I’m writing about Twilight again because I just can’t get away from it. It is a phenomenon, and I hear about it daily. Everywhere I go I meet women singing praise for these books, and having intense discussions about them. Not all women are affected of course -that would be a gross generalization. There are quite a few females out there who do not care for for these books. But nevertheless the series has unprecedented number of fans of all ages. It’s almost as popular as Harry Potter.
I actually read one of these books just to see what all the fuss was about. It didn’t help – after reading it I was even more confused. Why is it so popular? What I read was an infantile, badly written romance story glorifying an abusive relationship between clumsy, ditzy, submissive and weak willed teenage girl and a controlling, abusive, violent, sexist vampire. No, seriously – the novel is so rife with misogyny I actually had to double check that it was written by a female. I could hardly believe something like that was even published in this decade, and much less swooned over by so many women.
The text strikes me as something that should be widely reviled – it sending all the wrong messages. One could say it is almost an anti-feminist novel and a domestic abuse apologia. Some reviewers pick up on this but many, including self proclaimed feminists, give the book high praise. Not in literary department of course. Pretty much everyone agrees that Meyer writes at a grade school level. But she gets points for being a guilty pleasure for many people.
Guilty pleasure with a large helping of blatant misogyny. How does that work? I couldn’t wrap my head around this. How can anyone get past the sexism? Why none of the fans cares that Stephanie Meyer is dis-empowering all her female characters, making them weak, petty, jealous and completely incapable of taking care of themselves, constantly needing to be rescued and protected. She doesn’t even bother describing most of them, an none (including the main character) have any personality to speak of. She praises women for being submissive and justifies blatant abuse as being done in the name of “true love”. The main couple in the book is a textbook case of abusive, unhealthy relationship. The male protagonist is a creep. How do people read this and not get angry and/or disgusted. I was completely befuddled.
Seeing how no matter where I went I ran into gushing Twilight fans I decided I will just flat out ask them. PROTIP: don’t try this at home kids. Especially with significant others. There is just no way to win this argument – and yes it will become an argument if you don’t drop the issue quickly enough.
Let me put it this way – when you badmouth twilight (and any mention of sexism in relation to the book will be considered bad mouthing) most fans immediately go into knee-jerk, overreaction mode. Any criticism of the books is met with stark opposition. It’s comparable to the reaction you would get telling Star Wars fans that prequels were way better than the original trilogy. Or telling any self respecting geek that Firefly was a shitty show. It will end badly.
At best the fans will just refuse to talk to you about it, and ban you from any future conversations. At worst, they will unleash internet grade FAN RAGE upon you in real life. Yeah, they will be talking in all caps and shit. In most cases you regret you ever brought up the subject.
To keep you from destroying friendships, sleeping on the couch or ruining parties I share with you what I learned in the course of several heated arguments. The best response I got was something along these lines (an I paraphrase):
Due to the fact that you posses a Y chromosome you will never be able to fully understand Twilight. To relate to Meyer’s writing you need to put yourself into the mindset of a 17 year old girl. Of course no one wants an abusive stalker boyfriend. But the whole thing is a girly fantasy, and a guy just won’t get it.
Ok, so I embellished this a bit. The actual conversation was much more violent, included some shouting, expletives name calling and threatening me with sharp objects. But that was the essence of the matter. I wouldn’t get it because I was a dude. Initially I dismissed this response as playing the gender card – since the twilight fans were unable and/or unwilling to address my questions directly they simply were excluding me from the conversation. They were saying that since I don’t have the necessary frame of reference I can’t properly analyze these books. Bullshit! That was equivalent to saying “you can’t review this book objectively”.
But as the time passed, I realized that there was something there. The frame of reference was the answer I was searching for. The last piece of the puzzle just fell into place.
It goes like this: Meyer’s writing speaks to people’s inner teenage girl. Twilight is nothing more than a fantasy of an insecure teenager who is waiting for a perfect guy to sweep her of her feet, and make everything right in her world. If you put yourself in that mindset, you will see the book in a different light. It’s still shitty, and it’s still sexist as fuck – but you won’t see that. Meyer’s wankery will fly right above your head because you will be too busy living out your childhood fantasies. Or something like that.
