Twilight: Enter another dumb heroine.

I read youth fiction because I find it much more intelligent than the general "women's mystery". I'm always on the lookout for a good story in this genre. On one of my trips to Barnes and Noble I picked up a copy of the first book in the Twilight series. I was told the author was a "local" so I was excited to support a local author and I'd heard many people say how much they loved the series. That is all I knew about the book when I picked it up.

I read. I waited for something to happen. I read more. Praying for something to happen. I read further telling myself that someone or something was going to hit "Bella" in the head and knock some sense into her. No such luck. I got to the end of the book and something finally did happen. Some other vampire tracked our heroine to a dance studio and, to my ever lasting chagrin, did not manage to rip her into so many pieces that the story could no longer continue.

As I've mentioned before I'm a huge fan of the Harry Potter novels. I thought for sure that the character of Hermione Granger had forever put an end to tepid, goody-goody, nonsense driven, female characters, at least in youth fiction (nothing, of course, will put an end to them in adult women's fiction). Hermione has every wondrous feminine emotion, yet she does not allow herself to be a slave to those emotions. She has spunk. She has common sense. She is intelligent. She does not spend 7 books swooning over Ron Weasley. We saw how stupid that looked when Lavender Brown spent most of her lines crooning sappily to "Won Won" and giggling like someone who might well be 3 or 4 bricks shy of a full load. Well, on second thought, let me rephrase that. The relationship between Lavender and Ron clearly showed how silly that kind of empty headed adoration looks. With the popularity of "Twilight" it's obvious that a lot of Potter fans didn't learn from that lesson.

Hermione, often quite literally, pulled both Harry and Ron out of more tight binds than I can count. She did not sit still waiting for "Won Won" or handsome and famous Harry to rescue her. Hermione is a heroine who stands on her own small feet and often saves the day. She doesn't wait for someone to tell her when to act or how to act or what to believe. Hermione LOOKS STUFF UP and researches the answers to all the problems and mysteries that plague them. Hermione was a giant leap forward in the world of fictional female heroines.

Back to "Bella", the heroine of the Twilight series, or should I say back up 50 years to the world of the feckless, wimpy, damsel-in-distress, who likens a sparkling dead guy to a "god" and spends an entire book sighing wistfully. Okay, she doesn't sigh through the entire book. She bounces back and forth between sighing and wondering if "Edward" likes her or doesn't like her and why he doesn't like her and then sighing and shivering and getting all goose pimply. I swear to you that by the end of the book, if I could have crawled into the pages I'd have killed the little dimwit off myself.

Years ago, back in the dark ages of the Reagan years, a talking Barbie caused a big stir because one of her pre-recorded lines was "Math is SOOO hard". 20 some odd years later we have "Bella", the village idiot, inspiring our young women to do nothing more than dream about, sigh over, and rely upon young men who look like gods. Back in the Reagan years we stood up to the brainless role models like Barbie. We, and Murphy Brown, battled Mr. Dan "Potatoe"-head Quayle as he waged his war against single, working mothers. Why are we, and our girls, now swooning over this "Twilight" tripe??

When faced with the dilemma of "Twilight" and "Half-Blood Prince" competing against each other this winter, Warner Bros. decided to move one of the movies clear out to next summer. In spite of all the hype, the trailers, the toys and games all set to be released in conjunction, it was "Half-blood Prince" that got knocked out of the line up. The bimbo movie for young teens won out over the story and characters of substance. What does that say about the U.S. entertainment industry? Well... it IS the industry that made Paris Hilton a star afterall.