Loving Twilight amid the Hoopla, Teenage Emo and all

By now almost everyone may have read and known about Twilight from your girlfriends, sisters, wives, teenage daughters, high school-ish office colleagues, etc; you know, the one helluva vampire – mortal smashing love story of Edward and Bella which has created a lot of stir it has gone so mainstream that even kids know about it.

Twilight, how ever it is regarded in the literary world became so famed and celebrated to merit nice and not so nice reviews. The not so nice ones were more interesting as they border on being agonizingly amusing. These are just a few I’ve come across (some have been edited and restated to emphasize the intended pun):

 Twilight is what happens if a Harlequin Romance was mashed with the Flowers in the Attic series - the flowery prose, the countless, breathless descriptions of Edward’s teeth; Meyer seemingly pours out adjectives like a bartender who forgot to put the regulator on the vodka bottle.

 The incessant Edward-swooning, increasing exponentially with every page/series, is so hateful. How many times can we read about how Edward literally makes Bella swoon?

 The bar on guys or boyfriends is set higher than expected. It’s bad enough that girls expect their guys to be romantics, now they’re expected NOT to sleep, play the piano well, compose lullabies for them, buy them a luxury car (WHUT??) and profess undying (LITERALLY!) love for them.

 When you get past the overwrought prose, Edward is nothing more than a moody teenage boy (OK, an almost hundred year old teenage boy, that is) with a chip on his shoulder and a good set of fangs, and Bella is nothing more than an angst-driven girl with a soul searing crush on a boy from the wrong side of the tracks.

 Twilight is, when you break it down, an emo song told in prose. Can’t you hear it? “The Tale of Bella and Edward,” an acoustic number sung by a guy in thick glasses and an ironic t-shirt. It would make the charts, yes, but would remain devoid of substance and heart.

Sans substance? Maybe.

But splendid in spite of? Certainly!

The author, Stephenie Meyer, in fairness to her, really made vampires look godly, beautiful and interesting. I mean, who doesn’t want to look dazzling, be superfast and superstrong, hear people's thoughts, live yet not sleep, or age or even breathe. And this Edward Cullen, when exposed to the sun, does not burn - he glitters! Also, here’s the punch - the Cullen coven aren’t conventional vampires as they have renounced human blood on moral grounds. Now, how awesome can vampires get?

But really, for grownups like us, Twilight is just the kind of stuff that makes young adult fiction interesting to read. It’s funny to realize how adolescents intertwine melodrama and realism, get so angst-consumed, and never get past gasping and swooning. Revisiting teenage emo can make one cringe in retrospect but hey, everyone gets through “that” stage, remember?

For the women literati out there, whether you can only devour books by Pulitzer Prize winning authors such as Jhumpa Lahiri or Frank Mc Court or belong to the downrightly hedonistic set who raves on chick lit by Plum Sykes or Sophie Kinsella, Twilight is something women of all ages can appreciate and enjoy. It’s worth curling up to on a balmy evening, iced coffee in hand as it can evoke a variety of emotions – thrilled when you read about the edgy curiousness of adolescent first loves and pensive the next as you get to the morose feel of Edward and Bella’s forbidden affection for each other.

And guys, if you happen to read Twilight out of plain curiosity or earn the love of a woman, realize that the bar has been set and it has been set very high you will wish you weren’t mortal at all. Just hope that the girl you are wooing isn’t a Twilight fan, this way you can remain to be a regular dude, that is, have warm skin and a natural blush on your cheeks and importantly, maintain a diet of normal food (and not wild animals!). But seriously, Twilight aside, your woman should be able to love you just the way you are even if you don’t have the ability to dazzle people – in your own little way, just dazzle her at least.

For Twilight fans, as the movie premiere draws near, it’s exciting to see words written in pages move and ogle at the characters in the flesh, err, almost.

So what else did I gain out of this liking for Twilight? A fondness for Muse (check out Time is Running Out, Butterflies and Hurricanes and their version of Can’t take my Eyes Off You), good and highly sensible set of friends and a Twilight tee.