There are four types of people in the world: the ones who like Harry Potter, who are the dweebs; the ones who like Twilight, who are the emos; the ones who like both, which would be the crossover whores; and the ones who don’t like either of them because they don’t know what a good book is when they see one (Harry Potter, not Twilight). When I first heard about the Twilight books, people were saying that if I liked Harry Potter, I would like them. And I did, for the next two years. Then all these comparisons came rolling out from the press, as well as from everyone who has read both, and I was disturbed. Harry Potter is better than Twilight for several reasons (fourteen actually).
In Harry Potter, we see a boy whose parents were killed, by a dark wizard, Voldemort, who is so evil that everyone fears to say his name. After he survives the killing curse, he is sent to live with his aunt, uncle, and cousin (Petunia, Vernon, and Dudley), where he is abused by negligence. He is considered an outcast, not only by the Dursleys, but also the world outside of the house. People hate him because they are either afraid of Dudley, or because he can do weird things to anyone or anything, without even touching them. At the stroke of midnight leading up to his eleventh birthday, he finds out that he is a wizard, that he can go to a school for magical people, and that he had been lied to almost his whole life.
Harry leaves the Dursleys to shop for everything that he will need for Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. He finds out that he is in an alternate universe that only wizards can enter, and that muggles don’t know exist. He goes through there, gets all his stuff, including an eleven inch supple wood wand, with a single tail feather of a phoenix, which people think is curios when they find out that his wand shares the same core as Voldemort, who is the person who tried to kill him. Arriving at Platform 9¾ is something that challenges him, as he learns that he has to run through a wall to get there. When he arrives at Hogwarts, he is awestruck at the castle, and how big it is. After he is sorted into the house of Gryffindor, he studies magic (how to charm things and how to transfigure them as well), the history of magic, how to brew potions, how to defend himself, how to read the stars, and so many other things.
Every year he goes back, not only does he have to face something in the Dark Arts, but he also has to struggle with the teenage years that are looming over his head. He is growing slowly into a man, and that growing is not made easy by all the things he has to battle. His first year, he has to pas seven obstacles (Fluffy, the Devil’s Snare, the flying keys, the chess game, the troll, the potions, and the Mirror of Erised) to get to the Sorcerer’s stone, which he is trying to save from Voldemort. He had to go down to the Chamber of Secrets, where he had to battle a basilisk, as well as the younger version of Voldemort, who had been reserved in a diary for sixty years. Third year, his Godfather, Sirius Black, escapes from Azkaban, and Harry thinks that he is out to kill him. However, he is out to reveal Peter Pettigrew, who is the man who is responsible for sending Lord Voldemort to Harry’s parents. He then is entered into the Triwizard Tournament without his own knowledge, and he has to compete, and watch as someone he knew got killed. He then had to go and rescue Sirius from the ministry, which turned out to be a trap, to get Harry to retrieve something for Voldemort. He watches as Sirius dies, and then a year later, he watches as Dumbledore is killed as well. Seventh year, he is on the run, trying to find all the horcruxes. He fights Voldemort for the last time and comes out victorious. Imagine, all that on top of human emotions, such as anger, contentment, sadness, disappointment, jealousy, and sometimes lust.. I would want to kill myself, but Harry resists that temptation.
The characters in the books are amazing. They all have something different about them. J.K. Rowling made them all different, with all different backgrounds. She introduced the plain facts about them, and then she tells different things about them so subtly in the books that we don’t even notice it. For instance, Harry has black hair, green eyes, round-rimmed glasses, and a lightning scar on his face. Ron is taller than Harry, with bright flame color hair and freckles. Hermione has the frizzy hair and the brain that is always turning, no matter what. She is the one who know everything. And Dumbledore is the man with the silver facial hair, the crooked nose, and the sparkling eyes everyone loves.
But more in depth on the characters. Harry is the savior of the wizarding world, at only fifteen months old, because Lord Voldemort was unable to kill him. He was unable to know his parents, as they died to save him. Over the years, he is trying to find out who his parents are, because he is missing that part of his life. Because of the fact that he was mistreated by the Dursleys, he hates people who mistreat other people. He doesn’t care about species, as shown when he saves Dobby from the Malfoys. At the very last battle, he is killed by Lord Voldemort, because he finds out that he must. But after his “death”, he finds out he was a horcrux, and that he can now kill Voldemort. In the end, he is free from the lingering threat over his head. He marries Ginny, and they have three kids, James Sirius, Albus Severus, and Lily Luna.
