QOTD (from yesterday)

During the House party (by which I mean five people watching House, MD):

METAL ADAM: Is that a dental dam?
JON: It's ORIGAMI PAPER!

House is pretty awesome, btw, even though medical stuff makes me very squeamish unless it's happening to me. Apparently I can watch people getting shot all day, but stick a needle in someone's eyeball and I go crawling under the couch.

Fail. Fail on so many levels. It's not even epic, just LOTS OF FAIL.

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article4492238.ece

Considering all the fun I've had completely snarking the Twilight series at every turn, I never really thought I'd say this, but... Stephenie Meyer *so* does not deserve this shit. This might be the most ineptly written interview in the history of ineptly written interviews. Offensively so, but I'll get to that in a minute.

We can start with the fucking HEADLINE (and that's a bad sign): "News Review interview: Stephenie Meyer. A Mormon housewife’s bestselling tales of a gallant ghoul are fast filling the void left by Harry Potter". Okay, I have enough issues with Stephenie referring to her sparkly wonderpeople as "vampires," but... GHOUL? There is only one instance in which a ghoul and a vampire are the same thing, and that is when the speaker is AN ILLITERATE AND CULTURALLY SHELTERED IGNORAMUS WHO DOESN'T EVEN REALIZE THAT "HORROR" *IS* A GENRE AND NOT JUST THE FEELING YOU GET WHEN YOUR TEA COSIES DON'T MATCH. Fifty bucks says this reporter doesn't let her children celebrate Halloween.

Also, the reviewer has clearly not read "Breaking Dawn" yet. She/he/it happily dithers on the series "boil[ing] with desire that all goes unconsummated" (emphasis mine), and that "even though her characters never have sex...". Um, that was true of the first three books, but part of the reason so many people hate BD is that Edward and Bella are constantly sexxin'. CONSTANTLY. Especially in the third segment of the book, which I'm only halfway through, and I am so god damn sick of it already. I'm going to vomit next time I she uses the word "physically," I swear.

Most importantly, by which I mean the punishment for the other two should have been being locked in a library for 10 years each but the punishment for this one should involve electroshocks and waterboarding, there is the following evaluation of Stephenie Meyer's literary genius:

"She’s a roundish, bouncy figure who disguises her weight well in smart black pants and tailored shirt."

As much as I am a nosy bitch and want to know absolutely everything about everyone, Stephenie Meyer's weight has absolutely NOTHING to do with her writing ability, or lack thereof, depending on what camp you're in. NOTHING. And it is not nice to call people fat. It is especially inappropriate to call people fat when it has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with what you're talking about. And as much as I do believe that being able to dress yourself is a skill (I go to a hippy nerd school... there's actually people who can't around here), it's not a writing skill. Also, I am extremely skeptical as to whether this comment would still have been made if Stephenie Meyer were a man.

This article does contain some helpful insight into why the Twilight books are... um... bad, as far as I'm concerned. Point the first:

"Even her husband was doubtful, once she confessed what she had really been doing all those nights when she came to bed late. “He wasn’t very enthusiastic, because he was trying to protect me,” she said. “He knew how hard I would take rejections and I think he was concerned I was going to get hurt. And nobody would want to live with a rejected Stephenie.” "

Score! My number one problem with the Twilight series, Edward's particular dickheadedness-- "protection" at the expense of supporting your girlfriend/wife's ability to be a god damn person. At the expense of supporting her right to take chances, make mistakes, try new things, face the big bad real world and its meen ppl. God forbid you encourage your wife to develop her artistic talents and express herself! Somebody somewhere might not think she's good, and that would hurt her feelings, so you should just beat them all to it instead.

Interview also mentions that "before she started writing, [she] had never read a vampire book". YOU DON'T SAY. No wonder her vampires' mythology is so awkard and, um, NON-VAMPIRIC. No wonder there's all these awkward scenes where Bella goes to check out vampire myths, and only finds the *myths*, and then dithers about how the Cullen vampires are "sooooooo different than the stories" even on the points where their differing from Dracula and pre-Dracula myths are, in fact, extremely common points of modern vampire mythology. If I read one more vampire novel where, upon discovering vampires, some human character goes "But I thought vampires couldn't go out in sunlight?" and the vampire is like "ALL TEH STORIEZ ARE RONG!!" I will BURN IT. So many modern stories have adopted the idea of "the vampire that can go out in the day and there's just (x) reason why they usually don't" that most of us have freaking heard that notion by now. Did Meyer really think she was making her own change to the mythology? When I actually review BD, I will go on my own rant as to why the modern changes to the vampire myth are being made (any why they suck!), but I am now going to shift my focus onto the changes that Meyer made that actually *are* original, and why *they* suck.

