Title: LIKE ANTIQUING, BUT MORE FABULOUS
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Comic ID #3478
Title: LIKE ANTIQUING, BUT MORE FABULOUS
Print Status: Available
Title: LIKE ANTIQUING, BUT MORE FABULOUS
Print Status: Available
Discussion (45) ¬
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I just find that first line of the answer hilarious, and more so that it was chosen as “best answer.” In the end, the monsters in the movie version of I am Legend are more real vampires than Twilight. Twilight isn’t a “vampire love takes nation by storm” but rather “teenage girls find new lust objects in sparkling skin and strange blood fetishes.”
-DKL
who hopes no father of a teenage girl reads that last line and has a heart attack. lol
“I will never understand why Stephanie Meyer chose to upend the vampire myth and allow the vampires in her books the ability to walk around in daylight.”
Well, to be fair, Dracula, the be all and end all of vampires himself, was known to walk around during the day.
http://www.snopes.com/language/literary/dracula.asp
Dracula could walk around in the daylight? I didn’t know that.
But he was kind of like the King of Vampires, right? He could do whatever he wanted. Kill Dracula and all of the people he turned into vampires would revert to normal, right?
Maybe it’s just the underlings that explode in sunlight.
Regardless of if they burn or not, making a vampire sparkle is kind of a lame re-interpretation. Vampires are undead monsters… unnatural in every way. They shouldn’t be pretty to look at.
My fave Vampires (Rayban ad) http://tinyurl.com/yctpq96
I just wanted to say that I love the sparkling lettering. Perfect.
I don’t understand the whole ‘Team Jacob’ vs ‘Team Edward’ hooplah. If you have read all of the books, you will know there is no team anyone. I guess this is great marketing for those that haven’t read the books and I guess there are a lot of people who didn’t read the books. None the less, love panel 3 again Tom!
In most vampire lore, the oldest and strongest can walk in the daylight but their powers are severly weakened. Eventhough I think the sparkly thing is pretty stupid, I give Meyer artistic license to run with it, just like the fact that her vamps never sleep. It’s all a bit of an odd vampire myth interpretation & her werewolf mythos is just as odd. Oh, we only become weres if we’re pubescent and vamps are near. Odd!
My simple response is that Twilight isn’t about vampires at all – they just call them that since it’s a popular term. I explore this in much more depth in my own web comic, and have blogged about it at length.
Because teenage girls – the demographic for this schlock – like shirtless, brooding guys and things that sparkle. Throw them together and you have the most annoying thing to come along in some time. Now we’re also having to put up with all the dumb spinoffs in movies and TV.
What would I like to see? A new vampire movie where they are monsters and aren’t looked at as love interests.
Damn women. What are men to them? They treat us like nothing more than pieces of meat! Maybe not me. Okay, definitely not me. Aw hell! Why won’t women treat ME like a piece of meat?!? 🙁
What was my point again?
They have all come from a rave dance party after doing Extacy. They just think they are vampires.
Hey now, I resent the implication that goth Jareds like Twilight. I’m a goth Jared and I hate Twilight.
So I stand firm in the name of all goth Jareds that Twilight is awful. Just plain awful.
🙂
But, well, regardless, love the comic
In the movie Edward says “This is the skin of a killer” when he shows off all his glitter glory (gag) and my gay friend replies with: “No, that’s the skin of a gay man going out to the club”.
In short Meyer is an idiot and should not be considered a writer.
Hi, my name is Liz and I read and enjoyed Twilight. I know that they’re terrible books, but they were entertaining.
Anyway, I feel like Edward addresses the whole “we’re really fast and strong, so we don’t really need to be beautiful” thing. I’m pretty sure he says the attractiveness is superfluous. As for the sparkling…I’m kind of whatever about it. I never understood why the sun had an effect on vampires, but not zombies. The sun has no real holy connotation, and vampires are dead, just like zombies, right? *shrug*
Also, Edrondol, I’m not sure what spin-offs you’re referring to, but both True Blood and The Vampire Diaries are based on book series that were written well before Twilight. They’re certainly capitalizing on the popularity of Twilight, but they’re not spin-offs, per se.
