stephenie meyer

Confessions of a Host lover

/ Lisa Asanuma / 2 Comments

thehostmovieposterThe Host is premiering in theaters tomorrow. And as someone who has been using this book to justify Stephenie Meyer to non-reader-movie-goers ever since the Twilight movies took inhumanly-beautiful vampires and made them pale-beyond-belief with whacko hair and emo lighting… well, I’m nervous.

I really, really want this movie to be good.

Really.

Aside from a few little issues that I have with The Host, the book (like the weak-sauce pipsqueak they turn the main character into in the epilogue, and Meyer’s ongoing belief that being carried around by others makes for a romantic heroine) I really love this book.

I’m the first to admit that I have a complicated opinion of Stephenie Meyer. I love the Twilight trilogy. And I hate it. I especially hate Breaking Dawn. Except for Jacob’s chapters. And Renesmee, annoyingly enough (I hate that I loved Renesmee by the end of the book). I hate that so much of Twilight is about giving up any power you have in the name of love, and how being a supernatural creature made you sterile if you are a woman. I’m fairly convinced that, at least fictionally, Stephenie Meyer hates her own gender.

But that’s all besides the fact that I love Jacob Black. I love Charlie Swan. I love Alice Cullen. And when I write these names, I’m talking about the book versions of them, which in my mind look nothing like their movie counterparts.

And, I love The Host. The love-triangle-that-isn’t appeals to me in ways that I can’t fully explain without delving into my long-ago, fanfic-obsessed days, where I reveled in stories that questioned the hows and whys of love, instead of just having the same two characters fall for each other in some new quirky way.

Maybe the thing that makes me truly worried about The Host  coming out concerns how it is being advertised absolutely everywhere online. It is trying really hard to make it as big as the Twilight movies. And it even has a few well-known actors thrown in that are legitimizing it.

But I don’t know what I will do if the movie doesn’t do the book justice. I don’t care if it’s spot-on-accurate; I gave that wist up with Harry Potter. I just want the feel to be the same. And if this movie is bad? If it is as bad as the Twilight movies, so that it almost becomes its own parody? Will I have as much difficulty separating the badness of the movie from the goodness of the book, the way I do with Twilight now?

Because so far as I’ve seen, the movie doesn’t feel like the book. I can’t tell yet if it’s made a mockery of it. But Jared is a little too pretty, and they’re showing him kissing her a little too much, and Jamie—Melody and Wanderer’s MAIN priority in the book—has not been mentioned at all.

These things, they worry me. I want to trust that this will make a decent movie… but I don’t know that I can until I see it firsthand.

What about you? Are you looking forward to The Host?

K is for Killer Instinct

/ Lisa Asanuma / 14 Comments

I’ve been trying to wrap a lot of my blogfest entries around to writing, and it took me a while to think of something that I could write about the letter K, but then it hit me.

You see, I have a secret fear when it comes to my writing… that fear being that I just don’t have the killer instinct required to be great. Villains are hard for me to write, because they involve motives that don’t always make sense to me (in an emotional way, not in a logical way). And then my other characters, my non-villains? Well… I like them. I like them too much, maybe. A part of me worries that I’ll always pull punches—that I’ll never put my toys away and play with the big girls.

This is, I think, Stephenie Meyer’s great fault. One of the Cullen clan ought to have kicked it by the end of the series. I was betting on Rosalie being killed off in Breaking Dawn. It would have packed enough of a punch, and torn Emmett to shreds—a depth of character possibly well beyond him with Meyer as his creator.

Good writers—great writers—don’t pull punches. Great writers make you feel every inch of indecision, or hurt, or loss that the character does, and lets the worst of things happen to their characters. My latest favorite author, Maggie Stiefvater, has torn my heart to pieces on more than one occasion, and by goodness do I love her for it.

I worry, though, if I’m capable of that. If I can really destroy a character I love, for the sake of good fiction. It takes a lot to take or destroy a life, even a fictional one.

I want to be able to do that, though. I’m seeing some hope in my future, as lately in plotting I’ve come across ideas that both horrified and excited me—and I think that must be the way it starts.

D is for Doctor Who

/ Lisa Asanuma / Leave a comment

Today I started watching Doctor Who with my husband. We watched the first episode, and are planning on doing an episode a day. This is his first experience with the Doctor. I myself am simply shamefully behind. And by “behind” I mean I have yet to see the last two David Tennant episodes and have yet to expose myself to the eleventh doctor.

Mainly this is because I was getting married and a little too busy to catch up on all my TV shows (of which there are multiple I’m behind on, I have to admit!) (Fandom goes by the wayside when you’re busy trying to organize a wedding and keeping financially afloat, etc.) but partially this is also because I was being very reluctant, again, to let Eleven into my life, but now that it’s been some time, and I’m getting to share the show with my hubby, I think I’ll be ready by the time we get to Eleven this go around. (Though with my luck, he won’t!)

Anyhow. For those of you not familiar with the show, the Doctor (yes, that’s his name, his full name, so far as you’re concerned) is a Time Lord, the last of an alien species who can both see and travel space and time. He does this in his TARDIS—that’s Time and Relative Dimensions in Space. He travels around both history and the universe, encountering aliens and weird situations of all types, usually running into crises, and he does the best he can to help (which is usually quite a lot, considering the fact that he’s a genius and has been around the block more than a few times.) Usually with a “companion” of the female persuasion who is full of gumption and can stand on their own feet.

I’m not going to go on and on about the show (though I do highly encourage you to watch it!) but I do want to talk about one of the bit reasons why I love the show so much, and that is its inherent message that humanity is good and capable of so much.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but in the general world of fantasy, the consensus is that humans really aren’t all that great. They’re weak, greedy, violent creatures, and there are a whole lot of fantasy races or creatures that are a whole lot “better” than them. Think about Twilight, and how Bella Swan could do absolutely nothing better than any of the vampires in the books—she was weaker, slower, had less understanding, had lower intuition, and was basically nothing in comparison to the vampires (and the wolves, to a lesser degree). She couldn’t do anything to save the day except for possibly kill herself, until she became a sparkly, shiny vampire herself.

Doctor Who is fairly the opposite. Even in this first episode that we watched today, the Doctor, despite all his great intellect and experience, had his life saved by a girl who worked in a shop and happened to have taken gymnastics when she was younger. All throughout the series (so far as I’ve seen it, and I trust, beyond that) the Doctor is always not only encouraging of humans, but impressed by their tenacity, their inspiration, and their ability to adapt. As a human who’s always looking to be tenacious, inspired and adaptable, well… 🙂

There are a lot of other reasons I love Doctor Who, but that’s a really big one, one of the biggest ones out there (other than the fact that the show is capable of heartbreakingly beautiful moments, and certainly pulls no punches). So, if you haven’t watched it yet, go watch it! It’s on Netflix, or so I’ve heard! And if you have watched it and are waiting for season 6 to start—don’t spoil me!

Image source here: http://scottysdrawings.webs.com/doctorwho.htm