 But, guys, I put that option on the pole as a joke. I wasn't expecting it. Okay. This is the introduction song. It's not very good, but it's not too long. Back in November of 2008, a cultural phenomenon came of age when Twilight arrived in theaters. The story of a teenage girl falling in love with a 109-year-old vampire who's pretending to be a teenage boy had a marketing campaign more aggressive than my dog playing Keepaway with his toys. It was impossible to exist back then and not hear about this movie. Whether you cared or not was another matter, the fact is, we all knew about it. And I say it came of age because the film was based on a book of the same name that came out in 2005. It had been around for a few years, it just wasn't a huge hit. Most people who hadn't read the books misunderstood the marketing, and we sort of thought that this series was going to be Harry Potter with vampires. So I read the books. And my mom read them. And my sister. And everyone I knew at the time. And we saw the movies. And most of us were disappointed. If you're one of the three people unaware of this, Twilight is not a fantasy adventure story. It's a paranormal romance. All the fantastical elements are just a background for the love story between Bella and Edward. While there are some bigger conflicts that feature in the story, they aren't the focus. Look, I know that the past decade has seen everyone in their grandmother make fun of this franchise. Sparkling vampires are dumb. Kristen Stewart's acting is awful. Bella is boring and pathetic. Edward is emotionally abusive. Jacob is an obnoxious nice guy. Victoria is the least intimidating villain of all time. There's next to nothing left for me to cover in that regard. However, with the benefit of hindsight and without being swept up in the hate train, I feel the need to ask, is Twilight really that bad? To clarify, I'm not saying that Twilight is a great series. I'm not even calling it good. I put New Moon on my 10 most hated books list for a reason. And while that list is outdated now, I would still have it on there somewhere. Rather, I just want to take a fresh look at those books and try to explain why I think they're bad, but not THAT bad. I might even admit that there are one or two things in there that are good. But that's kind of beside the point. It doesn't matter if there are good aspects to it or not. No franchise aimed at teen girls is going to end human civilization. The way we all piled on to hate this series is a good example of how internet hate mobs form. People don't just decide to loudly hate someone or something on their own. They do it because there's a crowd that cheers them on every time they loudly hate it. Anyways, that's a long enough intro. Let's get into the meat of the matter. Spoilers ahead, if anyone cares. Part 1. Expectations. So I already said that we thought this series would just be Harry Potter plus vampires. We were expecting adventures in a secret world where people would be saved and bad guys would be fought. Obviously, that wasn't what we wound up getting, and part of the blame for that can be placed on whoever put the trailers for the first movie together. They played up the action and tension as though they were the main focus of the story, which they clearly weren't. Not that I blame them, the point of a trailer is to make people go and see your movie, so you want to show off the good bits. There are plenty of trailers released over the years that are misleading. That's not a crime. Not until I'm elected to Congress anyways. This issue was exacerbated by the fact that the Deathly Hallows had come out only a little over a year earlier. All the Harry Potter fans, which was everybody, were still clamoring for something similar that we could devour. And really, we should have known from the get-go that this would be bad. The first trailer has some clearly bad acting, bad dialogue, and an unusual amount of focus on the main characters staring at each other longingly. We should have known that this wouldn't be something that appealed to us. The signs were there, we just didn't want to see them. We were so desperate for more Hogwarts-esque adventures that we ignored the sea of red flags. We heard that Bojack Horseman quote here. Because we had expectations, and those expectations weren't met, we were more upset than we should have been. If we went in expecting crap, then when we got crap, we would have shrugged and moved on. There still would have been people mocking the franchise, sure, there's plenty of comedy here, but there wouldn't have been any of that visceral anger that's marked most of the discussion around it. I have to start off with this bit because there needs to be a context to everything else I bring up. While the problems with Twilight are legion when you look at it as a fantasy adventure, as a romance with a fantasy backdrop, a lot of those issues either go away or are mitigated. Teenage girls looking for an escapist fantasy are going to have a different wish fulfillment and different expectations