This probably won’t be popular, but in a weird way I kind of feel bad for Stephenie Meyer. I know there’s some problematic stuff in her books, but past all that - as someone who writes, and themselves has wanted to publish something in the YA sphere for years, her story seems like some weird kind of cautionary tale. She writes a book. It’s her first book, and it manages to garner the attention of the right people, and it gets published. Not only does it get published, it’s sort of an overnight success. Suddenly people are demanding a sequel. More than that - a trilogy. Of course they’re not great books. She’s a new writer who’s under a lot of pressure. But she’s managed to garner an audience, and they’re hungry. So she writes the books and they’re bad, and they get made into some pretty cringe-worthy movies. And then, every basement dweller with a YouTube account spends the next decade dumping on them, while the whole world laughs.
Honestly, it’s the stuff of nightmares. If that happened to me there’s no amount of money that would console me. I’d just want to find somewhere to die.
I really love it when people prove my point exactly. Just because she made money doesn’t mean that I still don’t feel kind of bad for her. It was very, very fashionable at one point in time to shit all over her, and while I’m not defending the quality of her books, it on a human level, that’s gotta feel awful.