Research+Paper

This is my original research paper written for Literature Class. It an outrageous size at the moment, so hopefully I'll be able to break it up somehow later on.

__Twilight: I Wouldn't Recommend It __  The //Twilight// series by Stephanie Meyer has become one of the best-selling book series of the past ten years. Mrs. Meyer’s success with //Twilight// has been compared to that of //Harry Potter// by Joanne “J.K.” Rowling. From its success has spawned a cinema adaptation, a spin-off graphic novel, as well as various television series with similar characteristics. However, despite its success, I hold this fantasy/romance story to be an awful read. The //Twilight// series is a terrible story because of bad writing, bad storytelling, and an illogical romance.  The book is full of bad writing. Stephen King himself has said that Stephanie Meyer "can't write worth a darn." Stephanie Meyer is known to have graduated from her university with a degree in English Literature. This being the case, one would assume that the books would have few, if not non-existent, grammatical and spelling errors. To be fair, I will say that I'm only using the first book as reference. However, you can actually read up to page nine and already find quite a few spelling error. Throughout the entirety of the book, a reader will find many spelling and grammatical errors as well as awkwardly worded sentences. This would be fine if it were from the first draft of the book, but Stephanie Meyer actually published it as a book without the consulting of a beta reader to help her find these errors in her writing. Now I will admit that the newer versions of the book seem to do a notable improvement on all of the errors. However, I do not see that as an excuse for not bothering to go through the first draft of the book and instead publish a rough draft of a book, when she could easily go through "spell and grammar check" on Microsoft Word or some other program that would only take a few minutes to eliminate most of the errors. If my friends and I decided to write stories last year in Literature class in a same manner that Stephanie Meyer had, we would have been subjected to a great lecture by our teacher, been given back our stories with a notable number of red marks for corrections, and asked to redo it. Stephanie Meyer also seems to try a great deal of utilizing the thesaurus in the inner monologue of Bella Swan. This is not a bad thing in and of itself, but Stephanie Meyer seems to make a point to exhaust the thesaurus. As a result, the reader becomes greatly confused, because he or she either has never seen the word before or, simply does not understand the implication of the word. This also makes Bella Swan out to be a very intelligent, or at least very literary, teenager. However, Bella does not show either of these characteristics in the book, besides for the fact that she had read Wuthering Heights a number of times. Thirdly, Stephanie Meyer rights Bella Swan with no character faults; this essentially makes her a perfect person, a "Mary Sue". You may say that this is outright false, but can you name any character flaw that she might have? She does not have any, and clumsiness does not qualify for character flaw. This makes her character unbelievable- not in a good way- for the reader. She does not learn anything and exhibits no growth as a character throughout the duration of the four books. Considering these factors, she becomes much less interesting as a character, yet she is the protagonist of the story.  The plot of //Twilight// is very faulty in the way that everything is introduced. We have no explanation as to why Bella must move to Forks. We remain ignorant to this fact until Edward asks her in the second into the book. Secondly, the fact that Edward Cullen is a vampire would seem like it would be a piece of information that would stay hidden from the reader until it is revealed in the book. This would make for a good dramatic effect for the reader. However, this would prove not to be the case since this fact is written into the summary on the back of the book. Because of this, we do not experience the same impact of this revelation as Bella does when Jacob reveals it in chapter six. As this story has established itself as a romance novel, the first book could be cut down a few chapters, since for a great deal of the book there is no actual conflict in the storyline. Everyone seems to be fine with Bella's and Edward's relationship, and even though Edward has an obsession with wanting Bella's blood, being a vampire, he seems to keep himself under control so as to not feast on her blood. The book could arguably end there. However, somewhere in the middle of the first book, another group of vampires is introduced with its leader, James, deciding to hunt down Bella for sport.  The romance between Bella and Edward does not seem to make sense. When Bella first meets Edward, she does seem to take interest in him, however, they have little to no interaction whatsoever, save a few points of dialogue, in the four chapters. When she does find out that Edward is a vampire, her immediate plan of action, which would seem to be the reasonable one, was to cut off any contact with him whatsoever, but she immediately dismisses the thought, having no desire to do so. While this contributes to the fact that she truly wants to be with Edward, I do not see how she could dismiss facts about Edward, facts that people would normally be frightened by, and even fall more in love with him. Before you choose to say, "It's true love" or something similar, might I add that anyone with common sense would not want someone to watch over him or her while the individual sleeps. I am also very sure that no one would want his or her significant other to glitter in the sunlight.  In Edward's case, having a relationship with Bella would be extremely difficult. He wants Bella to stay human, yet he also craves her blood more than that of anyone else. This being the case, were Bella to ever get a blood injury, Edward would have a very hard time keeping himself from drinking Bella's blood, already finding it extremely difficult to do so. As it turns out, Bella does in fact turn into a vampire eventually. Regardless, if Edward were to have the willpower not to drink Bella's blood and Bella did not turn into a vampire, Bella would still have died after a certain amount of time, be it disease, old age, or some other cause. This would lead Edward to become greatly depressed and try to get himself killed, as exhibited in New Moon when Edward thinks Bella has died.  //Twilight// is not a very good story. I would probably leave this story alone in any other situation, however, as it has become so immensely popular and the majority of people think it's an incredible romance, I would expect it to be much better than it is. I do not find it fair as there are a vast number of authors with books much better than //Twilight// that do not get the kind of attention this series has garnered. Though I suppose it had potential for a great story. Were Stephanie Meyer to have worked on the overall story more before publishing it, I am certain //Twilight// would have been a decent series.