Sparkly Vampires Will Kill You!

Grab the Totally Twilight Button!

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Sparkly Vampires Will Kill You!

Stephenie Meyer gets a lot of flack for creating tame vampires. You’ve seen the slogans: Real vampires don’t sparkle. These naysayers make me imagine a vampire sparkling in the sun like a glittery craft project gone bad strumming a guitar singing “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” and kissing babies on the head as he sashays by.

Where did the Twilight vampires supposedly go wrong? The sparkles are a scapegoat for greater issues with Twilight. I think the biggest crime the Cullens committed again traditional vampire lore is their morality. They don’t exude sexuality like most of your steamy vampire romance novels. Humans drool over the Cullens’ unearthly looks, but that’s as close as they’re going to get. The Cullens try to live good, relatively normal lives and embody “traditional” values, in a sense. And of course, they’re vegetarians.

Don’t let the sparkles deceive you. The vampires Stephenie created, particularly the non-Cullens, veer way from traditional vampire legends in two key ways: Brutality and Invincibility. Over the past three years, I’ve read dozens of vampire books. The Twilight vampires are still the most dangerous vampires I’ve encountered.

Let’s explore this a little further...

1. Eat To Kill: In many vampire novels, the vampire’s bite and taking of blood is innately sexual. There’s a little nip in the midst of a passionate love scene. Or the bite gives the human a big-time high. Not the Twilight vampires. Humans are food. If a Twilight vampire feeds from you, you’re dead. And while you’re dying, you’ll be in incredible, paralyzing pain as the venom seeps into your veins. Consider the feeding scene in New Moon with the Volturi. A crowd of humans was herded into the castle like a crowd. While we didn’t see the actual feeding session, we can imagine that the vampires descended like a flock of vultures. The humans were sucked dry. There was nothing romantic about it.

2. Humans Are Helpless: The Twilight vampires are the only vampires I’ve read where humans are completely defenseless against them. A human cannot kill a Twilight vampire. Yes, a werewolf can, but there aren’t any outside of the Washington coast. Stakes don’t work. Vampires don’t have beating hearts and their skin is so strong that even a steel stake would break against them. Nor do garlic or religious icons do a thing. Fire can destroy them, but no human could hold down a vampire long enough to light a match. Bella is perceived as weak and helpless throughout the first three books. This is not because she is a weak individual, but because she's human. Even the strongest body-builder or best marksman would be no more than a mosquito, an irritation easily slapped dead, to a Twilight vampire.

3. Vampire Sex: Stephenie’s vamps aren’t all choirboys. Tanya, Irina, and Kate of the Denali coven are succubi. For a long time, they had sex with human men and then killed them. They developed consciences and didn’t want the men they “loved” to die. So instead, they hunted animals and had sex just for fun. Of a more sinister nature is Joacquim, Nahuel’s father. He purposely had sex with and impregnated human women to create his own science experiment. He glibly let the mothers die. Within the saintly Cullen family, it becomes clear in Breaking Dawn that Emmett and Rosalie and Edward and Bella can't keep their paws off each other. The lack of detailed descriptions or the desire to wait until within the bounds of marriage does not mean that the Twilight vampires are less sexual beings than humans or other vampire legends.

One more thing: Let's not forget that vampires are not real! Vampires are legendary creatures, subject to the imagination of each author or artist who envisions them. An author should be celebrated rather than scorned for looking outside the box of plastic fangs.

What do you think? Have you read any other books where humans are incapable of destroying vampires?