Seagull Fiasco posted:

And none of it is ever really addressed as problematic, or as something a character might need to change to become a truly good partner. It's all just inevitable features of the one true love, and the story focuses heavily on this.

chitoryu12 posted:

I don't think Bella even drinks coffee or tea. Does it surprise you, though?

MorgaineDax posted:

I'm just side eyeing at both Alice and Rosalie wearing long silvery white gowns to someone else's wedding. I can see Rose doing it to be a bitch, but I thought better of Alice!

PetraCore posted:

It feels like this whole thing could have been resolved more safely with the acknowledgement that sex is more than PIV intercourse.

chitoryu12 posted:

Oh yeah, Meyer is going to take advantage of this to do Rosalie dirty later on.

hyperhazard posted:

I think what gets me most about the imprinting (besides the pedophilia, good god) is that the women seem to have no say in it and Meyer's okay with that. She just kind of handwaves it away like "oh, you can't help but fall in love with someone who loves you so much." It doesn't matter if you're attracted to his personality, have similar goals in life, have shared interests or friends, actually enjoy being around him...nope, it's meant to be.

Like, if my husband was the sweetest, most adoring person to me and treated everyone else in my life like poo poo, no amount of love could make me stay in that relationship. But according to these books, it's fine if your soulmate's an rear end in a top hat because he looooves you.

chitoryu12 posted:

What she neglects to notice is that all of the choices gradually bring Bella to the standard of a good Mormon housewife (vampirism excluded) who gets married, cooks and cleans, and has children immediately after marriage. In this case, it's pushed so strongly that it actually requires other characters to behave illogically to be painted as the villains in a standoff.

chitoryu12 posted:

Also borne out by the evidence! Bella has been pregnant for 7 days and is already basically at the 8 month mark, with the fetus growing so fast and strong that it's injuring her with its kicks. This is such an unexpected variable that the wolves are being very prudent and practical.

hyperhazard posted:

Is Mormon sex ed this bad?

A Real Horse posted:

A more exciting author than Stephanie Meyer.

Up Circle posted:

Imprinting is such a bad concept to me because it's almost like an acknowledged, built in conceit of true love as we see in media all the time, but like it's been turned into an rpg mechanic. You now have the imprinted trait, you are obsessed with someone and will do anything for them. Why? Who knows.

But then, obviously, it's too one-sided, so Meyer has the recipient of the affection inevitably fall in love too. That is more like the actual trope, where they are just falling in love with their imprintee(?) because the person has such overwhelming feelings for them or because it's fated (by the storyteller), rather than actually involving any genuine affection or even an attraction to their personality traits or their character. Even though everyone is inevitably super sexy and good looking, they don't even fall in love out of physical desire either.

As usual, she doesn't effective follow through on the idea and it feels so strange to me that the person who doesn't have a paranormal compulsion to fall in love still, inevitably, falls in love with whoever imprinted on them. They just automatically become a couple, and both of them will forgive any fault in the other, struggle through any adversity for each other without actually having real reasons for both partners to have that kind of dedication to each other.

True love is pretty old hat at this point, but Twilight manages to suck even the slightest bit of compelling interest out of it, somehow!

SUPERMAN'S GAL PAL posted:

While it’s poorly described, the implication is not cute, and given the context can be interpreted as horrifically racist.

chitoryu12 posted:

Oh, you ain't seen nothing yet. This next chapter is basically torture porn.

chitoryu12 posted:

And it's not even really a "martyrdom" because she's been arranging everything for over a year to end with her being revived through vampirism anyway. Considerations of who she could be harming or what she could be sacrificing come and go within a paragraph or two, and the book comes pretty close to implying that it's a worthy sacrifice for her True Love anyway.

chitoryu12 posted:

Ah, great! All of the resentment that Rosalie had for Bella is now wiped away in an instant because she didn't get an abortion!