And when it comes to vampire shows, Buffy and Angel FTW.
As I understood it, vampires are kind of like spawn of the underword – demons or Hellish creatures that impacted by the “purity” of sunlight (or perhaps God’s grace?)
Zombies are just reanimated pieces of meat. Usually it’s not something supernatural that propels them.
Twilight is the result of Hollywood. I know it was a book first, but as Hollywood has moved more into the realm of ‘Make it look awesome’ as the main thought pattern behind majority of movies, it has dragged almost every other entertainment medium with it on the same road.
There is also a strong move that everything has to be original. I believe that the Sparkles McVampy concept present in Meyers books is a result of the Hollywood ‘Has to look awesome’ (although while this has been an effective trap for its target audience, it has turned away others on the fringe of that niche group) and the need to be original.
Instead of accepting the fact that she is not doing anything original and instead make the story interesting revolving around well established mythology, or coming up with a completely new concept of immortal creature who feed on life essence of some kind, she copped out and applied a cheap visual gimmick to make her Vampires ‘unique’ and look ‘cool.’
It is a shame, if one looks at the plot alone, those stories could have been interesting, of course the plot is not her own creation, merely a more convoluted Romeo and Juliet with an ending that takes out the argument of were the lovers selfishly devoted to the idea of eachother, or actually in love, and replaces it with an answer, “The girl is bloody selfish and the guy is a passive aggressive idiot.” This conclusion could be the result of the fact that none of the characters experience any real growth. If the amount of effort that was given into the beautiful cover art of these books was given to the writing in the books, they could possibly be much better works, and the movies I am sure would of benefited as well.
In the end though, the books, and the movies, are quite successful because they find their target audience, capture it, and enthrall it into buying into a consumer world view that they can control. Welcome to the period of unintelligence, a world where Glen Beck, Sarah Palin, Nancy Pelosi, and Joe Biden have the same intellectual capital as great minds of the past. In this new world, the sparkles hide the dross.
LOL! That, is an awesome comic. I love it and I swear, you’re modeling Goth Jared off one of my friends. To answer your query about Meyer here’s my two cents. She had to create a reason vamps couldn’t be in the sunlight that was “non-violent”. Sparkling would be a dead giveaway ya ain’t human, pal.
Personally, I think Meyer was trying to find a way to make vampire mythology more accessible, especially to teenage girls. Vamps always HAVE been violent and not love interests. But her’s aren’t, and I’d say it succeeded brilliantly. I had always viewed the sparkle as a downside to the invulnerability, rather than a perk. Diamond cells but you lose your edge out of your element, night. And honestly, as contradictory as a beautiful appearance and an innate fear of the same thing may be (not to mention counter-productive) don’t we see that often in nature? What about a panther? It’s beautiful (and I’m definitely prey to it) but I know my instincts would be screaming at me to run when I got to close.
And I totally agree with Liz. Angel’s the best vamp story, ever. Period, paragraph.
Dracula could go out into the day, but he was trapped in his humanoid form (i.e., he couldn’t change into a bat and fly away from people trying to kill him), so he sleeps during the day and preys on people at night.
