Less than a year ago I read the Smeyer tetrology of brain-damaging swill known as Twillight, and it has changed my life. The books are an incredible clusterfuck, impossible to plumb in a single post. Smeyer is not to be blamed. She's a bad but eager writer, an avid reader, and a take-no-prisoners capital-M Mother. Bless her, I could and have been Smeyer.
We must not even blame the exploitative publishers who recognized this book as both a 300-year set back to civil rights and the golden goose. Our society demands that they profit in their work and DAMN were they successful!
No, my fine reader, we are the only ones to blame. We are the collective machinery that runs on and demands Smeyer. She would exist anyway, happily scribbling the teenage-angsty fantasies of an over-worked and under-appreciated mom, but it was us who lifted her up in praise. We selected her because she feeds something destructive and cruel within us.
We are Smeyer, and we are legion.
There were many hints in the books, pieces that hurt and wounded me so deeply that they demanded a response, but here is one. Among the reductive and bland descriptions of Edward as a mind-blowingly, pants-shittingly gorgeous super-human, Smeyer mentions off-hand that he once had green eyes.
That wounded me badly.
I began to think to myself, wouldn't those green eyes be more lovely than the caramel-honey-melted-topaz irises he currently has? Those eyes are the stamp of his curse and the mark of his rebellious family, but they are not his own. Edward has green eyes. Who is this creature?
Did he lose his freckles and moles? His chicken-pox scars and the handsome asymmetry of a natural face? Where is the olive-oil glow of summertime skin? The network of blue veins under winter-white skin? What about the identifying irregularities and the idiosyncrisities? Is he a tabula rassa, worshipped for being manifestly vapid?
I had to do something. I couldn't read books in a world where God condemns Edward to oragami-paper skin and unrelenting symmetrical perfection. I had to wrinkle the paper and leave a coffee stain. I had to give Edward back his green eyes.
We must not even blame the exploitative publishers who recognized this book as both a 300-year set back to civil rights and the golden goose. Our society demands that they profit in their work and DAMN were they successful!
No, my fine reader, we are the only ones to blame. We are the collective machinery that runs on and demands Smeyer. She would exist anyway, happily scribbling the teenage-angsty fantasies of an over-worked and under-appreciated mom, but it was us who lifted her up in praise. We selected her because she feeds something destructive and cruel within us.
We are Smeyer, and we are legion.
That wounded me badly.
I began to think to myself, wouldn't those green eyes be more lovely than the caramel-honey-melted-topaz irises he currently has? Those eyes are the stamp of his curse and the mark of his rebellious family, but they are not his own. Edward has green eyes. Who is this creature?
Did he lose his freckles and moles? His chicken-pox scars and the handsome asymmetry of a natural face? Where is the olive-oil glow of summertime skin? The network of blue veins under winter-white skin? What about the identifying irregularities and the idiosyncrisities? Is he a tabula rassa, worshipped for being manifestly vapid?
I had to do something. I couldn't read books in a world where God condemns Edward to oragami-paper skin and unrelenting symmetrical perfection. I had to wrinkle the paper and leave a coffee stain. I had to give Edward back his green eyes.
Your writing is lovely. I do like to imagine Edward as an imperfect, but therefore more beautiful, human.
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