I finally got around to writing it. :)
THE MOST SICKENING MARY SUE STORY I HAVE PERHAPS EVER ENCOUNTERED BECAUSE OF THE FAME IT RECEIVES IN ADDITION TO ITS PATHETICOSITY. ALSO, THE BANE OF MY EXISTENCE, THE SUBJECT OF MUCH OF MY DISAPPOINTMENT WITH THE WORLD, AND INSPIRATION OF MY VIOLENT TENDENCIES.

ADDITIONALLY, INSPIRATION FOR THIS RANT, AS WELL AS MANY INTERNAL ONES.

Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight and other abominations.

(I will begin by saying, parenthetically of course, in a very whisper-like voice, that most of my examples are from Eclipse because going through the first two books a second time to find examples would have been too painful and time-consuming for what they’re worth. Eclipse is peppered with examples, however; fear not. Obviously contains a few spoilers. Also, I am not a book critic, nor do I aspire to be one, nor do I usually tear down books like this. This is the first. No book I’ve ever read warranted it more.)

I suppose the appropriate thing to do is address Edward first, seeing as how he is one of the many major flaws in this embarrassing series: hero of the fangirls, cause of Stephenie Meyer’s popularity, etc. Let’s begin classically with his eyes: the ever-changing-states-of-matter-and-color-and-volatility-and-ductility-and-malleability-and-solubility-properties of Edward’s liquid solid topaz red hard cold hungry desirous marble soft eyes. Could there be a more blatant Mary Stu ever written? I have seen teenage fan fiction that is not this over-dramatized and obsessed. Because that kind of superhuman beauty is just waiting for a girl to stumble upon it. The basis of Bella’s and Edward’s relationship is his appearance, which Meyer takes care to describe for pages upon pages at least once a chapter. You and I know that the drop-dead gorgeous factor defines the quality of a person and relationships and literature, yes? Bella has few other thought processes besides “Uhhhh” because she is absolutely floored by his gorgeyness. And his kissing, another important factor that is important to describe with blood boiling and hearts racing and stopping. Edward is, in a word, pathetic. There is no relationship dynamic. He is an empty shell that is full of nothing but Bella—which you may think is a contradictory statement but let’s be honest, being full of Bella is the same as being empty. I would have punched this guy (if not for his marble exterior! Like Michelangelo’s David… ugh, the references to great works of art in this series is torturous) for his lack of opinion on anything except Bella’s safety, which is another matter that will be addressed later. Credit to the most eloquent Maria, to whom I can never compare: Edward’s thoughts are extremely multi-layered! On the bottom, there’s: “I bet Bella tastes good.” Above that one, there’s: “Bella smells really really yummy, omg.” Then, towering on the top of these masterful realizations about what it means to be a human and other striking universal themes, there is, “OMG I LOVE BELLA, BECAUSE SHE SMELLS GOOD, AND ALSO IS HOT. SHE IS THE COMET ACROSS MY NIGHT SKY.” There is the phenomenon of Stephenie Meyer (twitch) elevating all the hopes of preteen girls going through puberty and dreaming of their one true love that will one day come and save them and they will mesh perfectly together and he will protect her from all ugly things and of course the priority characteristic is his degree of ~hawtness. Which must be a 10, because all boys will now be measured up against Edward until these girls get over themselves via some rude awakening (or a few, or none and die spinsters or trapped in loveless marriages or thrice divorced). I thought preteen fanfics were bad enough examples of young girls’ wishes to find that perfect boy with an amazing body, face, hair, intelligence, artistic talent, wit (though most don’t know exactly what that is, especially at that age) and infinite amazing dedication to his significant other. Then there is the laughter-and-horror-inspiring anecdote that even I didn’t expect, Edward’s proposal. Mon dieu. I don’t care if he IS a vampire (because they have serious commitment that shames mere mortals due to the timelessness of the undead—if anything, that would be reason for promiscuity); nowhere do you find obsessively committed ‘teenage’ boys like that who are hell-bent on you and marriage and forever-n-ever and there’s-nothing-in-the-world-for-me-without-you. It’s inaccurate and unnecessarily inspires young girls that someday their prince will come. He will not. (Enchanted: Edward! Prince Edward will save me! :) Props.) You may find a great guy but no one is going to ‘save’ you; grow up and grow a spine. “Look after my heart—I’ve left it with you.” I understand the obvious popularity of this book. It rests in lines like these. It is quite sick how so many people have imaginary Edwards like this they plan to find that will rescue them and spare them the experience of anything. I literally burst out laughing when I read, “Sleep, my Bella. Dream happy dreams. You are the only one who has ever touched my heart. It will always be yours. Sleep, my only love.” Puke. NO ONE SPEAKS LIKE THAT. You won’t find a boy who goes “It’s okay that you love him too, I understand. Let’s all be friends. I’ll be super-understanding, give you time to choose, hold you all night while you cry about picking me. My perfection makes you feel horrendously guilty for being not-so-perfect.” Perfection is waiting for you, girls; seize the day and find it!