Wait one more thing… you said:
“For the life of me, I will never understand why Stephanie Meyer chose to upend the vampire myth and allow the vampires in her books the ability to walk around in daylight. Twilight would be a much more satisfying franchise if Edward Cullen’s head burst into flames every time he pokes that moussed-up haystack out of a window. ”
Satisfying to whom?! This book/series was targeted at a very specific audience: awkward, teenage girls. (The adult women who have embraced it do so, I find, often because Edward (or Jacob) reminds them of what they dreamed of as teenagers) And they would not appreciate what you are insisting should have happened with this series/characters. It continues to puzzle me why others, whom this work was not designed to attract, continue to bash it as garbage. Sorry, but this series did exactly was it was intended to do and cannot be termed a failure in any respect. Does focusing her writings on a specific subset of the population make Stephanie Meyer a shallow writer or victim of commercialization? Perhaps, but a damn successful one at that and I applaud her for the ability to put her vision out there and to speak to so many people. If it doesn’t speak to you, fine, but that doesn’t mean it sucks. It simply means I don’t understand your obsession with UFC and we each find satisfaction in our own way.
Okay, LadyKathryn. I get where you’re coming from. But I think you need to take what I’ve said with a grain of salt.
I guess I don’t understand why altering the vampire myth from burning in the presence of sunlight to making them sparkle would attract female readers? Are you suggesting that women can’t stomach violence?
If anything, making Edward a nightstalker would have made his relationship with Bella more illicit. Imagine her having to sneak out of the house at night to see him, friends and family start to worry about her, etc.
A vampire’s seductive prowess is already built into the myth. So making Edward this glittery… thing doesn’t seem to add much. It’s a superfluous choice.
Just because something is written for a specific audience doesn’t excuse it from being poorly written. If you enjoy it, great. But popularity isn’t a get out of jail free card, either.
Also, I don’t watch UFC. 😉
I am female and I hate twighlight. It is poorly written and comes off as fancied up fanfiction to me. Why elce would a unintresting clutz end up with the hotest guy in school and cool powers? Oh yeah also she has two hot guys fighting over her that screams bad romance novel to me.
I’m again going to go with mormon madness, it’s all just Joseph Smith, Jr slashfic anyway…
Also: http://www.chainsawsuit.com/20091113.shtml
In my book, anything that gets teenagers in this day and age to actually walk into a book store for something other than just loitering is a good thing. I used to work at Barnes and Noble and half the teens that came in there just sat in the isles and bothered other customers. Now they have something to read, and talk about, and yes even obsess about. I think the old advertising adage applies: If you don’t get it, they’re not selling to you. Just be glad that teeny boppers are reading something willingly, and that hopefully it will spread to other types of books. So lay off all you bitter dudes (not you Tom, some of the posters are a tad sour) and leave the adolescents to their fake vampires.
With that, I can agree. If teens are reading at all, then it’s a win.
Hopefully they don’t stop with Twilight, though. 😉
Unfortunately though I don’t think that teens reading Twilight would be able to understand and comprehend the concepts in other books. I’m not bashing anything here, from what I have heard, these books are poorly written. Any once you get used to reading a style of writing that isn’t up to par where it should be, it makes adjusting to something of higher quality more difficult.
Hmm, I don’t know about that… Would you say the same if teens were reading racist propagangda or mein kampf?
Although I’m not saying Twilight is that bad, although the misogyny (ie if you don’t have a man, you are nothing, represended by 10 blank pages in the book) does seem quite a dangerous idea to be putting into teens heads…
Frankie, I get what you’re suggesting. But comparing fiction like Twilight to a racist manifesto is kind of a leap.
That is, unless teens are reading Mein Kampf for the entertainment value – which I doubt.
I agree that the themes present in Twilight are dangerous. Bella basically gives up her life because she lusts for Edward (and the whole vampirism as a substitute for sex / abstinence message is sloppy and contrived). BUT it’s really no different from a Disney princess movie when you think about it. The Little Mermaid? She changes EVERYTHING about herself to be with Prince Eric and he gives up nothing. Not exactly a good message, but it’s subtext – which I doubt many toddlers are going to pick up on.
Good parenting will cancel out any of those unrealistic notions of romance, in my opinion.
Whoops, I forgot something else. Of course though if you start out with a higher quality product, once you try to go to a product of lesser quality, you are automatically turned off by it. You can always upgrade, but downgrading is extremely difficult.
