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I've read Twilight.

That's right. I went to a bookstore, stood in line, paid close to $13, and spent a few hours of my life turning the pages of the first book in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Series. And I was not disappointed. It was exactly what I expected it to be. A page turner that creates an ideal soap-opera love interest, often described as perfect and god-like, who falls desperately in love with a normal, nothing special whiney teenage girl. And of course he’s so enraptured by this pathetic nobody that he can barely keep himself from eating her. She just smells so good.

As a Fantasy reader I really have to comment of the gimmicky-ness of the use of the Vampire in this story. Sure, Meyer is using the tradition of the sex predator consuming an innocent young woman, but she’s also destroying the legend for no reason other than to tell a sappy love story. He’s a vegetarian. Please give me one good reason why a soulless being that thrives off sucking human blood would just decide that it’s ‘wrong’. Here’s a reason: Meyer couldn’t think of a more creative, thought-provoking idea that would actually make sense for a vampire to fall in love with a girl and not just kill her. Or make her a vampire. There have been great vampire stories where a vampire is so intrigued by a woman that he turns her to have her for his eternal companion. How romantic!

Now for my straight out qualms with the book. First, the writing is terrible. I kept a pen with me at all times to cross out some of the most offending lines. Also, the dialogue is terrible. Most notably, Edward is described as speaking with the words and “cadence” of the Victorian era in which he was born, but his speech in the book does not even come close to holding up to this description. His dialogue is colloquial and modern. The plot is terrible. It makes every mistake a bad story can make. Ever watch a movie and think, “of course the good guy would just show up out of nowhere and save the day at the opportune moment”? It shocks me that something with as much of a following as Twilight, regardless of the naivety of its audience, would really have Edward show up and save Bella. Is there a single person who would pick up this book and not predict that ending?

Bella is the worst-written character I have ever encountered. The story is in the first person, so we really get access to her personal thoughts. Plenty of time to hear her whine about how unworthy of Edward she is. She is also really dumb, for lack of a better word. A vampire has her mother. He wants Bella herself for ransom. Wants to eat her. She finds this an acceptable ransom. Instead of telling her vampire pals to help her out of a jam, she decides to fill the kidnapper’s demands and let him eat her. She even considers the likelihood that the vampire will just kill her mother anyways, but still decides that her only option is to hand herself over. That makes a lot of sense.

How does it end? Edward saves her. Oops! Sorry for the spoiler!

My final verdict is not much different from my initial one. Twilight features the vampire unnecessarily and contributes nothing of value to the legend. Edward is a gimmick. Also, the book has far more flaws than I had previously imagined. It is grotesquely unimaginative, and commits every plot device know to literature. Not even worth reading for a laugh at its failings.

Random thought

As a person learning English as a second language,

how do you keep straight the words

lead, lead, led,

read, read and red?

There's a really faulty pattern here.

Present tense to lead, lead (the metal) the noun, past tense led,

Present tense to read, past tense read, red the colour.

See what I'm saying?

Magical Realism as a more ‘Literary’ Genre

What is it that gives One Hundred Years of Solitude its critical acclaim, where many high mimetic fantasies go unrecognized? This book kept me delightfully shocked and appalled with its depravity and bleakness, but what makes it more ‘literary’ and likely to be studied in a high school English class then the charming tale of a wizard going off to defeat his arch-enemy? Is fantasy silly and childish? Because the Buendia family is reminiscent of a never-ending chain of eight-year-olds playing in a sandbox and fighting like savages over whatever their hearts desire. Harry Potter is more mature than Jose Arcadio. This is the story of the lost boys never growing up, but in this story their bodies mature and they have adult desires that they gratify however they can, whether it be with their aunt or a donkey.

Is realism just more literary than magic? What about the striking contrast between the verisimilitude of Maconda and the sudden appearance of ghosts or mile-long trails of blood or women suddenly floating up to heaven? These things seem much less realistic in contrast with their real-world setting. Yet we don’t consider these things silly. Wand-waving in a completely separate and magical universe is more likely to be thought silly. The fact that magical realism is so well received among literary circles is counter-intuitive to me. One Hundred Years of Solitude is deliberate, artistic and crafty, but it is also ridiculous, over-the-top and at times childish. It really speaks to the human condition that this kind of debauchery is what we value over an imaginative epic of good versus evil.

