What Went Wrong with Breaking Dawn?
Warning: This post may contain spoilers for Twilight/Breaking Dawn, Harry Potter, and The Dark Materials. Read at your own risk.
Forgive me, friends, because I am a terrible person. I have a morbid fascination with the fallout over Breaking Dawn, the fourth and final book in the Twilight series. I’ve been watching the Amazon ratings and reading the fan discussions on the interwebs. My, there are a lot of angry fans out there.
Here’s the lowdown for those who haven’t been obsessively tracking the Twilight phenomenon. Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series consists of four books dealing with (best I can tell) a love triangle between a teenage girl, the sparkley vamp she loves, and a werewolf. The much awaited finale had a midnight release this weekend to the tune of 1.3 million in book sales. Early Saturday morning Amazon reviews suggested some dissatisfaction with the book. (Two and a half star rating? Oh my!) Shortly after, threads suggesting readers return their copies or even burn them began appearing. Currently, the fandom appears divided between “Breaking Dawn is the BEST BOOK EVER” and “OMG did I just waste my Saturday morning reading that?”
Having read only the first 200 pages of Twilight, I am not at liberty to review the last book. I’m probably not qualified to even write this blog post. Still… In reading the reviews and discussions, one of the things that upsets me most are the people that answer any criticisms of the book with some variant of “it’s just fiction, don’t think too hard about it.” (For the record, there are a number of plot criticisms in which this comes up, but the primary discussion to which I’m referring to deals with vampire sperm. You see why this is fascinating to me.)
The Breaking Dawn problem seems to stem from the fact that Meyer broke the rules of a world that she created. Anytime you write fiction, you get to establish a new world. It can be a world just like ours, or it can be a completely other world. Rowling created a underground magic school and an entire society of wizarding folk. Pullman assigned people daemons that were tethered to them. Both of these world were completely plausible, despite the fact that they were completely unlike the world we live in.
But, just like our world operates on rules (the laws of physics, as just one example) so do fictional worlds. In Pullman’s world bad things happen when daemons are severed from their humans. It’s a rule. It would take a hell of a lot of skill to break it.
So Meyer built three books that established the world of Twilight and among the established rules is one that says vampires can’t have babies. Sorry, vamps, just the way it goes. And then in the last book, the rule is utterly, spectacularly broken, and revamped (sorry, I really couldn’t help myself) with some vamps can’t have babies, but others can. Hmm… remember that part about it taking a lot of skill to break an established rule? I’m gathering from the Breaking Dawn fallout that this book didn’t pull it off. People are pointing out that the whole vampire siring a child thing is completely implausible in the Twilight world. And it’s a valid criticism, one that has the other half of the fandom answering it with “it’s just fiction.”
To answer that criticism, or any criticism with that remark suggests that fiction doesn’t have to honor the world it creates when, in fact, it very much does. The best stories are the ones that I get completely lost in and I never question their plausibility, but that’s because they establish their rules and they don’t break them without some serious skill. Just because “it’s just fiction” does not give the work a bye when it isn’t plausible or breaks the rules that it has created.
Sorry if this post seems extremely harsh toward the book or toward Ms. Meyer. I actually feel a lot of sympathy for the Twilight fans that are feeling ripped off by the latest book. It really sucks to get very much invested in a book or a series only to want to end up burning it when it’s over. I hope your next reading adventure is much more enjoyable.
Linkage: What Makes Bad Fiction
Ward Six writer J. Robert Lennon recently posted a list of what makes fiction bad (in his opinion) and invited others to share their complaints. I tried coming up with my own list of complaints, but could only think of one:
Fiction that puts artiface or style over the story. There’s a book I started reading recently that had an unusual narrator. That part didn’t bother me, but this narrator was frequently interrupted by vague poetic observations that were usually written in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS. These observations were so intrusive, they kept pulling me out of the world of the story and reminding me that the author was trying something very clever. I hate that. I like to be lost in a story. I like to forget that a novel even has an author, so if the story is mainly a conduit for the style (instead of vice versa) it’s going to leave me cold.
Anyway, I encourage both readers and writers to check out the original list and the discussion that follows. I think we can all benefit from being able to talk about why we don’t like a novel or story instead of simply saying that we didn’t like it.
