You could make a lot of points about Twilight and why it sucks. You could focus on the use of words like “chagrin” and “dazzle.” You could talk about the series as “abstinence porn,” or raise the question of Edward Cullen as an abusive control-freak. None of these things really bother me, though. I can overlook all of it for the unadulterated DAZZLE.
Something was bothering me, though. It bothered me when I read an excerpt of Stephenie Meyer’s Vogue profile, thinking the whole time, “Why the hell is this woman in Vogue? Oh well, at least it’s not a Plum Sykes feature.” There was something nagging me about the whole Twilight phenomenon, something that was just… off.
It only became clear when I somehow ended up at the Forks, WA website. There is a interactive map feature, where you can look at all kinds of different places in Forks which are featured in the book. Like the Thriftway.
I was kind of surprised when the map came to La Push, though. I had always assumed, for some reason, that the Quileutes were not a real tribe, because I would imagine that they wouldn’t appreciate their culture being co-opted to create a mythology of werewolf vampire killers for a series of books for teenage girls. But La Push is real, and First Beach is real, and their website makes no mention of the Twilight connection. (Although I guess on the bright side, they’ve raked in a lot of money from increased tourism.) Even the stores and restaurants that Bella goes to in Port Angeles are real places.
In fact, if you want, you can participate in a six day, five night trip to Volterra, which luckily includes wine tasting. I shudder to think how much wine it would require to make me forget that I spent 2299$ on a Twilight tour in Italy.
It seems strange that Stephenie Meyer didn’t make up any locations for her books except for, I am assuming, the houses of the characters. Isn’t part of the fun of writing fiction is that you can make up your own locations, settings, and objects and manipulate them to suit the story? It reminds me of Mallory Pike in Mallory Pike, #1 Fan, where she thinks that fiction must be truth and have a counterpart in life. No, that’s why it’s FICTION. If you want to give a Cullen a fast car, you don’t need to consult someone on a year, make, and model number, unless you’re searching for an endorsement deal. You can make up your own goddamn superfast car.
In the series, Stephenie Meyer failed to create her own mythology, the way JK Rowling did or even Ann M. Martin and Francine Pascal. Stephenie Meyer couldn’t even be bothered to think up something as basic as The Dairi Burger. It seems like a strange decision to have to set everything in real places. If you want to set a story in New York City or Paris or another big city which already has a mythology in the collective consciousness, that makes sense. It’s a specific decision that is made to convey a ready-made meaning. But to set your series in a small remote town which no one has ever heard of–well, it wouldn’t make a difference whether Forks was real or not, because it doesn’t already have a meaning attached to it for 99.9% of the people in this world. She could have made up her own town on the Olympic Peninsula and given it stores and other locations as she saw fit.
It’s decisions like these which really mark Stephenie Meyer as an amateur, I think. It shows that she didn’t have the self-confidence to create an entire world for her stories. Now, I thought some of the things she did make up, like the Vampire Wars of the South, were pretty interesting. So I’m just not sure what her problem was and why she decided to hold herself to the Mallory Pike Rules of Fiction as Inspired By a Made-up Ernest Hemingway Quote.