For some reason I feel like I’m not making any sense here and completely missed the point of what I was trying to say.
The same argument was used with Hairy Potter. As in the at least they are reading. (Not that I am comparing quality or skill here.) The problem was that after the HP books, the only ones that kept reading, were the avid readers to start with. Today is an age of trends, and it is only cool to read a book when it is part of a trend.
I am an educator, and while I love to see my students reading, I would rather they read things that allow them to question and be curious, not reaffirm a consumer world view which puts them at the center of a world focused on them. (Lets face it, mediocre girl has two hot super powered boys after her, and no matter how much of a brat she is, they still love her?)
I don’t know why she chose to make them sparkle, though I do recall reading an interview she did somewhere in which she stated that when she wrote the books she knew almost nothing about vampires and didn’t do any initial research about them.
Meyers hasn’t really done anything too innovative. There’s always been a sort of “shiny” vampire movies it’s just people just weren’t that crazy about them. Remember “Interview with a Vampire” that had Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, at their peak, as sexy vampires. Dracula, the charming/ romantic/ powerful vampire, has always won over Orlok(or one of the other gypsy myths), the decrepit/ manipulative/ plague spreading vampire in both literature and film.
Does the glittery-ness actually come through in the books? It seems like it would take a lot of work to set that up. I’ve not read any of these books so I don’t know. I always found the Dracula character weak because he’s really got everything going for him. That’s why I didn’t give this series of books a shot. Orlok is interesting because he’s got all kinds of weaknesses and he’s a horrible troll. Try buying coffee with a pack of plague rats following you around. Awkward.
See now I want to throw sparkles into the faces of Twilight fans. I’d assume the whole sprkly Vampire thing was if it sparkles it’ll grab your attention. If I’m walking down the street and something sparkly jumps out I’m definately going to pay attention to it for a little bit.
Back when I was a tween (I am now in my late 20’s), I was pretty obsessed with vampires, and my first vampire book was Interview with the Vampire, then I saw the movie, then I watched Buffy on the TV, and I read vampire erotica from early on. I haven’t seen any of the Twilight movies nor read the books because I frankly like my vampires dangerous and kinky, which is how vampires are supposed to be: supernatural “bad” boys that every girl wants to redeem. I guess Edward Cullen represents the wholesome, non-threatening version of vampires, kind of like the Teeny-Bopper magazine vamp, but “edgier” because he’s shiny. Blegh.
Dracula in its origins represented the repressed sexuality of the victorian age, with sucking on the neck a metaphor for sex. Is the shiny skin thing now a metaphor for purity pledges?
Oh, and if I had a daughter and she was interested in reading Twilight, I would instead hand her books like the Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series, which features really dangerous yet sexy vamps and lycans.
Honestly, Moviebob has some decent arguments for the Twilight series. What Stephanie Meyer has essentially done is combined the Teen Abstinence romance novels with Vampire Softcore. So the romanticism of blue balls mixed with a blood fetish.
Now that formula in and of itself isn’t bad (well, not terrible, anyways), but when the characters don’t evolve at ALL during the entire series and you alienate actual vampire fans by making them no longer approachable from a heterosexual male perspective, then you can understand why there’s some griping. And I’ve heard the primary excuse that “These are new age vampires. The same old rules don’t apply” to which I respond with “No. BLADE featured new age vampires.” I showed one of my twihard (God, why do I know that word…) coworkers the entrance to the first blade movie (the Blood Bath scene) and she was genuinely enthralled. “THAT’S a new age vampire!” I said.
It’s glittery appearance is only the gripe that nerds like me hang onto because it’s so aesthetically unpleasant. But also factor in that there’s virtually no character development added in with the fact that Bella is a complete moron, giving up all her individuality to be with a moody, brooding violent and potentially murderous pretty-boy loner. It sends the completely WRONG message to girls.
Girls.
