Yes, I'm opening that can of worms. Sort of.
I know a lot of people despise Twilight -- absolutely despise it. I know a lot of people love Twilight, as in, absolutely freaking adore it. I'm in the middle. There are a lot of things that I really don't like about those books. I don't like the way creeper-ness has become synonymous with love ("I like to watch you sleep, every night, by climbing in your window without telling you" is NOT romantic. "You're cute when you're asleep" might be, but the creeper one is not, nor will it ever be) because of Edward Cullen. I don't like the implication that you can never find true happiness without a romantic partner. I really, really hate the idea that it is in any way okay for a boy to tell a girl that she is his only reason for living and that without her, he would kill himself.
BUT...there are also good things about it, primarily this: even though the writing isn't always perfect and there are certain messages that I object to, I can read the books and enjoy them for what they are -- simple, fun stories that are meant to take us away from the realities of day-to-day life for a couple of hours. And in my book (pun intended), anything that can inspire so many teenagers to read is a good thing.
I think it's fine to be a Twilight fan. For a long time, I was a big fan -- and then some stuff happened in my personal life that rather shifted my perspective on a lot of it. Now...I'm sort of in between, I guess. But I don't mind Twilight as a series or a franchise or whatever. No, my two big problems with Twilight have nothing to do with the actual Twilight books:
1. "The next Twilight" is a phrase that I am absolutely sick of hearing. Next time there's a series as popular as Twilight,we'll know it for what is is. Then it'll be "the new XYZ Series," etc. Great books stand on their own. I'm sick of comparing them to Twilight. (This also holds true for Harry Potter, and anyone who's spent five minutes around me in real life will know that I'm a total Harry Potter nerd. This isn't anti-Twilight so much as anti-comparison, but Twilight is the one we hear all the time now.)
2. Twilight copycats. They remade the covers of Wuthering Heights and Pride and Prejudice and Romeo and Juliet to look more like the Twilight covers! (I blogged about that a long time ago, actually.) That did not make me happy. And I'm not happy with what vampires have become in the YA Lit world. I like vampires. I don't know why we decided that they should all sparkle just because the Cullens did. I miss evil vampires. But the other thing is that I don't like the automatic associations of everything to Twilight -- "oh, it has vampires AND werewolves in it, and there's a vampire named Victoria and a character named Riley? It's totally a Twilight knockoff." No, no it's not. Unraveled may have taken me a while to get into, but it was still a good book and it was nothing like Twilight. The world is not divided into Twilight-knockoffs and books with no vampires, werewolves, Victorias, Rileys, Edwards, Bellas, Alices, creepers, or anything else that ever appeared in Twilight.
And that got a little bit rantier than I meant for it to. My sincerest apologies. But now that I've said all that... where do you guys fall on this issue?
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