"Twilight" Reviews

I went to go see "Twilight" with my sisters &c. around Christmas. It was really beautifully filmed in the Pacific Northwest. And the premise of the film was delightfully ridiculous.

Not only is it a love story between a human girl and a vampire... The vampire is a sparkle-vampire. Srsly. He can't go in the light because everyone will see that he's a glitter vampire. It's amazing.

Book Review: Twilight (Prettier than Napoleon): Twilight is an evil book. A bad influence. Something that should be kept away from children for reasons of content and prose style. There is, as one Jezebel commenter noted, Harry/Draco fanfic that is better written. ...The problem with this book is it sums up exactly what it is to be a teenage girl, and teenage girls are callow and dumb.

...I haven't even addressed the horrendous sexual dynamics and messages in the book: guys lose control, girls have to monitor their behavior at all times lest they cause a guy to lose it and kill/rape them, and sex = death. I understand it only gets worse in future volumes, as hot-blooded Bella pushes for them to get it on and Edward argues that he can't unleash his sexual feelings without losing control and hurting her (thereby normalizing the idea that being hurt during sex is an unavoidable consequence of intimacy with a man, instead of an example of a guy being a weak-willed, inconsiderate jerk who "can't help" but cede all autonomy to his lizard brain once you take your clothes off).

What Girls Want (The Atlantic): Twilight centers on a boy who loves a girl so much that he refuses to defile her, and on a girl who loves him so dearly that she is desperate for him to do just that, even if the wages of the act are expulsion from her family and from everything she has ever known.

...The erotic relationship between Bella and Edward is what makes this book—and the series—so riveting to its female readers. There is no question about the exact nature of the physical act that looms over them. Either they will do it or they won’t, and afterward everything will change for Bella, although not for Edward. Nor is the act one that might result in an equal giving and receiving of pleasure. If Edward fails—even once—in his great exercise in restraint, he will do what the boys in the old pregnancy-scare books did to their girlfriends: he will ruin her.

And then...