I still don’t have the right frame of reference to emulate this state, but I think I can relate, because fuck – I’ve been there. I too was once enamored by an incredibly shitty book.
That book was Ender’s Game by Orson Scot Card. I read it back when I was in high school and I literally loved the shit out of it’s every single page. Why? Because the story was pretty much engineered to appeal to geeky teenage boys. It’s main character, Ender is a child prodigy, bullied by his peers and abused by the adults. He is hated, singled out and picked on because he is different – smarter, more determined and more ambitious. But he never gives up, and does not let anything stop him from achieving his goals. He disposes of the bullies, he outwits the adults and manages to overcome all his difficulties. He rises to a position of leadership and respect, and the kids who used to chide and laugh now worship and admire him. He defeats his adversaries by using his intellect, ability to manipulate people around him and if all else fails calculated application of violence. He is smart, cunning but still vulnerable and prone to being picked on – usually due to the fact that his natural talents make other people envious. As an antisocial, introvert who had his fair share of bullying, social ousting, and exclusion I identified with Ender so hard it was not even funny. He was everything I wanted to be at the time – he was strong and assertive where I was weak. Selfless and honorable where I was selfish, jealous and petty. He always kept his cool, and could plot and scheme even under immense pressure, whereas I tended to completely fall apart in crisis situations.
And of course I completely missed the part where he was paper thin, cardboard cut out of a character and a violent sociopath too boot. Or the fact that all the other characters in the book were nothing more than plot devices that maneuvered around Ender to put him in situations Card wanted to exploit. Hell – Ender he was my idol for a while.
Of course over the years my perception of the novel changed. As a 28 year old, I can clearly see that Card’s novel is basically a straw man argument constructed to prove that “good intentions can justify heinous deeds”. Card attempted to do this by creating a character who is so intensely likable that the readers will still love him even him after he becomes responsible for a genocide of a whole species. Sadly, this only works when you read the book on the surface level, and never question any of Card’s core assertions.
Ender is a good guy because he never intends to do evil. He just does it. Each time his hand is forced to by the dire circumstance and he always shows an appropriate amount of regret and remorse. Card poises him to be a spotless, virtuous hero despite the fact he viciously murders several of his peers. He is a monster, but Card massages the situation until he ends up looking like a saint.
I mean, come on! He is not a bad guy. He was kicking this unconscious boy in the face until his skull cave in because he had to set an example to deter future abuse! He had to do it. He didn’t want to kill him! Besides, he cried afterward – bad people don’t show remorse, don’t they?.
That’s the sort of logic you can expect in Card’s novel. How does he make Ender become genocidal maniac without making him evil? Easy: Ender is “tricked” into it. He is lead to believe he is taking part in a training exercise while in truth he is leading a real armada in a final assault that ends in a complete destruction of the enemy home world. And even though he was tricked, Ender still takes the blame for this act and becomes Emo about it.
I am all for exploring moral dilemmas like this one, but Card’s argument fails as soon as you step back and look at the book with just a tiny bit of objectivity. All the characters are basically empty shells with pre-set personalities. Ender is good because he is good – he has not a selfish thought in his head. The kids who cross him are evil because they are evil – none of them have any redeeming qualities. They are motivated solely by petty jealousy, malice and plain vindictiveness. The whole setting is a one dimensional world, populated by shallow cardboard cutouts. The plot is a game of chess in which Card carefully positions his pieces to maximize the amount of sympathy readers feel towards Ender at any given time. It’s just a bad book. There is just no two ways about it.
But it reads, oh so well when you are an angsty teenage geek. It’s like an ultimate nerd revenge fantasy, wrapped up in a SF setting. And despite knowing better, I still remember it rather fondly.
You could say your appreciation for Ender’s Game should be inversely proportional to your maturity level. Card’s argument is as flawed as his premise and his defense of genocide is at best unconvincing. It has little to offer to a mature reader. And yet, I know grown men who read the book and still love it. Why? Because it speaks to their inner geek. They still remember their shitty school experience and strongly identify with Ender just like I did.
Twilight it is just a variation on the same theme – it is built to be a feel good novel. It offers the readers an intensly likable protagonist they deeply identify with. It exploits readers deep desires and entraps him/her against better judgment.