than the rest of us, and that's perfectly fine. The Way of Kings is one of my favorite books, but it's not for everybody. It's extremely long, has a very steep learning curve, the world is very strange, there's tons of violence, and some of the struggles that the characters go through are mentally taxing to read about. Someone who didn't like epic fantasy and read the entire book would probably hate it. Even though it's better put together than Twilight, I'm sure someone could go through and describe in vivid detail all the ways in which they hate it. People do it to perfectly find pieces of media all the time, just look at the last Jedi. Anything that's been put under a microscope the way Twilight has been will look bad, and anything that hits your preferences will seem better to you than to others, that's just how art works. The sparkling is stupid, there, I got it out of the way. At a glance, the world of Twilight seems like your standard hidden magical world setting. These are extremely common and usually require some suspension of disbelief to get into, but there's usually at least some sort of explanation as to why the magical world would keep itself hidden. In Harry Potter, the wizarding world stays hidden because before the modern era, magic was understudied and weak, the Muggles posed a real threat to them, so they hid themselves and made rules to prevent others of their kind from exposing them. And in the modern era, the wizards have grown comfortable with the current segregation arrangement. They don't feel that they'd have anything to gain by interacting with the Muggle world. It makes sense that magic is hidden from society at large. This is so common in fantasy tales, especially those aimed at younger audiences, that most of us don't even think about it when we see it anymore. It's more noteworthy when someone makes a setting that's wholly original. The wish fulfillment aspect to it is pretty obvious, a world like Middle Earth or the Cosmere can be amazing, but there's never a feeling that you could get pulled in there one day. Even stuff like Panem or the Expanse, which are just our world in the future, have a serious disconnect from real life. By setting a story in a hidden section of our own world, usually with a protagonist who lived a normal life until they stumbled across it, you give the audience the ability to project themselves onto the protagonist and imagine being pulled from their own mundane lives. Twilight is far from the only book series to use this trope, and it'll be far from the last. It's not as though this is a lazy way to world build either since you have to account for all the ways in which the hidden world keeps itself hidden. Any failures there can make the whole thing fall apart. All that being said, why the hell are the Twilight vampires hidden? I'm not talking about the Cullens or others like them, they're just people who drink blood. They want to be left alone to live mostly normal, immortal lives, and if their neighbors knew they were vampires, they'd be unable to do that. It makes sense how they'd hide their true nature. I'm talking about all the other vampires of the world. People like James and Victoria and the Volturi. James feeds on humans frequently and loves the thrill of hunting, so why does he bother hiding himself from the public? The Volturi are thousands of years old and are said to have no respect for humanity, yet they keep themselves sequestered away. In fact, they outright kill other vampires who threaten to expose the existence of their species. This is the crux of the conflicts that come at the end of New Moon and Breaking Dawn, but why? Most vampire legends have a couple of common traits given to vampires. They're nocturnal, subsist on human blood, and have great strength and speed that allow them to overpower a human. At the same time, they have a few weaknesses that allow a human to overcome them if they're clever and or prepared. Some common ones include garlic, sunlight, holy water, silver, and a steak through the heart. It's not uncommon for authors to change these around and give new weaknesses or remove some of them to make them seem more threatening, but the general idea that vampires can be killed by knowledgeable humans stays intact. In Twilight, vampires have no weaknesses. Sunlight, garlic, silver, et cetera, all have no effect on them. In addition, they're strong enough to rend steel with no effort, can run faster than the human eye can follow, and their skin can't be pierced by any weapons other than fire, but even that won't kill them on its own. They don't even have to sleep, so they're never vulnerable to attack. Oh yeah, vampires are also the X-Men in this universe. They can all read minds or fire lightning or something else along those lines. It's not a problem by any means, but it's never properly explored either. In the end, it's a wash, so I'll drop it here. As far as we can see, the only things that can kill a vampire are another vampire or a werewolf. So why the hell would they bother hiding from humans? They