Girls just want to be lovesick?

Note: If I've been posting a lot lately, it's mostly to avoid working on my disaster of a novel.

If you've been in a bookstore lately, you've surely seen the glossy cardboard ad-stands in black, red, and white. A cursory glance will tell you three things about the Twilight series, by Stephanie Meyer. It's dark fantasy, it's being made into a movie, and it's massively popular. Basically it is about a high school girl who falls in love with a vampire, and it is a huge phenomenon that arose completely unbeknownst to me, which makes me feel somewhat out of touch. Girls are reading it by the millions. But I have never read any of these books, and I don't plan on it. Many critics compare the appeal of Twilight to "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," and suggest its popularity could grow to Potter proportions. However, having read the above article, it disappoints me that something like this could be the next Harry Potter. Why? Because it represents a huge step backward for girls' search for fantastical role models.

As a fantasy fan who has often had to latch onto male protagonists to get my fix of inner conflict and peril, I like the idea of girls having a main character (who is not a princess) that they can roleplay without gender bending. As we speak, I am trying to write an ordinary young heroine who captures the same kind of je ne sais quoi that attracts me to young male leads. Unfortunately, Twilight's Bella Swan is really a lame heroine. LAME, I say. Here's why.
The whole premise of the book is based on Bella's obsessive love for Edward the vampire, who, despite being immortal, gorgeous, and brilliant with two Harvard degrees, is posing as a student at her high school. Worse, Bella is, as we fiction writers say, a Mary Sue -- devoid of personality, she was designed for reader self-insertion, a pair of empty shoes. The effect of this is that every reader, and the writer as well, places themselves in the position of an adoring girl swooning over this perfect (if undead) man. It seems profoundly anti-feminist in a way that even those fantasy sagas with few female characters are not. Eowyn and Galadriel, the only strong women in Tolkien's LotR (Arwen's heroism being largely a movie creation), would scoff at the LAME.

Compare Bella to Buffy. From what I've seen of Buffy, she, not the vampires she battled after school, was the main attraction. She was awesome. Yes, she fell in love with a vampire too, but the point was that she was a born slayer with inherent powers that set her up for internal conflict as well as just being kickass. However vapid the series could become at times, none would argue with the fact that Buffy exemplified a strong heroine girls could -- and did -- want to be.

Girls want to be Bella Swan, too. But why? I'm not saying Bella has to have magic powers or something to be worthwhile. But I have a feeling that if I read Twilight, even as a goth-leaning fifteen-year old, I would not be able to relate to Bella. Ironically, even though her void character is deliberately written to be a stand-in, I don't think I could do it. So maybe it's just me -- can I somehow not relate to an ordinary girl? It's not as though there have not been female characters whom I identify with. In Harry Potter, though Harry's story arc naturally resonated the most with me, I personally was able to identify equally with Hermione Granger, who impressed me by being a nerdy know-it-all who was nevertheless primarily defined by her daring rather than her smarts. This is no small feat. And Lyra Belacqua, an ordinary girl at the start of Phillip Pullman's Golden Compass is wonderful and drew me in immediately. There were the American Girls. And don't forget Disney's Belle, who originally was motivated not by desire for a man, but by longing for adventure and escape, as well as devotion to her father.

But from what I've seen of Twilight, Bella is no Belle, and she's certainly no Hermione. Yet apparently, most teen girls want to be her, which really just means they want to be loved and protected by the creepily perfect Edward. Does anyone else find this disturbing? Twilight at its core is neither fantasy nor horror, but romance. It bothers me that millions of teen and pre-teen girls are obsessing over romance novels, especially ones that seem so devoid of original interpretations of gender roles. I'm starting to sound like a militant feminist now, which is hilarious. That's how annoying these books are to me.

Nothing against romantic love, of course. We know how I feel about this subject, don't we? For that matter, I don't have anything against romance-centric fiction; I've even written some of it myself over the years, featuring characters who are by no means mine to feature in such a manner (my sincerest apologies to their creators). I would have no issue with these books if it weren't for the tremendous hype around them. Many romances, I'm sure, are much worse. It's just that the minds of girls are being led into a fantasy world in which their primary existence for being is to love this unrealistic male ideal. As an alternative to Hannah Montana and High School Musical, Twilight seems aesthetically appealing. But is it any more empowering? The message of Twilight's mass popularity seems to be that the ultimate thing a typical girl wants is the perfect man. Not saving the world. Being adored by Mr. Popularity.

Ew.