I am so happy

Improvement.
AYAYAYAYAYAYAYA

Late night musings of a girl that really needs to go to sleep sometime soon

So I was once arguing with a girl when she decided to call me fat.

It didn’t faze me at all. I mean, mostly because I know I’m not fat; I currently weigh 6 stone and 7 pounds, and that’s after a rather hefty meal. I’m quite honestly a skinny little dork. So when she called me fat, I simply ignored it and passed it off as a rather pathetic insult. Only when I recalled the encounter later on did I realise that it was, in fact, a truly pathetic insult.

Now, as a member of the female sex, I’d say I quite understand how a girl’s mind works. And as the ‘fairer’ sex, as we’ve been called, girls have a natural fascination and/or obsession with appearances, most commonly their own. Girls are, in general, quite insecure with their appearance – they’ve just a few too many spots, or a few pounds overweight, or their nose is just a bit too big – it goes with the girly territory for us to be fussy and finicky about the way we look. Heck, I consider myself quite butch as far as femininity is concerned, and I still take pride in styling my hair every day, wearing make-up, dressing up and having people look at me and compliment me on the way I look. It’s a natural shallowness that everyone has in themselves, hidden somewhere.

Which is why I think girls are so much more affected than boys when someone insults their appearance – that concern for their exterior is far closer to the surface than for most men. Pretty much every girl has been unhappy with the way they look at some point in their life, if not constantly, and so when we get called ‘fat’ or ‘ugly’, it really hits home, sometimes even when it’s not true.

It’s this kind of thing that saddens me. When people look for insults, they more often than not go for insults about a person’s outer appearance, rather than their character. Personally, I’d be much more offended if someone slung out insults about my personality than about my looks. I think it’s much easier to look past someone’s outer flaws and see into the goodness inside them rather than ignoring their vile personality and instead concentrating on a beautiful façade. I’m not saying that the two go hand in hand and that all ugly people are saints and all beautiful people are rotten inside. In fact, I’ve often met a few blessed people who are stunningly beautiful and also cultivate sweet, charming and intelligent personalities; also, on the other end of the spectrum, I’ve met one or two people who were not the best of lookers and acted as grossly as they looked.

I think the points I’m trying to make here, in amongst all these quasi-philosophical musings, can really be condensed into a few bullet points:

·         Girls get hurt by remarks on their appearance because they’re naturally quite insecure.

·         Content of character is more important than looking good 24/7.

·         I really need to go to sleep sometime.

Anyway, if any of you bothered reading this – thank you!

My first ever blog entry is a rather vicious rant, and I don't think that gives a very good first impression of me as a person, sooo...

Hello! I'm Hannah. I'm a teenage girl from England who likes drawing, writing, dorky music and Harry Potter. Just in case you have some kind of burning desire to know what I look like, here's a picture of me.

Aren't I a charming enigma?

A while back I was sat in my room munching on stale pretzels when it occurred to me that I was a very interesting person. And instead of being selfish and keeping my interesting self to, um, myself, I decided to set out to ruin the internet for everyone. Yes, indeed - I made a blog! And I plan to use this blog to rant and vent and scream at people because that's what I'm good at. I aspire to be a professional whiner when I grow up and get a job. Do those exist? I'm pretty sure they do. I've seen a few on telly, they must be real.

Anyway, this was just a brief introductory blog to just show off how immensely interesting I am. I might post some more interesting stuff here. I might not. Who knows? Certainly not Elvis, because he's dead. But anywhore, I have other places where I have to be interesting, so I must wrap up this woefully short entry. Expect rants and various other entries in the future!

A totally original rant that I'm sure no one's ever done before.

Once upon a time in a magical land far, far away called Arizona, there was a woman called Stephenie Meyer. One day, Meyer had a dream about an omg supermegafoxyawesomehot vampire and a decidedly bland girl who is totally not a self insert, guys. After this life-changing vision, Meyer decided she wanted to write a book about emotional abuse, obsession, women being completely dependent on men, and sparkly vampires. She did so by creating a blank slate of a protagonist and a manipulative, obsessive stalker love interest whose only redeeming factor is he is hot. She then placed them in Forkes, Washington, and made pretty much absolutely nothing happen throughout the whole of the book.

