By Ashleigh Johnson

Daily Titan Copy Editor

I have come to a realization about why I hate everyone: It’s because everyone likes “Twilight.” OK, not everyone, and in all fairness some “Twilight” fans are at least able to admit that the series is flawed.

Allow me to rephrase my first sentence: I don’t hate everyone, only die-hard “Twilight” fans. You know, profoundly stupid people. I hate them. The end.

Stephenie Meyer’s rise to fame is nothing short of a Cinderella story. A stay-at-home mom had a wet dream, presumably after a night spent weeping openly because no one commented on her latest LiveJournal post.

Some well-meaning individual convinced her to write the details of her dream down because the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

So she did. Then another one of her enablers – maybe they thought that they were playing a hilarious practical joke on the publishing industry, or maybe their father was killed by a falling copy of “East of Eden” and they swore revenge against literature in general, I don’t know – suggested that Meyer send her manuscript to publishers.

No one knows for sure what happened on that fateful day – some say that a high-powered publisher’s black tar heroin bucket ran dry and he, knowing that teenage girls will read anything that involves angst and glitter, made an unholy pact with the elder gods (Oprah and a drug dealer with a heart of gold named Skidz) to bring the book into the public consciousness in exchange for another hit. Still, others claim that God simply has a warped sense of humor.

Whatever the reason, editors carefully wiped the spunk off the manuscript’s cover, unstuck the pages from one another (the Count had a lengthy segment on “Sesame Street” while Meyer was writing) and did their best to piece together some semblance of a plot.

The book was marketed, sold and, long story short, Meyer now has enough money to maintain her own plastic-fanged harem and have me killed if this column gets into the wrong hands.

Here’s one of the problems I have when reading most recent books about vampires (anything by Anne Rice springs to mind): I spend most of the book just wishing that they’d lighten the hell up.

OK, I get it, you’re an undead creature of the night. Life is so hard for you because you have awesome superpowers, but you can’t see the sun and you cut yourself to feel something, blah blah blah … If life is so fair, why do roses have thorns?

C’mon, dude, you’re an immortal creature with supernatural abilities. Quit whining and make with the awesome. By the time I’m about halfway through one of these books, I’m practically foaming at the mouth, screaming at the unresponsive pages for the vampire to eat someone.

In regards to “Twilight” specifically, the book is about a teenage girl who falls in love with a dude who is probably legally obligated to introduce himself to his neighbors and inform them he’s a registered sex offender. And then there’s the fact that the primary d-bag vampire, Edward, is quite open with the fact that he wants to murder his love interest Bella, who only responds with, and I’m paraphrasing here: “OMG, iluvyoutoo! Kthanxbai lol!”

All of the characters are boring, whiny and one-dimensional, to the point where I wanted to pull a Meyer and create my own self-insert character who would then go all Rambo on their asses. Or at the very least, backhand them, I’m easy going like that.

Meyer doesn’t deserve her fame. The story she told (It’s not a saga, shut up before I smack you) is nothing special. Her writing style is sub-par at best. Her characters are unlikable twits.

To quote horror writer Stephen King, “Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good.”