could coexist without any worries since we can't hurt them. They could even rule over us like demigods and we couldn't do a thing. Why don't the vampires rule us? Well, because Stephanie Meyer decided to write a story with a hidden world as the setting. Since she wanted to write about vampires, she threw them in there and just left it at that. There's a few magical things other than vampires that exist here. We get a very long sequence in Eclipse with the origin story of the werewolves, which involves human spirits leaving their bodies and merging with wolves. How much of this is true and how much is just legend is unclear and we never see an indication of other spirit walkers or magic anywhere else in the world. This might go some way to explaining why the status quo was set up and how it's been maintained if it were ever mentioned, but there's nothing there. Also, the werewolves aren't actually werewolves. They're shapeshifters who chose the form of wolves and you know what? I don't care. So in the end, Twilight's world building sucks fat floppy horse hoses. It's not the worst I've ever come across though. It just makes no sense. It doesn't actively contradict itself at any points that I found and things like the Volturi wanting to keep their race a secret are treated consistently. In the end, it's just kind of dumb, not worth being mad about. Part three, relationships. You know what the thing about a 109 year old man dating a 17 year old is? It's creepy. It's like Hugh Hefner marrying someone in her 20s only tempered by the fact that he still looks her age and she's also underage. An age difference isn't always a bad thing though. Sometimes people born many years apart can fall in love as long as they're both above the age of consent. I'm not disputing that. This is only one issue among many. Edward holds all the power in their relationship. Physically, he can do whatever he wants and Bella is powerless to stop him. If he wanted to rape or kill her, she wouldn't be able to do anything about it nor would the police and justice system be able to punish him afterwards. He wouldn't hurt her because he's allegedly a decent person but that's not the point. The point is that there are no constraints on his actions at all. Among human couples, even if there's a stark physical difference, society at large can act to constrain the actions of one or both parties. Just being able to hurt her doesn't mean he will. Not by a long shot. It's just something to keep in mind. From the first book onward, Bella is completely dependent on Edward for protection. The beginning of their relationship comes when he saves her from getting hit by a car. Then not long after he saves her again, this time from getting raped by strangers, which is good. The problem is that it frames the rest of their relationship through that lens. The audiences told that Edward is primarily concerned with protecting Bella and we see some evidence to support this. Therefore, we believe him when he says his later actions are in service of that goal. As an aside, they really should have reported those guys to the police. Nothing was ever done about them as far as I can tell. Edward just led a gang of sexual predators go without even warning others about the danger. Because vampires come after Bella, first James, then Victoria, and then the Volturi, she has no way to defend herself. Most of Edward's actions are supposedly based around his desire to keep her safe, including him telling her what to do and controlling her movement. You might be seeing the problem here. Even if his desire to protect her is genuine, he's extremely controlling. Even her sexual desires are used as leverage for Edward to get her to do what he wants. As a vampire, he doesn't get horny and Bella, as a perfectly normal young woman, still does. She wants to have sex with him really badly and he doesn't want to, ostensibly because he's worried about accidentally hurting her and because he wants to wait until they're married. He won't do it until she becomes a vampire and he won't turn her into a vampire until after their marriage, which ties her to him in another way. Throughout the series, he dangles vampirism and sex over her head to get her to do what he says, as though they're rewards for good behavior and not something that they should come to an agreement on. I'm not saying that Edward should have sex with her if he's truly uncomfortable with it. I'm saying that this aspect to their relationship is put in solely to demonstrate how he holds power over her and how that's somehow a desirable state to be in. And due to his long life, he has knowledge on how to do things like remove pieces from her car's engine so that she can't go see her friends until he deems her worthy of it. If you were unaware, yes, that does happen in these books. There isn't a single area where Bella could be considered Edward's equal, not even close. That's just no way to form a healthy relationship to begin with. Then when you add in behaviors like Edward isolating her from her friends, it