infant that also loves Bella... It's a concept really ripe not only for horror but also exploring ideas of a parent being responsible for their child even if that child becomes a monster (thinking of like facing your son becoming a serial killer). Combined with the parallels of imprinting and super vampire mind control, the horror of one's 'free will' being at the whim of chemistry or outside forces, a good writer could follow up that gross out body horror with a really impactful exploration of psychological horror. I think the thing of Meyer being a lazy and incurious writer who manages to repeatedly come up with interesting ideas or characters to only to ignore them or explore them in the most dull and disappointing way possible is pretty accurate. Also super creepy ways.
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Jun 5, 2020 22:19
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Shwoo posted:
The vampire children described at the beginning that gently caress people up and are totally illegal are human infants/toddlers that get vamped. A vampire has never impregnated a human before because it's super dumb. Also tl;dr for the chapter: Bella drops her sippy cup and goes to pick it up because she's just a selfless idiot like that. Carlisle isn't back, Bella tears something inside herself and the baby freaks out because it can't breathe. Cue Bella being torn apart from the inside and having every bone in her body visibly shattered. She gets some relief from the pain when the baby snaps her spine, paralysing her. All this time Jacob is thinking about how much he hates the baby, giving Bella CPR, talking about how he hates the baby, giving Edward poo poo, talking about how he hates the baby, repeat ad nauseam. Edward gets the baby out with vampire teeth, gives it to Bella and it immediately bites her and she dies. Rosalie takes it off downstairs while Jacob thinks how much he hates it and Edward injects his venom into her and proceeds to start licking her like a giant popsicle. Jacob goes downstairs because the pull of Bella's love isn't there, since she's dead obviously, instead it's downstairs. Obviously outside. When he gets down though there's an intense pull towards the baby, obviously because he hates it. Then he sees it and the most poorly telegraphed twist in the series happens.
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Jun 6, 2020 09:53
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Shwoo posted:Not them, the legendary South American demon babies Edward and Rosalie told Jacob about earlier. That scene isn't as clear about their existence as I thought, though. Ah good point. I think they don't exist in the same way colonists discovered the Americas, Terra nullius and all that.
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Jun 6, 2020 11:48
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I think it's more a reference to the mindset than specifically what she does. She seems to be a Mormon woman who fully embraces being a housewife, as in a married mother who cares for her man and children, as the be all and end all of womanhood. Anything else she does is effectively hung around that self image. It definitely can be taken as dismissive of women for doing the kind of role they're very much encouraged to do by society though.
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Jun 11, 2020 21:16
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I am impressed that Meyer manages to write characters unexpectedly doing something morally upstanding and then two pages later has someone tell them 'ah but have you considered that TRUE LOVE might be involved?' and suddenly they're totally on board with killing everyone in Forks or paedophilia.
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Jun 19, 2020 20:45
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Grammarchist posted:Jacob getting routinely mauled by a blood-hungry baby is the weirdest thing to just laugh off after all that foreshadowing about evil vampire children. That bit earlier about imprinting being associated with seeking mates that would produce strong offspring leads me to wonder if Meyer is angling for yet another Demon Baby with vampire AND werewolf traits, but I'd like the series to end long before that comes up. It's almost like Meyer wrote a cute little thing to try and add some humour to the situation but forgot what this would actually mean for the characters she's describing and actually it's horrifying.
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Jun 22, 2020 23:24
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I think Meyer has clearly established that characters all retain absolute control over all powers and suffer 0 downside from all the sensory input except strictly linked to plot requirements or to emphasise how terrible Leah the not so feminine woman is.
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Jun 30, 2020 08:04
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I actually like the idea that Renee finds out about vampires and demands to be turned so that she can avoid ageing in the most shallow and petty plot development ever. I'd imagine meyer frustratingly wouldn't recognise any parallels to Bella and every character would treat it as totally different. Also for my guess as to the rest of the plot somehow word of Nessie gets back to the Volturi. They assume someone is making vampire children again and descend upon the Cullens. They meet Nessie and she projects her thoughts into the boss guy's head. The Volturi immediately realise that actually the half human, half vampire mutant baby is totally cool and good and all promise to stop eating humans. For no reason Bella is hailed as vampire Jesus for her incredible self control and for ushering in a new age. Being written by Meyer, this takes about as long as everything we've read and there's a ton of tension arising from people disagreeing over how to deal with the situation and people making incorrect assumptions about what or who is coming. Which all gets resolved by things just happening with no pay off for the earlier conflict.