Ender appealed to me because I wanted to believe that all the shit I went through as a kid has meant something – that it made me stronger and better than my peers. I wanted to believe that I was special, that I mattered – that I could make a difference. I wanted to be like Ender. That was how Card hooked me.
How does Meyers hook her fans? She writes about finding idealized “true love” – the kind of magical fairy tale love that that does not happen in real life. It’s the kind of love that comes with a 100% assurance sticker and guarantees satisfaction, loyalty and compatibility or your money back. It is the ultimate fantasy about finding a soul mate who understands you better than you understand yourself. About having a life partner who will sweep you away, and fix all your problems while whispering sweet nothings into your ear. Most of us probably had this type of fantasy at one point or another regardless of gender.
The fans of the silly vampire books are simply more susceptible to it. That’s their main, goto feel good daydream and so they get all wrapped up in this fantasy. Its so cozy and familiar that they don’t even care/notice that Edward is a creepy, controlling, sexist dick. They don’t see it, just like Ender fans don’t care/notice that their role model is a shallow, pretentious, unhinged sociopath created solely as a vehicle for Card’s shaky defense of absolute moral relativism. Both books use fantasy fulfillment as a carrot to dangle in from of impressionable readers. Their characters are vehicles for that fulfillment, and this role overshadows everything else. It hides their less than desirable qualities for those who allow themselves to be swept away by the surface currents of the narrative. Only if you read these books critically you discover that there is some nasty stuff below the surface.
Your Twilight is my Ender’s game – I finally get it!
This of course does not change how I feel about Meyer’s series. I just understand why she is so successful now.
Then again Card actually said that Meyer writes “with luminous clarity”. This was either a nice euphemism for “like a 12 year old” or a sign that he recognizes and acknowledges a fellow literary hack when he sees one. :P
Is everyone thoroughly offended and angry at me now? If yes, then good. My job here is done. . :P
Funny that you mention Ender’s Game, because I had a similar reaction to it. I thought that it was a decent book when I read it. A while ago, one of my friends was reading it, which prodded me to reconsider my opinion of the book. Looking back, I couldn’t see much positive about it. The whole thing seemed like a giant excersise in wish fulfillment. In the authors’ defense, I suspect that anyone with deep insight into human nature is probably not writing vampire romances or sci-fi.
Alex Vostrov wrote:
I don’t see why not. It’s not like science fiction genre can’t support deeper commentary on human condition. In fact this is a perfect genre to study human nature by constructing scenarios that can’t or won’t happen in real world.
Many important literary works of this century are technically science fiction (for example Orwell’s “1982”, Huxleys “A Brave New World” and etc.)
You can write a masterpiece in any genre and on any topic. What makes a great book is not the genre or initial concept, but the execution. How you write, how well you present your case, and how you move the reader, is usually more important than whether or not the plot takes place here and now, or 20-200 years into the future or in a galaxy far far away.
Like Luke, I must disagree. It is not the genre that determines literary worth but content. While I found “Brave New World” severely overrated, much as I shrug my shoulder at anything by Philip K. Dick, I don’t dismiss them as being vacuous or superficial merely by virtue of being SciFi.
That Card would be excused from writing properly based on his chosen genre I find absurd. All good stories are ultimately about people, and in (hard) Sci-Fi, technology is merely the vehicle and the foil used to bring said people to the forefront.
But then, the actual meaning of Sci-Fi in a literary sense seems lost on far too many people these days. :/
(Darnit. I seem to have made a formatting error. Either I did screw up the blockquote (I doubt it though, since it was autogenerated), or it was voided by my attempt at a smiley. Ah well.)
Just wanted to add that I for one liked the original post. Meyer is a poor author. Card is a poor author. Twilight and Ender’s Game are mostly third-rate writing that panders to teenage egocentrism.
It’s perfectly alright to call things by their proper names.
First of all, I must praise your courage :) The only people who ever read my blog are Twilight fans, because I was stupid enough to review Twilight the movie :) they are scaary :)
Second, I tried reading the chapter of one of the books on Meyer site (because of all the hype) and I felt that it would melt my brains and gave up on it :) the prose was awful. Rowling is genius compared to that. On the other hand, I recently acknowledged to myself that part of the charm that Harry Potter books hold for me is the fantasy of very special school friendship that I never had.
