Twilight Summarized by a Smartass, Chapter 14

How is it that things can get even creepier?

In this chapter, we find out that Edward was born in 1901 and turned into a vampire in 1918 as he lay dying in a hospital of the Spanish flu that had already killed his parents. Somehow, it's supposed to be more honorable that Edward's "father," Carlisle, turns people into vampires only when they're dying. I don't know why, but this makes me feel creepy.

Also creepy: sparkling vampires. I don't know why, but it's just kind of creepy. It's also incredibly stupid and completely worthless. So, vampires can survive in the sunlight, but they don't like to venture out into it because they sparkle, and that attracts attention. That is the single dumbest thing you could ever attempt to add to the well-established literary vampire mythos. What is the point of it? Honestly, it only seems like it's there because, just over 300 pages in, Stephenie Meyer's got nowhere else to go. She's wasted so many giant adjectives so casually that she's got to find something bigger.

See, this is why I hate it when people casually use adjectives like phenomenal and epic, because it renders those words meaningless. Meyer's been repeatedly using words like godlike and archangel in describing the wonder of how panties-tingling Edward is that the only place she can think of to go is that his skin literally sparkles under the sun. And it's just so, so stupid. It's the mark of a bad writer, and Meyer is certainly that.

(Or, as a friend of mine put it, Stephenie Meyer is a gay man trapped in the body of a fat girl. Ouch. But since I've said many times that I hate Meyer and Anne Rice for turning vampires into imaginary gay best friends for lonely fat high school girls, I guess I can't judge.)

Bella keeps casually denigrating her father for the crimes of being interested and caring about her. It just bugs me. A lot.

But here are the two things that really annoy the living shit out of me. Oh, but first you need to know the basics of what happens: Edward drives Bella home, he comes inside and talks to her while she cooks dinner, then Bella makes her dad suspicious and goes up in her room and talks some more with Edward and then falls asleep laying next to him.

Okay, first annoyance: Edward already knows where everything is in Bella's house because he's already been inside. Every night. He lets himself in and stands there and watches her sleep every single night. So, all of this talk about how much he wants to kill her, and meanwhile he's been in her bedroom every night, just watching her sleep? That is fucking creepy.

Seriously, it's like a series of deal-breakers with this guy. Oh, he's hot. But he treats me like an intellectual inferior. He imposes on me to let him do everything so he feels masculine and superior (in this chapter, he even picks her up by her shoulders and sets her on the bed, she acknowledges, "like a toddler"). Then he tells me he's a monster who can't control his emotions, and that he's been desperate since I came to town to kill me and drink my blood. He acts out examples of how he can kill me, he follows me everywhere I go, and now he tells me that he breaks into my home and watches me sleep every night. She should be staking him right then and there.

Instead, Bella's flattered. Once again, she's too fucking stupid to live.

In fact, she's only horrified when he tells her that she talks in her sleep. Yeah, honey, that's the invasion of privacy.

Annoyance the second: this talk of how easily Edward can kill her keeps going on. Look, we get the fucking point already, and if Edward isn't going to just snap and rip her head off, you can stop talking about it now. The more this gets mentioned, the more idiotic Bella looks and the more of a pussy Edward makes himself. It's like that scene in The Princess Bride: "I'll most likely kill you in the morning." It's a punchline now. Let's move on, okay?

In a particularly sickening scene, they finally address the issue of sex (without saying the word, as though it's some kind of curse or something, fucking Mormons). Edward won't be having sex with Bella. Why? Because she's so fragile that he might lose control and kill her. I mean, if he's not thinking (or, Christ knows, talking) about not killing Bella every single moment, he'll just go ahead and do it.

Whatever. Keep talking about it, loudmouth. Edward is like one of those pathetic, mopey, emo boys who go around crying so that you'll know just how sensitive and tortured they are because they're desperate for attention.

Fuck, I hate these two assholes. And I hate Stephenie Meyer for writing this stupid book about herself and her tame fantasies as an allegory for being a loser in high school.

I especially hate her for encouraging far too many children to think that emotional abuse is love, that dry humping is a perfectly good substitute for sex, and that they should be terrified of sex. It's all over the internet; kids are fascinated by their bodies and by deep, overdramatic love, but they are absolutely terrified of the act of love itself. They talk like every single one of them is a target for molestation at the hands of an adult. They talk about sex as though it's evil. Why are kids today so fucking uptight? I don't think this book would have found near the audience it did if it didn't tap into the puritanical psyche kids have today when it comes to their bodies. They've gone from learning about safe sex to being afraid of having any.

The whole country's like this now: seemingly permissive, but uptight as all get out.

Anyway.

Here's the most telling moment of this chapter: when Edward says he's happy to be her prisoner, and then "his long hands formed manacles around my wrists." (Emphasis Meyer's.) That's it right there. Because that's what an emotionally distant abusive asshole does: makes you think his manipulations are somehow your fault.

Also there's the moment where he compares her to a baby seal being hunted by a killer whale, an even more pathetic metaphor than the last chapter's, where he compares her to being a lamb falling in love with a lion. Oh, and he compares her to wine again. Romantic.