Somehow, inexplicably, this book became an international phenomenon, got three sequels where pretty much nothing happens AGAIN, won awards, had movies made out of it, and attracted hoards of screaming pre-teen fangirls. Somehow, people managed do disregard the awkward handling of dialogue, the unmemorable characters, the mysterious absence of a proper plot, and Meyer’s lack of writing talent. This is the part I really don’t understand.

In case you hadn’t guessed, I’m talking about the Twilight Saga. There’s another weird thing – it’s called a ‘saga’, but the definition of ‘saga’ according to Google is “a long story of heroic achievement”. While I agree that these books are needlessly and painfully long, there is nothing heroic about them, and nor is anything of note achieved. This annoys me, so I will henceforth refer to this as the Twilight Series. Go cry about it later.

Anyway, here’s a quick summary, just in case you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years - the Twilight Series is a bunch of books revolving around the life of Bella Swan, an insipid teenage girl who moves to Forkes to live with her dad. She enjoys whining, complaining, and being roughly as interesting as sandpaper. Now, that might be a bit of a harsh summary – sandpaper can be kind of interesting – but it’s pretty damn accurate. Bella Swan is your typical special snowflake, totally different from other girls her age for reasons that are actually not really explored very well (apart from the fact that she reads Wuthering Heights like once), who moves into a town where she knows pretty much no one and instantly everyone is fawning over her.

And then she attracts the attention of the charming, handsome and gentlemanly Edward Cullen. At least, that’s how he’s described in the books, but this description is inconsistent with how we actually see him. From what he does/says to Bella, we can gather he is a possessive, controlling and enjoys telling Bella to stay away from him because he’s a dangerous vampire who wants to eat her, while simultaneously contradicting himself by breathing down her neck, following her and watching her sleep. I am not even joking; he sneaks into her room at night and watches her sleep. She doesn’t mind because he is hot.

That is pretty much the plot of the entire first book right there. I pained myself with reading the majority of it before giving up. I was extremely tempted to lobotomize myself afterward, as it really was a horrific experience. Not only was it stupid to the point of being offensive, it was also mind-numbingly boring. How can people plough through this pile of horse shit and find it good or interesting? Nothing happens.

Not only is it annoying and of poor quality, though – it’s also being teaching the next generation of girlies some pretty scary things. Of course, a lot of girls who read this crap are in their preteen stages, barely beginning puberty, and so they’re extremely impressionable. Literature influences their thoughts and feelings about the world; it helps them to define their morals. Give them the Twilight Series and they will start thinking some rather awful things in the world, such as –

·         Abuse in relationships is okay! A man only abuses you because he loves you.

·         Love should only be skin-deep. People are defined by what they look like, not by their personality. Only pretty people are worth your time, and being good looking automatically cancels out anything bad you’ve done. If a man hurts you or abuses you, it’s okay – he’s hot!

·         Known each other for a week or two + like four lines of shared dialogue = <3TRUE LOVE<3

·         Girls should be totally dependent on their man. They should give up everything – family, friends, education, a chance of a proper life – so they can be with their man. Their man will do everything for them, because they are just a silly girl who can’t possibly do a thing for themselves.

·         Your boyfriend will always save you from dangerous situations.

·         If a guy wants to kill you, that is totally romantic.

·         Lust = love, totally.

·         NO SEX TILL MARRIAGE GUYS, OR YOU WILL GO TO HELL.

·         Imprinting on newborn children is okay!

·         If a guy breaks up with you, HE TOTALLY STILL LOVES YOU. Blocking you on Facebook, not answering your calls and changing his email address? ALL EXPRESSIONS OF LOVE. He’ll come back to you if you whine and act depressed for long enough. Meanwhile, when he’s not there, do reckless things and attempt to off yourself to try and get his attention.

