Wednesday, July 7, 2010

Twilight: Take it for what it is

Twi hard fan or commited critic, you can’t open a webpage without seeing some sort of commentary on the Twilight franchise and I’m over everyone taking it so damn seriously. Let’s put the whole pop culture phenomenon in a tiny bit of perspective, shall we?

Twilight (the books and movies) are a lot of things, including, but not limited to:

•A trite, but nonetheless entertaining love story
•An excuse to either watch or visualize sexy men (while feeling creepy because one is under 18)
•Something to consume on an otherwise lazy weekend
•A recently pervasive piece of pop culture that provides a relational baseline between strangers
•Not-so-positive construction of women’s sexuality

Along the same lines, the Twilight series/saga is not a lot of things, including, but not limited to:

•Appropriate content for adolescent women to consume (do we really want young women to grow up pandering to a creepy, albeit super hot, old man?)
•Classroom literature
•Non-fiction, despite our deepest fantasies that a sexy, brooding, protective vampire is really out there waiting to find us
•To be taken too seriously

My verdict? Everyone stop taking these silly books and movies so damn seriously. Whether you’re a devoted fan or emphatic critic, take a moment to contextualize the whole hullabaloo. Accept the franchise for what it is – a relatively poorly written, but compelling fantasy romance that appeals to some women’s sexual and romantic desires. It is not real, nor is it really harmful in the scheme of things. It is not worth foul words on a message board, nor does it necessitate picking a “team” for either of the lead male characters. Wanna know why? Because they’re not real.

I say read it if you like, enjoy it for the simple piece of pool reading that it is and stop blowing up my Facebook feed with your weirdo comments.

Full disclosure: I spent an entire weekend finishing Breaking Dawn and I have read/seen the entire series.

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