If you don't want to actually resolve conflicts and just want to make them all instantly go away at the end of the series, maybe you should reconsider if you actually enjoy writing.

chitoryu12 posted:

This is the most disturbing child in fiction. Here's the official image from the Illustrated Guide:

chitoryu12 posted:

It sucks that Rowling had to go mask-off so hard because I had thoughts of eventually doing a Harry Potter thread, where we would approach with full spoiler freedom and try to figure out if the books held up and if there was legitimate foreshadowing and character arcs planned out for years. Unfortunately, I think any attempt at that is tainted now.

PetraCore posted:

Why is Meyer so racist

chitoryu12 posted:

hyperhazard posted:

I get that they were going for beautiful and dangerous, but it just looks like she turned into a 90s manga villain.

chitoryu12 posted:

Oh yeah, remember how a few times I pointed out how Meyer seems to have accidentally wrote Bella/Alice shipping in the previous books?

It happens in Midnight Sun. A lot. A frankly worrying amount.

chitoryu12 posted:

There's an alternate universe out there where this is just Bella and Alice dating and Edward is the loser nobody likes.

chitoryu12 posted:

So I was intrigued and decided to see if there was any public info on her hobbies.

Zip. Zilch. Nada. A few minutes of searching online can't pull up any interviews where she talks about what she likes to do other than reading or writing. A site of questionable provenance includes gardening and traveling, and another site tries to list "being a film producer" as a hobby, but that's it. She's spoken at length about raising her kids and how stressful it is, going on for paragraphs about cooking and going to Little League games, but never anything about what she does to unwind other than read and write. Bella having zero hobbies other than reading and Edward not really doing anything for fun except composing makes a lot more sense if the author likewise doesn't really have anything else she can name as a pastime. And she doesn't even seem to write very much for a professional writer!

hyperhazard posted:

That's awesome. Finally, a woman in these books that wants someone other than a man. Granted, the reason she wants to be human is to have a proper little nuclear family, but it's refreshing to see someone not completely satisfied in Mormon heaven. Emmett's a nice dude and definitely her best option, but he's not her soulmate. She loves him, but she'd leave him to follow her dream. To Meyer that makes her a selfish bitch, but to me that makes her the most interesting character by far.


TW for discussing Rose's backstory:

I also have to point out that Meyer making fun of how obsessed Rose is over her beauty is pretty loving sick after she was gang-raped to death. What the gently caress, Meyer? If a woman who went through that trauma finally healed to the point where she's okay with her body and proud of it again, you should be throwing her a loving parade! Not going on and on about how vain and vapid she is! Jesus christ.

chitoryu12 posted:

Not only do I not like the new Jessica being such a bitch, I have some concerns about the fanbase. Looking at fan reactions to Midnight Sun, I saw some people angry that Jessica was suddenly being framed as a false friend who secretly hated Bella the entire time because she's so shallow and stupid. But I also saw a shocking number of posts that were "I never liked Jessica anyway! Now we know what she was always like!"

Keep in mind that the original book is 15 years old by this point. Anyone who was a fan at the height of their popularity is an adult now, possibly in their 30s. You can go back to the previous books and see just how normal and non-threatening Jessica was in the actual text. But there are adult women who are somehow still holding on to hatred for a character who didn't really do anything bad on the page except be interested in boys and makeup.

SUPERMAN'S GAL PAL posted:

At least it’s the only way it makes any kind of remote sense.

chitoryu12 posted:

Wait, sleeveless? It was just described as a button-down when he first spent way too much time talking about it.

Grammarchist posted:

Billy being told that a bunch of nice white people with the power to annihilate his whole world will be moving in, and having to endure "assurance" after "assurance" that it'll be fine, is actually kinda haunting.

Grammarchist posted:

Harry Potter seems like it could be interesting. My school actually kinda pushed those books out of desperation, since kids actually seemed to like it. We did have a small satanic panic about it though.

I personally never got into the series. The big bearded guy breaking into a lighthouse and turning an rear end in a top hat kid into a pig (to punish his parents) kinda turned me off the whole thing. So most of my middle-school reading was dominated by a bunch of ghost-story books from rest stops my uncle had collected from across the country.