A Review of Midnight Sun

Here’s the thing. I know what that title is implying (Love At), and I hate it. I hated it in Twilight and I hate it here. If you read Twilight, you know that it doesn’t live up to it’s weight.

This was the time of day when I wished I were able to sleep.

Literally how does Weirdo piss me off so easily with just 14 words. I thought being in Bella’s head was whiny and annoying but I feel like I’m gonna hate Weirdo’s head even more.

We get a full ass paragraph of Weirdo fucking emo whining about how high school is LAAAAME and BORRRING as if his white bread ass has any right to judge something like that.

Half the sheep-like males were already imagining themselves in love with her, just because she was something new to look at.

... Excuse me, Weirdo, What the Fuck??? This quote is gonna be real fuckin’ funny real soon.

Rosalie's mind was a shallow pool with few surprises.

Nice try, Weirdo, but I’ve been inside your beloved Bella’s mind for three and a half books and happen to know for a fact that hers is the same way.

Their instincts told them what their conscious minds would never understand: we were dangerous.

Because I’m pulling all of my Twilight knowledge out while I read this, I’m calling immediate bullshit on this. Never once did we actually see any humans displaying unconscious effort to stay away from vampires in the Twilight universe. We were told they did, but everything shown was ‘Wow, they’re so hot and sexy and gorgeous and heart eyes emoji!!!1!’ So I don’t buy it. And if the people of Forks’ instincts are telling them anything about the Cullens, it isn’t that they’re dAnGeRoUS, it’s that they’re fucking rude.

He was picturing it - picturing himself getting up from his seat next to Alice and going to stand beside the little girl. Thinking of leaning down and in, as if he were going to whisper in her ear, and letting his lips touch the arch of her throat. Imagining how the hot flow of her pulsebeneath the fine skin would feel under his mouth...

Went ahead and kept that full for context so I could go ahead and just say WHAT THE FUCK JASPER, that’s a fucking PERSON. A HUMAN BEING. SOMEONE WITH A LIFE AND FRIENDS AND FAMILY. Sure, sure, wah wah vampire hunger bad, but between Weirdo going out of his way to call this poor chick a ‘little girl’ and Jas just having a cute lil murder daydream, the regards that the Cullens claim to have for human life seems a bit ‘protest too much’ if you ask me.

soothing his chagrin.

I’m excited to have my first chagrin, and in the first chapter no less.

"It helps a little if you think of them as people,"

See my above point about the Cullens regards for human life.

I never actually read the leaked MS manuscript when it was first out, so I dunno how much of this is edited/the same as that, but I gotta say that this attempt at making Jessica seem like the biggest bitch in the world doesn’t work when all that was ever shown of Jessica in Twilight was that she was a little bit of a gossip, a little bit shallow, but overall was very kind and welcoming to Bella when she arrived and tried to make her part of the group. Jessica was kind to Bella, who was kind of a total asshole to her right back to her. I don’t buy Mean Girl Jessica Stanley. I do buy high school girl Jessica Stanley with a few wayward shallow and even mean thoughts because she had a crush on Mike, who didn’t give her the time of day, but this feels like overkill. I guess I should just be fucking grateful that Leah isn’t in this story because I just know she would get a dump taken on her. Leah deserved a much better book. Anyway, I’m rambling, moving on.

What did she see when she looked at the strange, chalky-skinned family that was universally avoided?

Oh, ya know, just that you’re all alabaster skinned angels with perfectly swoopy hair and shimmering topaz liquid gold eyes that she wants to go swimming in. But thank you for actually fucking acknowledging that you guys are chalky pale. I’m not ready for all the alabaster purple prose yet.

Point of order on Weirdo’s little mind reading thing. Seemingly, he only hears passing surface thoughts, yes? There’s no deeper emotion behind them, he can’t really hear anything past what is immediately on their mind. And yet he judges all of the people around him on these surface level thoughts. Pretty much everyone has really mundane and inane surface thoughts. Things like ‘what should I have for dinner’ or ‘where did I leave that thing’ or whatever. He isn’t getting a full picture of people based on these surface thoughts but he judges them as shallow and boring anyway. Point of the tangent here: Edward Cullen is an asshole.

Her skin was so translucent it was hard to believe it offered her much defense from the outside world.

The implication of this is that Bella’s skin lets you see through it, which is a gross mental image. Translucent is not the word SM wanted there.

they would be just as petty and trivial as any human's thoughts.

Please see my rant above about Edward and surface level thoughts. This is exactly what I’m talking about.

Alright, time for biology class, let’s go.

Except not quite yet because I have a continuity question: This might be a book to movie error, but this says that Emmett, Rose, and Jasper were pretending to be seniors, but in New Moon (definitely in the movie, but I thought also in the book), Jasper is there at school with Alice and Edward and Bella. So did Forks High flunk Jasper???

Anyway, Biology class.

would manage to pull out anything in his lecture that would surprise someone holding two graduate degrees in medicine.

Edward has two graduate degrees in Medicine. This makes all of the Twilight books look hilarious in retrospect, but makes the fourth one especially funny in a rage inducing kind of way.

The humans weren't smart enough to know that they feared me, but their survival instincts were enough to keep them away.

1) You said this shit already back in the cafeteria, and I didn’t buy it then, so stop repeating yourself, and 2) I will say again since we’re repeating ourselves: They stay away from you because you’re a stuck up, smarmy little asshole.

Still, from the place where Bella Swan stood, nothing.

