Today, Americans everywhere are huddling together and bracing themselves for the darkest day in our nation’s history: The last film in the Twilight saga arriving in theaters.
I don’t honestly think Breaking Dawn Part 2 will be the last time we hear about Twilight. After all, the entire point of Twilight’s existence in the first place is to make lots of money as lazily as possible. You can’t do that without more movies. I still would like to celebrate this occasion by compiling a list of the reasons why I am glad Twilight is possibly finished.
1. No More Hatred. My manic hatred of this series goes back many years. My extremely negative review of the third Twilight movie, Eclipse, was my most popular story that I wrote during my time at Penn State. Considering I also wrote several stories about drinking holidays, that is really saying something.
My hatred was more powerful than Penn State’s desire to drink alcohol. With Twilight over, both myself and many other entertainment venues will have to find new things to hate. I hear Disney is making some more Star Wars films. I think we might not have to wait very long at all.
2. No More Bella (Bonus: Less of Kristen Stewart’s “acting”). I hate Bella Swan. I strongly believe that Twilight could have managed to be average if this character was never created. Bella Swan is one of the worst literary characters ever. She has no personality and makes wizards who got one line of dialogue in Harry Potter books seem complex by comparison. As an added bonus, she has no character flaws and nearly causes the destruction of a family of mascots representing the most popular version of Count Chocula breakfast cereal by being an uncaring siren.
I fear that Twilight’s popularity among young readers might cause many more Bella Swans to be the focus of books. I don’t want future authors to make female characters like this. I don’t want writers to make any characters like this. More importantly, I don’t want Kristen Stewart to be in any more movies. “Bored frown,” “Stoic frown,” and “Vacant staring” are not human emotions. They are my reactions to Twilight films. Let’s keep it that way.
3. Vampires can be scary again. Vampirism was ruined by Twilight. Young bats were so ashamed that they started exclusively eating fruit and fighting crime. Depression amongst adolescent mosquitoes is at alarmingly high levels. With this series finally done, perhaps Dracula will finally be able to make a triumphant return to Halloween. He has a lot of catching up to do to overtake Frankenstein and Bargain Outlet Ninja, but I think old Drac can do it.
I don’t think Twilight managed to ruin werewolves because there are no werewolves in Twilight. Instead, there are fashion models that shape shift into hilariously shoddy CGI dog creatures. I suppose I am glad we won’t see any more of that either.
4. Hollywood can stop treating young people like morons. I don’t honestly expect this to happen, but a man can dream. I don’t care if Hollywood makes lucrative awful movies for young audiences like Transformers and Avatar. Studios need easy cash cows like those to take on riskier projects like Tropic Thunder or a Ghostbusters sequel.
I only get upset when the studio thinks so little of the targeted audience that they actively hunt for directors who won’t try to make the movies entertaining or even bother to stop Robert Pattinson from saying how much he hates Twilight.
Take at look at this official poster. Without even taking the generic hyperbole of a tagline into account, this poster is awful in more ways than I can even comprehend. It’s bland, it’s cliche, none of the actors look even remotely excited to be in the film, and the cartoon wolves are barely in the poster at all.
Compare that to this poster for Wreck-It Ralph. It is similar, but features each character in a pose that displays their character traits and personality. Even the background elements have meaning. The sad part is that the second poster is for a Disney cartoon that is marketed toward very young children. In a Twilight world, the Walt Disney Company has to actually make a strong effort to market a new movie to grade-schoolers, while Twilight makes millions off of much older audiences by being awful and lazy. It is a strange world we live in.
5. Nobody will talk about Twilight anymore. Giving a bad franchise attention might not always be the wisest move. After all, even negative publicity is still publicity. My favorite thing about this last Twilight movie is that it is the last Twilight movie. It is the end. The finale. The conclusion. Lights out. No more. That’s all she wrote. “She” being Stephenie Meyer, of course.
With no more books out there and no more movies, Twilight won’t ever need to be discussed again. Perhaps someday in the future while we are all riding our flying skateboards and watching our robot soap operas (Roboperas?), a young girl or boy will dig through the bargain bins of a Netflix Queue and discover Twilight.
“What is this?” they will say. “Looks like some cheap attempt at making a quick buck. Oh my god, that guy seriously needs a tan.” That is the future I want to live in.
Leave a Reply