And it’s back: Edward Obsession, and, concurrently, my fascination with Edward Obsession. I have been (obviously enough) reading a lot about the subject, and here is a little something my good friend Chelsea (my partner in starting up Geek Girls Anonymous) sent on the subject. It’s well worth the read.

Massawyrm drops trou and offers a moon of his own to THE TWILIGHT SAGA: NEW MOON!!

Hola all. Massawyrm here.

Bella Swan is one of the most detestable, obnoxious, mentally unstable characters in modern American literature. She is a character so over the top that she borders on satire; and were she some sort of Holden Caulfield-like, deliberately unlikable character written with the intent to openly mock the ideals of modern romantic literature, she would be acceptable, if not perfect for the part. But Stephanie Meyer isn’t that self-aware. Instead, she has woven together a cloyingly insufferable romantic saga – a junkfood and cheesecake epic, if you will – centering around a woman who revels in, nay celebrates, how damaged she is. I dated a girl like Bella once. Thank god they make medication for girls like that now.

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That’s not to say that I don’t understand the attraction. TWILIGHT is soap opera; neutered soap opera scrubbed clean of indecency to be sure, but soap opera none the less. In the place of the lurid we simply find the supernatural. And Meyer has found a way to turn the dark, shadowy world of the vampire into the pink frilly lace and teddy bears of a little girl’s room, creating a vampire archetype so bad it will stand for generations as an example of how badly classic monsters can be re-invented.

The review I wrote of the first film almost one year ago to the day still stands, and all of its critiques hold true for me for this mangled mess of a movie. Its attempts at creating a mythology are embarrassing at best, clearly lifting from sources that themselves were not the originators while occasionally creating an idea of its own only original for the sake of being so stupid no one else thought to put it in print. The romance is juvenile, over-sentimentalized and never truly shared with the audience and feels more akin to middle school romance than the concept of courtly love it often pretends to evoke. If you felt that Stewart and Pattinson lacked real chemistry before, just wait until you see how little time they spend together in love in this film. Sure there’s a few moment of canoodling meant to be tender, but there is still absolutely no meat to their relationship, no spark. Making matters worse is that when Pattinson leaves the picture for a while, we are treated to a second act that is merely a rehashing of the second act of the first film with a new love interest, complete with very similar lines of dialog and some of the exact same concepts.

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And just as that comes to its inevitable conclusion, with Bella once again being the prized pony in the show, her boyfriend re-enters the film and we’re presented with a classic Casablanca problem. Does Bella run off with the dangerous soulless vampire who she is terrified of growing old with (because, really, if you thought Bella wasn’t shallow enough, adding in nightmares about growing old and unattractive with an unaging boyfriend will seal the fucking deal) or remain with the dependable, barrel-chested, good natured guy who has been looking out for her since minute one. Let’s see, dangerous guy, comfortable guy? Dangerous guy? Comfortable guy?

Yeah. By hour four of this terrible series, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that Meyer is going to make the wrong choice, and she does it again here. But not before rolling out a series of relationship clichés and a third act with the stunning lack of a climax. Seriously. Two hours and ten minutes and the movie has NO CLIMAX. It just ends, punctuated by one of the most hysterical final lines in cinema history. People about fell out of their seats, laughing at the last moments – even women digging the film. It was so bad friends of mine couldn’t make eye contact with one another without bursting into tears and doubling over.

Read this awesome post in its entirety here.