So I am currently watching a live reading/questions thing with John Green and David Levithan about their novel Will Grayson, Will Grayson. I have to say, the conversation going on in the chat room is completely fascinating right now.
What are people talking about?
Everyone is comparing Harry Potter to Edward Cullen. Note, Green and Levithan were mentioning Harry Potter and in no way where talking about Twilight. I find this interesting because I realized how much it has seeped into our culture.
The conversation started with someone saying “I’m kind of in love with Harry. He’s my Edward Cullen.” This prompted people to instantly start talking about how much more they loved Harry. They wore comparing their love to him to how much a Twilight fan loves Edward. It was like now their is a scale to love and at the top of it is how much you love this certain character. Everyone seemed to know exactly how much this meant too. Like there is a quantitative amount of love. I just find it so completely interesting that as a culture, we have created a symbol of a quantity of love based on a character.
How I just flipped back to read some more of the chat and the conversation went back to talking about Green and Levithan for a while but then shifted back to Twilight. This time people are talking about how awful the book is. Someone even said that it was a disgrace to literature. One person is even making fun of it despite saying they have not read the books or seen the movie. Why have such a strong opinion about something you have not even actually experienced? That seems a little bit crazy to me. Like I have said on this blog before, this book was written for teenagers as a fantasy book. Meyer’s was not trying to break ground or create a perfect piece of literature. Yet, the series has become so huge that even people that have not read it care enough to say they strongly dislike it. How amazing is it that a book has that kind of effect on people? That to me is what makes Meyer a great writer. She made something that truly has become a cultural phenomenon.
This also caught my attention yesterday when I was inside Experience Twilight which is a store in St Helens, Oregon that is, as you can guess, all Twilight stuff. I used to live very close to St Helen’s which is where many scenes from the first movie were filmed. Until yesterday, I hadn’t been downtown, where the Port Angeles parts were filmed. It is insane how into Twilight St Helen’s is now. There is photos all over. Store fronts have cut outs in them. There is the whole store. Have other books made that impact on towns? I know lots of movies are filmed in Oregon yet I don’t see whole areas of towns dedicated to them. Again, completely fascinating. I can see why people are researching and writing books and doing documentaries on how much this series has impacted society.
By the way, thank you so much to Experience Twilight for staying open a couple minutes extra for us to look around! The people working in their were super nice.
