My Brainwashed Obsession with the Twilight Saga

Don't you dare laugh. Okay, so you can laugh, but don't make it the knees-lapping tears-streaming guffaw kind of laugh. As of the publication of this blog, I have finished the entire Twilight series. But it's not my fault that I started reading it in the first place.

I was brainwashed. That's right, I said it.

Brainwashed.

It all happened on one of my sleep-in Saturdays when I wasn't teaching. I was watching TV, specifically ABC's Freeform, formerly known as ABC Family, and for once, it wasn’t a Harry Potter weekend. And then Twilight came on. Out of morbid curiosity, I just wanted to see if the movie had been as bad as I originally thought when I wasted my money to watch it in the theater. It was, and as a result I ended up falling asleep on it. When I awakened, the second part was on, and it wasn't as horrendous as the first movie. Turns out Freeform was having a movie marathon of all 5 movies, so I made it through the second one. Then I had to see it through to the end. However, I didn't have time to watch the movies for the entire Saturday, so I ended up recording them and watching them over the course of the week. I have to admit the movies got marginally better with each passing film, and there were also interesting star cameos, such as Dakota Fanning and the guy who played Lucian in the Underworld saga.

The end of the series made me curious enough to investigate the books. After all, with the exception of Fifty Shades of Grey, for the most part, books are better than the movie. So off to Amazon I went. And would you believe it? Her books are still full price! And I'm sorry, but I absolutely refused to pay full price for a series that I was only lukewarm about. So I found a good hardcover from Amazon Marketplace for around $3, and I was satisfied with paying that price.

In order to erase the horrific first movie, I found myself doing mental recasting of the characters. And to tell the truth, the only characters I really had an issue with were two main characters: the love interests Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson. To overcome their deficit, I mentally inserted Ryan Philippe in the role of Edward and Liv Tyler in the role of Bella. Thank God the book didn't say the worst line in the movie: “Your skin is like diamonds” or I may have chucked the whole thing across the room. I made it through the book. And like rubbernecking on the Beltway, I had to know what happened. So I ended up ordering the next book. And the next. And the last. And yes, I still got them all in hardcover without paying more than $5 for any of them.

My conclusion? They definitely are not the worst books written, although I've read better. Although they are paranormal books and feature vampires, there really wasn't a traditional emphasis on vampire lore. These vampires could come out in the sun, they chose not to drink human blood (at least not the principal characters), and they didn't fit into the evil mindset or even the tortured soul typecast. On another level, reading them back-to-back helped me better see the author improve her writing technique along each of the story lines. Also, the books were fairly easy reads, so they could have a broad appeal to teen readers and reluctant adult readers, even though they were lengthy. They were interesting enough to make me want to get to the end, unlike with crappy Shades of Grey, where I rather unceremoniously stopped after page 2 of book 3. In the end, I ended up giving my father the first book in the series so that he can continue to read and keep his mind sharp. So all-in-all, not bad for taking up one month of my life.