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Jul 7, 2020 08:10
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YA pre Harry potter was a very small market which typically had short, simple stories with very basic characters. There were a few stand out examples like (relatively well written) the Pern series, Redwall, etc. But they had basically no adult readership. Largely because they were relatively short and simplistically written stories. There are a few cases of better written stuff but those weren't written as young adult usually. Harry potter was seminal because it had break out appeal and as Rowling could get away with using more complex writing, young adult became a lot more focused on the adult part than just the young part. As a marketing concept it suddenly became more than a small niche genre with very tight acceptable elements. At least in assuming that's what they meant.
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Jul 15, 2020 22:12
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Yeah, I can see the danger of the whole thread devolving into TERF bullshit but honestly unlike Meyer I don't think there's that much of Rowling's personal mind in the books. At least partly because TERF crap wasn't part of anyone's radar 2 decades ago, hell it didn't become part of mainstream 'feminism' in the UK until 7 or 8 years ago. I'd be genuinely interested if it was something that did rise organically out of discussing the books but the only place I could see it is pointing out that people don't gender swap with polyjuice potion.
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Jul 16, 2020 23:40
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I think it's that he now has the, ugh, love of his life in the form of an infant and Bella is married. Without the possibility of boning men and women simply have nothing in common to engender spending time together.
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Jul 21, 2020 16:00
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That reading would make more sense if they hadn't started clearly that all the other vampires would also mistake Renesmee for an immortal child and emphasised how much all of them expect the Volturi to wipe everyone out. If that's actually an intentional twist from Meyer she ruined it by writing everyone fully believing the Volturi are going to actually flip out and not pause to actually see or hear anything exactly like the other vampires almost do. So either she's got a perfectly good explanation for why the Volturi would take so long and not have vampire sensing powers but every other vampire acts exactly like they will claim to and even the Cullens believe they will or every other vampire is dumb as a bag of rocks and no one is even able to imagine the Volturi are so manipulative. On another the note: what the hell are the 'wives'? They're clearly valued and protected but what reason is there for that? I mean they're vampires so they're all but indestructible and it's not like they can reproduce so what role do they play other than Meyer having some clichéd vision of European nobility/eighteenth century vampire fiction.
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Jul 26, 2020 17:45
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Also how is Bella able to expand her shield to cover others without also making herself vulnerable to their powers once they're 'inside' her shield? I know the answer is that Meyer hasn't thought through the power at all but it's bizarre that her power is described (and has the effect of) a geographical bubble. There needs to be some kind of spatial continuity for her to protect people i.e. she can't just shield one particular person without affecting anyone in between, the shield expand outwards from her. It might actually have been interesting if expanding her shield had made Bella vulnerable to powers within it that would have made protecting people not cost free. More interestingly would have removed the aspect of Bella that first drew Edward in and force Bella to confront having a husband who can read her mind and every thought. That seems like the only realistic source of real tension Meyer could bring in. Although realistically she would write it as 20 chapters of Bella threatening suicide and moving to Brazil over it followed by Edward saying he finds her every thought incredible and she's the deepest, most insightful person he's ever mindread.
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Aug 5, 2020 13:52
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No see, Volturi bad mean doodoo heads. Also it sounds like Bella's figuring out how to expand her shield required dropping her internal shield (I guess somehow protecting her from other people under her shield? Which makes no sense but anyway) means she should be readable by Edward now that she's covering him. Also the werewolf thing is just bizarre. Like, does that work the same for any other power? If Sam gets whammied with the blackout ability would all the others be taken out too? Could Kate take down all the werewolves by herself? Also please do a novel detailing the Volturi combating first the Romanians and then several OG werewolf infestations. TIA.
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Aug 18, 2020 18:45
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I don't think Stephanie Meyer has the writing talent to pull off any of the incredibly interesting premises and protagonists that emerge in her writing but it does kind of amaze me that she's either unable to see them or not interested in trying to write them rather than... *Gestures wildly towards the crap pile*
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Dec 23, 2020 12:53
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I like picturing Edward in such a hurry that he methodically shifts up from gear to gear but his super vampire speed means the car stalls out in 5th.
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Jul 27, 2021 23:35
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drat, the man managed to draw a level of interest and information from some real crap (as evidenced in this thread) that really demonstrated a love of writing and the functioning that helped me better understand some of what's so bad about this kind of stuff. I'll miss his posting.
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Feb 13, 2023 14:06
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