Secondly, faeries. Twilight would make much more sense if you replaced all of the vampires with faeries (fairies would also do at a pinch, but are less good), for several reasons:
1. Sparkling in sunlight makes a lot more sense for a race one of whose defining traits is glamour/illusion/enchanting mortals than for a race one of whose defining traits it having less tolerance for sunlight than ice cream.
2. Faeries being creatures who, as mentioned, traditionally rely a lot on mind manipulation, would probably be very interested in someone with a natural mind-shield (as Bella canonically has). Thus, you could get rid of large amounts of Bella's Mary-Sueishness without too much of an effect on the plot.
3. Vampires are rather easy to kill. You can stake them, wave garlic at them, leave them chained up in the middle of the Sahara at noon, cut off their heads, or simply blow them to smithereens (granted, all of these also work on normal people, although one has to be creative to kill someone with garlic). Faeries, on the other hand, are vulnerable only to iron – and sometimes only to cold iron. Even then, the vulnerability to iron varies from 'the mere touch of iron can incinerate them' to 'they aren't actually vulnerable to iron at all - they'll just come back from the dead if you kill them any other way'. Thus, Meyer doesn't have to screw with mythology to make her precious Edward repeatedly and emphatically dead.
4. Faeries have glamour. Therefore, it isn't really that incredible that they should all be incredibly attractive. Neither is it incredible that someone mortal becoming fey should increase in attractiveness. There isn't really such a commonsense explanation for a mortal becoming a walking corpse and suddenly being more attractive
5. Faeries tend to be infertile. That's why they steal children. But the key word here is 'tend'. Faeries having children is not entirely unheard of, especially faeries having children with mortals. Thus, the plot could proceed as planned, it could be a complete surprise to everyone (in novel) that Bella was pregnant, without it having to contradict the novel's established system of vampire biology.
6. Faeries are approximately four thousand six hundred and twenty-four percent more awesome than vampires. You may think that that's just my opinion, but it’s not. It's scientifically proven - you can tell by the way I used percentages. This is mainly due to overexposure - vampires are clichéd, and angsty 'vegetarian' vampires are somewhere between 'the cake is a lie' and 'why did the chicken cross the road?' in terms of originality. Like Monty Python, except that Monty Python is intentionally funny.
It wouldn't solve all the problems of Twilight (chief among them that it is written by Stephenie Meyer, although the plot, characters, and the fact that it's more than three pages long also all deserve a mention), but it would make it make somewhat more sense without actually having to change very much of any real significance. Just something I thought of. And now that I've revealed a more knowledge of Twilight than anyone male should really have, and got to the end of several hundred words about faeries without having to decide whether the singular is 'faerie' or 'faery', onto the actual topic of this post. I promised something random, so here it is: video games.
Specifically, how horrible and deranged they are. I'm not talking about games like Silent Hill, or Call of Duty. Those just try too hard. These are five games that seem innocent enough, but which are really quite horrible if you actually think about them. And so, in order of subtlety:
5: Pokémon
Do I actually have to explain this one? You capture creatures with human/superhuman intelligence (e.g. Alakazam), some of which even used to be human (Yamask), and force them to battle each other for your amusement and profit. If that's not enough, remember that in wars, Pokémon fight with their trainers. Now imagine all the ways a Pokémon could kill you. Or imagine being a civilian in a world where ten year old children are allowed to walk around carrying what are effectively weapons of mass destruction.
4: Robot unicorn attack
You might seem like you're playing as an adorable and colourful unicorn setting out to fulfil your dreams. But as time passes, it gets harder and harder to stay alive. No matter how many people (well... fairies) you murder for your own gain, you might gain friends (dolphins) for a while, but in the end, you have no chance of actually fulfilling your dreams, and a meaningless death is all that awaits you. And through all this, the world and music remain bright and cheery. The heavy metal version is just trying too hard though.
3: Super Mario
It’s a game where you fight enemies by crushing them to death. Or throwing fireballs at them. When you eat strange mushrooms everyone around you becomes tiny and pathetic. Flowers can cause you to gain special powers. So... Horrible murder and strange distortions of reality caused by ingesting unidentified plant matter. Need I go on?
2: Pac Man
You're in an inescapable maze, trapped forever, forced to endlessly repeat the task of picking up objects and chased by murderous ghosts. If you somehow succeed in your task, everything you've done will be undone, and you'll just have to do it again, unless you can do it enough times (two hundred and fifty five times actually), in which case your selfish quest for self preservation will end with the world itself breaking. Try and leave by one of the two apparent exits, and you'll just end up back at the last one. By taking strange unidentified yellow pills, you might be able to fend off the ghosts for a brief while, but they'll never come back. You'll never actually be able to give them more than a temporary defeat. And the longer your struggle to survive goes on, the less capable you are of doing even that.
1: Eversion
OK, here I have nothing. Even I can't come up with a way to make this game sound evil. It's a sort of Mario clone, so I could of steal from there, but I'm above that. You can download it here, or on Steam, and if you can find anything at all dark in it, please tell me. You play as an adorable little asterisk in a bright, shiny little world. What could possibly go wrong?
Right then. That was my list. It should probably worry me that the actual intended topic of the post turned out to be less than half of the actual text. I might do some more in this vein someday, but next up: Rape. Because the words 'consistent mood' mean nothing to me.
No comments:
Post a Comment