Reason #2 for hating Twilight, the relationship and dynamic
So we all know that Twilight's entire infrastructure is no longer valid because the central characters of the love story fail to make us care about them. Without that, we don't care about them getting together or about what might happen because of it.
But let's pretend that physical features can constitute a bond and that we care about them for a few minutes. It wouldn't matter because everything about their relationship and the dynamic it holds is wrong. Everything about their little tale is so horribly wrong.
You see, every love story has a certain dynamic that affects it's mood and tone, kind of like an overarching cloud that the story lies within. These dynamics come out in how the love story plays out and can wildly vary since love stories are so diverse and numerous.
Here's a few examples: Passsionate but forbidden romance; an animosity that still remains despite a growing attachment; childhood sweethearts; the knight and his princess; interracial relationships; intercultural relationships; interspecies relationships; Being friends with benefits; wartime loves; a pair in an on and off relationship rollercooster; strained lovers; arranged pairs; fraternization; Pretending to be in love and eventually actually falling in love; the seemingly odd couple that no one saw coming; the chatty one and the quiet one; the nice one and the jerk; one person is manipulating the feelings of the other for their own gain; and then there's people who just like to bang and that's it.
Each one of these types of relationships has a dynamic that is going to affect how the story plays out and how it will end. The relationship has some traits that make it stand out even when it might not be at the forefront of the story. Childhood sweethearts who remain a pair from kids up to adulthood is going to be a lot happier in tone than a forbidden romance. Interspecies relationships like say between a human and a quarian has a lot more issues working against it than the friends with benefits situation.
It's also going to affect the mood of the story. As much as people hate the star wars prequels, I'm probably in the minority who actually enjoyed the love story between Anakin and Padme. It was a forbidden romance that was doomed to tragedy despite the goodness and nobility of the characters and it worked for the increasingly dark and depressing mood of the star wars prequels.
The paradigm of a knight and his princess is mainly one of a hero and the girl that he has to go save. Maybe she was genuinely captured by something that she couldn't handle on her own, she's in tight spot and can't get out without help, or she's a dumbass in distress who really shouldn't be in that situation, but the hero's going to save her regardless. This especially prevelent in anime and manga like Bleach or Inuyasha and it seems pretty simple at first glance. However, the girl getting saved is eventually going to feel like a burden because the main character is getting hurt to save them. She'll feel guilty, unworthy of his devotion and loyalty, weak, powerless, and she'll probably go through an arc where she decides to stop letting him do things for himself. This will inspire her to get some kind of training to either support him or she'll take a level in badass and start fighting alongside him. She'll still make mistakes and stumble a lot and she may still have to be saved a few times, but in time she'll pay back the favor by saving the hero when he's in his darkest hour or provide a constant emotional support that he may need.
A relationship where manipulation or falsehood are in play may have some bright spots, but's going to end badly. Take the main characters in Gone in the Wind for example, Rhett clearly loved Scarlet from the start, but she was in love with a soldier who had married her best friend and already had a family. So she toyed around with Rhett and even married him and had a daughter, but she still pined for the soldier. By the time she finally got her head out of the gutter, Rhett came to conclude that despite his wealth, his charming good looks, his devotion, and his love for her that Scarlet would never truly love her. So that movie ends pretty sadly with Rhett getting fed up with Scarlet's games and walking out on her and frankly not giving a damn about what she does from there. This worked for the story and is one of the reasons that Gone with the Wind is one of the best regarded movies of all time.
Then there's the odd couple, the pair that nobody say coming, except for diehard fans who saw all of the foreshadowing and put the pieces together. Often characters in the story and the audience will wonder what one character sees in the other. Usually this will involve a genius, beautiful, and high teir individual falling in love with and maybe even marrying what others consider to be undesirable, clumsy, weird, or something about them that that just spells, "reject". Even the lucky interest will sometimes ask themself how they got so lucky. Sometimes we never find out the answer, other times the answer is so simple that it brings a smile to our faces. Like Roger Rabbit ending up with the hot as hell Jessica Rabbit because he makes her laugh; Vegeta and Bulma getting together and starting a family with Bulma still retaining all of her bones and limbs and Vegeta actually caring for his family; Yuna falling for that whinny little scrappy Tidus in Final Fantasy X; or or Riza Hawkeye falling for a guy who wants to become Fuhrer and create a law requiring all female officers to wear tiny mini-skirts!
(Okay, that last one is actually a pretty well-written relationship, I just found that very funny)
Here's another paradigm called the strained lovers. This is when two characters started out really being in love, but the circumstance of the story splits them apart and when they're together, so much has changed that that the bond could go either way. They'll work to still stay together despite the change, or they'll conclude that it's too late and move on with their lives. Take Ten Commandments for example, in the movie, Moses and the woman who was engaged to Rameses had a bond. But after Moses discovered the truth about his heritage as a hebrew and was eventually exiled for murdering the egyptian torturer, the woman, Bethy might have been her name, married Rameses and despite not loving him, comes to enjoy the power of authority, has a son and is much more of a venomous and vengeful person when Moses returns as God's messenger of deliverance. She even eggs on and pressures Rameses into continuing to defy Moses' demands despite the obvious stupidity in denying the guy whose apparently causing water to turn to blood by touching it with his staff. By the end of the movie, Bethy is left miserable, her son is dead, her kingdom ruined and humiliated and all she has left is a pharoah husband who was so broken that he couldn't even kill her in anger. Moses on the other hand, has moved on, he's married with two sons, the leader of the Hebrew people and he leads a long faithful and productive life as a servant of God. It's kind of bittersweet even when the parting of ways is for the best, it leaves a question of "What if?"
