Edward is a pedophile...The characters are flat. No dimension at all, barely. The cliches were just too much....I mean really.
From Urban Dictionary:
Cliché #1:
The new girl in school who is awkward and clumsy and terrible at everything. How many times have we seen and read this?
Cliché #2:
The new girl falling in love with the hottest guy in school (Edward). No one saw that coming.
Cliché #3:
Despite the new girl's awkwardness and plain looks, the hottest guy in school falls in love with her. The epitome of originality, am I right? *sarcasm*
Cliché #4:
The new girl is hopelessly in love with the hottest guy in school to the point where you want to slap her because she'll do literally everything and anything the hottest guy in school will tell her to do just for him.
Cliché #5:
The vampire (who is the hottest guy in school), despite his love for the new girl, thirsts for her blood and struggles to control his bloodlust. Wow.
Cliché #6:
The vampire is a good vampire who doesn't want to hurt humans, so he feeds off of animals instead. *cough* Louis from Interview with the Vampire *cough*
Cliché #7:
The vampire thinks he's a monster and that the new girl should stay away from him if she values her life, but of course the new girl risks her life to be with him.
Cliché #8:
The new girl would rather die than not be with the vampire, which is the stupidest thing anyone on this Earth can ever say. Yes, I understand she's madly and hopelessly and stupidly in love with him, but you only get one life. She isn't even considerate of the family members she would leave behind who would mourn her death.
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From
Twilight sucks, or how to offend teenage girls. | Crimsonietta.net
Right off the bat, the book has somewhat of a monotonous, Livejournal-esque feel. Bella describes, in almost painfully mundane detail, every single thing she does. This technique is useful at times when it’s molded properly, but quite obviously Stephanie Meyer does not possess this ability. Instead, as one critic put it, she uses uncomfortable adjectives and adverbs in an attempt to make her writing elaborate. Unfortunately, most of the time it just falls flat.
"I sat at the old square oak table in one of the three unmatching chairs and examined his small kitchen, with its dark paneled walls, bright yellow cabinets, and white linoleum floor… The engine started quickly, to my relief, but loudly, roaring to life and then idling at top volume."
Yeah. No one cares about the kitchen, and I’m pretty sure we all know what an engine sounds like when it starts up - did that description really merit that much of a waste of ink? Please to be getting to the point?
"Once I got around the cafeteria, building three was easy to spot. A large black “3″ was painted on a white square on the east corner."
… are you -serious-, Ms. Meyer? Are you freaking serious? Can I interject a very blunt “no effing shit” here?
Okay, so I maybe a bit harsh, spoiled by the characteristically blunt style of the nonfiction texts I read. Some of you romance-lovers probably like to be able to envision the environment, to step into a new world, to experience the fantasies in perfect clarity, so on and so forth with your fancy fictional excuses. Even if I was to forgive Meyers’s annoying descriptions about trivial items, I must blatantly point out the fact that she spent no less than seven paragraphs letting the protagonist agonize about her new kid syndrome.. and not in any sort of literary structure either; it just kind of jumps from thought to thought, remaining only vaguely connected to the plot at hand by the repetition of the same boring cliched idea - “I’m an ivory-skinned freak who won’t fit in.”
Yes, Bella. You’re an ivory-skinned freak but somehow all the guys like you (and you shoved them all away except for Insta-Hottie Edward). You’re a major clutz but for some reason that grants you a certain kind of charm that makes girls want to “step into your shoes”. You are the world’s most sorry excuse for a reverse-psychology Mary Sue (being loved for what’s -inside- the imperfect body, cliched blah blah random gobbledygook). You meet some sparkly vampire who appears to hate you, and then all of a sudden you’re both zomg-passionately-in-love… just because you smell nice and said vampire is somehow misogynistically hot. Mmmm, yes. I can just hear the Nora Roberts fans screaming in agony.
Reading a few chapters of this book was already enough to make me want to gouge my eyes out with a spoon. Cue fangirls rallying up their favourite warcry of, “But you didn’t even traverse the entire novel, you biased and unreasonably spiteful anti-vampire cynic!” Oh pardon me, are any of them capable of such vocabulary? Maybe I need to rephrase it in
Bellanese: “
I felt enraged. My pale not-really-albino self shook with rage. I felt anger building up. I looked around for my sexy uber-hot boytoy Edward so I could sic him on these anti-fans who hate me. And I’m not a Mary Sue. I’m a freak. I’m not perfect. I’m a little dot in a sea of three thousand. What are you talking about. The engine sounds nice today, it’s starting up nicely and roaring to life only to decrescendo at a rate of 20 Hz/s, letting the waves of sound caress the air molecules before coming to rest in my delicate ears that twitched ever so slightly at the gentle hum of the engine. And did I mention I have a sexy boytoy?”
Shoot the girl in the head, Stephanie Meyer. That’s the only one way to redeem the horrendous level of cliched purple prose you’ve shoved mercilessly into the confines of your books; I’m sure you’ll get the approval of many anti-fans as well if Bella meets her well-deserved end at the finale of
Breaking Dawn.
As for the fans using the “you didn’t even read the entire book” argument against critics of the precious quartet, let me just kindly point out that if your beloved book was so brilliant, I would’ve been captivated long enough to make it through without feeling the need to resort to self-harm to restore my faith in modern literature.