The final installment of Anti-Twilight Week is brought to you by my wife, Jennifer.  She may have never read the first word of Stephenie Meyer’s “saga”—lucky her—but she certainly has some valid opinions on why the series is not all it’s cracked up to be. Enjoy!

When Beej asked me to write a post for Anti-Twilight week, I was hesitant. So many wonderfully insightful and snarky women have already tackled the issues of abuse, submissiveness, and crappy writing in the series—I’ve even heard academic presentations on the subject. And those women had a distinct advantage over me: they had actually read the series and could therefore make specific, informed critiques. I have read enough plot summaries and excerpts to know how I feel about it, and I haven’t brought myself to trudge through it simply for the sake of making my criticisms appear more legitimate.

As a relatively young woman, I frequently have other relatively young women approach me, eyes glazed over with eager anticipation, and ask me in a just-us-girls whisper:

“Have you read Twilight?”

I try to casually tell them that I haven’t without appearing to dismiss their taste, but they usually won’t leave it at that. “Why not?” they ask, alarmed. “It’s sooooo amazing!” I tell them that it’s just not my thing, elaborating that I have some problems with how it depicts relationships and that I’m not a fan of the story or the writing style. I probably say this with more of a sneer than I intend to, simply because I get so tired of being asked about Twilight every few days, not because I’m actually angry at the person talking to me.

But because I haven’t read the books and care nothing about seeing New Moon (I did see the first film), fans feel the need to convince me of why I would love them. Here, I’m going to lay out the two arguments I get most frequently and why they don’t work on me.

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Let me say this first: I don’t particularly like fan fiction. I appreciate that it can be a terrific way for up-and-coming authors to develop their storytelling chops without dealing with the in-depth processes of characterization or worldbuilding; however, the writing is often lazy and uninspired, relying on tropes, clichés, and an nascent use of adjectives to “enhance” the prose.

Enter Twilight.

Stephenie Meyer has made a career out of lazy prose.  Her writing, while decent (at best) on the narrative side, lacks any other element that should have helped her rise out of the quagmire that so often is young adult fiction. Instead of using fanfic-inspired conventions and mechanics to springboard into a real writing career, Stephenie Meyer embraces the hackneyed elements instead of ever moving past them.

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