Breaking Dawn Should Have Come With A Warning Label: "This Is A Terrible, Terrible Book"

WARNING: MASSIVE SPOILERS AHEAD FOR BREAKING DAWN

I haven't spoken much about the Twilight "saga" on my blog--probably because I don't usually blog all that often, and when I do, I have more important things to blog about. However, with Breaking Dawn Part 1 about to hit theaters, and a large number of my girlfriends unreasonably excited about seeing it, I just can't help myself. Besides, it seems like the women of America are finally coming to their senses and moving on from Twilight to other (hopefully better) fads. So I have to get my licks in while I can!

My issues with Twilight are legion, as you will know if you ever read what I write on Facebook or have regular contact with me. I heard bad buzz on the books initially from my sister (who lives in Utah, and whose taste in books I generally trust). A year or two later, the "phenomenon" had spread nationwide, and created hordes of fans who insisted that they were, in fact, great books. I read the first book, Twilight, and was alternately bored and disturbed by the super-lame depictions of both vampires and romance.

photo from complex.com

But people kept telling me, "You've just got to keep reading! Each book gets better! Give it another chance!" So, one hot, lazy summer, I plowed through New Moon--which actively annoyed me; Eclipse--which seemed promising but ended up meandering and dull; and finally Breaking Dawn, the most interesting of the bunch, but not in a good way (more on that in a minute). So, I tried to meet the book's fans halfway--I really did! But it's impossible to do when the books are so badly written, and populated with such stupid, unlikable characters, not to mention promoting really really horrible ideas of love, sex, and the worth of women in general.

I think I'll save most of my bile in this post for Breaking Dawn, since that book is a very special kind of awful (and heck, it's freshest in your minds because the movie's about to come out). Now I realize I can't change everyone's taste--some people (including many of my good friends) really enjoy these books as guilty-pleasure pulp. But for those ladies who want to convince me that Breaking Dawn is a legitimately "good" book, I can tell you: no...objectively, it really isn't.

Breaking Dawn is Crazy Bad--and I don't mean "crazy" as a slang-y equivalent to "awesome", I mean "crazy" as in "has Stephenie Meyer lost her marbles?" The whole book has a very schizophrenic, disjointed feel; the tone, plot, and even narrators unexpectedly shift midway through, and as a result it feels like two books uncomfortably thrust together.

Heh. Thrust. As most of you likely know, Breaking Dawn is the book in which our pathetic protagonist, Bella Swan, finally gets the one thing she's apparently ever wanted in her passive little life: she gets to marry her creepy stalker vampire boyfriend, sparkly Edward Cullen, who is beautiful (I know this because the books have told me approximately 1,022,345,780 times). This "perfect wedding" scene goes on at length, then the happy couple head to a secluded island off the coast of Brazil, where they proceed to have bed-breaking sex...that is left completely off-camera, so to speak.

Bella faints while having sex with her husband, apparently. How convenient for prudish Stephenie Meyer, who has such a "junior-high" mentality where love is concerned. It makes sense that she'd rather dwell on the constant sighs, kisses and love notes between the moony-eyed couple than talk about icky sex. Ew. This also explains why her vampires are so toothless (pun intended) and poorly realized; she has robbed them of all their menace by making them "vegetarians." The vampire is probably the most sensuous demon in all popular literature; the act of draining blood is a not-so-subtle allusion to sex, and it's referenced that way explicitly in many other vampire tales (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, True Blood, even Bram Stoker's original Dracula to an extent).

Why did Meyer have most of her protagonists be vampires, if she was going to deliberately avoid that essential part of their nature?By having a bunch of vampires who don't feed on humans, and who constantly repress that side of themselves, they start to feel like...well, like a bunch of prudish teenagers who have heard how awesome sex is, but who don't dare have anything to do with it, because it's dangerous. That's all well and good some of the time, but Bella & Edward are married now, so why not be a little bit more frank about it? Nope--let's just avoid the topic altogether! Good one, Meyer!

Then, however, Bella finds out that she wasn't just knocked out, she was knocked up as well. She's pregnant--and the equivalent of a few months along. That was one crazy night! This is the first major rule of Meyer's universe to be broken in the novel (and it won't be the last), but at least it makes things a little more interesting. Rule 2 gets broken pretty soon thereafter; Meyer suddenly decides to use Jacob as a POV character, after we've been inside Bella's head exclusively for three and a half books.

While it's nice to get a short break from Bella's interminable whininess (seriously, she's one of the most insipid, self-absorbed, passive characters I've ever had the misfortune to read), this is a really weird decision. This magic pregnancy is maybe the strangest thing that's happened to Bella (and that's saying something), and her inner turmoil at this juncture would make for interesting reading. But instead, Meyer opts out of the deeper, more complex stuff again, and we're stuck with an outside observer looking on in confusion (yeah, join the club). This strikes me as either laziness or cowardice on Meyer's part, and let's face it...being in Jacob's head is kind of dull, because Jacob is kind of dull. And if Meyer wanted to do POVs including the werewolf pack dynamics, she had plenty of opportunity to do it before this. It's just too little, too late.

