thoughts re: twilight

Is this what adults felt like when the first few Harry Potter sequels starting hitting the shelves? A juggernaut, a sort of behemouth of children's literature that reduced said adults to be both out-of-touch with anything outside of the New York Review of Books and marvelling at the possibility that their offspring could be sophisticated enough to re-discover reading in the nascent years of the Internet age. I was part of Hurricane Potter, dutifully buying each book at midnight, finishing them within the night and sleeping off the drama in the following daylight hours, much to chagrin of my Circadian-regulated parents. I've read each book at least three times, asides from The Order of the Phoenix, which I still maintain is 800-plus pages of contrived verbal vomit and misplaced teenage angst. But that's vitriol for another day, or perhaps never. I read the fanfiction religiously. Entire summers were whiled (wasted?) away in anticipation for new chapters of favorite works as high as it was for the books themselves. But gradually, as I aged, the unrequited love between Harry James Potter and Draco Lucius Malfoy diminished in my fevered brain. I moved onto 'real' books, away from the children's and YA fantasy that had fueled so much of my elementary and middle school years.

I suppose what that extended preface was trying to say is that the release of Breaking Dawn, the fourth and final volume of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight books this weekend, coincided with realizing whether my utter ignorance of these books marks a tiny first step into the world of adults, away from the in-between state of teenager-dom that the first two years of college seems so conducive to cultivating. These thoughts are no doubt exacerbated by the fact that I turned twenty two weeks ago, my panic age. When you're twenty, you are no longer a teenager and no longer automatically excused from teenagers' errors. You are upbraided for lack of maturity; you are twenty, dammit, act your age. I've always tried to be on the up-and-up concerning books, which includes keeping tabs on my favorite authors from when I was younger. Thus, my reaction towards the Twilight phenomenon was originally of bewilderment - how had it gotten so popular so quickly? This was the kind of novel that I would have eaten up. (Side note, I was a devoted reader of Amelia Atwater-Rhodes back in the day-- she was the same age as me! She wrote achingly beautiful vampire novels! Of course I had a crush on Aubrey! Having recently unpacked all of my books and re-skimmed In the Forests of the Night... I was perhaps too easily impressed.)

Maybe I'm too jaded to be shocked at the devotion that Bella and Edward inspire amongst the droves of the teenage girls of America. Maybe it's because having gone through a similar level of devotion for Harry Potter, I'm hard-pressed to admit another series engendering such fervent reactions amongst its readers.

The New York Times posted an article a couple of weeks ago about how the youth of today (how is that I am no longer youth? Riddle me this!) are reading, just not books. They're reading fanfiction and blogs and there is an academic divide between those who think that all reading is good, no matter what the medium, and those who believe the only subjectively worthwhile reading is that which comes from the printed word. It presented the reality as dichotomy, providing no room for the possibility of evolution in the minds of young readers (like myself! The patent self-absorption of a personal rears its ugly head! This entire entry really just is about me!) from the days of fanfiction towards a lifelong appreciation for literature.

In defense of fanfiction, even though the characters are not original, the author is charged with sustaining the personality of the character in a wholly believable fashion. In an original work of fiction, the author at least gets the benefit of the doubt from his or her readers by virtue of characters being an organic creation with no preconceived notions held by the readers. The case of fanfiction is not unlike writing under a microscope, with the author's responsibility to and respect of the fandom on the line, he or she is charged with creating new plotlines and/or universes in which beloved characters must fit into while staying true to an original artistic vision within the plotting. Bottom line, it's hard. And fanfiction should not be automatically relegated to 'bad' when there is plenty of original fiction that is either more derivative than fanfiction or simply awful. In reading fanfiction, one can develop the same eye for picking out good characterizations, literary style, and plot as one can reading straight fiction. Appreciating both is possible and reading both can only broaden one's literary horizons and eye for 'good' writing.

Of course, because everything that is said on a personal blog will always circle back to the author and her self-obsession, the person I just described/ranted about was really only me and how I will one day read Infinite Jest but at the same I still have about a half-dozen fics that I re-read whenever I'm feeling especially hateful towards the cop-out epilogue of the last Harry Potter book.