becomes straight up abusive. It kind of makes sense that she would shut down so completely when he leaves her since she had nothing else in her life and that allows him to control her. Romance doesn't always have to be totally realistic to be good. What it does have to be is romantic and this ain't it, chief. I guess it's impossible to talk about Twilight without at least briefly bringing up its spiritual successor, 50 Shades of Grey. For those still somehow unaware, 50 Shades was a book series that was later made into a movie trilogy and the whole thing started as a piece of Twilight fan fiction. Without going into detail, the relationships shown in 50 Shades are considerably worse than those in Twilight featuring severe emotional abuse, sexual abuse and controlling behavior. That being said, I actually think that it's less of an issue there than with its progenitor. 50 Shades was aimed at adult women who were looking for a sexual thrill and the marketing and word of mouth kept that at the forefront of the conversation. I'm not saying that no one else read these books, just that the target audience was grown. The majority of them were probably well aware how unsavory certain parts of the story are and they were able to separate it from reality. It's a fantasy and so is 50 Shades of Grey, so I don't see the abuse there as such a big deal. I mean, it's not good, it's just not that big of a deal. This sort of thing only really bothers me when it's in media aimed at kids and teens because they're young and impressionable. Even then, as long as we educate them on how those things are supposed to work, it shouldn't be too big of a problem. All that said, Bella's relationship with Edward is abusive in most ways, yes. Her other relationships, on the other hand, are shockingly positive most of the time. First, look at her and her father, Charlie. Part of the reason she came to Forks was because they had been so distant from each other and she wanted to spend time with him. The two of them trying to get to know each other again is awkward but surprisingly sweet. Charlie takes a genuine interest in her life, asking her how she's doing, how school is going, and meeting Edward right after they start dating. Near the end of the first book, when Bella has to go on the run, she tells him that she's leaving and he responds with complete understanding. While he's clearly upset, he understands that Bella is a young adult who deserves some level of control over her life. He's mostly just concerned for her, which makes sense when you realize that her complete lack of emotion or hobbies and her obsession over the first man to show her affection could be symptoms of depression or other mental disorders. Later on, Charlie continues to give her advice and support her in her major life choices. He's understanding of what she wants and only gets angry when he feels as though she's being taken advantage of. Long story short, Charlie is an awkward dude and a great dad that has a healthy relationship with his daughter. Edward's family is pretty loving and accepting of her too. His sister Alice in particular is helpful, explaining some of the details of being a vampire and letting her know more about the family. She has a friendship with her that doesn't rely completely on Edward too. They go out and do stuff multiple times, just the two of them. They understand and they like each other. His parents, Esme and Carlisle, are generally loving and caring as well. When Bella shows up, they're just happy that their son has found someone and they're never anything but kind to her. The only one of the cullens that doesn't like Bella is Rosalie, who has fair reason to resent her, Rosalie misses being human and hates that Bella is so willing to throw it away. But when she accidentally tells Edward that she's dead in New Moon, she apologizes profusely and tries to make up for it. And in the final book, the two of them mend their divide. They don't become best friends or anything, they just learn to get along better. Frankly, that's a realistic depiction of how family ties work. You don't have to like everybody, you just have to learn to live with them. Then look at Bella's other friends, Sans Jacob. As soon as she arrives in town, they welcome her with open arms. They answer her questions about the local area without judgment, invite her out to events with them, assist her in acclimating to her new home, and generally just act like decent people. When Bella shuts down emotionally for months during New Moon, they try to reach her and when they can't, they still stand by for when she goes back to normal. Then afterwards, they don't seem to hold any hard feelings towards her about her actions, they welcome her back into the fold and continue being there for her, because that's what friends do. They might not be a big part of the story, they aren't three-dimensional characters at all, but they're good people and they have a solid relationship with Bella. Jacob deserves his own mention, because at first he's just an acquaintance