friends

All you people who are into these stories? We need to have a Serious Talk.

The crap dialogue and Bella's complete lack of any redeeming or sympathetic qualities, besides just being a whiny, self-important, angst-ridden teen so I guess she's a shoe-in for the books' intended market (because you know teen readers can't empathize with anyone who is not just like them, which means we are raising a nation of fucking sociopaths and should all be very afraid (and you adult readers who found Bella a likeable character need to fucking stop listening to Evanescence for once))...okay, those things aside. Also, let's not talk about the film's narrative device for idjits, in which Bella told us everything that was being shown on screen at the time; seriously, it was like closed captioning for the nuance impaired (and then the device was abandoned as some point where I guess it was assumed we'd finally evolved past pond scum, AND THEN CAME BACK, WTF). Besides all that. Let's discuss the WTFery that had me rolling around on the floor, laughing so hard I started coughing.

Sense of place. As in, do you have it, Stephenie Meyer? Apparently she's lived in the Phoenix area, so you'd think there would be some awareness of the Southwest. So when Bella's dad warned her about the predator that was eating people, maybe it should have been done in a way that acknowledges that Bella came from a place that boasts (in order of descending size) bears, pumas, javalina (not predators, but nasty biters), coyotes, wildcats, badgers (they will fuck you up, so I am including them), eleven different kinds of rattlesnakes (two fatal), coral snakes, sidewinders (yeah, they're venomous), gila monsters (not really fatal, but fucking nasty), bark scorpions, black widow spiders, brown recluse spiders, and fucking africanized honeybees, which are no fucking joke. Not in the you're in the wilderness now, baby way that he did.

Upon further research, I found that Meyer lived in Scottsdale, which the closest thing you can get to living in some sort of outdoor chi-chi mall. And apparently she never went on a goddamn field trip, or went near an arroyo during a drought, so fuck her.

On the other end of the spectrum, thunder seems to play a huge role in the life of the Pacific Northwest Vampire, and I would like to know where they are getting it from, because we have lived here for a year and a half, and I have heard it half-a-dozen times. Definitely not often enough to be some sort of ominous device, much less cover a baseball game or whatever the fuck that bullshit was. Maybe she's showing her desert upbringing here, since one of Arizona's rainy seasons is always accompanied with lightning storms, and maybe she's dumb enough to assume that rain must be like that everywhere. I don't know. And shit, maybe it's a thunder wonderland out near Forks. Somehow I doubt it.

Next up: cultural awareness. Does she have it? Fuck no. At one point I turned to Jon and said, with incredulous delight, "did she just buy a goddamn beat-up red truck from a goddamn Indian?" because, replete with the misnomer, that is the setup for the majority of racist jokes in Arizona. Good job, Stephanie!

So OF COURSE the tribe are descended from FUCKING WOLVES, because Native Americans are not only not really human, but Magical. Of course. I don't know why that revelation made me ask Jon to pause the film so I could recover my senses, during which we tried to determine which animal the Hohokam were. The sense of fun was starting to veer dangerously into a sick feeling.

But the thing that disturbed me the most, that did not make me laugh at all, was Edward's chastizing Bella for, frankly, being so delicious and making it so hard for him to control himself. It was like Stephenie Meyer wanted to walk that fine line between blaming the victim and developing some sort of scentproof burqua that would keep the poor vampires safe from her human delights.

So the people on my FL who read and enjoyed these books, and might have enjoyed the movie, god save you -- and I am not going to out you, but you know who you are -- did none of these things throw a little flag in your head? Really? Because aside from the utterly crap dialogue and infantile character development (that I know is in the books, so don't try and deny it), two of these things would make me stop and say HOLD THAT SHIT RIGHT UP.

Познание – сила, никто с сиим спорить не будет, потому необходимо обзавестись как можно огромным количеством инфы, чтоб ощущать себя мощным.

там еще много такого!

I've got a nice sized bedroom and a music room, and it's so close to the uni.

Y'know, for that Masters degree I can't do now. Because I am a failure. Because someone at LCM really really hates me.

As you can see, I have mixed feelings about the move.