(NOTE: The following post(s) include discussions of plot points from a bunch of books already published but that have not been made into movies yet, much of which can be considered SPOILERS. So no carping at me for not doing inviso-text or something.)
Among the many (MANY) valid criticisms lobbed in Stephenie Meyer's direction i.e. "Twilight" is one that I think is a little unfair - namely pointing to her self-professed lack of familiarity with the genre outside her own work. I'm of the mind that it doesn't matter - if anything, it ought to make the series more original... but instead only serves to make me both dissapointed and a little perplexed that someone who's not a "fan" of the horror/vampire scene puts out an entry that's so incredibly familiar and cliche.
Where it DOES hurt, though, is in the suspension of disbelief. The teenaged characters in the series are - as befits their age - sponges of the popular culture, but seem to exist in a world where no one has EVER made a movie or written a book about either werewolves or vampires... how else to explain how NO ONE picked up the veritable "hi, I'm a vampire!" name-badges the Cullens (good guys) are wearing all the damn time? The only other possible explanation is that everyone in the series is a moron, which is probably closer to likely as demonstrated in...
Eclipse: ...case in point: This, book #3 aka "the 'action' one," turns on two main plot threads. #1: There's a 'serial killer' in nearby Seattle, but it's really a small army of freshly-minted vampires. #2: The girlfriend of the now-deceased vampire villian from Book 1 is still skulking around looking for a revenge-shot at the good guys. It takes HALF THE FUCKING BOOK for anyone to put together that these things are probably related.
Brief sidebar: Most of the "Hm, something's fishy in Seattle" foreshadowing (which the author isn't getting any better at, btw) comes from Bella's cop father, who filled a similar role last time dropping lines about "strange animal sightings." Somewhere amid the slog, it occured to me that this was how Nancy Drew (30s version) often got her more unusual stories set up - save that her father was an attorney (right?) and she usually wound up solving a problem that had either baffled or escaped the (usually male) adults around her. Bella, on the other hand, typically winds up immediately in-over-her-head, bruised and bloody or flat on her back cooing "thank you sir, may I have another?" to the nearest available dominant-male. Aaah, progress ;) Incidentally, new plot point: Edward puts his foot down and refuses to either sleep-with Bella OR turn her into a vampire until they're married, for those wondering if the weird-ass abstinence metaphor kept on going.
Anyway, this means Superhero Team-Up time for the vampires and werewolves, preceeded by a training montage wherein the wolves learn proper tactics for such a situation. I can't wait to see this part filmmed, since given the way the FX and casting has gone for this series so far I imagine it'll look something like the "pose-off" contest in "Zoolander." The "war" is actually a bit of an afterthought - the real focus is on the increasingly dippy love-triangle, culminating in an awkward sequence involving Bella freezing in a tent (don't ask) and only one of her two paramours being capable of generating body heat. This scene will innevitably be an acting challenge for Robert Pattinson, who plays Edward in the films, because he'll have to try and look even MORE like a whiny punk than he already does...
There's also a lot of backstory on the werewolves, unfortunately including lots of mythology-building (which Meyer is lousy at) and foreshadowing (WORSE at that.) The big new plaything is "imprinting," (which MIGHT have been mentioned earlier but I'm not going back to check) the process by which the wolves 'mate for life' by having their entire worldview snap-focused onto their "chosen" woman the moment they run into her. This is, of course, problematic for werewolves already in relationships (or by-the-numbers love-triangles) but it has an ickier side in that there's no set "age limit" on this - so several of the young-adult wolf guys are "locked-in" on pre-adolescent fate-indicated girlfriends, whom they hang around "babysitting" like Daddy Long-Legs (as in the movie) until she's old enough to screw without Dateline showing up. Apparently the girls in question don't object to this, in fact the book goes out of it's way to infer that this kind of stalker-ish fixation is something they ALL either want or ought to want. So... yeah. For those keeping track, you can add "child-brides" to the list of Retrograde Misogynist Relationship Scenarios That "Twilight" Considers The Height of Romance... right next to ritualized-abstinence, technical-exemption incest and marriage-by-contract.
As to the promised dust-up between the goodies and baddies? Not bad (probably going to need a trim for the innevitable film version's PG13, in nothing else) but one does begin to REALLY notice how situational everyone's "power-set" is. Also, for about the sixth time since starting the things, I find myself wondering if Stephenie Meyer's DVR is full of Inuyasha reruns...
To be concluded tomorrow.
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