And there was a shitty book which I would never name :) that I somehow just couldn’t stop reading. Though I knew that it was bad and silly and I even laughed at it in public but I secretly liked it anyway.
@ Björn Paulsen:
I fixed your blockquote. :)
Also, I recently found a new appreciation for Dick after reading Valis and Divine Invasion. I don’t know – maybe I just like to read convoluted theological discourse with a dose of insanity and a tiny sprinkle of plot. :P
Victoria wrote:
See, now you have to share what book was that. ;) Come on, out with it. We want to know!
Quote from one of Russian blogs: ‘Romance between a vampire and a human girl is impossible because girls tend to have periods. The vamp would eat her the first time she has it :)’
As for the shameful book, it was John Norman’s Chronicles of Gor. I bristled with indignation when I read it yet I couldn’t put it away. And I usually value books that fill me with emotions, even like that :) Half the time I wanted to beat the author up.
One of the reasons why Twilight wouldn’t speak to my inner teenage girl is that at that time I was a die-hard Xena fan so sweeping me away with ‘true love’ was kinda problematic :)
What really ruined Ender’s Game for me was that it was written by Orson Scott Card. :-)
I imagine if I dug out a copy and tried reading it today, I would also find it to be shallow and disappointing, even though I really enjoyed it in my teens. I’ve already had it happen to me with films I enjoyed in my teens, but can’t stand as an adult.
Of course, your argument excuses teenage girls for liking Twilight, but there are many adult women (I know quite a few ~30yos) who are also in love with the books.
How many grown men do you know that still like Ender’s game?
I wasn’t implying that sci-fi and fantasy is somehow inherently inferior, but I do think that they’re biased towards escapist stories. One of the big draws of fantasy and sci-fi is the extraordinary and the fantastic. That’s often used as a crutch, an excuse for shallow characters. There are absolutely authors who do more than that (Dan Simmons and Frank Herbert are two, off the top of my head), but for each one of them there hundreds of writers who just want to spin a good tale sans the deep thoughts.
Victoria wrote:
Ah, Gor. I haven’t read any of these books but I heard of them. And what I heard of them was that they were pretty much “space opera meets fantasy meets porn”. :) I was expecting something worse. Then again I’m blissfully ignorant with regards to how bad the Gor novels really are.
Victoria wrote:
Interesting. Care to elaborate on how being a Xena fan makes you impervious to true love fantasies? I’m asking because I never really watched the show. I mean, yeah – I’ve seen few episodes here and there but I wasn’t regular viewer, or member of the fandom. Is it because Xena was a strong, assertive female role model, whereas Bella from twilight is a flaky damsel in distress who can’t ever tie her own shoes without Edwards’ assistance?
Chris Wellons wrote:
Yeah, same here. Though I can’t for the life of me come up with an example right now. Which movies got ruined for you?
Simon wrote:
Ok, I admit – I know none. But Ender penomenon is sort of in the past now. The Ender hype fizzled out long time ago. And it never was as hyped up as Twilight to begin with. So finding a grown ass man who would be interested in reading Card’s novel but haven’t done it yet is not that easy.
Twilight on the other hand is at the height of it’s popularity right now – with the movies and all. So it’s sort of like a feedback loop – women start reading it because of the hype. In fact, Twilight fans go out and pimp it to their friends, relatives and coworkers. At my work it started with a girl in her early 20’s and she literally infected every single female coworker to the point where they all went to see the New Moon together after work.
@ Alex Vostrov:
True, but that can be said for just about every genre. Romance novels are form of escapism too. Action thrillers, criminal novels or spy stories can be seen as escapism.
Maybe I overreacted, but it’s not uncommon for people to discard all SF and Fantasy as worthless and devoid of literary worth as a principle. Some people literally act as if anything outside of the mainstream literature was invalid, and worthy of nothing but scorn. They consider SF genre to be a literary ghetto reserved for talentless hacks who couldn’t make it writing “real literature”. This annoys me to no end.
