...and am legitimately liking it. I read 140 pages in one sitting tonight and never once struggled to continue through the book. I am actually really and truly finding the plot interesting enough to keep me reading. Okay, okay, these books are not going on my top ten list of books and they certainly pale in comparison to other teen series (um...Harry Potter?), but it seems that they are getting more crap than they really deserve. People are knocking them before they are trying them because they have seen the movie (which is, as per usual with book-to-film endeavors) much worse than the novel or they have heard from their friends about it and draw their own conclusions.
I was one of those people for a long time. I love vampires but I HATED the thought that they would be so melodramatic to come up with lines like "You are my life now," and heaven forbid that a vampire should EVER sparkle. But you sort of have to give Stephanie Meyer some credit for trying to break out of the stereotypical mold of vampires where they turn into bats and die in the sunlight a la Dracula. While I doubt that Twilight and its sequels will go down as literature of literary merit, they are pretty standard fluff and if one simply lets go of reality, or what they think is reality for vampires (this IS fantasy, remember?), then they prove to be a fairly fun read.
I think what Twilight-haters hate is not the books themselves, because it's hard to hate a book that you are not forced to read (and I challenge anyone to show me a syllabus from their English class with these books under required reading) because it is all to easy to avoid. It's like saying that you hate musicals but continue to buy tickets to every show on Broadway. I think what they hate are the fans. The rabid teenage girls who flock to the bookstores and libraries every time they hear the name "Edward Cullen" and make ridiculous amounts of Flair and Bumper Stickers on Facebook and stay up late for the midnight premiers and so on...but isn't that their right? Sure, you can dislike seeing it everywhere, but its like anything that has a fan following.
Fans of Harry Potter do the same thing. But no one is condemning them. They dress up in cloaks and run around with wands in broad daylight with sharpie on their foreheads, but not many people are deeply concerned. You might argue that Harry Potter has more literary merit than Twilight (I apologize for using this phrase over and over, literary merit, but it was drilled into me Senior Year of high school...I cannot help it), but isn't enjoyment just as worthy a cause to be a fan of something? Someone famous, perhaps Emerson, said "Beauty is its own excuse for being." So, if a thing of beauty is a joy forever and beauty is its own excuse for being, then isn't joy it's own excuse for being? Twilight brings fans joy. It may be short lived. It may be superficial, but it is joy.
So, in conclusion, Twilight-haters/ Twilight-Fan-haters- c'est la vie and live and let live. Stop the hating on the Twilight series.
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