Entry tags:

books that failed, twilight, wish fulfillment

Is there such a thing as too much wish fulfillment?
The Twilight series built its fandom on huge, pulsating, throbbing, shiny shiny heaps of ethically twitchy girly wish fulfillment. The "final" book, Breaking Dawn, was the biggest, shiniest, most pulsating heap of wish fulfillment of all, a professionally written version of the eternal, deathless "happy family" fanfic.* And yet the readers rejected it. Why? Where did the book's emotional appeal go wrong?

* You know the one--two random canon characters fall in wuv, get married, and proceed to fill their house with babies, adopted kids, traumatized war orphans, assbabies, and a menagerie of pets. Cooking, sex, and wacky hijinx ensue. The most important question is: Which of Family A's children (who are carbon copies of their parents) will fall for which of Family B's children (ditto)? Often involves masterpieces of the "assbaby labor scene" genre.

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	charmian 2008-08-06 06:48 am UTC (link)
	Maybe it was the pregnancy of doom scenes? Kind of squicky to the avg. teen, I would guess. Or maybe it's the magical baby. I read it, and the book feels poorly structured. It's like one thing after another, and full of anti-climaxes. (Reply to this)

	atreyu 2008-08-06 07:54 am UTC (link)
	Have they rejected it, or is that just the internet fallout? A ton of people screamed bloody murder over the last Harry Potter book, but I don't think that did anything negative to the sales or popularity, did it? (Reply to this)

	tangentialone 2008-08-06 08:46 am UTC (link)
	There was the whole "imprinting" thing... shudder That might have something to do with it. (Reply to this)

sithwitch13
2008-08-06 01:33 pm UTC (link)

Maybe some of the readers finally realized that there was no real tension to the story. From the sound of it, everything that should have been hard about being a vampire was cake to Bella, and suddenly she was the best and most awesome vampire with a superintelligent baby to boot. The tension between Jacob, Edward, and Bella smoothed out (squickily, to be sure) and it was kind of a lame happily ever after. The only actual "oh god" stuff, as I understand, was the doombaby pregnancy and that was seen through somebody else's narration so the reader didn't have to experience it. Did it ring false to have all the happiness with none of the work?

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r_a_black
2008-08-09 05:12 am UTC (link)

I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that when you do too much of that, all that Mary Sue happy ending crap, the world you've created sort of becomes destabalized and ten times less believable than it was before, and none of us like to read a book that has a world we can't even remotely believe in. On top of that, it sort of feels good when you read your favorite characters go through hard, challenging life stories and see them triumph over something. In Twilight, everyone triumphed over nothing. It just wasn't exciting, we didn't get a flip of emotions, we didn't get to cry over the loss of anyone we loved. Not that I gave a damn about Twilight and it's characters, I knew it was crap ages ago, but I can't help but compare it to Deathly Hallows. Some complain that it sucked that so many characters died, but I loved that she did that, because it showed us just how bad things are when Voldemort gets to that level of power and control. Shit is scary and depressing as hell, because, as Rowling has stated before, anyone can die. In fact, you could even blame Rowling for doing this to us. She spoiled us, and now we can't expect any less than that.

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