lucy_valiant t1_j0u8ypy wrote on December 19, 2022 at 1:42 PM

People have been saying things like this for so long, but I think people are confusing the symptom for the disease. The problem at the heart of Twilight is that Meyer was not a good writer.

Even if every change you suggested was implemented and the whole story was restructured and rewritten to star Charlie, Meyer would STILL fuck that up too and write a bad book, and maybe in that alternate universe, people would be crying out “The simple solution was to make the teenage daughter the protagonist!”

I’m being a little glib, but the truth of the matter as I see it isn’t that Twilight in its structure and details had to necessarily suck. In the hands of the right writer, who knows what it could have been — but in the hands of a bad writer, every premise is just going to be wasted potential. The problem is the writer, not the story.

War_of_the_Theaters t1_j1munl9 wrote on December 25, 2022 at 6:30 PM

In the hands of Meyer, it was perfect for tween and teenage girls. I don't know why people keep thinking the prose had to be phenomenal or that it's bad for not having a more adult or male audience. People don't shit on Sweet Valley High, and the quality is about the same. I'd argue that Twilight is significantly better than those books, and I very much enjoyed both series.

lucy_valiant t1_j1nfwh6 wrote on December 25, 2022 at 9:16 PM

I obviously disagree. Having once been a teenage girl, Twilight was never a thing for me, even when I was younger, and personally, I’ve always found it misogynistic and patronizing to say, in effect, “It doesn’t matter if it’s shit, it’s for girls and that’s what they like.” As if teenage girls don’t deserve something better than Twilight because quality can’t possibly matter to them, they’re teenage girls. Like, no offense, but if someone’s standards are low, don’t rope me into that just because we share a gender. I didn’t want Twilight to have a more male or adult audience. Like, as a lifelong female reader, I didn’t care about the demographics of Twilight’s audience —in fact, in my personal experience, it definitely was older women who were fans of that book, women who were adults in contrast to me and my teenage book-reader friends. So it was definitely a matter of wanting more than Twilight for me, wanting to be taken seriously as a reader, to be treated as if I deserved more than some very bad prose and shallow characterization strung together with tepid romance.

So I’ve never really accepted the “But it’s for teenage girls!” argument when I once was a teenage girl and it was very much not for me. That line of reasoning just seems like a No True Scotsman fallacy for me.

War_of_the_Theaters t1_j1p18hg wrote on December 26, 2022 at 5:55 AM

I was ten or eleven when the books came out. I loved them. They were perfect for me at the time, which is to say they were literary junk food. Why would I want to be taken "seriously as a reader" at that age when I didn't even take myself seriously? I loved the shallow characterization because it meant it was easy to insert myself into the book. I loved the so-called "tepid" romance because it meant that the book wasn't delving into particularly deep or serious issues that would be less fun. (I would also argue that at ten or eleven, it was far, far from tepid.)

None of this is a bad thing, nor does it make the books "shit" given that they never pretended to be anything else. Nobody who picked up the book and read the summary was surprised by the content or quality. There are plenty of other authors - YA or otherwise - that don't cater to fans of cheesy romances, and there are others yet who write more critically acclaimed romances if you want to keep to the genre. Want to exchange Edward for Heathcliff? Be my guest, but I'll take both, thank you kindly.

Side note, it's incredibly patronizing to say that the books are shit and that the millions of fans (many young despite your anecdotal experience) have low standards just because you wanted something different. I read Twilight alongside a variety of other literary works. I can have both deep-fried Oreos and beef Wellington without thinking the former should be cooked differently.