of Bella's, then he's a friend that brings her out of her depression, and if they left it at that, it would be fine. However, when he falls in love with her and feels as though she's rejecting him, he goes full fedora-tipper. He gets angry, he lashes out at others, and he bemoans his lack of success with the girl he likes. It comes within a hair's breadth of, why doesn't she like me? I'm such a nice guy territory. Things escalate past that with Jacob forcibly kissing her at one point, although it's not really portrayed as romantic, so I guess it could be worse. What couldn't be worse is how Jacob hears about Bella and Edward being engaged and threatens to commit suicide afterwards, only relenting when Bella willingly kisses him. Then she realizes that she loves him too just less than Edward. Basically, by this point, they've developed a toxic codependency. Their relationship changes and gets better later on, but that deserves its own section, so I'll put a pin in it for now. What I'm getting at with all this is that while the normal romance is creepy and unhealthy, the rest of Bella's interactions are surprisingly normal. Part four, plot. The story of these books is bad. Not because the setup is bad, it's not even the execution really, it's the pacing. Although that kind of falls under execution, but for the sake of this video, let's pretend it doesn't. For just a moment, forget everything you know about Twilight and let me describe the major story beats to you. A young woman moves to a new town and falls in love with a vampire. She winds up being targeted by a different vampire who wants to hunt her for sport. She manages to outwit him and her boyfriend kills the evil vampire. All is well again. Except the evil vampire's mate is now out for revenge and she wants to get it by creating a small army of new vampires. Now the main character's new family has to work with their sworn enemies to protect themselves. Doesn't that sound cool? When you remove the lion's share of the interpersonal drama, depressive episodes, trips to Italy and staring at Edward's abs, that's what the story of the first three books is. The setup is pretty cool. The execution is perfectly all right too. Bella's flight from James has twists, misdirection, tension, a genuine threat to her life, a villain that has a real reason to want her dead, namely that he's a psycho. In action-packed climax, this is what we call storytelling. And the Victoria's retribution arc is set up the same way. As long as we forget all the nothing she did during New Moon, she poses a real threat, has a motivation, and is defeated through a combination of brute force and cleverness. Even the conflict with the Volturi in Breaking Dawn isn't awful. We don't get the epic vampire showdown we wanted, sure, and it doesn't make sense for them to wanna keep themselves hidden so much, but at least there's something to threaten the main character's happiness. There's some basic understanding on how to write a book. So what's the problem then? All of these events are crammed into a fraction of the total page count. The PDF copy of Twilight I have here is 260 pages. James isn't introduced until page 195, exactly 75% of the way through the book. And the conflict starts right after that. There's no build-up and no anticipation, it just starts. Say what you will about the movie, but at least it has some scenes of the villains doing stuff before this. The same thing happens with Victoria and the Volturi later on. The plot is fine once it gets started, it just doesn't have enough time to properly develop. Few of the events truly sink in. This goes for the second book as well. Eclipse is, in my opinion, the best of the series simply because the vampire army is brought up early on, the characters learn that there's a threat, they spend time preparing for it, they have smaller conflicts along the way as they gather up allies, and then there's a big battle. Bella even plays a role in defeating the villain, which she didn't really do with James. It's not amazing, but it's something. Really, that's what I'd say about the plot to the last book too. Not amazing, but there's something to it. The biggest problem with all of this is that we almost always follow Bella's POV, meaning we don't get to see anything if she doesn't see it. Once she witnesses the action, it's fine. There's a baseline level of competence in this series, but that's all it is, competent. Nothing more, nothing less. Part five, character. The biggest problem about these books to a lot of people are the two main leads. I've already discussed Edward enough, so I'll leave him alone. Let's talk about Bella. When you get down to it, there's not much to her. She's a total blank slate without much of a personality. But remember, this is designed to be a self-insert story, so her having little personality is by design. We tend to look down on these sorts of wish fulfillment type stories, but come on, let other people have their thing. This would be where I'd leave it except for New Moon. In that literary