"Tell me it's not Twilight..." - the end of an era

Finally, you might say, I am cured, cured from vampirism. You want to know how I lost my fangirl obsession with this particular genre that is still on the loose with ever more and more clichéd storylines? Then read on and enjoy the ride.

 I was going through all of my books a couple of months ago. It has become quite a task to fit all of my books into my room. As a huge bookworm you just have this bad habit of buying books constantly until you can build a nice little staircase of books if you wanted to touch the ceiling (which won't stop you from buying even more books, by the way). To other bookworms I don't have to explain this but this just serves as a nice illustration to those folks that have not been blessed with a book sniffing addiction and the compulsion to read and discover new worlds through stories.

Anyway, while I moved stacks from one corner into the other, I began to realise that some of them had to go. Though, usually I'm not the kind of person who just wants to read a story once, forget all about the book after the ending and resell it. This spirit of the casual "only-on-holiday-reader" is not my attitude. I usually buy books for life. Stories can be excellent companions, indeed! When I buy a book, I know that I'll love the story and want to have it in my shelf to reread any time I want. Then books are not just books but friends that keep you company and cheer you up any time you need a shoulder, I mean, spine to cry on. (Sorry, these weird references keep popping up in my head. ;-P) For example, when you reread Harry Potter for the 10th time because it's basically your childhood, you still dream about your very own letter from Hogwarts even if you're already 25.

Still, all romanticism aside, I decided that a particular part of my fangirl career that I'm not as proud of as I used to be, had to go. The part I'm talking about is my obsession with everything around vampires from TV shows over books to the original mythology. So, on this memorable day I put my TVD, TrueBlood and Twilight books into a box to sell to the highest bidder. But how did it happen that I went from passionate Twihard to a rather cynical and sceptical observer of the vampire genre?

Let's start at the beginning:

If you expect to hear all about Ann Rice and Lestat, I have to disappoint you. I never liked the movie and never read the book. Sorry! xD For me it started out with the good TV shows like Moonlight and Blood Ties with charismatic actors like Alex O'Loughlin and Kyle Schmid playing the hot vampires. These two played conflicted vampires with a dark past, who were now helping people using their powers to investigate and bring criminals to justice. For me it was the right mix of supernatural elements, dark conflicted (and handsome ;-P) characters, romance, comedy and action. In short: I loved it. But unfortunately the vampire hype was yet to come and Moonlight disappeared from the screen after only one season with a major cliffhanger. Also Blood Ties, the ending of which did not satisfy (mildly spoken!) any sense of completion either (she let a demon loose and the two guys who could help her track him down just leave her). If these two shows had come out later during the vampire hype that was kicked off by Twilight there would have been as many seasons as True Blood and TVD had. (Though it's probably for the best when you look at how TVD and True Blood developed: TVD has been painful to watch since season 4 and True Blood since season 5.)

After these two shows were cancelled I forgot all about vampires for a couple of years until I picked up a certain book in the school library. I remember thinking "I don't know, if this will be good. It sounds a bit too romantic for my taste. But hey, it has vampires in it, so it might be good, after all." (Until that day I had avoided reading books with storylines that oozed romance from their pages and had rather gone for the great fantasy epics.) Strangely enough I was hooked on this story of an awkward high school girl and her first supernatural love. And I guess I was in the right age and belonged to the target group of teenage girls. *sigh* How innocent I was back then. Soon I was researching stuff about the books on the Internet and the usual fangirl madness happened as soon as I found out that it would be adapted for the big screen. (An adaptation I was hugely disappointed by - even as a fangirl it was hard to NOT make fun of the movie.)

And one day I woke up and  was part of a worldwide hype. Vampires were everywhere. Posters of TV shows with hot blood suckers showing their abs and book covers depicting a conflicted vampire with a sensual gaze that said WATCH/READ ME out of every shop window. So, TVD, True Blood and a couple of other vampire/werewolf books were the natural follow-up of my fangirl journey through the vampire genre.

But then Breaking Dawn happened and everything changed. The last book in the Twilight series was the first wake up call. It was hard to handle the unnatural pregnancy and the resulting madness of all characters around Bella (e.g. Edward asking Jacob to make babies with Bella! WTF?!). Then basically nothing happens in the rest of the story except that they are really scared, invite a bunch of other vampires and get their over the top, sweet romantic ending. (Don't even get me started on the movies!)

It was a downward spiral from there. As more and more vampire genre shelves popped up in bookstores I was more and more disturbed by what I found on the wooden boards that should be supporting quality books rather than these Romance Novels with a supernatural touch. Clichéd storylines and a substitute for erotic literature, the vampire genre has finally lost its appeal for me.