Still and all, back in those dim days of mine and yore, I do know that the teen angst "our love can never be,
My point is that, by virtue of being an agéd hag, I have totally missed the post-Buffy generation's vampire smolder fodder: the Twilight series. Fortunately, others have taken the bullet and I can critique from behind a cozy protective wall of second-hand pain. It looks like the books are truly hideous tripe, possibly worse prose than that found in my now-regretted collection of early Mercedes Lackey novels. Second, the introduction of a genus of vampires unwilling to go out in the sunlight not for the traditional "I will burst into flame and do a Savini dissolve" reasons but because sunlight makes them glitter is hilariously unforgivable, even if the resulting movie (hahaha, of course there's gonna be a movie) stars the cutie who played Cedric Diggory to such tasty effect. Third, there's a weird stalker/possessive vibe between the nominal protagonist (her name is BELLA SWANN, do you begin to see the problem here?) and the aggravatingly pretty vampire/objet d'crush that is hyped up to a point that is freaky even for adolescent-bait cheese lit.
On the other hand, but, and however, there has been a commendable resurgence of Sparkle Motion references and at least one kick-ass comments thread beginning, "And they unlived in sparkly flowery goodness forever and ever, or until he said 'Fuck it' and drained her like a jug of Thunderbird." To paraphrase Spider Robinson, shared pain is halved, shared snark increased, and thus do we refute entropy.
5 comments:
The Vampire as good guy has been done to death at this point. where is blade when you need him, oh yeah they threw him in jail.
Ha! I just read this article, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1734838,00.html, on the topic.
At least Joss had some angst about creating his vampire with a soul. From his letter to the Angel fan (I just got the DVDs as a gift), "No, wait. That's way too cheesy. Nobody will ever buy that."
In my spare moments I'm working my way through the Joss oeuvre. Angel ain't my favorite, but when Joss tells me that he loved him, "at least 76% platonically," then I figure I got to give the dude a chance.
I didn't go for the Angel spinoff; I caught a few episodes, but the highlights (viz, Joss doing the Dance of Joy and Mr. "You Can Call Me Jayne" Baldwin doing, er, anything) were too few and far between.
The Time article is classic. I refuse to believe that the author wasn't being at least a little sarcastic in referring to Meyers' "singular talent," because her prose, it floats like bricks. "I listed again in my head the things I'd observed myself: the impossible speed and strength, the eye color shifting from black to gold and back again, the inhuman beauty, the pale, frigid skin. And more – small things that registered slowly – how they never seemed to eat, the disturbing grace with which they moved. And the way he sometimes spoke, with unfamiliar cadences and phrases that better fit the style of a turn-of-the-century novel than that of a twenty-first-century classroom. He had skipped class the day we'd done blood typing." OH SHE SO SMRT.
I have been hearing both rave reviews of the Twilight books and total pans over on livejournal, but never had I seen any examples of her writing.
Um. I think my eyes glased over about a third of the way through that first sentence.
I can see how these books are filling exactly the niche that B&B did when I was a spratling, so it's no surprise that they've got their passionate defenders. Back in the day, I had a close friend who went through a stage of fervid NKOTB fandom and who got very upset if anyone suggested that they were not exactly meant for the ages. In later years, reminding her of those conversations was a one-way ticket to Writhingville, population: Mortified Friend. This? may be much the same.
You owe it to yourself to check out the Barbed Lyre pages. "OMG HE'S GOING ON ABOUT HOW HE LOVES SEEING HER BLUSH, LIKE, THE BLOOD BENEATH HER SKIN, OMG OMG QUIT FUCKOFF EXIT NO STOP BANANA SPARKLES PYRAMID SAFEWORD HELP."
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