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Kulturzeit 2010
Jan. 19th, 2010 01:35 pmKulturzeit post, to keep track of what I read, watch, do this year. Hopefully I'll do a little better than last year, especially in the book department, but I'm such a lazy reader. The first book I finished was "The Vampire Diaries - The Struggle", a Christmas present from my dad. It's the second book of a series and it was like watching only the second episode of a 4-episode TV series. It's not like the Harry Potter books: sure, there are seven different books, but each one of them has its own main plot with a beginning, a development and an end, while having a bigger plot in the background. This novel started right in the middle of an action and ended right in the middle of another one. But I'm not blaming my father, he knows I love vampires and just wanted to get me a present I'd like.
On a meta level, it's nice to notice that the novels were written at the beginning of the '90s and the setting is pretty much the same as in the Twilight series: American high school, girl falls in love with "good" vampire and so on. But the vampires here are closer to the classic vampire image: they drink human blood, and they love it. There's also an erotic subtext that's completely missing in Twilight (I can only talk about the first book, as I refuse to read the others). There's also the eternal triangle between the human girl, the good vampire and the bad vampire (the vampires are also brothers).
So, it seems to me that Stephenie Meyer took the idea behind this series, changed a few details, made everything tamer et voilà, she got her best seller. If I was an American teenager I would probably love the Vampire Diaries series, or, at least, I'd like it much more than Twilight (sparkling vampires, for Heaven's sake!), but as a European adult, I'm not so enthusiastic. I'll stick to Anne Rice, thank you very much.
( Kulturzeit 2010 )
On a meta level, it's nice to notice that the novels were written at the beginning of the '90s and the setting is pretty much the same as in the Twilight series: American high school, girl falls in love with "good" vampire and so on. But the vampires here are closer to the classic vampire image: they drink human blood, and they love it. There's also an erotic subtext that's completely missing in Twilight (I can only talk about the first book, as I refuse to read the others). There's also the eternal triangle between the human girl, the good vampire and the bad vampire (the vampires are also brothers).
So, it seems to me that Stephenie Meyer took the idea behind this series, changed a few details, made everything tamer et voilà, she got her best seller. If I was an American teenager I would probably love the Vampire Diaries series, or, at least, I'd like it much more than Twilight (sparkling vampires, for Heaven's sake!), but as a European adult, I'm not so enthusiastic. I'll stick to Anne Rice, thank you very much.
( Kulturzeit 2010 )