Maybe I read too much in Ender’s book and the following sequel, but, despite the fact they are poorly written, I always thought the point of the book was precisely that the end does not justify the means. The guilt that Ender feels, in my understanding, was to show that someone does not need to be actually consciously responsible for a genocide to be morally wrong. Ender was morally wrong (and a sociopath) precisely because he commits genocide in what for him is a game. And because he does not use his superior brains to detect that the generals who make him pass his “final test” are way too nervous for it to just be a test. In other words, I always thought that Card’s message was: “don’t be intellectually and ethically sloppy because it is going to come back and bite your ass in the end”. But maybe it is just my own moral point of view which made me seen stuff which was not there.
Luke Maciak wrote:
Trust me on this: they were really bad :) At the time of reading I was suspecting the author to be a total loser who turned his misogynistic fantasies into books. When I got access to internet I went to check him out and found out he was a Doctor of Philosophy from Princeton University, married and with kids. I stopped reading the books when one of them turned out to be real torture p*rn and I finally was more disgusted than angry.
Luke Maciak wrote:
Basically, yes. I loved me some vampire flicks back in the day, with Anita Blake being the favorite (before it too
went to the dogsbecame all orgies and stuff. When I read Sookie Stackhouse books after Anita’s, I found so-o many similarities but Sookie was much weaker than Anita in the beginning and it felt annoying. So, Bella, being not only incapable of fighting back but even walking straight without falling, would annoy me to no end. And telling me what to do is not the best way to make me do it :) So, while I find the idea of ‘true love’ sweet and romantic, any attempt to impose control like Edward’s would freak me out instantly.As for Xena, I watched it several times (I was 16 :) ) and I think Xena was my one and only girl crush. I now understand that I wasn’t so in love with the show (mostly cheesy) as I was with idea of Xena. When I saw the show opening credits with that wild music and voiceover saying ‘mighty princess forged in the heat of battle’ I thought: ‘Finally, someone got it right’ :) I watched Buffy for the same reason. Suzan Ivanova from Babylon-5, Zoe from Firefly – you catch the drift :)
The funny thing is that I myself am not strong and fearless. So those women were who I wanted to be. And I hate it when something reminds me of my own weakness, so that would be another reason why I wouldn’t like Twilight.
As for adult women who love Twilight – some of the most successful and independent women are sometimes tired of fighting. I have a friend like that – she got everything on her own, two degrees – computer science and finance, job, looking after her incapacitated mother. And sometimes she says she is SO tired of it all that she would like someone to appear and solve all her problems. Maybe such a book (only better written) would secretly appeal to her.
I haven’t read Ender’s Game in years, but I remember that I enjoyed it. Didn’t it win a Hugo?
Hard to remember since I’ve tried to forget them. :-P Any silly slapstick stuff, like Leslie Nielsen films. The Patriot. There are a few more, but I can’t remember them …
@ Victoria:
Hey, I guess you could add Aeryn Sun from Farscape to your list. She was pretty much Zoe protoplast chatacter.
@ Steve:
It won both Nebula and a Hugo actually. But award winning != beyond criticism.
@ Alphast:
I’m pretty sure I read the interview with Card in which he flat out said his intention was precisely to create a character who could commit genocide and still be likable and have reader’s support.
@ Chris Wellons:
Heh.. Leslie Nielsen pretty much just makes the same movie over and over and over again. So you don’t necessarily need to mature to get this effect. Just watching 2-3 of his movies in a row will do it. :P
Luke Maciak wrote:
Of course, and her too :) one of my fave episodes was the one where everyone went insane because of some stars radiation and she and John Crichton had a standoff :)
One of the reasons I always liked Conan saga (original and with some followers) that there were really tough female characters. Ahh, my first fantasy book :)
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Overall the Ender series says this
“Good people can do evil things and evil can do good”
Ender, with his Xenocide (evil)
Peter, with his Hegemony (good)
p.s. Twilight really does suck and Card is an award winning writer.
Ender Will Save Us. wrote:
See, this depends. Is Ender really a good person? I mean, he means well most of the time, but I wouldn’t really characterize him as the paragon of goodness. At the end of the day he is a calculating opportunist and when cornered he turns into a vicious little pittbull who is not afraid to beat a kid into a bloody pulp to make a general statement of “don’t fuck with Ender”. Granted, there is nothing wrong with that but it does not necessarily put you in the same bracket as Ghandi, Mother Theresa and etc…
Not to mention that even though Ender takes the full responsibility for the Xenocide, Card makes sure to let us know that Ender really was tricked into it, and he never meant it.