Bella. Undoubtedly the great author (I use the term loosely here; I really mean sham or a variety of synonyms of ‘sham’—i.e. blatant failure, sacrifice to the gods, Nazi camp test subject, etc.) Stephenie Meyer has written herself (oh shiett) as Bella as a result of a tad too much daydreaming. Do we need a detailed account every time Bella decides to cook for Charlie—i.e., every day? I don’t need to hear about you combing the fridge at least once a chapter. Quantity does not equal quality, as professors, mentors, and wise old men on mountains have said for ages, and being heavily supplied with one and not the other this series could use a transfer of the abundance of the former to the latter. Meyer openly discusses Dartmouth and Bella’s potential acceptance (Edward does all the work, of course—boys exist to serve you, girls; keep that in mind as you look for relationships. Pampered Bella=your future). I got an interview with Dartmouth. I do not like to consider Bella my equal. But, I mean, she’s taking AP Bio, right? And AP Calculus, and WOW LOOK AT HER LOADING ON THE AP CLASSES. Not that AP Bio is all that difficult, but it does require some brains, and seeing as how Bella has all of nothing betwixt her ears… you cannot be Bella and be of AP-and-Dartmouth caliber. The two do not equate. I suppose Bella’s most annoying quality (or collection of qualities) besides her utter empty-headedness is her self-absorption & pity: “With a sigh, I marched up the stairs to endure my party.” What a martyr. Take one for the team, babe, in spite of your hard life, with the rich vampire friends who like to throw you expensive parties with their expensive cars and doctor fathers and big houses in the middle of a poor nowhere. The aspect of Bella that most frequently irks me is her constant self-obsession and Meyer’s characterization of her as this tragically flawed character (this is exceedingly more apparent in the first book; I think eventually IT GOT OLD—wow, what a novelty!: a trite concept that you really shouldn’t repeat four hundred times within one book’s spine!) that is really ~special, of course. I absolutely laughed aloud when the genius known as Stephenie Meyer revealed that Bella is immune to all vampy powers. She’s a tragic character. So PLAIN, how can one live like that?! How can you stand it, thinking all the time that Edward does not really want to get into your pants? And she always compares herself to Edward; there’s a SERIOUS burden to live with. I’m so plain, he’s so yummy, and whoops I tripped over a stair since being clumsy is my DEATHLY FAULT and now you must save me because somehow that loose floorboard has landed me in a life-and-death situation. And now I’m going to rant about how there’s “something wrong with my brain” because Edward can’t read my thoughts. *sob* It’s sickening how pathetically Meyer tries and thinks it is okay at all to have this sort of rubbish in print and especially prominent. When schools have to take Great Expectations and other classics out of the curriculum because the youth of America has become too stupid. (I will, however, refrain from launching into a rant about how stupid America has become and how a frighteningly large percentage of American teenagers does not know which came first, the Civil War or World War I, and that we have shows like Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader? [way to brag, U.S. of A.], and that other countries have every right to make fun of us. That is for another day.) Bella (beautiful! Subtle) is the perfect role model for girls, abandoning all trace of a spine or independent thought once Edward left, melting into a puddle on the floor and refusing to live. It’s okay, not because you grow stronger and self-aware and take control of your life, but because you get your boyfriend back! Kudos for educating the youth of America about the realities of life, Stephenie. I have just about had it with Bella trying to convince Edward not to go fight the nasty evil vampies. Get over yourself, woman. Things have to be done. You cannot cuddle Edward all day long. The world is bigger than you. I promise. …No, really. It is. She makes him ask if he can sit out. Later it strikes her that ‘OMG, THEY ARE OUTNUMBERED, and I am making it worse.’ Brill, Bella.

Besides the products she’s created and prides herself on, there is Meyer’s writing style. The characters have no depth. These books are so fat because Meyer feels like she has to narrate everything that happens (I got in my truck, the next paragraph talks about the truck starting, another paragraph about cooking dinner, two more about washing dishes, seventy more about my ‘thoughts’, which are really all the same thing in circles over and over again). If the characters had any depth and personality and Meyer had any talent as a writer, the reader would understand the characters’ thought processes and motives without going through each one with excruciatingly unnecessary and poorly-written detail. Then there is the fact that relationship dynamics are nonexistent, horribly obvious in the relationship that this whole damned series revolves around. Both lack in the personality department, and the basis of appeal for this series is, Dana’s term: ‘soft porn’. Reason for popularity of many teenage works of fan fiction as well. Hawt Edward, after all, with a Bella that girls can identify with (any girls that identify with Bella, I sympathize and wish you better luck in finding yourself, establishing opinions, intelligence, avoiding stair tripping, etc).

The series is filled with sad and pathetic examples of a little girl in a woman’s body who attended college, received a degree, and still cannot quite put words together. I assume Meyer’s editor has caught many of the mishaps in her writing, but apparently these mistakes were too numerous to completely eradicate. Examples include “dust moat”—as in, a moat of dust surrounding one of them castle bits, eh? Try ‘dust mote’—and “Who’s definition of right?”—where it should be ‘whose’, and if I have to explain this to the American public this is a sad sorry sight indeed.