But Harry couldn’t have done it all on his own. He had the help of his best friend, Ron. He is the sixth of seven children. He has one sister and five brothers (the brothers, Bill, Charlie, Percy, Fred, and George, are all older, and his sister, Ginny, is the youngest). He becomes Harry’s best friend after an encounter on the train their first year. He helps Harry with the magical world, and in return for his friendship, Harry helps save any of the members of his family that need it. Because he is a chess whiz, he is able to help Harry past the chess obstacle. Of course, he has jealousy problems, with Harry in the Triwizard Tournament, and then with Hermione, who is going out with Viktor Krum. He is lazy when it comes to schoolwork, and he tries to either push it off till later, or make someone else do it for him. Because he has five older siblings, he thinks that if he does single things, no one will notice because of the fact that they did it first. He wants to do everything that they have done, so that he can outshine them. But he starts outshining them when he starts helping Harry save the world.
And even with a loyal best friend, Harry still couldn’t have done it on his own. He would still ne someone with brains, which is where Hermione comes in. Hermione is the typical know-it-all, the one who jumps in her seat when she is asked a question. She is very much like Joan of Arc, trying to stand up for what she believes in. She is always trying to show that the muggle borns deserve magical education if they have magical blood in them. She tries to rally for the house-elves, to help them get payment, sick leave, and vacations. She shows women in a bad aspect, as she is very often moody, and she also short with Harry and Ron. Because of her smarts, she was able to take ten classes in her third year, needing to go back in time to take some of them. She is only to break the rules only to prevent crimes. Over the years, she loosens up, and she starts to fall for Ron, and she hates him for dating Lavender Brown. Of course, they get together after the war, get married, and have two kids, Rose and Hugo.
They all have their headmaster, who informs them of everything. He is like a father to Harry after starting Hogwarts. He watches over Harry for six years before his death. He is wise and benevolent, and he always gives second chances, even if people aren’t very deserving. He always helps the trio, and gives them hints. He even gives them permission to break the rules sometimes. Because he was one of Voldemort’s teachers at Hogwarts, he was able to tell Harry all there was to him, so that Harry could hopefully defeat him in the end. When Dumbledore is killed, Harry, Ron, Hermione, and many others are torn, as he is the father or grandfather that they never had. In fact, he seems so much like that to the people who are reading the books.
The reason that they all go through this is because they pretty much signed up for it. “You might belong in Gryffindor, where dwell the brave at heart. Their daring, nerve and chivalry set Gryffindors apart.” By asking the sorting hat to sort him into anything other than Slytherin, he was placed in Gryffindor, the land of the brave. Also, by being born to Lily and James Potter, who defied Lord Voldemort three times (“The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches...Born to those who have thrice defied him, born as the seventh month dies...and the Dark Lord will mark him as his equal, but he will have power the Dark Lord knows not...and either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives....”). Hermione and Ron signed onto it when they became friends with, Dumbledore had always been targeted, as he was the only one that Voldemort ever feared.
However, the Twilight saga is very different from that. It is a very boring set of books. Stephenie Meyer adds no depth to Se makes it is set in Forks, Washington, which is a real town. It occasionally goes out of town, but rarely. It is about a girl with low self-esteem, named Bella, who moves to Forks, because she wants her mother to be happy. She meets a group of beautiful people, and falls in love with one of them, Edward, who she constantly describes as “beautiful, and perfect”. She finds out he is a vampire, and she runs towards him, rather than away. She falls in love with him because of his beauty, and because he resists the temptation to eat her like an animal. They go through trials, such as another vampire hunting her, their breakup, a group of newborn vampires who want to kill her, and the vampire government who wants to kill them because of an illegal child.
The thing I abhor about this book is that Bella has such a low view of herself, and yet Edward stays with her, and goes back to her after their relationship ends. She takes him back, and about three months, they get married. And she gets impregnated. Edward drinks animal blood, not human blood, and he sparkles. He bloody sparkles. The self-esteem of any and all vampires went down about twenty-hundred-million notches with this book. I want to clear something up while I am talking about it. Vampires do not glitter. They do not sparkle. They eat HUMANS, and not animals. And they have no hormones, because they all DIED when they were turned into bloodsuckers. A good friend of mine, who I will keep anonymous, said to me one day, “If Spike (from Buffy the Vampire Slayer) every met Edward, he would say, ‘Edward, you are a fruit. You are a fairy. You are pathetic.’ And then he would kill him.