By the way, One Hundred Years of Solitude was a great read. It deserves every bit of positive critical acclaim it has received. It's incredibly engrossing and just taps into the darkness in humanity that we love to watch from afar.

Layout Revision

It's come to my attention that my sci-fi theme isn't really working for me. I believe I've written very few sci-fi reviews in the past year. I had my sci-fi phase and while I still have some good cyberpunk on my reading list, my heart belongs to Fantasy. Expect a new theme and layout, and you may even see the Psychotic Android disappear forever. Stay tuned.

The Way of Kings Final Reaction

Final sounds so final. This is my final opinion on the matter! The Way of Kings is a very promising beginning to a hopefully long and enduring fantasy adventure. It's exactly what I've been looking for. It's lengthy, and much of this first book is introducing the characters and the world, but those characters are interesting. Fascinating. Remarkable. And I can't really do them any justice without spoilers because its all about their secrets. Just trust me on this.

I've read some complaints that there isn't enough action, not enough going on. I completely disagree with this, but then my experience of reading this novel was three months of picking it up and putting it down for a while to keep up with my studies. Every time I picked it up Kaladin was overcoming some new and terrifying obstacle, Dalinar was admitting grappling with the same issues (but grappling with, not whining about), and Shallan was up to something mysterious. The progression of each of these characters' struggles was beautifully paralleled by the revealing of their depth.

Most intriguing to me is the way in which, while Shallan is a well-flushed out and complex character, I still just can't believe her actions and her motives. Not to say that they are unrealistic, but to say that she is driven to do terrible things that are difficult to understand, and we're left with a bit of a cliff-hanger in terms of her character that Sanderson is sure to resolve in future novels. While I thoroughly enjoyed reading about Kaladin, Dalinar and the minor characters of the interludes, I constantly found myself counting the pages to get back to Shallan.

As I stated before, the world is creative and immersive, the magic and the plot are original and enticing. I hope this is the way fantasy goes in the future.

Sexual Undertones in Harry Potter

I found the new Harry Potter film to be really unremarkable. It was what can be expected from a movie that stops in the middle of a plot arc. This allowed them to keep most of the material, which always makes me happy, but as a stand-alone film I don't think it works.

One of few things that interested me about the film was the sexual undertones. I've stated my opinion on the romance in Harry Potter before. It's the biggest flaw in Rowling's writing, the one area where she digresses from the necessary action to indulge the fantasies of preteens. Not interesting to me at all. But I found the movie incredibly sexual in a way I never picked up on in the books. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

First and foremost, the homoerotic aspect of Bellatrix's torturing Hermione was hard to miss. Did anyone else feel a little hot in the theatre? I'm sure the air conditioning was working. To me the scene didn't try to avoid bringing images of girl on girl to the mind, even evoking bondage and S&M. Cool.

Another one was the scene with the destruction of the first horcrux, where Ron sees Harry and Hermione declaring their love for one another and making out. They looked pretty naked to me. Well, I guess being trapped in a tent in the winter with one another they're bound to end up naked together at some point.

Even Harry and Ginny got to repeat their motionless and emotionless kiss from the last movie. Wasn't he supposed to break up with her? I should also bring up Fenrir Greyback's predatory demeanor. He didn't look like he wanted to eat Hermione. That chase scene was very 'Little Red Riding Hood' (written by a French author in a time when the prostitutes of France were wearing red cloaks.) Today we laugh at the double entendre of eating her, but the connection between sex and consumption has existed in literature for a long time. What do you think makes Vampires so sexy?

Let me know if you watched this movie and didn't notice what I'm talking about. I'd be interested to hear if my mind is just perpetually in the gutter. Maybe this was a perfectly innocent children's movie. Maybe.