“They could hold ten sheets of paper to the fridge without breaking a sweat” and “I forced the magnets side by side, that’s not so horrible, is it?” Haha, one example of Stephenie Meyer’s pathetic attempts at symbolism. It’s like hitting you over the head with a dead fish. Also, magnets do not sweat, Steph—are phrases like that the vernacular in the intellectual collegiate crowd you run with? More pathetic head-beating that is more inarticulate than my eleven-year-old fan-fiction self: “He’s very intense about you… and very careful. I feel like I don’t really understand your relationship. Like there’s some secret I’m missing… The way you move—your orient yourself around him without even thinking about it. When he moves, even a little bit, you adjust your position at the same time. Like magnets… or gravity. You’re like a… satellite, or something.” Fragments litter all 1500+ pages or so of the chronicles of Isabella Swan (get a slightly more Mary Sue name—oh wait…). I don’t mind one every now and then for emphasis, but this is juvenile & unsophisticated.

According to Meyer, the subconscious knows all, and is blatantly obvious about it. If there’s ever anything important that you missed along the way of Meyer’s so SUBTLE narration, wait until Bella falls asleep. The symbolism of her dreams will hit you in the face like so much unwelcome icy water. Fall asleep and you’ll have the answers to everything. I don’t by any means discredit Freud, but dreams are not like that. I have dreams. I know I am not the only one who has dreams that aren’t crystal-clear in meaning. This technique is about a Level 1.5 on my just-now-fabricated path of From Writing Terrible Fan Fiction To Becoming An Author. Dreams, I tell you. How original.

She has stooped low before, so I shouldn’t be surprised, but still I very nearly always am: “Sometimes… we don’t exactly know why… we find our mates that way. I mean… soul mates.” “What way? Love at first sight?” But oh no! It’s MUCH more powerful than that. See, it has to do with werewolves. Werewolves and vampires and The Force and the supernatural all tangled into Bella’s life. So it’s not ‘love at first sight.’ It is not ‘chemistry’ and instantaneous attraction. Oh no. It’s more magical when it has to do with Bella and her frustratingly numerous love interests. It’s special. Did she SERIOUSLY try to work in a lust-at-first-sight-but-way-way-deeper into this bedtime story? Wait. Duh. Yes.

“It reminds me of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with all the chaos caused by the fairies’ love spells… like magic. It’s very nearly as strong as the way I feel about you,” says Edward. OH NO SHE DOES NOT. NOT SHAKESPEARE. I will hunt her down and beat her brains out. Does she only know how to allude to Shakespeare, Bronte, etc.? You do not parallel your own crap with Romeo and Juliet, Wuthering Heights, A Midsummer Night’s Dream… “Hello, I would like to tell you up front that Edward and Bella parallel Romeo and Juliet by hideous comparison and I by extension may or may not correspond to Shakespeare, even though stupid Bella & Edward have nothing to do with Juliet and Romeo and Shakespeare was a bleeding GENIUS who deserves our respect.” Who on earth credits him/herself with Shakespearean attributes?

How dare the New York Times use a phrase such as “literary immortality” to describe this, and VOYA call it “near genius”? The Amelia Bedelia books put Meyer’s to shame because at least Peggy Parish anticipated her second-grade audience and wrote at that level accordingly.

Though Stephenie Meyer has caused many aberrations in my loving view of humankind—oh wait, I don’t have one of those views most of the time—it is not her pathetic crap excuse for literature alone that is my biggest bone of contention (though considerable). It is, rather, how youth, adults, influential literary critics, and movie makers absolutely devour these books, make disgusting comparisons to great works of art and praise this facsimile to high heaven, and there is a tiny fraction of people in the world that realize how atrocious they are.

[If she thanks Muse, My Chemical Romance, Armor for Sleep, and Jack’s Mannequin for helping her overcome her writer’s block and inspiring emotions and scenes one more time, I might crash a plane into her house. I’m possessive, yes. Disgusted too.]

QUOTABLE QUOTES, demonstrative of Meyer’s eloquence (I certainly hope I do not have to explain these; this is long enough already):

• “My khaki skirt lay over the back of the rocking chair, waiting for me to discover something that went with it just exactly right. Something that would make me look beautiful and grown up.”[The makings of the next da Vinci with words, friends. ‘Just exactly right, beautiful and grown up’, says the lady with a degree in literature.]
• “What was the word he’d used just now? Unbearable—that was it. His beauty was too much to bear…” [Edward helps little Bellakins with her vocabulary, too! Hard words like unbearable! Now she is ready for Dartmouth!]
• “Edward kissed me quickly, sighed, and went to go stand with the C’s.” [The C's? Did your fingers fatigue, Steph, and then did you hit 'print'?]
• “From the way the food disappeared, that must have been good, too.” [o rly?]
• “I thought in my head.”
• “I frowned at the letters on the page.”