If only, sweet Weirdo, you had taken this as a sign of what it truly is: Your sweet precious flower Bella is empty space. A placeholder where hundreds of thousands of guys, gals, and non-binary pals can slip in and make it their fantasy. Can’t do that if she has unique and interesting thoughts. (And no, dear readers, I do not consider Twilight Bella’s ‘unique and interesting thoughts’ because SM never mastered that first person POV and it never felt like we were actually in Bella’s head.)

There was no room full of witnesses - they were already collateral damage in my head.

Okay everyone (myself included) clowns on the fact that as soon as Weirdo gets a sniff of the blood, he’s plotting out the murder of his entire class, but if we could all just take a second here.

Edward Cullen, the Vampire with Morals and A Heart Of Gold (according to the fanbase) gets a sniff of Bella’s blood and is immediately plotting out the murder of his entire class. No hesitation, no thought. This does not strike me as a man with a high regard for human life, as the books tried to tell me over and over that he was. If the line is still in there, this will get even worse later, but for now, I’m letting it rest on that.

I would also like to make a point about Vampires and their Instincts, but I don’t think this is the time for it. Not yet. So hold on to that thought for later.

the face I'd beaten back with decades of effort and uncompromising discipline

Remember that time Weirdo got pissed at Carlisle and fucked off to go people for a few years in a fit of warped vigilante justice?

Okay, the section is far too long to quote, but let’s talk about Weirdo’s little murder plot, shall we? At this point in the story, especially in this one as I am in Weirdo’s head, I’m supposed to think that he’s driven mad by bloodlust and in some kind of incontrollable madness.

But he’s sitting in his seat literally planning out exactly what the best route is to kill every single student in this classroom so that he doesn’t leave any wittnesses to his crime. He’s being detailed to the point that he can tell exactly how much time he has to do this.

That isn’t driven mad by bloodlust, guys. That’s fucking cold and calculated. This man is planning to the second how to kill 20 people all at once without getting caught. It’s planned down to the detail. As hilarious as it may be to clown on Weirdo about this passage, please think about it. Think about the cold, calculating way he’s describing murdering innocent teenagers and his biology teacher just so he can drink Bella in peace. Please think about the implications of what kind of person Edward Cullen is, that he can so coldly plan something like that.

In my head, Carlisle's kind eyes did not judge me.

I have a lot of feelings about Carlisle, and none of them are very nice, but I’ll save that rant and see just how he is in this book, since we’re gonna see more of him.

There is more of Weirdo’s woe is me bullshit here. I feel like it’s supposed to be dramatic and really get us into his Feelies about the Tasty Good Hooman Blood he’s wiffing, but it reads so much like a dramatic pre-teen diary entry that all I hear when I read it is ‘Waaaaaah! Why me? I hate everything, this isn’t FAIR!’

But I didn't have to breathe.

This is a very relevant and important point about the mythology of vampires in this canon. They don’t have to breathe. They literally never have to breathe and choose to do so anyway, and while I could understand that new vampires might continue to breathe because it’s a comfort of their previous life and a force of habit carried over, Weirdo has had plenty of time to lose the habit. And it is absolutely possible to not notice someone not breathing if you aren’t constantly staring at them waiting for the signs, so saying that it’s a tactic to blend in (especially when the Cullens do nothing in their power to blend in to begin with) doesn’t fly either. Weirdo goes on to make a point about how he relies on scent more than his other senses, for the hunt and for warning signs and all that, but he is in school, and if we go by the text, he doesn’t want to hurt the humans around him, so even if he does use his sense of smell, he has no reason to use it in a school full of vulnerable teenagers.

Weirdo calls Bella a Woman-Child and Thanks I fucking Hate It.

And once again, Edward is going into a lengthy fantasy about how to get Bella alone to murder her. I said it already but I’ll say it again. This isn’t fucking bloodlust, this is a cold blooded killer plotting his next kill. This fucker is Calculating. He’s plotting. If he was truly as bad off as he’s claiming, he wouldn’t have the brain power to be this cold and rational about it.

I played a CD of music that usually calmed me, but it did little for me now.

This is funny to me for a number of reasons. The first is my assumption that the CD he’s playing is that one with the DeBussy song on it. Symbolism and all that. But the second is that this is v much something that happened all throughout the Twilight saga with SM. She refuses outright to call things by name. She won’t say the names of bands, or search engines, and the only ‘product placement’ we get is the cars. I can’t tell if she did this to try and make her stories feel more timeless or because she was genuinely afraid of being sued or something for using specifics.

He's almost young enough to be my son. Too young to think of that way..

We get is SM, you want us to think your Pires are the most beautiful, amazing, alabaster angel creatures on the planet. But no sane, rational middle-aged school secretary is going to think of a student this way. It’s gross and creepy and makes me think extremely badly of Mrs. Cope if she’s having lustilicious thoughts about what she thinks is a teenage boy.

like they've found some way to cheat in every subject.

I would like to point out that, at the very least Weirdo has found a way to cheat in every subject. Even taking into consieration the amount of times he’s been through high school and college, the guy can literally just pluck the answers right out of the teacher’s head.

And we end Chapter One with a wimper. There are a lot of plot holes in relation to Alice’s visions, but they aren’t bad here, so I’ll leave them alone. The narrative of ‘Vampires do everything so much better than icky humans because they’re just the best and wonderful and great and amazing’ has already started happening, and now that we’re in the head on one of the Pires, I can only assume it’s gonna get so much worse. Here, it only really came up in the form of ‘pitiful, insignificant humans could never do that that I could.’ and the super fast driving bullshit that makes no sense because a car is not a Pire so it can’t just magically adhere to the warped Pire physics.

Anyway, that’s chapter one done. On to the next.