I haven't read the books (I tried when they first came out and made it about twenty pages through before my brain went numb), but I don't know. I'm considering it now, just because so very much controversy surrounds them. People are touting them as a new age in fiction, and condemning them as evil, occult rabble-rousing. It's all quite fascinating from the point of view of someone who has neither read the books nor seen the movies.
Personally, I'm a strong believer in the idea that a simple story can engage, formulate, and even completely transform a person, be it in the small, simple change of an ideal, something that simply makes you go "huh," or in a complete paradigm shift, such as The Catcher In the Rye supposedly being the book that led to John Lennon's murder.
But my literary mind finds itself utterly boggled by the idea that my favorite movie monster, vampires, can be transformed into sparkly metrosexuals and this is a revolution? It makes me feel a little ill.
What happened to the days when vampires struck terror? Caused nightmares? Slinking, sexual, angry creatures that required the sustenance of mortal life force to continue their immortal existence drew me in to fantasy and horror. And now they -sparkle-, and happily sustain on animal blood? Uhm. No. It takes away from the very fabric of the monster to reorganize and recreate them in such a fashion. And it makes me sad.
And then of course, there is the legitimate community of real-life vampires. Nurses, teachers, tattoo artists, waiters and waitresses, lawyers, all sorts of people around the world identify themselves, in their personal lives and behind closed doors as vampires. They lack a critical energy, perhaps born without it or perhaps simply unable to continue to produce it, that they find in willing donors either through small amounts of blood or energy. They don't claim to have superhuman strength or speed, they don't have fangs that slide out at the most cinematically appropriate moment, they simply have a void to fill, one that requires the assistance of another. While obviously not widely accepted or necessarily believed, why on earth should these people be forced to hide when Edward Cullen's face appears on everything from lunch boxes to the silver screen? (Do they still put stars on lunch boxes?) And frankly, if you were one of these people, "in the coffin," so to speak, how would it feel to you to be forced to keep the way you are a secret, to have your communities onset by thousands upon thousands of adolescent teen girls, and know that someone is making a living off of this sparkly, impossible fantasy? I think it would likely feel pretty shitty.
All in all, I'm going to stand by my original opinion and that is this: Twilight is a horridly written series by a woman (a mormon) who to me likely has a lot of sexual repression to overcome. The hype is simply today's youth latching on to yet ANOTHER moronic fairytale of emotional leeching and perfect lovers that makes their "dull" lives a little more....well, sparkly.