·         It’s okay to lead guys on and pretend to like them, especially when they’re genuinely nice people who really do like you.

·         Hot guy who treats you like crap > nice guy who treats you like a human who isn’t as hot as the other guy.

That’s not all of the morals this series teaches, but it’s a lot of them. Can’t people see what a bad influence this could have on girls? Meyer is essentially putting feminism back several centuries by teaching that women should submit to and depend on men, and is promoting love based on looks instead of personality. There’s also an incredibly sinister undertone of paedophilia in Breaking Dawn where Jacob (who was up until then the only decent character that I genuinely liked) falls in love with a newborn child and pretty much instantly begins imprinting on her. I wish I was making this shit up, but it’s true. It doesn’t matter that this baby will age very quickly – while she’ll physically be a teenager, she’ll still mentally be a child.

If I’m honest, I think the success of this franchise depends solely on two aspects: one being that because the character of Bella is so poorly developed, any person who has been through puberty can relate to her and lack of description of her appearance means they can pretty much slip into the character and wear her like a suit. Readers can pretend they’re Bella, pretend that the story is about them, pretend that they are dating a super hot vampire sex god.

The second thing that makes this cash cow so popular is basically that Edward is hot. Girls like the idea of a sexy guy, so they eat this shit up. If Edward was some pimply, bespectacled, awkward social retard that played COD all day, this would be nowhere near as popular, which in a way proves how shallow audiences can be.

Meyer’s writing is also another epic fail worth mentioning –she seems unable to grasp the concept of a plot and therefore her books lack structure and pretty much contain Edward and Bella staring at each other for a couple hundred pages and Bella painstakingly describing every inch of Edward’s Adonis-like body and his eyes that change colour every chapter or some shit like that. She also has no idea how to deal with conflict, instead putting a few weak clashes towards the end of each book that blow over relatively quickly and everything ends a-okay for Edward and Bella. Meyer, gormless gazing, purple prose and tiny vampire scares all tossed together in some uninspired salad of stupidity does not a good book make.

The amount of thesaurus rape in these books is hilarious and bordering on indecent – the characters can’t seem to just ‘say’ anything, they have to bark or mumble or hiss all the time. It’s the same with walking; the vampire family really can’t do anything without it seeming overly dramatic, which results in them practically teleporting everywhere because they are way too cool to simply, oh I don’t know, move their legs. I’m sure Stephenie Meyer owns a very scared, very violated thesaurus that cowers in fear every time she approaches it. It’s also pretty funny how often the characters’ eyes are filled with chagrin, or they are chagrining over something, or basically doing anything with chagrin. It’s one of Meyer’s favourite words, apparently.

Meyer also likes to completely ignore biology when she creates her vampires. Despite the obvious (her vampires SPARKLE in the sunlight instead of burning up and dying), there are many flaws with her vampires, the first that comes to mind being: how does Renesmee, the daughter of Bella and Edward, even EXIST? Meyer says that a vampire’s bodily fluids are all replaced with venom when they are turned, which means no blood. No blood means no erections. So not only can Edward not get a boner, meaning he can’t have sex with Bella, he also can’t ejaculate, because I’m presuming that, along with other bodily fluids, Edward’s semen would have been replaced with venom too. Even if he did have sperm, wouldn’t they have all died or frozen seeing as his body’s so cold all the time? Now, I’m no biology expert, but I kind of know how sex and baby making works. No boner means no sex, no semen means no vampire-human hybrid demon spawn of Satan.

What I’m trying to say is this series is bad. The writing is bad, the characters are bad, the awful messages it sends out to the readers is BAD. I’ve been wanting to write a rant about this for a long, long time and I don’t care about the fact that no one will read it, it just feels good to have it all typed out and out of my system. It’s been a long time since I’ve genuinely raged at something like this. But the Twilight Series truly makes me mad. It makes me want to physically break something. The sooner this whole craze blows over, the better, and I hope in the future humanity looks back at Twilight and says “Oh geez, people didn’t seriously like that fuckery, did they?”

Over and out – until next time.