Lastly is my personal favorite, the animosity that remains despite the growing bond. At TV tropes, it's as "slap, slap, kiss, kiss" trope and is generally referred to as a love-hate relationship. This involves two characters who are initially distrustful, prejudiced, hostile or outright violent to each other from the start of the story. Maybe they come from two warring clans and they've been raised to hate each other; Maybe they come from conflicting cultures that have a dark history between them; maybe one did something to the other in the past; or maybe they just don't like each other. But circumstances will emerge to put these two into contact with each other. Overtime, they'll get to know each other as they're animosity cools to better work together and may even come to realize that they're more alike than they were previously willing to admit. After that, they start to grow attached to each other despite their misgivings, but then something will happen and they will form a bond. Even though the animosity might still remain to some degree, the story usually plays it for laughs or as something akin to an arguing couple.
Again, none of these paradigms are strictly as they're defined, some can be subtle while others are quiet. They don't even have to end the same way, but the dynamic of the relationship still remains. The details of what they do when they're together, how they act, what they talk about, how they came to become a couple, the pressing concern that they'll have to deal with, the hurdles that is causing a rift in their trust, the mistakes that one or both of them make and the reaction to it, and how it all plays out before the audience.
So what's the dynamic of Twilight's relationship?
I don't really know to be perfectly honest...It presents itself as a fantasy-type relationship when it really plays out like a manipulative or shallow relationship but still gets a happy ending like it was a fantasy-type relationship. It...it doesn't feel like how an actual relationship would go...I just can't picture any person who in their right mind would marry someone else based solely on their looks and their wealth after barely a year of knowing each other.
And remember all of those traits that I had listed out for Edward and Bella while looking for a personality? Oh wait! We're assuming that they have one for this section...anyway, I did not make any of that stuff up, all of that stuff actually happened and it didn't interfere with their happy ending at the end. Not once do the books appropriately address the negative connotations that Edward constantly sneaks into Bella's room without her knowledge and possibly consent since it's always a "pleasant" surprise and with complete disregard for respect towards the household of Bella's father. Never once does Edward get ticked that Bella is toying with Jacob or that she kisses him after she was engaged to Edward. All he says is that, "She needs about herself more and that she things about herself too much."
Hold it....
....
WAIT A MINUTE!
.....
.....
.....Excuse me...I just realized how stupid that last sentence was....
Any realistic person, even the most stoic and seemingly unattached man would at least have a few words to say about their woman pining for another man and put their foot down. See, when a love interest gets upset about something that the other one does, it's not out of venom, it's because they might feel like they're being led on or betrayed and they want to know that the other person's feelings are genuine. Sometimes this leads to a fallout, or maybe a confession will ensue and forgiveness will tenderly come. It all depends on the personality of the characters and the dynamic of their relationship.
For instance, I'm a really big fan of bioware mainly because of the strong writing that they're games have. They could easily be translated into movies or anime with the right direction. Another reason is that the situations of the relationships that you can form is actually pretty close to reality. In the first game, you can hook up with an opposite gender human assuming that you didn't leave them to die in during the game. This is going to contain spoilers, but long story short, you kind of died in the beginning of the second game and a blackwater pro-human cooperation brings you back to life and even rebuilds your ship to allow you to form your own team. But once you meet up with the love interest from the last game, they're kind of ticked about you working with the blackwater corp. and basically dump you. The strength of the writing is that you could easily interrupt that scene as either a fall-out or a break up. The love interest has every reason to be ticked at you, but you're as much in the right or even more so considering that you were dead to say she's not worth the time and hook up with a member of your team.
Reactions like this show that the characters have emotions and that they care about their relationship, and when we care about the character and they care about their relationship, the audience can also come to care as well. But with the pair from Twilight, I don't feel anything about their bond. There's nothing that constitutes a deeper relationship between these two other than that Edward's hot and Bella's blood is alluring, I...we are never shown anything deeper than physical traits. Hell, Bella can somehow shield her mind from Edward's..."mind reading ability" and if you're so in love with someone that you'd marry them after a short amount of time, why do you need a shield? Don't you trust Edward to respect your privacy? You know...like he does when he sneaks into your room to watch you sleep?
Every trait that I can see point to this relationship ending horribly from book one and it's not just because of the vampire-human dynamic. It's because the tone of this tale is completely mismatched with everything that's happening! Like it's celebrating women who can't take care of themselves and need a muscle-bound boy to look after them! Like it's applauding the stalker for threatening his wife to have an abortion and calls his unborn child a monster! Like it's celebrating Bella's leading on of and manipulation of Jacob! The story never sees them suffer appropriately for very negative actions and traits and that makes the dynamic unrealistic and practically nonexistent. When people do negative things to each other in real life, there's a penalty in some degree and everyone suffers for it.
Even Disney movies have a more believable love dynamic and most of those are formed with the span of a week! And when the relationship in the Little Mermaid, formed over three days, is more believable than your's; when Up, whose entire love arc lasted five minutes and was still better written than your's...STOP WRITING LOVE STORIES!
These are the two big reasons why Twilight fails as a love story. The characters are unbelievable and we don't care about them and the love dynamic is wrong and we don't care about it. If you're in the group who actually think that this love story holds water....please take a little piece of paper, write the words: "Insert name's" Common Sense and then rip it in half!
It's not because you like love stories, I actually like several myself.
It's not because you like vampires, Blade is one of my favorite superheroes.
It's not because you like eyecandy, who doesn't?
But as I'll explain later, Twilight takes those three sentences and twists them into a messed up fantasy completely removed from reality or common sense. Lord of the Rings is more grounded than Twilight and I won't lie, the books are hard to read through, especially the Silmarrilion.
Bare with me for a little longer and I'll show you how the chain is further broken by these two points....
No comments:
Post a Comment