abortion, Edward leaves Bella and she goes into a depression for months, not talking to people, not doing anything, and not feeling much of anything. While this does make her seem pretty pathetic and her lack of any hobbies or personality traits exacerbates this, with the benefit of hindsight, I can see that this is all symptomatic of severe depression. Now, I'm not going to try and diagnose a fictional character with a mental illness, partially because I'm not a psychologist and partially because fictional characters don't always follow real-world logic. All I'm saying is that this looks a lot like depression. When the series starts, Bella has no friends, a strained relationship with her family, and seemingly no interests at all. There's this heavy melancholy that follows her around and it only raises when she starts to open up to people. Not just Edward, but all the others I brought up earlier. And when she opens up, she becomes much happier. Viewing it from that perspective, this is the story of a young woman dealing with her demons. However, it's still a bit problematic when you consider that her romance with Edward is all that's holding her in her state of normalcy. That feels like it's saying that you need to be with a man to get over your illness. In the end, it's just a wash. Bella is a boring character that has one or two neat aspects to her and in some ways functions as a tale for overcoming mental illness. Let's get to that Jacob pin. Yeah, he's obsessed with Bella and has a toxic dependency on her and he tries to manipulate her a couple of times. But he does get better near the end. In Breaking Dawn, Bella and Edward get married and finally do the sex. However, the still human Bella gets pregnant with a half vampire baby. It's slowly killing her, so some of the others try to convince her to terminate the pregnancy, Jacob included. She refuses, he's angry and winds up giving this information to his wolf pack. They're angry because turning humans breaks the treaty that they made a century earlier. The pack wants to kill the cullens, Bella and her unborn baby, which Jacob is horrified by. He tries to convince them not to get violent, but they refuse and so he runs off from the pack to protect the cullens. Jacob cuts himself off from his friends and family, puts his own life at risk and allies with people he hates all to protect Bella. Even if he knows she'll never love him the way he does her, she's still his friend and he still cares about her. He's willing to give up everything to do the right thing. This shows just how much he's matured in a short time. While he was a petulant child for a long time, when reality hit him in the face, he stood up and did the right thing. When Renesmee is born, he does this thing called imprinting on her. Basically what it means is that he forms a connection with her that makes them soulmates. While it is creepy for an almost grown man to be in love with a baby, this process is entirely involuntary and he never does anything physical with her. And since the other wolves can't attack anyone who's the soulmate of another wolf, the fighting ends. In this sense, it's possible that Jacob imprinted in order to protect everybody he cares about on both sides, though I can't say for sure since imprinting is never totally explained. The point is that he becomes a good person by the end, even if he had issues earlier on. The rest of the cast isn't awful either. Basically every character has an interesting backstory except Bella. Edward used to be a vampire serial killer. Jasper participated in a war between vampire clans. Carlisle used to be a demon hunter. They all had a life before they show up on the page. And while they're generally not super developed or well-rounded, they have a little personality. People associate them with the abysmal acting in the films, and I don't blame them for that, but in the books they're much less wooden. They have lives and relationships outside of how they know Bella. Basically the character cast, other than Edward, is perfectly serviceable for the sort of story being told. Were this a fantasy adventure story then the cast wouldn't be that great because most of them aren't given much to do. But I really want to reiterate that this is romance first and everything else second, which means everything else just isn't that important. Part six, other stuff. Here's a couple other things that don't deserve their own section but still deserve to be brought up. This series puts a huge emphasis on having children and how not having children makes you an incomplete person. Esme Cullen makes several references to being upset that she can't have children. And Rosalie too, that's a part of why she resents Bella for wanting to give up on her humanity. She's jealous of her ability to have kids. I don't think I need to explain how Bella's entire pregnancy is one big anti-abortion message. The whole thing seems to be saying that you should just ignore your doctor when he says you're jeopardizing your health because you'll be fine as long as you use