Free tip:
In reality, these guys aren’t in need of someone to change them. They’re just $%*holes
Frankie D. wrote “if you don’t have a man, you are nothing, represended by 10 blank pages in the book”.
I really disagree with this statement. The ten blank pages represented Bella’s depression and emptiness upon losing Edward. Like many people who experience a terrible loss, Bella was working on auto-pilot & surviving. These pages were the most insightful & resonating of the entire series. Of all the wrong Meyer did with these books, this was a rare bright spot of good writing (eventhough there wasn’t much of it)… Wait, I guess this means Meyer is better when she doesn’t write a thing;)
I don’t really thing that shows a command of language, wren. 😉
It’s an impactful stylistic choice, sure. But not an example of good writing.
gothdorkette: be careful, the Blake series takes a heavy bondage/polygamy turn in the later books.
Meyers never researched her characters. She purposely didn’t, because she said she didn’t want to be influenced by what others have written. Bullshit. Stephen King said it best: “What, you think you get academic brownie points for purposely staying out of touch with your audience?”
My thought is she didn’t give her vampires (and thus her main ideal boyfriendI mean character) a sun weakness (or really, any weakness at all) is because she doesn’t know how to write to overcome them. Why write something with conflict or challenges when it’s easier to make them SPARKLY?
The whole thing is an elevated fanfic given book form. The main female is a self-insert (seriously, read the description of Bella and find a picture of Meyers; there is NO difference) the main male is domineering and controlling, and anything that should make sense is treated as not how things should be.
Check out this link: http://vampirely.wordpress.com/
The site disects the first two books, and it currently working on the third.
I’m with Stephen King: Stephanie Meyer can’t write worth a darn.
If you become an apologist for crap, all you’re going to get is crap for entertainment.
Even the guy who plays Edward said reading the book to learn about the character was like reading an intimate fantasy from Stephanie Meyer’s personal journal.
Being happy because teenagers are reading uninspired, insipid, morally repugnant (which would be one thing if it actions were criticized in some way, but it’s just “OMG! Hot sparkly guy! I’ll do anything for you!”) characterless books is an ironic statement from anyone who loves to read. Or thanks to Hollywood, anyone who wants to see a good movie.
Dark and Light are synonymous with Good and Evil. This goes back for centuries. All the monsters come out at night because the night is a frightening place where the hunters have advantage and we humans are at a psychological and physiological disadvantage. Demons came for you while you slept, Dracula hunted at night, the Wolfman came out during the full moon, the zombies originally came out during the night (Night of the Living Dead). Meanwhile, everything can be seen in the daylight, those spooky shadows recede, all our senses are functioning at full capacity, all is well.
This is such an integrated thing in our minds that having the monster come out during the day time to terrorize used to be scary just by itself (read just about anything by Stephen King for some of the best of this; It, The Stand, etc.). Or, the daylight could be used to drag the monster out of hiding to show children that it’s nothing to be scared of and/or how to defeat it or our own personal demons that we’ve metaphorically turned into some spooky monster.
Stephanie Meyer didn’t try to follow nor reinvent any of these basic standards. She just threw them out the window because they made writing her erotic personal fantasy too hard. And while you might subjectively like it, objectively there is nothing at all to recommend these books as anything but crap.
time for my 2pence worth…
…not read the books so I’m not going to comment about them
..only seen the trailers and to be honest it looks a bit too much like a 90210 or Dawsons Creek or OC but with a hint of vampire/ Werewolf.
and this is coming from a massive Buffy fan so that kind of thing hasnt put me off before….when its original and done well.
as for the reading argument. I worked in a Borders when HP fever was at its highest, just after the films started. the argument that only the avid readers will continue works, we’d sell the HP books and nothing else for a few weeks then back to the rest. Except for one factor, the majority of the books were from my section the true Genre fantasy SciFi section not the childrens section and were sold to … adults just like me. The children coming near there tended to walk away with well written horror, or over written (in my opinion) Tolkien.
and finally… arent vamps meant to be the footsoldiers of the dark, when they are given any kind of back story other than viral or “just generally dark” like Drac?
