Sunday, July 21, 2013

It took a Few Years, But....

Rebekah and I finally made it through the entire series of the Twilight movies. Painful as it was, we watched the second Breaking Dawn tonight.

Ironically, I was the first one to become intrigued with the books. After, "teen girl falls in love with a vampire" sounded like a good idea right? I remember reading a blurb about it one humid Friday afternoon in the distribution center while Rebekah and I were stuffing Sun Times Sunday inserts.

At the time, I had just grown serious about writing Bryony. Deflated, I plopped onto a work station thinking, "What a good idea. I should have written it." And then I stopped writing mine.

A couple months later, Rebekah came home with Twilight from the library. She wanted to read it in preparation for the release of the first movie. I latched onto the book and immediately knew two things: I didn't like it, and it wasn't my story. I returned to Bryony with enthusiastic fervor.

The trailer for Twilight looked okay, so I had higher hopes for the movie. I took Rebekah and one of her friends to see it; Timothy and Daniel, being good sports and laboring under the delusion Twilight was a real vampire movie, accompanied us.

The girls sat close to the screen. Timothy and I sat farther back, and Daniel had taken refuge in some remote part of the theater. As Edward was about to reveal the true reason why vampires could not tolerate sun, Timothy and I held our breaths and leaned forward. Now, we both thought, comes the gore.

Instead, we saw sparkles and heard Daniel's voice ring out, "Oh! My! God!"

Brothers have a way of keeping it real. And so do mothers writing "real" vampire stories.

For Rebekah and her best friend loved all the books and read (and re-read) them. So, I tried introducing her to vampire stories I loved.

No dice.

I enumerated all the ways the Twilight vampires didn't count as real vampire.

No dice again.

I asked her opinion on an early draft of Bryony. She loved it and couldn't wait until I could deliver a draft of Visage. Still, Rebekah persisted in her love for all things Twilight.

New Moon didn't far much better. Again, Timothy and Daniel accompanied us (Glutton for punishment?). Halfway through Eclipse, Rebekah grew bored and began playing games on her phone.

"Ah, no," I told her. "It's your turn to suffer." And I took away the phone.

And suffer she did, for I made her sit through both Breaking Dawn movies, as payback for having to sleep several years under the torture of Twilight posters hung all around the attic bedroom we sort of share.

 Granted we didn't waste any money on these last two movies at the theater (thank goodness) because we watched them on her laptop at whatever site she found that carried them.

We endured number one last fall; the showing of number two tonight concludes the series. The Twilight posters have long since come down, and Rebekah has developed a taste (so to speak) for real literature (although she still loves her manga).

She is no longer a fan of the series, as she is longer a teen girl. Rebekah will turn twenty in January. Even though we ended the adventure sharing the same opinion, the victory doesn't seem quite so victorious.

 

1 comment:

Steve Finnell said...

You are invited to follow my Christian blog