Sometimes, Love Sucks…

Happy Valentine’s, everyone! I hope you all are safe and well. Valentine’s Day is looking pretty different this year. There aren’t a lot of places open for date night, thanks to social distancing. That’s a major reason why I haven’t leapt back into the dating scene the last two years. I have some family members in my household that are categorized as “at risk,” and the school I work at is trying to keep each class within their own bubbles. I don’t want to take any chances with them right now. Maybe during the summer, should things let up.

That’s not to say my dating life has been all that successful to begin with. I’ve only ever dated one girl, back when I was in college. It was nice while it lasted. Sure, her confessing at one point that she still had lingering affection for her ex could be seen as a red flag, but I wanted to prove I was different, that I was better for her. I learned a lot from that brief relationship.

If there was anything I would’ve done differently, I would have talked about pressing issues sooner. I was going to take a semester off due to no internship opportunities, and she was going to do a study abroad trip. I waited for her to bring up the potential long distance, but when neither of us did…well, it turned out as you would have expected.

A couple of years ago, while I was in LA for a filming gig, I met up with one of my old college friends to hang out. Neither of us had been successful in the dating game, so she proposed a bet. The two of us would have to go on at least one date with someone before the year was out. If we failed, we’d have to do something of the other’s choosing. (I can hear you all screaming right now. “Why didn’t you just date each other?” My best guess? I was dumb, competitive, and felt like that would’ve been “cheating,” and I hate cheaters.)

End of the year rolls around, and, low and behold, we both failed the challenge. Our punishments weren’t bad per se, but we had to do something neither of us would’ve wanted to do willingly. For her, she had to watch an anime (pretty sure it was Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood). For me, I had to read, not watch, read the Twilight saga by Stephenie Meyer. I had tried my hand at writing romantic scenes before. Even had a female friend compliment me on making a conversation between two girls about the boy they both liked accurate. Delving into a teen romance novel? Never thought I’d try it. However, a deal’s a deal. One trip to the library later, and the reading began. For those of you still following along, congratulations. The Prince of Plot Twists has struck, and now you’re reading a Twilight review.

I encountered many of the expected tropes. New girl moves to a new town and has trouble fitting in. The odd attraction to the “bad boy” type. Describing the love interest’s eyes as “gloriously intense.” Yet, as much as it terrifies me to admit, the first book in the Twilight series honestly wasn’t too bad. The whole book is written in first person, from Bella’s perspective. Normally, I write in third person, but Meyer did a good job putting us in somebody’s head. It was refreshing, reading from the girl’s side, though, to be honest, it’s not all that different from the boy’s side. There were multiple times were I found myself enjoying the drama, taking note of the dynamics of the tension and release, and laughing more than I should have.

There were, of course, some things that bothered me. From a writer’s perspective, I noticed times where she would describe how her face looked when she herself could not see it. For example, in Chapter 11, she talks about the “bags under her eyes” without any mention of observing them in a mirror or other reflective object. Other times, Bella would say she smelled something, like the blood in Chapter 5, but there was no mental or physical reaction from her before saying it. These instances pulled me out of the story whenever I came across them. We the readers follow the story through Bella’s mind. We see what she sees, feels what she feels. Our five, sometimes six, senses are linked to hers. She is our medium. If she talks about something that she herself has not or cannot experience, it ruins the illusion.

Then, we have some character dislikes. Edward had some fun and enjoyable dialogue bits, but at times, his mood swings were oddly extreme. And Bella…oh, girl, where do we start with you? I guess my main rub with her was that, while driven, she often came off as manipulative. Take Chapter 6, for instance. Jacob, an old friend of hers, barely enters the scene when Bella flirts with him to get info out of him. I caught myself thinking, “Don’t lead the poor boy on, you jerk!” So much future drama could have been avoided if it weren’t for the faux-flirting. I suppose this is a good example of how little decisions create major consequences later down the line.

Speaking of “later down the line,” I finished the first book and moved on to the second, New Moon. Again, I did enjoy the previous installment, so I was prepared to get more of the same with the next.

