On Stories That Should Have Never Been A Big Deal

There are three stories that I was thinking about/came across at the library today. All three of them went through a super big hype, and all three of them did not deserve it.

#1 Twilight

Sure a teen story about falling in love is fine. Vampires are fine. A series where misfits find comfort in belonging with each other is great. Twilight had some fantastic potential. I'll even admit that the end part was pretty exciting, when they were running from James and being hunted and stuff.

But it took 300 pages to get there. 300 pages in which an emo girl falls for an emo guy vampire and their relationship is entirely based on smelling each other. Entirely. Don't believe me? Read the meadow scene. Seriously, Edward is always "enjoying the bouquet" because Bella is so very tasty. And Bella is obsessed with two things: His intoxicating aroma, and his crooked smile.

The two of them never do anything besides sitting together and rubbing their faces on each other. They don't have any mutual hobbies or see any movies, and their conversations sometimes even cover suicide.

Bottom line: It's a darn good thing for both of them that they end up as immortals because if two regularly aging people had a relationship that shallow, they'd be divorced as soon as the physical appeal started to wear off. Not to mention the very prominent "you can't control who you love" theme, which is such a crock.

#2 Brokeback Mountain

The entire reason for the hype on this movie is the look-at-us-being-all-risque-and-making-a-blatently-gay-movie factor. The plot itself is nothing that hasn't been done about a billion times before.

For those of you who don't know the story, basically there are two guys who get hired by a sheep rancher to herd sheep for the summer. They get super drunk one night, get all over each other, and spend the rest of the summer being extra friendly.

The summer ends, they go their separate ways, and both get married. One to this girl he's been engaged to for forever (meaning that his gay fling was totally cheating on her), and one to a girl he meets after the summer. They spend the next 20 years meeting on and off basically being together during their fishing trips, but being too afraid to be upfront about it all, and pretending that they still love their wives. One gets divorced because of it, and doesn't even get to see his kids anymore because his wife saw the two guys making out. The other one dies.

Now, let's say that this had happened over a girl. The guy cheats on his fiance with a cowgirl, but still marries the fiance and spends 20 years having an affair with the cowgirl who he loved all along. Then she dies and he spends the rest of his life pining over her. Would anyone watch that? Probably not. It's not even interesting. There's absolutely nothing exceptional about it.

Bottom line: It doesn't matter what beliefs you have about being gay, cheating on your wife is still wrong and movies still need good plots.

# 3 The Time Traveler's Wife

Admittedly not the worst story ever, but I was sincerely disappointed with it. The entire plot is that there is a guy with a genetic defect that makes him randomly time travel for indefinite spurts of time. So his wife knows him before he knows her, because his older self travels back to see her as a kid and stuff. In the end, his travels cause him to die young.

Like I said, it could have been worse, but that's all there was to it, and I was bored. Maybe the book was better. I don't know. I didn't like the story line enough to waste my life reading the book version of it. But I do admit that some of the things I hated about it were probably a result of bad filming.

The thing that annoyed me the most was the dying part. And not because I was sad about it. It was because of complete lack of point. Killing of characters to produce emotion can be very effective, but not if it's totally avoidable and serves no purpose. THE only reason he died was to try to make people cry when the wife was left alone.

And anyway, when he dies at the end, he accidentally shows up in the woods where his dad and dad-in-law are hunting. They see a deer near him, shoot, and hit him instead of the deer just as he travels back. Hopefully it's not so bad in the book, but in the movie he just stares from the deer to the hunters like 60 times for what felt like 5 whole minutes. If I had enough time to figure out what was happening and shout at the tv 12 times to drop to the ground, he sure had enough time to figure it out even if he was a complete moron. But no. He just stood there staring like an idiot.

Okay, I'm done. I could keep going on why I didn't like the story. There are other reasons. But I won't. Needless to say, it got really, really hyped up for me, and so I was way disappointed when I saw it.

I've decided that some girls like lovey dovey stories with weak plots just for the mush in the exact same way that some guys like action movies with no plot just for the explosions. Some things between genders aren't so different after all.