However, I guess if we were inside Bella's head, we would have missed out on some of the most twisted, bizarre things in the entire series, most of which involve Bella suffering horribly and then "dying" (YAAAAAY!) because her vampire/human hybrid baby is basically eating her alive. Let's review; her ribs and back get broken, she starts drinking tons of blood to "feed" the baby, and she finally vomits up basically all her own blood and has a crazy labor in which Edward tears the baby from her womb with his teeth! This is so drastically unlike anything that had come before in the world of Twilight that it left me speechless.

Wow, I thought, this is actually kind of interesting, and not just because Bella suffers (hee hee!). It feels like maybe Meyer was dramatizing the intensity and bloodiness of a typical childbirth, then turning it up to 11. Either way, it's one of the few moments in the series that actually feels like it has weight, and stakes, and fear, and more than a hint of mortality. I am not a fan of horror in general, but my opinion is that this brief section does a pretty good job of filling the reader with dread.

Wah! SAVE me Edward. You're the ONLY thing that gives me a sense of self-worth...

 And then Part 2 of the book happens. And...sigh. All that potential is completely wasted and then some. It's at this point that Meyer pretty much kills whatever minuscule respect I may have had for her as an author, by throwing her entire rulebook out the window, all in the name of having everything end up all hunky dory. I just can't figure out why this happened; my best guess is that Meyer committed the cardinal sin of an author falling in "wuv" with her characters and wanting them all to be happy at the end.

And let me tell you, that makes for really bad drama. Why? Because there's no weight to anything that happens, and there's no real conflict to be solved. It's unsatisfying, lazy writing. Let's just run through all the consequences (or lack thereof) of in Bella's big decisions throughout the series. I'll mention the consequences she is promised/threatened with, and then what actually happens in Breaking Dawn.

If Bella stays with Edward:
-The werewolf clan will declare war on the Cullens! (there's a little growling & tension, but nothing ever comes of it)
-The Volturi will have them all killed! (they don't. The Volturi don't do anything remotely effective in these books. Seriously, so much sound & fury over nothing. They come across as annoyed school board members, not some menacing all-powerful cabal of super-vampires) 

If Bella marries Edward, and then becomes a vampire:
-Sex with Edward will kill Bella, because vampires are so strong, yo! (Edward doesn't break anything but the bed, and the sex was apparently so awesome that Bella slept right through it!)
-She'll have uncontrollable bloodlust and be little more than a feral creature for years! (Nah...she figures out the whole "being a vampire" thing in about 5 minutes)
-She can never see her father or mother again! (After a brief awkward conversation about his daughter's new lack-of-tan, things are back to normal in the Swann household)
-The werewolf clan will have to destroy all the Cullens for creating a new vampire ("Naw. Never mind. We cool?" "Yeah, we cool.")
-Jacob will no longer be Bella's bestest friend anymore (Just kidding! They're still friends. In fact--it grosses me out just writing this--he becomes the guardian/future boyfriend of her baby daughter. That may be the single creepiest thing in the book, and I'm including the Ceasarian section via teeth). Speaking of babies:
-Bella & Edward can never have children! (Gotcha! She gets pregnant on her wedding night. Oh, well...Edward is an incubus, didn't we TELL you?? Sigh)
-The baby is a demon seed and it must be destroyed before it kills everyone! (Wrong again. The baby likes the taste of blood, true, but otherwise she's just such a cutie! She's sooo adorable and soooo smart and everybody just loves her, especially Jacob (ew!!!). Too bad she has the hideous name Renesmee, otherwise she'd just be perfect!)
-The Volturi will show up and kill them all! (they don't....again. *yawn*)

In other words, all the agonizing decisions Bella has had to make over the last three and a half books (abandoning her mortality, bringing down the wrath of the werewolves and the Volturi, losing family and friends for a tortured eternal existence) don't end up meaning diddly squat. All that's left are a bunch of smiling, sparkling, creepy people standing around singing "Undead Families Can Be Together Forever," and waiting for the several-hundred page novel to wind to an arbitrary close. I think my jaw actually hit the floor at the end, and I thought, "That's IT???! THAT'S what American women are flipping out for?"

I'm not saying books have to be dark, dreary, or depressing to be good. But they have to make me care; they have to make me worry (or at least wonder) what's going to happen next. There need to be stakes; there need to be consequences for big decisions. In Breaking Dawn, the consequences are arbitrary, and the happy cop-out ending feels completely unearned. The characters (especially Bella) haven't sacrificed anything. They haven't grown in any way. Everything's been handed to them by their lazy author. How can I care about a lackluster ending like that, regardless of any of my personal feelings for the characters or the (bare-bones) plot?

Oh well, I have gone on long enough. Time to go read another, better book (aka, almost ANY other book). I hope all my girlfriends have their fun tonight, and then come home, forget this ridiculous junk, and move on to better things, putting Twilight firmly behind them.

Wait...Breaking Dawn Part 2 is coming out next SUMMER?? Ah, crap...