This One Card

Beware thought if you read, over-reasoning if you write

Bardelys was happily reading Stephenie Meyer's Twilight (though he had to confess a certain loss of tension as the amour progressed without so much as a spat between the love-birds) when, all of a sudden, he struck a wall.

Meyer had over-explained herself. Or rather — she had over-thought her world-building, and thought herself too clever.

Here (trying hard not to spoil things for possible future readers) is how Bardelys saw it:

Twilight is set in the Pacific Northwest in contemporary time (which is the 1990s). Actually it takes place in Eartherea — but it seems important to Meyer that her vision of Eartherea resemble Earth and our own Pacific northwest in the 1990s as much as possible. And into this dreary, cloudy, rainy contemporary landscape she brings vampires, such as she reimagines them.

Her particular 'family' of vampires eschews (for commendable moral principles) to prey upon humans. Instead, they hunt wild beasts. All well and good, until…

But why should they hunt when they can herd?

There are after all people in Africa who are well known for their cattle herds, which they raise for their milk and blood. The blood (as well as the milk) they drink raw and fresh from the living beasts.

What stops Meyer's vampires from being cattle ranchers?

At a stroke, Bardelys felt his enthusiasm for the tale deflate. It was a minor point, but it did not stop from nipping at his thoughts. Each time it did, he found himself kicked back out of the dreamscape of Eartherea. With this one card removed, the whole house of cards goes splat.

He wondered now how Meyer might have done it and held onto both the hunting and the trust of readers such as Bardelys. He suspected there must be a way. But the only way he saw ran counter to Meyer's apparent preference — she would have to let go of her sharply-focused vision of the semblance of Earth, and instead adopt a dreamy, lyrical, poetical vision — a vision such as Lord Dunsany had.

Vampires out of Fairyland would disdain common animal husbandry out of sheer principle.

And if only Meyer had mentioned that once upon a time, her monsters had raised beasts but found the practice dull, it might have won back even so prosaic a frump as Bardelys now must admit he had become.

In the end, he thought, maybe Twilight had not collapsed like a house of cards — not, at least, to the unfrumpy young girls who were its intended audience.

(Composed on pen-top Wednesday 13 August 2008)