The characters in Twilight are very…two-dimensional and unintelligent. And so is the story, but that is not the point of this paragraph. Bella is the very worst. She is a whore in my opinion. She may not sleep with every man in the book, but between two men, she is a love whore. She loves Edward, and then she starts to love Jacob, and then Edward comes back and she goes with him. Then she marries Edward, and she still tells Jacob she loves him. Then there’s the self-esteem issue. She thinks she is the ugliest girl ever, which I really don’t doubt, yet Edward still loves her. She complains all the bloody time, and yet she attracts people to her. For someone with super sight and hearing, he is really dumb.
Edward is supposed to be a man, but he sparkles, and that just lowered the idea of men in general. I mean, I’m sure it’s somewhat pretty, but it’s just not okay. He has all these abilities, but he is with Bella, who is less than he deserves. In life, you are supposed to find the one who is like you in every way, and right for you in every way possible, but he is just settling. But I guess that’s just how the old-fashioned people do it. He said he left her to find Victoria, and that he was miserable, but I think that is just a lie. If he was the best at everything, he should have been able to find her almost instantly, instead of dragging it on. And we only see one side of Edward is one who loves Bella. Stephenie Meyer gives him no other personality trait.
And last but not least, we have Jacob, the kid who comforts Bella, and falls in love with her all at the same time, after Edward leaves her. He is a nicer person at first, but then he turns into a bloody werewolf who isn’t really a werewolf, but a “shape-shifter”, he becomes more cynical. He helps the people of La Push, and Bella against the vampires, although there is no real purpose for it, since he sucks at it, the vamps are gone, and Bella doesn’t want him to. But I guess persistent people get what they want, but not in this case. And then he imprints on Bella’s baby who isn’t really a baby, because the father has no hormones, so it doesn’t count as a baby.
In a survey, in which I asked ten very intelligent women, the result was, Harry Potter: nine, and Twilight, one. A few people allowed me to quote them. One was by Natalie Richards, who said, “I am frankly appalled at the thought of being a Twilight obsessee.” Then from the biggest Harry Potter fan (who wishes to remain anonymous), who explained, “I appreciate the Harry Potter series for both its complex thought, continuity, and its three dimensional characters. In comparison, Twilight contains little originality, and has very shallow characters.” Then I got another one from another anonymous fan, who told me, “Harry Potter provides a depth and a storyline that Twilight can’t even come close to. Twilight is just a sweet fluffy book that is fun to read, but doesn’t challenge the mind or the imagination.” Another from someone who offered the statement, “Twilight is just creepy and weird.” And one last person states, “Anyone who sparkles is shallow.” However, Samantha Showers argues, “The movie kept me interested. It wasn’t predictable for me.” Unfortunately for you, Samantha, I agree with the Harry Potter fans, and here is why:
When I read a book, if it is too much about religion, and it is blasting in your face, I set it down. If it is subtle, and I can’t tell unless someone tells me, I read it. That’s why Christian undertones are much better than Christian overtones. In the books, Harry Potter is seen as a Christ-like figure. He goes around, and he has followers who think that he is the best thing since sliced bread. And then we have Voldemort, whom everyone fears, because of what happened last time he was in power. That is our Satanic symbol. They battle in the end, and Harry wins. But at the end of each day, he is still the teenager who is viewed as too young to have to deal with any of those things. And that is all subtle, so it seems like a real story, so it’s not as big of a deal. But for Twilight, we see that Meyer has made it a campaign for abstinence, condoms, and all that fun stuff. She is putting the message in every word she breathes and speaks. It’s just too much.
There is a quote by a famous person (from Harry Potter, of course), that states, “If you want to know what a man’s like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.” This has a lot to do with the fans as well, seeing as they are inferior to the books. The fans of the Harry Potter books are the types of people who sit in the dark corners of their high schools and play Dungeons and Dragons with their other dweeb friends. They love Lord of the Rings, and they almost always roleplay something that has to do with it. However, Twilight fans are people who sit in the corners all alone and cut their wrists because a lover left them. They sympathize with Bella because she was left. That leaves all of them, including Bella, crying about their miserable existence in “a world that could never understand”.
