As I'm still feeling extremely 'don't want to think about this LALALALA I'M NOT LISTENING' as far as RL goes at the moment, here is one of the things that has been distracting me over the last few days.

See, Twilight fandom is eating itself and I have been avidly following THE SPARKLEGEDDON. If anything makes me want to read these books, it's seeing half the fandom go into meltdown over Breaking Dawn. This could be a million bucks' worth of free publicity if it wasn't for one thing: I refuse to buy these horrible books new. I'll buy them secondhand or get them from the library. In fact, I got Twilight yesterday, it's fantastic reading for when I want to facepalm.

The wank is a thing of beauty. First we got the inevitable spoilers pre-release. Cue WTFery, lashings of fan denial of the 'I KNOW Stephanie Meyer and she'd NEVER write anything like THAT!' school and, as the spoilers start to look more and more authentic in the run-up to release, cries of 'oh, this is gonna be good' from the wankas. Unfortunately, every rose has its thorns and this comes with a small, yet rather embarrassing outbreak of wanking inside the house.

Then, of course, the damn book actually got released. Complete with the midnight bookstore parties and annoying media hype. Stephanie Meyer is touted as the new J. K. Rowling. Unfortunately, just before that Amazon quietly announce that J. K. Rowling's book of Wizarding fairy tales is going to be published for charity. Preorders for the Rowling book prove she never needed replacing.

Also, Breaking Dawn is revealed to have an unfortunate tendency to suck.

Of course, fun though browsing the JF writeups and boggling are, they pall in comparison to getting the tranwreckish goodness right from the source - or, at least, from Breaking Dawn's Amazon page. Terrible reviews and fans tearing into one another on the message boards? Yeah, I was there for hours. The truly sad thing is there's apparently some kind of fan campaign to make sure that there are more five-star reviews than one-star reviews, because God forbid people dislike a series and say so, too. Cue a fair amount of LEAVE STEPAHINE ALONE and reviews that can best be summed up as 'it's fantasy, it's allowed to suck!'. Ms. Meyer, the ghost of Tolkien would like a word.

To anyone who never heard of THE TWILIGHT SAGA (Now With Extra Sparkly Vampires!), all you need to know is this and this.

(If your appetite for fail has been whetted, there's more here. Also, here.)

Personally, I agree with cleolinda when she asks why, oh why the fans only got outraged by the craptacular fail of it all now. It's not like this marks a sudden decline in writing, characterization or continuity for Meyer. So why now? Twilight has always been made of fail. At least Breaking Dawn sounds like it fails so spectacularly it almost becomes a win, unlike the early stuff which just fails. I can stomach, at the very most, about two pages of Twilight at any one time before wanting to strangle Bella for being an annoying, whiny, self-absorbed Sue. At least, by the sounds of it, in Breaking Dawn she's SPESHULLY SPESHUL SPARKLYVAMPY enough to justify all the attention.

Wow. That was a lot of linkspam.

If anyone else out there actually managed to read all that without zoning out or walking off... congratulations, I guess. Here are some kittens in a bathroom playing with a roll of toilet paper.