The way I understand the book is that Card set out to show how a ordinary, mostly good natured person could be pushed into committing a horrible act of genocide. But he cops out at the end and Ender is tricked to “accidentally the whole species” while thinking he is just participating in a training session. Which is sort of disappointing.
Ender’s brother is almost cartoonishly evil in the first book. Again, as I mentioned there is just not much to these characters – they are just pale shadows and rough sketches based on their chosen alignment. But if he got more stuff to do in the later books, that’s great.
Ender Will Save Us. wrote:
Absolutely. He has much better style, technique and flow. He is unquestionably much more talented than Mayers who writes like a high schooler. Ender’s Game is incomparably better than Twilight in every way imaginable.
My whole point was not to compare the quality of the books but rather their somewhat nasty subtexts. Twilight is deeply sexist and misogynistic – Ender’s game is a nerd revenge fantasy and genocide apologia – but a fairly well written one so there.
I actually fit the expected fan criteria perfectly: I’m a 17 year old white girl. With that in mind, let me say that I found this book completely horrendus. My view on the story and writing style was probably affected by my finishing a well-writen drama before reading it, but I could barely finish this book. I know the point of this book is mushy romantic scenes for women to squeal over, but the delivery was bad enough that I skipped about 4 chapters total of pages. Bella makes the entire female sex look like morons who overlook things like stalking and hostility when the guy is hot enough. I had better ease relating to Hannibal Lecter than this Mary-Sue and the only reason I finished this book was because someone told me that Bella was gruesomely murdered by a vampire at the end. I really wish I had just read the synopsis on wikipedia instead of the book, because I all I want to do now is lie down and scrub every one of SMeyer’s purple prose sentences out of my brain.
[Just found a link to this, and since the movie just happened. I’ll post even though it’s years later.]
If Ender has to be a “paragon of goodness” in order to satisfy “good people can do evil”, then you are setting the bar out of reach, from a literary perspective.
I read Ender’s Game as a teen and loved it too, and wouldn’t dispute any of the power-fantasy things that go along with it. I just re-read it last month before seeing the movie (to get some visuals to go along with it, it was basically like a slideshow of a movie), and I still enjoyed it.
The issue at hand with his personality, IMO, is that the story is on rails. He is an an overriding scenario: All humans in jeopardy, a system is set up to deal with this, he is a cog in the machine.
If you have ever spent any time around people completely locked in an environment, like a military school (bootcamp or other training), where everyone is around all the same people all the time, some are vets and some are new, then there is a lot of truth to people not acting with a lot of depth, because they are playing a role.
They are the role of the enforcer, who will tell the new people they suck and they aren’t worth anything. This actually happens, and they have people who want to share in being on the top of that particular mound by agreeing with them and giving it more force and eyes to collect information about failures.
With any work, what the author intends is less important than what you take away from it, IMO. Card may have wanted to set up a perfect-boy-warrior who does the worst things, and is still likeable, but whether you take away more than that is up to your response to reading it. Art inspires emotions, regardless of it’s intent or pedigree.
For me, it gave an interesting and clear picture of many scenarios of control and violence, and let me respond to them in my own way. When I followed along with Ender’s path, then and now, I got to empathize with his situation of being in a low-power scenario, coming out on top through violence or manipulation, and living with the result. Clear cut scenarios allow for their own interpretations exactly because things are laid so open. Muddled scenarios may invite more nuanced inspection of the material, but it does not mean it produces a more nuanced introspection.
The book allowed me to watch with empathetic eyes as genocide was committed, and I think when I first read it at 13 all in one sitting on an airplane, I wasn’t ready for what happened at the end because I didn’t spend time thinking about it. Letting it sit that none are left, and then finally 1 is left (hope for rebirth), was an interesting perspective for me to be in. That they were so alien and enemy throughout, and then they turned into the vulnerable ones at the end allowed, or perhaps demanded, for a change in perspective as a reader.
So while you say you think Card meant it to be shallow, you can’t say that what people will take from it will be a shallow experience. I had no illusions coming away from this that genocide was something that could be justified or excused, and also with a strong feeling that things that are not like me, that I cannot understand, still deserve to exist, and I could get lots of interesting perspective from learning more about them.