the power of love. Also this. You won't, you're gonna have a part of me. I'll need you. Do you honestly think that I could love it? Or even tolerate it if it killed you? Seriously, fuck Edward. Premarital sex is seen as a big no-no in this franchise. Edward refuses to do it, which he claims is because he's old fashioned. When Bella tries to have sex with him in Eclipse, he seems like a totally cool headed and rational actor while she seems half crazed from her desires. This is clearly trying to show that waiting for marriage is the normal default states that mature people fall into while those who want to do it before tying the knot, even if it's inside of a committed relationship are just slaves to their desires. Children who don't understand how the world works. And Edward holds this over her head for months as a way to shame and manipulate her too. I'm not saying you have to have sex before you get married. I honestly don't give a shit how you do it as long as everyone involved is safe and consenting. What I'm saying is that Meyer pushing how this one viewpoint is the only correct one and any deviation is bad is shitty. It's a shitty thing to do. Someone more knowledgeable than me could probably go into how this places all the blame for sexual deviancy on women just like most Abrahamic religions, but that's a whole other rabbit hole I don't have time to fall down. Why do vampires not need human blood? The idea behind the Cullens being vegetarians that only feed on human blood is obvious. It's part of the wish fulfillment for young women who want to catch the eye of a dangerous man who also isn't a threat to her. And it feeds further into that theme of resist your natural urges or you're an awful person. The problem is that it paints a very clear line between good and bad vampires. Wouldn't they be so much more interesting if they couldn't overcome their dependence on human blood if they would die without it? The Cullens would either have to feed on people without killing them or choose targets that they would be fine with killing. That immediately makes them all 10 times more interesting. Cirque de Freak did basically the same plot line before Darren learned to accept that he wasn't human anymore. Honestly, this aspect of vampires is worse than the sparkling because it negatively affects their character. Most people agree that the blank pages used to depict depression in New Moon are clever. I'm one of those people. The only issue is that Bella's depression goes away the instant her true love comes back to her, which is not how depression works. Those are the big ones anyways. I could go into excruciating detail about all the tiny issues, but that would be antithetical to the point of this video. Conclusion. I hope by now you've all realized that I still think Twilight is bad. In some ways, it's downright awful, but it didn't end civilization. There are a few things that are even good in there. I'm not the target audience. I never was and neither are most of the other haters. Maybe enough time has passed that we can all get over ourselves and react appropriately to the next thing we don't like. Of course, if the reaction to Game of Thrones is anything to go off of, this is only getting worse. But when the rise of Skywalker comes out and we're all consumed in a ball of aimless, white-hot nerd rage, at least I can say I did my part to remind everyone to chill the fuck out. And hey, maybe my opinion has been skewed by years of reading the most horrendous shit I can find. Maybe Twilight only seems mediocre because I've tortured myself with the lovely bones and elixir. In the end, this comes down to my own very subjective tastes. If Twilight is the worst book you've ever read, then I don't think you've read all that many books. But that's from my perspective. Something in there might have managed to push your buttons just right to make you hate it, and I won't judge you for that. It just bothers me that this series got a reputation as a completely irredeemable pile of garbage when really it's just a regular pile of garbage that someone sprayed for breeze on to, so it smells nice. I'm a proponent of the idea that all art has something of value in it. Even if the overall product is ass, there's something in there to appreciate. I was hoping to talk about something different for Nostalgia November, but this is fine. I like being able to get out some of my thoughts on this. If you want to read a supernatural romance, just read The Mortal Instruments. It's not perfect, but it's a better option. Man, that was long. If you made it this far, uh, thanks, I guess? Without people who wanted to hear all my thoughts on a book series that ended 11 years ago, I'd be totally lost in life. Be sure to subscribe and like the video to help it spread. Thanks as well to my patrons, and a big thanks especially to Oppo Savilainen, Christopher Hawkins, Joseph Pendergraft, and Melanie Austin. They were among those who voted for this topic, so if you want in on that, then send me some money. That's all for today. Bye.