This Just In – Vampires are Fictional

It is the plight of the Twilighter, especially those of us over the age of eighteen, to put up with endless amounts of ridicule for our obsession.

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Okay – here’s the thing. I am not one of these Twilight people who insist it is – OMG teh best thing evr! Stephenie Meyer is a genius in a number of ways, but Twilight is not the best book out there. The movies are enjoyable but neither of them, so far, even makes my top 25 favorite movies list (and before you can berate me, Twi-Hards, I saw Twilight 22 times in the theaters and New Moon 14, so… no worries).

However, if you want to get into a discussion with me, and believe me when I say that I’m not interested in juvenile discussions about Twilight, you’re going to have to use an excuse better than “it sucks”. Of course it does! It’s a vampire series.

::cough::

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Moving on. What I hear most often is that it sucks because Stephenie has “destroyed” (or any other number of adjectives meaning totally obliterated) real vampires.

Um – excuse me? Real?

Okay. First off, when I say vampire – whatever image pops into your head is not the ‘original’ vampire myth to begin with. Vampires exist across practically all cultures and have been around, in one form or another, for all of recorded history. Everything you see to do with vampires is merely an interpretation of an entirely fictional being.

Let my main man Agent Mulder tell you some more.

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Mulder: Still, that leaves us in something of a quandary because there are as many different kinds of vampires as there are cultures that fear them. Some don’t even subsist on blood. The Bulgarian Ubour, for example, eats only manure.

Scully: Thank you.

Mulder: To the Serbs, a prime indicator of vampirism is red hair. Some vampires are thought to be eternal. Others are thought to have a life span of only 40 days. Sunlight kills certain vampires while others come and go as they please, day or night.

From the episode Bad Blood

Okay, so, claiming that Twilight sucks because they’re not ‘real’ vampires is not a ‘real’ argument. Vampires are entirely fictional characters. What this means is that it is entirely up to the author how to portray them. Stephenie

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Meyer could have written that vampires all have purple hair and she would have been well within her creative license loving rights. If she had, it would not have been a good reason to call the series ‘bad’.

Now, how about we work on our communication skills. What you can say, if you’re getting into a discussion with me, is that you don’t care for Stephenie’s vampires. I can understand that. Personally, I don’t care for anyone’s vampires EXCEPT Stephenie’s …and maybe the Count from Sesame Street. For me, most stories that are about vampires, or space men, or werewolves or mutants or whatever other monster you can think of, are just ridiculous.

For me, Stephenie presented Twilight in a way that I could jive with. The story is not about vampires, as most monster-related stores are. It’s about a girl who falls in love with a boy…who just happens to be a vampire. Then, Stephenie proceeds to make vampires realistic to me. A paramount in any story I read is that, if you’re tying to tell me that the story you’re telling exists in this world, is that you make me believe that it could absolutely be real. Let me lay it out for you in a way you Twi-Haters who spout off about bad-ass-ness might understand. The Dark Knight is the best action movie possibly ever because that Joker is so flipping real that I believe he could be out there walking the streets…and that scares the bejesus out of me!

Stephenie presents her vampires in a believable way. If you understand myth at all, you understand that myths

One - One Vampire Ah. Ah. Ah.

occur to explain things we don’t know how to otherwise explain. Hence, if vampires were real, it would only make sense that there would be many myths about them. In this way, Stephenie realistically explains away all of the things that just seemed idiotic to me in other stories. With very few exceptions, all of her vampire traits make biological sense – in that, if a vampire were an animal (for lack of a better term) like every other species on the planet, they’d have natural defenses, lures for prey and the like. Stephenie’s vampires simply make sense. None of this dying because wood hits them through the heart nonsense. And don’t get me started on garlic.

Which brings me back to the original point. Obviously, I don’t care for the…”normal” vampires. For a person like me, the way Stephenie portrays her vamps just adds to the read-ability.

Now, imagine for one second that I was like you Twi-Haters out there. Here’s what I really don’t understand. Why would you pick up a book with pre-conceived notions about what the characters should be like? It seems pretty narrow minded to me to box yourself in and only accept certain characters a certain way. Where’s the variety? The spice in life?

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It’s like saying you’re going to reject any book with a mother character in it who isn’t exactly like June Cleaver…or Norma Bates, whatever.

Here’s my advice. Go into any book, Twilight, whatever you may be reading, with NO expectations. It isn’t reasonable to expect every author to write the same old characters the same way over and over again. It isn’t reasonable for you to expect an author to write a story that you already know you’re comfortable with.

Honestly – where’s the fun in that?

I’ll tell you this much. If I had let my pre-conceived notions guide me I wouldn’t have ever fallen in love with this series. I don’t like vampire books. I don’t like teenagers in books. I don’t like true love stories. Twilight was all three – but not in any way I’ve seen it before.

Open your mind. No one is saying that you have to like Twilight or anything else you read, but know the difference between when you simply don’t like a certain style and when the writing is, in actuality, bad.

In your always humble opinion.