In this world, there are two types of schools, schools for magical people, and, well, schools for non-magical people. The magical people go to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. They learn magic, when to use it, potions, and they have fun. They get to leave their families and hang out with friends for ten months, should they so choose. And for us readers, we get to escape to a place where the magic captures our imagination, and it twists it, so we start using Harry Potter vocabulary, such as “muggles”, “Quidditch”, “Voldemort”, and all the spells that it offers. However, Twilight is set in a dreary, rainy place, in an actual city called Forks, which seems to be just about as boring as the real city. It has absolutely no diversity at all. The story that she places there is not very well thought with at all.
Fairy tales are the bomb. They’re what we grew up with, and pretty much what Rowling alludes to in her works. She knows that there were species of what she added in her books, before she added them in her books, so she knows they’re not her works, and she’s admitting it. She is putting old things in her book, like mermaids, gnomes, wizards, centaurs, and so many other things, but she is also adding to them things like languages, habits, places that they might live. And she is also adding her own creatures as well. Meyer doesn’t seem to understand that rule, as she turned her main vampires into things that suck animals’ blood, and not humans, and things that, once again I need to mention it, sparkle. That just ruined my idea of vampires as a whole.
When I was in high school, I hated it, because my teachers were always so happy, which made me feel like they were trying to dumb themselves down to talk to me, which is stupid. Stephenie Meyer does that in her books. “Meyer makes it obvious that her characters are smarter than me without trying, prettier than me without wanting to be, and just better than me in every way possible.” It’s true, I am pretty sure that I am smart, because I got into college, and there’s the famous quote, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” by Plato. But in Harry Potter, Rowling, makes the kids just like us. They go through these phases in their lives, such as when they feel happy, excited, anxious, or smart, and when they feel scared, angry, upset, stupid, and ridiculous. That makes them seem more real, and it makes them like our friends.
Like I said in the first paragraph, people who read both Harry Potter and Twilight are crossover whores. It’s the exact same with actors who are in Harry Potter, then Twilight. This statement goes for Rob Pattinson (of whom his fans lovingly call RPattz, an adorably disgusting name that makes me want to vomit), who is Twilight’s very own Edward Cullen, and Harry Potter’s Cedric Diggory. In Harry Potter, he plays Cedric, just as he should, as a noble boy who returns Harry’s favors. He is a hard-working Hufflepuff, who would be proud to see what his death had helped. However, in Twilight, Robert plays Edward Cullen, and he adds a rather cold nature to it. And I don’t just mean skin-wise. He looks constipated, almost as if it’s Bella that’s making him sick. His hair makes him look like he killed a rat, cut off its tail, and just stuck it on his head. What happened to the boy who was so noble? Was it because he became Americanized? Or was the lead role too much for him?
In the fifties, they had really bad special effects. They thought it was good, but when you could see the microphone for someone to speak into, or the string holding something up…or even the hazy look of it, then you know it’s bad quality. In Twilight, you can see the haziness of everything blended into something else. Look at the sparkling faces, which look like sweat. Or when someone is running really fast, and you can see where they are, then it’s got to be bad. That’s what Twilight is. With the first two Harry Potter movies, the special effects weren’t the best, but it was definitely got better in time. Watch the fifth movie, with the battle between Dumbledore and Voldemort, or the scene in the sixth one, with the fire in the tunnel. Those scenes are amazing. They own it, whereas Twilight is still pulling special effects from the toilet in an outhouse.
When it comes to boys, they want girls who don’t throw themselves at his feet. Trust me, I have talked to men about this. They want girls to play hard-to get. Sure, a flirty girl is good, but a flirty girl, who reaches in…and then out at the last second are the best. They are playing hard-to-get. Hermione is that very type of girl. We’ve watched her grow from the little bossy know-it-all, to the mature, wide-eyed witch. She makes the men like Ron ask her if she’s barking mad, and the men like Viktor want her a lot more than anyone else. “Playing hard to get is part of the dating game, not to mention the part that makes it fun.” Bella is just…she throws herself at Edward, and instead of him throwing her back, he just lets her stay where she is. For some reason, he finds her hot. Although, after a while, I am sure that he probably regrets it. Yeah, Kristen Stewart has had her moments…but Emma has had more.
