Entry tags:

in ur novel eatin ur book, publishing, rant

Grow your own imaginations, damn it!
Dragging this out because it's suddenly become more pertinent . . .


I remember when the HBO series True Blood first hit the air. Some morons who’d apparently never read anything other than Twilight were freaking out in the IMDB forums and the online press release comment pages about how Charlaine Harris, author of the Sookie Stackhouse novels (the base series for True Blood), had ripped off Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight.

This confused the hell out of me because I knew Twilight came out in ’05, while Harris’s first Southern Vampire book, Dead Until Dark, came out five years before. But the mentions of True Blood reminded me of how I first found Harris—how I picked up Dead Until Dark back in ’01, sat down in the bookstore’s aisle, and read the whole thing there on the floor. So sometime after the show'd started (and while all the crazed Twitards were running amok, panting open-mouthed over movie posters and attacking anti-fans and shrilling that they love Edward and that Meyer was the most bestest, most original author to ever type with one hand), I went back to Sookie.

What I found doesn’t implicate that Meyer, no matter what she's said, has never read other vampire fiction. It instead seems to indicate some extensive familiarity—with Harris's series in particular.

Meyer’s lead squee-inducing male character, Edward, is a telepathic vampire who hears people’s thoughts all the time & who’s driven nuts by them. Then he meets Bella, whose thoughts he can’t hear. Then he saves her life a few hundred times and they get together.

Harris’s lead female character, Sookie, is a telepathic waitress who hears people’s thoughts all the time & who’s driven nuts by them. (The people around her think she's crazy, as she's perpetually distracted.) Then Bill the vampire walks into the bar, and . . . miracle of miracles, she can’t hear him thinking. Then they save each other's lives, fight crime, and get together.

Bella is invulnerable to vampiric mental powers like glamoring/vampire hypnotism. So is Sookie.

Jasper from Twilight was a Confederate soldier. So was the main vamp squeeze from Dead Until Dark, Bill.

SMeyer’s vampires sparkle in the sunlight ETA: and in chapter 7 of Twilight there's mention made of Edward glowing. Harris’s vampires don’t sparkle—they actually catch on fire in the sunlight—but they glow to Sookie’s vision.

The alternate love interest in the Twilight series is Jacob, the black-haired motorcycle-riding (and -fixing) werewolf from a blue-collar Lamanite family. He starts off close to Bella’s height and size, but later turns into a huge built guy who's physically in his mid-to-late twenties. The farthest he and Bella go is non-con and dub-con rape kissing. The alternate love interest in Dead Until Dark(’01) is Sam, a shapeshifter of close to Sookie’s height and size who turns into a collie. Later, in Club Dead (’03), the “big as a boulder, with biceps that I could do pull-ups on”(p.59) black-haired mid-to-late-twenties blue-collar werewolf Alcide shows up to be an extra love interest and to help protect Sookie from biker gang werewolves. (Harris's werewolves canonically gravitate towards blue-collar jobs or biker gangs, [or in pretend-love-interest Tray Dawson's case, motorcycle repair], being the bruisers of the 'shifter world.) Both of these relationships pretty much stay put at (consensual) kissing.

Jacob’s human nature is set up as contrary to the vampires’ in that he’s capable of eating the normal food Bella cooks for him, living a normal human life, and of possibly having a family with her. Sookie cooks for and considers Alcide in the same way—especially after thinking over how she and Bill couldn't ever have a real breakfast as a couple:

This was the way life was supposed to be, for normal people. It was morning, time to get up and work, time for a woman to cook breakfast for a man, if he had to go out and earn. This big rough man was eating real food. He almost certainly had a pickup truck sitting out in front of my house.

Of course, he was a werewolf. But a Were could live a more close-to-human life than a vampire. (p.58, Club Dead)

Werewolves run a higher body temperature than humans in both series, and being a full were-critter is hereditary. (The first mention I remember of the temperature thing in Harris’s series is Club Dead; s2 of True Blood drops that almost immediately after they had to change the following scene to a doctor saving Sookie from poisoning.)

In Twilight, Bella gets attacked by a vampire, and another vampire has to suck that one’s venom out to save her life. In the beginning of Living Dead in Dallas(‘02) Sookie gets attacked and poisoned by a maenad. Vampires have to suck out the poison—and almost all her blood—to save her life.

Some of Twilight's vampires develop a special talent upon being vampirized: becoming Sookie telepathy, "beauty" wat, being Lily Potter, so on. So do Harris's: Some can fly, one has super-coagulating saliva, some can glamour people, Bill has a photographic memory, Stan can telepathically contact other vampires, and so on. (See: Living Dead in Dallas, '02.)

