Monday 18 August 2008

Stay Where You Are Harry Potter; or, The Twilight Saga.

I finished Breaking Dawn.

And what a saga.

Four books churned out in 3 years, around 2000 pages of writing and I read them all in a month (including the waiting time for Breaking Dawn to be released). I love vampires, I am the vampire slayer after all - well one of many - and the one thing that vampires always have are sharp teeth. Stephenie Meyer decided to throw out the sharp teeth and a long with it the entire bite of her four part saga.

It was a nice story, with an ending that was far too happy to really exist. Everything worked out too perfectly and I do appreciate a good and happy ending, but this was just sickly sweetened with happiness. Perhaps it's my inability to understand residents of the United States or perhaps my distinctly British upbringing, but I just don't believe that happiness, to that degree, has or ever will exist.

You know it's a bad sign when the main character irritates you, which she did. She was so moany and wingey all the time and all she ever did was the same thing over and over, she had the same worries over and over, she never learned a thing.

Don't get me wrong, I liked reading the books, it was good to get my mind out of Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine, Chuck Klosterman's academicly written essays, and even Chuck Palanhuick's nialistic story telling but I don't feel like I learned anything. There was no other meaning to it, there was no lesson to be learned. They just existed in a story. Perhaps I've been too withdrawn from the real fiction world for too long, but correct me if i'm wrong, usually books and stories have a meaning other than a teenage romance that all works out?

I think the comments that compare Twilight to Harry Potter and completely non-sensical. I'm not the biggest fan of Harry Potter, but those books are impressive. There is so much story, so much content, so much growth in the characters - the characters are also continuous. Then there are the subtle uses of Latin, the research and the fact that accompanies the fiction and makes it believable. Harry Potter is an impressive work and to ask J.K. Rowling to 'move over' for some trashy perfect vampire romance is just ridiculous. I know I am bias because Rowling is Scottish, but Meyer is a mormon, so I have an alligience to both sides, I just think there are more morals and standards in Harry Potter that Twilight, and above that Harry Potter is just wittier, smarter and more believable as a story.

Here's how I would have ended the book.

Bella would get over her selfish self and stop worrying about how she looked all the time.

She would go to Dartmouth and meet Reilly and then find out he worked for the initiative, Bella would change her name to Buffy... and then it would be an amazing story.

Really though.

I would have had it end with them living a few years mortally, easing off with the intense relationship of needing to be around each other all the time, Bella being a crazy baby vampire when she finally did change. Her still wanting to eat human food and doing it – that could have been her special power, the ability to live on eggs. (she ate a lot of eggs in that book I bet she was well blocked up.) And then when Charlie sees her again he goes, 'Oh, not you too, another damn vampire.' Then it would turn out that Renee's mother was a vampire or something like that.

I tell you, it makes sense, it would have made for some better reading too.

The Lost Boys Ending is still by far the best vampire story ending in the history of the world. I will stand by that forever. In fact. Let's upload and watch it now.

HERE how gutted am I that my Rolling stones video was removed from Youtube. Devistated. It was my 11th video. Now my 11th video is the Mormon Rap.

Yeah, so that whole video conversion thing is taking too long. I might post it later. I'm going to go make pasta.

I tell you though... if you ever get bored, search Youtube for Mock the Week and Watch the season six episodes because they are hillarious and more relevant to now than the older series'. Amazing.

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