Death happens. It happens to us when we least expect it. And Rowling knows that. That’s the most prominent theme in the last four books, is that people die. Fred, Mad-Eye, Tonks, Lupin, and Cedric Diggory all died for the cause. The death in the books shows that they died for something, and not so that people could just do nothing. They showed that there was a war, and battles, which is also a part of life. The theme of Meyer’s book is mainly eternal life, but for each book there is also another theme. But the main thing I am talking about is the eternal life bit. It seems like she is saying that we have to be a vampire, or be smart, or be beautiful, in order to have eternal life. And that is the most shallow thing I have ever heard. As much as I would like to live forever, I wouldn’t want a bite and a seizure to have that. And I don’t want to have to drink blood just for it.
All through high school, I was to use different words that mean the same as something else. Rowling knows it. She uses “fury”, “hatred”, “anger”, and “rage” for something, and “happy”, content”, “delighted”, and “ecstatic”. You always know that you can learn more words when you read Harry Potter. But with Twilight, you know that the only word Shephenie knows is beautiful. “Hesitantly, always afraid, even now, that he would disappear like a mirage, too beautiful to be real….He’d never been less human, or less beautiful….His beauty stunned my mind, -- it was too much, an excess I couldn’t grow accustomed to…” There are one hundred sixty-five references to beautiful, only in the first book. These go to total different parts of his body, but it is still the same. It’s exhausting. Oh, sorry, Meyer, I meant to say, beautifully exhausting.
Remember how in the third book Bella tried to punch out Jacob because he kissed her? And how she broke her hand because of it? Well, that would never happen to Ginny Weasley, because she is tough. She knows how to fight, and how to hold her own in a fight. She has to, seeing as she has six brothers, all of whom are older than her. The only time she was weak was when she was being possessed by Voldemort, and even then, she was trying to fight him off. But Bella cannot hold her own. She’s really only an ungrateful shrew who just stands and tries and fails to look “pretty” through the whole series, while sitting in the corner, sulking about everything that goes on.
The one thing that makes a book popular is all on who they are sold to. The Harry Potter books are aimed towards everyone, which means that my dead grandparents could pick it up, and they would love it. Assuming I were to have kids some day, I could give the series to them, and hopefully they would love it. But Twilight is for the teenage girls who love a good romance. They want it to turn out good, and it does, and so they are just so happy. But I can’t give it to my dead grandparents, seeing as it’s not for them. They would probably want to try and set the book on fire, as to not have to read it anymore. And if I were to ever have kids, I would make sure never to give it to them.
Apparently the reason that Twilight is better than Harry Potter is because it’s an epic love story??? And I guess I can see that…but wait…um…no…the most romantic scene is at the end of the entire series when Bella opens up her mind to Edward to show she really loves him.
“It still wasn’t anywhere as easy as shielding other people along with myself. I felt the elastic recoil again as my shield fought to protect me. I had to strain to push it entirely away from me; it took all of my focus.
“Bella,” Edward whispered in shock.
I knew it was working then, so I concentrated even harder, dredging up specific memories I’d saved for this moment, letting them flood my mind, and hopefully his as well.”
The only good thing about Twilight is that we get all the stories that are written by the fan, which sometimes turn out to be better than the actual novel. They don’t have all these conventions for them, and they don’t have a museum for it yet. They have more substance in these fan-made stories, and the characters are much better than that of what Meyer has created. It’s sad, because Meyer should have done that, seeing as she went to one of the best schools in the state. But apparently that means just a load of tish-tosh right now.
Harry Potter has that exact same thing with the fans being able to write the stories, but they won’t ever really be better than the original, because that is pretty much impossible. Then we have conferences, such as Infinitus, LeakyCon, Accio 2005, Azkatraz, and Collectormania. Then we have things like A Very Potter Musical, which is the parody of Harry Potter in musical form. Then there is Wrock, which is the Wizarding rock. There are bands such as The Ministry of Magic, the Minerva McGonagalls, The Aurors, and The Bat Bogey Hexes. And we have all these books analyzing the Harry Potter books, as well as other aspects of the series.
Your argument is invalid. (:
