If you take away the hideous purple prose and appalling implications regarding female sexuality, one of the Twilight series’ major failings is that its main cast is a parade of equally unlikeable people. Your female lead is so vacant that if you looked in her ear you’d see daylight, your male love interest is an emotionally uninvested non-character who needs to match his foundation more closely to his actual skin tone, and all the other vampires and werewolves are defined by singular character traits (“Compassionate!”, “Maternal!”, “Muscle-y!”, “Wears pants!”, etcetera).

Less the case with the book version but more the case with the movie version: I find myself more emotionally invested in the lives of the peripheral characters, Bella the Reader Proxy’s classmates, than I am in the central love story (also Charlie, who is a total badass and made of moustache). This is not a good thing. If you’re spending 400 pages/2 hours fixating on the least interesting part of the story, you’re taking the exact wrong approach with the plot.

I’ve come to the conclusion that Twilight would have been a much better book if written from a plural first person perspective, the collective “We” of the student body, bewildered and fascinated as they observe these two self-created social outcasts, Bella and Edward, drawn together by sex and hate and obsession, orbiting each other, spinning faster and tighter until they’re both found dead in a meadow, eternally bound together through a mutual suicide pact. End with a description of the memorial shrine outside the couple’s lockers at school.

Sadly, the publishing world has yet to take my advice on what makes good fiction and keeps on churning out vampire novels instead while Stephenie Meyer rakes in metric shit-tonnes of cash. Such is the universe.