Then, nine pages in, Meyer surprised me with a new wording choice. “Hearing the stutter of my heartbeats, he smiled again.” Huh. First person narrative talking about something someone else sensed without taking over their brain. Not a great start for me. Now, I was intending to read this series to comply with the bet, not nitpick it. However, if it’s something that completely took me out of the story long enough for me to think about why it took me out of the story, I had to take a note of it.

There was one early creative choice that I thought was stellar. The inciting incident of New Moon was Edward breaking up with Bella. We had been building up with Bella imagining what their future would look like, which helped Edward’s news hit like a truck. The beginning of Chapter 3 had a “passing of months” where the name of each month was written on separate pages. It made it feel like nothing but emptiness occurred during that time.

Then, after about six chapters, I put the book on hiatus for a few months. It wasn’t just work that had piled up. I found New Moon harder to read than Twilight. It just…dragged longer than it should have. It made sense at first, with Bella acting like a zombie after the breakup, but it went on for far too many pages. Even after the story started picking up and neared its climax, it started dragging again. At least in the latter case, there was impending doom looming on the horizon. It was the good kind of drag, with tension and suspense. But, again, very late in the game.

I thought that tough slog would’ve been the end of it, but as the story trudged on, I realized it wasn’t the narrative that irked me. It was Bella as a character.

First, we have her flaws as a protagonist. When the inciting incident occurs, the main character is forced to pursue their new goal. Storm Troopers kill your aunt and uncle? Go with the old space wizard to become a Jedi. Get bitten by a radioactive spider? Better make a costume and become a superhero. The goal needs to be clear early on in the story. Bella had an active goal in Twilight: find out who and what Edward was. Although she discovered his vampiric nature about halfway through the book, the goal to figure out what sort of person he was still remained throughout.

Here, in New Moon, we didn’t get that sense of “working toward something.” When the inciting incident occurred, she did the exact opposite of striving toward a goal. The depiction of her acting like a zombie made for good characterization, but it worked against the overall narrative. Bella lacked the drive to do anything, so the reader has little to no drive to follow along with her. If she had decided to try and find Edward instead, there would have been a stronger connection to the reader and we would want to follow her along. However, that wasn’t the case here. She lost the drive she had in the first book. The emergence of a pseudo-cult did create the sense of mystery again, but that was almost seven chapters in, far too long of a wait, especially with Bella’s zombie episodes.

Secondly, we have Bella’s flaws as a person. For those who are unaware, Jacob, Bella’s childhood friend/werewolf, picks up the broken girl and helps her find love again…at least, that’s what they want you to believe. At first, I thought Bella was showing genuine signs of liking him and moving on. However, a few chapters later, it became increasingly apparent that she was using him. He was her bounce-back, a fill-in for Edward until she found him again.

Now, I was planning on commenting further on how tough a read New Moon was, how it’s an example of the bad version of bookending. Yet, as I was writing this review out, I realized something: Bella used Jacob to ease the hurt of breaking up with her ex, even though she still had strong feelings for Edward. The girl I mentioned at the very beginning of this post? Dated me even though she still had feelings for her ex. I heard they even got back together for a bit after we broke up.

I don’t think you fully understand how hard this realization is hitting me. Back when I worked at Barnes & Noble, I had a customer straight up ask me, “Has anyone ever told you, you look like the werewolf guy from Twilight?”

I was the bounce-back. I was to my ex what Jacob was to Bella. I’m not saying she was manipulative or anything. Far from it. It’s just…the parallels are too uncanny for my liking.

For those of you still reading, the Prince of Plot Twists has struck again. Only this time, he’s struck himself.

I’m, uh, going to go shoot some aliens in Destiny, take my mind off this horrid revelation. You all have a wonderful Valentine’s Day.

Oh, and Brenda? If you’re reading this, I will finish reading those books. I just need to find a way to borrow them, if Covid hasn’t fully destroyed libraries yet. And now, the entire Internet will help keep me accountable.