twi-why?

I live with two fellow VISTAs in my West Virginia house, and since one of them is a soccer nut and the other a self-professed "Twihard" (but only the films, thank you very much) I pretty much laughed my behind off when this showed up last week.  I shared the heck out of it on Google, and quoted it to many people, and thought that would be the end of it.  Little did I know.

Despite the fact that my Twihard roomie (we'll call her Kappa) has already seen Eclipse (and drove 2 hours through the mountains to do so), my other roomie (who we'll call Stitch) rented Twilight and New Moon so that she'd have some background before going with Kappa to see the new one.  I chose to read over watching Twilight, but tonight found myself at ground zero for the New Moon viewing.  Why not, I figured.  Aside from a few exploratory excerpts, I've stayed at least 10 feet from the books since the craze hit, but what harm could watching a movie do?  Perhaps I'd find myself swayed and decide to give the books another try.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.  I mean, my God.  First of all, just to get it out of the way, I am Team Jacob all the way.  It's mostly Team Not-Edward (I've got nothing for respect for Robert Pattison, but MY GOD he plays a creepoid in these movies), but will freely admit to being rather fond of the Jacob character.  Fond enough that I wish he'd find himself a girl willing to kiss him on the goddamn mouth rather than just lead him on and flail her arms about like a brain-dead turkey.  I knew from the moment he entered the film that he would be getting his heart stomped on and that it would piss me off.*  And yes, I'm not going to lie, tt doesn't hurt that Taylor Lautner looks the way he does (as Kappa put it, she'd never before understood the guys who were thrilled when the Olsen twins turned 18).  But our (Stitch's and mine) real beef was with the girl herself, Bella Swan.

I met a brood of Bantam chicks on Saturday at the farmers market with a greater collective intellect than that girl, I swear.  She's the worst example of a potential role model character I have EVER seen from a young adult series.  She's reliant entirely on the men in her life, not only to keep her alive, but to keep her from killing herself.  I'm surprised she manages to stand in the rain without drowning.  I can see how a dude with a white knight complex the size of Canada would go for her, but what attracts female readers/viewers to the series?**  I spent half the movie wanting to smack her, and the other half wanting to smack Stephanie Meyer.  If it's an escapist thing, that's all well and good, but I can recommend a half-dozen romance novelists off the top of my head who can write circles around Meyer, and throw in some heroines with brain function greater than that of a pickle and, you know, SPINE, to boot.  Damsel in distress does not necessarily equal automatic moron.  Just sayin'.  Got a thing for vampires and/or werewolves?  That's cool, I can supply writers of those, as well.

Just...jeez.  How did we go from the craze over Harry Potter, which were intelligent, well-written books, to this?

*If you're interested, I recommend this highly intelligent article about how Jacob was doomed to lose in Stephanie Meyer's universe.  I read and loved it even before I watched the film.

**Aside from those there to see Taylor Lautner shirtless.  Which, by the by, is the second thing to pop up in the auto-complete when you start to type his name into Google.