(btw I have read most of the major works including the anita blakemore, BTVS books, I am legend (the book is much better than the film but the films good) and some random works just NOT Twilight)
Is anyone else disturbed by the fact that necrophilia is cool now? Everyone has forgotten that vampires are walking corpses. Granted they aren’t rotting, but they are pale for a reason… No blood or pulse. Which begs the question, how can you have sex with a male vampire without blood circulation? Sorry girls, Edward may be sparkly but they haven’t developed Vampire Viagra yet.
I might actually be able to answer this. Everyone else has done a great job explaining the inherent non-threateningness of sparkling in the sunlight, but I’m pretty sure I know why it was sparkles in particular and not some other equally insipid thing. Meyer has stated that her original idea for the entire Twilight series came from a dream–specifically, a dream of the scene where Edward reveals his “true nature” to Bella.
Yeah. The entire thing is based around a DREAM she had.
Now, I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with incorporating elements of a dream into a story. I myself created a character after having a particularly vivid dream about another character that featured this new man in an important role. But when the dream itself is the source of so much backstory and exposition, you’re bound to come up with a lot of elements that don’t make sense at all–like sparkly vampires.
So, in other words, she dreamed that vampires were sparkly, and instead of deciding to take the basic idea of the dream and rework it so that her story fit with the established mythos, or even changing the background completely so that Edward was some new, invented creature instead of a VAMPIRE, or even doing a little bit of godforsaken RESEARCH, she just started writing out her own little wish-fullfilment fantasy story. I very strongly doubt that she was intending to publish Twilight when she started writing. It was probably meant only for herself–it just got very, very out of hand, and thus the unresearched, badly written trash that is the Twilight “saga” now. What do you want to bet that she herself was in the role of “Bella” in the original dream?
Aside, this is a quote from a friend of mine regarding the attitude of “it’s better that they’re reading badly written books than not reading at all.” She said, “I hear so many people talking about the Twilight series and saying, ‘Well, at least they’re reading.’ NO! If your kids are going out and punching people in the face, you don’t say, ‘Well, at least they’re meeting new people!'”
I am dreading being dragged to see this dreck next week- at least I leveraged muy popcorn into the deal. Given that within a week of seeing the last one I had the pleasure of experiencing Let The Right One In ( the best vampire film since Near Dark ), the lack of any film of similar quality to offset this one is going to be a right pain.
Jacob: I have read all of the novels in that series, and I really really don’t mind the bondage (at least it’s honest in its portrayal of the wild sexuality of vampires and shapeshifters, no celibate critters here, unlike Twicrap!)
‘Well, at least they’re reading.’ NO! If your kids are going out and punching people in the face, you don’t say, ‘Well, at least they’re meeting new people!’”
Meh hardly a valid comparison. Punching people and reading bad books are hardly the same thing. Of course it’s good that they are reading something. No matter how bad it is because as someone else said you can always move up. Get em started with Twilight, move up to Stephen King and then start feeding them the really good stuff.
(Don’t get me wrong: I love Stephen King but he’s not exactly the pinnacle of modern literature)
I dunno. I kind of get the comparison.
Punching people is obviously doing harm to someone else. But reading bad books might give you bad ideas that cause you to do harm to yourself.
Even though I agree it’s better to read than to not, I just thought I’d play Devil’s Advocate.
?! How do you think reading and liking bad books will cause anybody to do harm to themselves (unless its something like “The Big Guide to Suicide” but I guess were still talking stuff like Twilight here)? Entering the wonderful world of reading via Twilight won’t genetically change people into beings unable to appreciate better books. Of course there ARE people who will think that Twilight is indeed the ultimate reading experience but those are the ones who wouldn’t touch any other book to begin with, so no harm done there…