My thoughts on the Twilight saga (and, of course, the Twilight franchise).

You know that song that you really love that they play on the radio 24/7? Like, you would bet your salary that if you turned on Z100, it would be playing? It’s a great song–you love the chorus, the bridge…hell, you even love the thirty seconds on instrumentals–but you suddenly find yourself unable to listen to it without cringing. You just can’t stand it anymore. This is exactly what happens with most Britney Spears, Taylor Swift, and Daughtry songs and pretty much explains why I can’t listen to any of the three.

I call it overplayed-syndrome.

We see this in other areas of our lives, too–for instance, the whole Tiger Woods scandal. You’d think that the world would be sick of Mr. Woods and his 10 or 11 or 5,000,000 mistresses, but humans have a natural, sick desire to focus their attention on the faults and mistakes of other humans. We like to see people screw up. It makes us feel…well, not screwed up.

I think my favorite example of this is the Twilight saga. Oh, the Twilight saga–it’s one of those things you either loathe or are totally obsessed with. There was a time not so long ago when I fell under the “obsesse” category. I loved everything that had to do with the series–I’d reread the books more than three times each and had fallen in love with Edward along with Bella. I hated the Volturi, idolized Alice, and laughed at how pathetic Jacob’s actions towards Bella were. The books ruled my world…so you could imagine how ecstatic I was when I got the word that Twilight was going to be a movie.

That’s about when the whole mess started; apparently, the promise of big-screen movie wasn’t enough. No–the public went insane. Suddenly, I couldn’t walk into a book store with seeing an Edward Cullen figurine, or go to a t-shirt store without seeing racks and racks of Twilight t-shirts and pins and gloves and cosmetics and shoes and scarfs and shit.

It drove me insane–people were suddenly idolizing Rob Pattinson instead of Edward, Taylor Lautner instead of Jacob. They were forgetting why we loved these people in the first place, and the miracle book Mrs. Meyer created that started it all. Nobody loved Twilight anymore. They loved the franchise.

It was after that when I started to see the flaws in Twilight. With the excitment and anticipation gone, I noticed things that didn’t bother me before and suddenly jumped out at me: Bella was a weak, obnoxious protagonist who couldn’t see what was right in front of her. Jacob was conceited, even though he had the most personality and was always the most realistic to me. Edward Sparkles was too…perfect. Annoyingly perfect. My love started to fade away.

And then I reread the first book, and I remembered how great of a writer Stephenie Meyer is.

What am I getting at here? Well, a lot of things. For one thing, Twilight–like Taylor Swift’s You Belong With Me–has been overdone and overplayed. And, for another, I’m fucking sick of Tiger Woods. If I hear his name one more time…*makes fist*