Reasoning With Vampires: New Moon
Reblogged from reasoningwithvampires
What I hate the most about New Moon: Meyer romanticized suicide.
I understand that teenagers (and grown-ups, too) have volatile emotions. A broken heart really can seem like the end of the world. People get depressed and feel like they have nothing to live for. I know.
Though I’m not a person…
Meyer apparently missed the message behind Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The play itself was meant to satirize the follies of blind love. Meyer, though, decided that the book was just the most romantic thing in the world, completely forgetting the fact the main characters killed themselves in the end. Now, there are teenage girls running around with the stupid idea that suicide for love’s sake is romantic. It’s not. Suicide isn’t romantic at all. It’s selfish, and it hurts everyone who’s close to the person. But that message didn’t come across in New Moon. Why? It’s because Meyer simply hand waved Bella’s destructive qualities. That’s not cool.
Think about it.
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Mary Shelley is one of the few authors who can pull of a deus ex machina without looking stupid. Why? She doesn’t slam it into the reader’s face. In Frankenstein, when the creature (for only the illiterate idiots call him Frankenstein) finds a giant coat in the middle of the forest that just happens to fit his massive stature, Shelley is using deus ex machina. While it’s really obvious, it doesn’t really affect the plot. Although she does use this plot device to move the plot along at times, she isn’t trying to shove the device down the reader’s throat, which makes it okay. 
Plot devices are good and all, but they shouldn’t be used to cut corners. Nobody would enjoy reading a book that doesn’t make sense. An audience’s suspension of disbelief can only be willed so much. If you’re going to work so hard to develop a story, make sure that your characters can find reasonable ways out of a situation without using cheap tricks. 