1. Individuated superpowers. Um, this one sucks because it betrays how little you know about traditional vampire powers. Since you have absolutely no idea what has ever constituted "vampire powers" except for superstrength, you gave them each individual ones, making them more like a bunch of superheroes than a single race. Mythologically, even in modern vampire stories, vampirism is generally *opposed* to one's individuality, which gets sort of tied in with the being human business, ie, being "you". Part of the existential angst facet of most modern vampire stories is that the vampirism thing basically irons out bits of "you", and you have to struggle between being "you" and being "vampire." The idea of an individuated superpower doesn't fit in too well with that theme.
2. Sparkly vampires. Actually, the whole 'inhumanly marble-like' skin thing being conspicuous is old. It's just the addition of the literal word "sparkle" that makes it dumb. SPARKLE. Seriously.
3. Vampires don't sleep. First of all, it just seems really Mary-Sue-ish. Second of all, it sounds like it'd be twice as big a curse as being immortal and sleeping through half of it, but no, it gives them extra time to be ~awesome~! *eyeroll* Third of all, and probably the weakest argument, it just departs SO completely from all other mythology, from the primevial horror image of rising out of the grave, that it very much bothers the folklorist in me. Vampires don't have to actually crawl out of their grave every evening to make me happy. There just needs to be SOME shred of a tie left to that original idea. Fourth, vampires aren't *robots*. They still need sustenance, why not rest?
4. Okay, the big one. Vampire "venom." Is DUMB. Why? Because they're VAMPIRES. What bodily fluid is most closely associated with vampires? BLOOD. If the vampire's power therefore resides in one of their bodily fluids, what fluid would it be? BLOOD. What is it in every single other motherfucking vampire story where a vampire's bodily fluid changes the victim? BLOOD. Why do some canons have vampires sweat or cry blood? BECAUSE THE VAMPIRE MYTH... IS... ABOUT... BLOOD. Now, WHY would you have a vampire's power reside in one of its bodily fluids that is absolutely unrelated to blood? There are two possible answers: one, you're stupid, two, you don't know what a vampire is.

Oh, and one more major, apoplexy-inducing pet peeve for the entire world of douchewagons who want to praise SMeyer without stopping to think if what they're saying makes any sense or not: STOP COMPARING THIS TO HARRY POTTER. Yes, they're both series, they're both popular, they're both fantasy. This is where it ENDS. The stories have radically different tones, setups, and characters. The world-building bears no similarities. Mythologies are interpreted radically differently. Hell, the idea of the power of love is interpreted almost COMPLETELY differently. Meyers' books are ridiculously conservative in terms of their social mores and evaluations of relationships between people (find Prince Charming, do what he says, everything else is secondary); Rowling has a strong hippie-liberal bent (stick by everybody, be dependent on none of them, challenge authority, be yourself, tolerance, etc). Meyer is deliberately writing about mythologies she knows nothing about; Rowling's books are deeply colored by more old mythology and folklore than you will ever be able to uncover. Meyers' books are mysogynistic, despite her female protagonist; Rowling has a male protagonist but also has a share of ass-kicking and sometimes even single women who are considered as individual characters, not halves of pairs, and certainly not in need of the protection of their men. (I would put in that HP is legitimately good and Twilight is just fun 'cos it's crack, but all know that.) JUST STOP COMPARING THE TWO ALREADY.

Meyer majored in English, too. >.< Inexcusable. But God... the fact that she writes crack has nothing to do her *weight*. And at least she writes; I respect that enough to believe she should get an interviewer who at least *reads*. Writing is hard; reading is easy. Poor Stephenie.

Yoinked from Chelsea via Facebook

( In which we find out that, despite my self-righteous ranting, I am in fact even *more* of a retard about relationships than Stephenie Meyer, just in the opposite direction. )