And Twilight Creeps In

It's happened. Inevitable and inexorable, it's happened.

I'm going to touch on a major, mainstream cultural phenomenon (one apparently equipped with stealth technology, given that it's being likened to Harry Potter and I only actually heard about the series two weeks ago). I'm going to talk about the Twilight series, by one Stephanie Meyer.

(There are some spoilers in here, folks, here and there; I apologize, but they just flowed naturally.)

I should stop here, and say, I'm not going to discuss the books. I haven't read the books, and given what I've seen of the plot summaries, I have less than zero interest in doing so. The phrase "half-vampire fetus" is one that would morbidly attract me in a low-budget film, not a novel. I will be fair, and make that the last actual comment I make on the content of the books--I don't want the terrible karma that could result from denigrating a book I've never even tried to read. Doing so, in fact, could get me in deep philosophical trouble, given that this entire post is born of my feelings about the reactions of Meyer's readers.

You see, for those (like me) who did not know, this young adult series has just ended, wrapping up in the fourth book, Breaking Dawn. Like any series--any single media artifact, really--it has its detractors. It would seem that several of Meyer's "true fans" did not like her last book. That they are in fact incensed about her last book. So much so that they have decided the best way to express their extreme displeasure is to start a campaign to return all copies of the book.

Yes, you read that right (after viewing the somewhat cringe-inducing picture of two people dancing all over the gothic subculture). There is a campaign on to return all copies of Breaking Dawn to the stores where they were purchased.

Yes. That will definitely show her.

But my problem is not with the somewhat strange, perhaps even desperate way of "getting back" at Meyer; no, my problem, and the entire point of this post, is this statement, levied at Meyer as it has been at a great many writers, to be found at the end of the first page of comment on that site: the idea that in some way, Meyer was "not true to her characters".

I'm going to go ahead and gloss over the disturbing and all too real possibility that this statement is born of the idea that the characters of the Twilight universe are somehow real enough that Stephanie Meyer could be inflicting her narrative on them, like lashes to an innocent back; while it's a possible avenue it's not one I think I can usefully address. I'll start prepping arguments for it now, in a separate document, in the vain hope that maybe someday I'll have to deal with that for myself.

Now. Allow me to drop my veneer of intellectualism long enough to say: horseshit.

I will agree that from what little I understand of the series (thanks to the masterful wit of Cleolinda Jones), Meyer threw the audience quite a few curveballs. Maybe even stupid curveballsm though the idea of cursing a werewolf to fall madly and irreversibly in love with a newborn is so stupid that the implications for the character it affects drown in the moron-static.

It is true that ultimately, a writer without an audience isn't much of a writer at all. Writing requires readers, if for no other reason than to provide the money that allows a writer to keep eating and drinking long enough to write some more. But there is a terrible tendency, particularly among the young adult novel set (both young adults themselves and those who get into the books), to mark a series as in some way the "fans' territory"; to make the assumption that in some way, the fans know the characters of the series as well as, if not better, than the author in question.

Let me make this clear: You don't.

I get imprinting on a character; I really do. I quit reading the Lord of the Rings trilogy for over five years (around about ages 9-14) because I couldn't stand what Tolkien did to Gandalf. (No, no-one told me.) I spent most of George R.R. Martin's A Storm of Swords periodically shouting "Hey!" at the naked page. But I never once felt that I somehow knew better than Tolkien or Martin as to how their characters should be handled, and that's because I knew I didn't have the first clue how those characters should be handled; all I knew about them was what those authors had told me.

If a writer seems to have thrown a huge, rusty monkey-wrench into their portrayal of a character, the truth is that there are two basic options.

The first option is this, plain and simple: the writer isn't very good (or at least, isn't any longer). Inconsistent characterization is not an unusual problem--even great writers can have trouble writing a solid character, and very few writers get to be great. In this scenario, there are no characters to know at all, let alone know better or worse than someone else.

The second possibility is that there is something going on you don't see. The plot twist, the double-cross, the apparent double-cross that's really a triple-cross, the sudden deep fear of lemurs; you know, the things that keep literature spicy and interesting? These are born of characters behaving in unexpected ways, i.e. in ways that aren't in keeping with the characters we "know" so well. And in this case, by definition, that means that the reader does not know the characters better than the author.

To boil it down: You can lambaste an artist all you want. You can hate them, you can return their books, you can even sell a t-shirt cleverly spurning their mythology for another. But do not for a second presume knowledge of a setting, a plot point, or a character that is greater than that of its creator.

Or, to put it another way, please consider this. Have you ever listened to two people debate the particulars of how a Jedi Knight (Luke, Anakin, Obi-Wan, take your pick) used the Force in a particular scene? Have you ever listened to them debate why that should or should not have made the Jedi in question fall to the Dark Side? I'm sure you have, and I want you to understand, that is what you are doing when you assume knowledge above and beyond that of the writer and creator. It may be about vampires or wizards or Victorian girls instead of Jedi, but it's the same basic concept.

Though I'll be fair, George Lucas is a bit of an exception. He did come up with midichlorians.