Both Bella and Sookie end up drinking blood, despite Bella's being melodramatically averse to the stuff. Bella takes hers from a sippy cup (supposedly without knowing what it was) as her doombaby couldn't just want a fucking iron-plus prenatal multivitamin. Sookie ends up mixing her (synthetic) blood with apple juice in a "big opaque plastic mug" (Club Dead, p.230) to try to mask the flavor, as she's just been severely wounded and the vampires Eric and Bill think ingesting blood (instead of getting an IV) will help her heal faster. The nature of the human digestive system doesn't make much sense of any of this. (Vitamins! More balance! Less vomit! Now in tasty gummy bear form!)

But on the blood theme: Dead to the World (‘04) introduces fairies, whose blood is so ridiculously intoxicating to vampires that they’ll stalk and stare at one like a starving doggie after a steak dinner. Sookie’s an eighth fairy (as of Definitely Dead, '06), which is the explanation for her blood tasting “different” (Dead Until Dark, '01, p.32). Bill goes on about this a number of times in Dead Until Dark alone. Bella’s blood, though, is the ultra-specialest of all, smelling like freesia(?!) and being so ridiculously intoxicating to Edward that he can’t stand it and must run off to Alaska in order to not bite her. The reason she smells so wonderful? Fuck if I know.


There’s some gigantic differences, though. Bella sticks with the first guy to catch her eye, no matter how many times he belittles her or how his treatment of her would set off a dozen red warning flags for any social worker worth their salt. Sookie, though, has enough of a spine to call Bill out when he starts acting like a possessive cock and enough of a sense of self to not be happy being treated like someone’s property. Bella's a perpetual victim; Sookie quickly gets sick of being put in the hospital, and'll grab a chain, stick, or shotgun and give as good as she gets. Bella’s a-okay with being telepathically stalked, but Sookie gets weirded out when it comes to tasting a vampire’s blood (which means he’ll always be able to sense her presence and emotions). Bella thinks it’s perfectly okay to take new cars and new credit cards and ill-gotten college acceptance letters from her sparkly wonder. When Bill tries to have Sookie use him as an all-expenses-paid account, though, she flips out on him—because she understands that it’s a shitty thing to be a kept woman, that it’s an awful imbalance of power and just leads to trouble.

And Sookie? Knows to use protection when she's with a guy who’s capable of getting her pregnant. (Harris’s vampires are really sterile—really—and Harris herself has said that fans won’t have to worry about a half-vampire doombaby. I'm not sure if she said this before or after SMeyer's last book.) Bella’s not doing so reeks of both stupidity and irresponsibility—though hey, it’s Bella. Bella perpetually puts herself at risk with a complete lack of forethought, unbelievable incompetence, and/or in order to be close to & be saved by Edward. Sookie ends up at risk while solving mysteries—but she’s got the sense to bring backup. Then we get Eric the Viking in spandex, or Bubba, and I lol forever.

But then again, Harris has Sookie’s relationships grounded firmly in the reality of how things build, break, and sometimes outright combust; in how sometimes the guy you thought was awesome acts like a douchebag with outdated morals, or lies to you, or cheats, or can't handle starting something new because of his psycho ex, or is sometimes just a gigantic epic jerk. Meyer? Not so much.



I don’t doubt I could find more if I sat down and read the Twilight trainwreck from one end to the next, and I'm certain this isn't the only series she's "borrowed" from, but I can’t stomach Meyer’s writing for long enough (Chagrin! Chagrin! Fucking dazzling chagrin! “ZOMG, everyone is always watching me even though I’m so plain!” "Silly little girl, why don’t you leave the problem-solving and decision-making and thinking to the big strong men?" Dust moats!) to go in and intensively search. So I’ll stick with what I’ve been saying: If you liked Twilight, go read Charlaine Harris. If you didn’t like Twilight, go read Charlaine Harris. She did it first and she did it better.


And now for the new, pertinent-today part . . .


Stephenie Meyer totally ripped off Charlaine Harris; there's no two ways about it. And surprise! Just like that other YA-section plagiarist, Kaavya Viswanathan, she's a fan of Cassie Clare's. As a matter of fact, the wonderful Borders email I got declares that Meyer is one of Clare's "biggest" fans. The Meyer quote that's slapped on the front of Clare's third book is this: "The Mortal Instruments series is a story world that I love to live in."

Read it closely. Not a world she would love to live in. A world she's currently living in. The extent to which Meyer's terrible wording choice echoes Clare's frequently terrible wording choices/nuked descriptions made me laugh a bit . . . as I cringed and died a little inside, of course. They really are two of a kind.



The question remains, though: Is this flood of irony uproariously hilarious, or stupendously depressing? I'm leaning towards the latter.