Just in case you haven't seen this yet, here is a link to a lame attempt to make us feel sympathy for somebody who donated to California's Proposition 8.

The editorial is extremely manipulative -- right from the headline."A life thrown into turmoil by $100 donation for Prop. 8" -- it's worded like we're supposed to think, "oh, a hundred dollars, that's so insignificant a thing to throw a poor life into turmoil." Except, a hundred dollars is more money than I gave the Obama campaign, so, actually, in my universe, a hundred dollars is a pretty significant commitment to a cause.

Also, anybody who voted for Prop. 8 is officially on my naughty list.

And anybody who actually donated money, even a dollar for a button, is on my even naughtier list. Now, I don't think naughty people should should get cancer or anything, but I do think they should suffer the natural and inevitable consequences of their naughty actions. So, yeah, I've just read the headline, and I already disagree.

The first paragraph is a description of how upset Margie Christoffersen is during the interview. She's so upset, she's crying! And then a quote from Ms. Christoffersen, "I've almost had a nervous breakdown. It's been the worst thing that's ever happened to me."

So, we're obviously supposed to feel sorry for her, but since I already know she donated to Prop. 8, I'm already thinking "Good. You're upset. Now go in the corner and think about what you've done and maybe you'll achieve some kind of epiphany about why it was naughty."

(And then we get this masterpiece of cheesy manipulative writing, "what calamity had visited this poor woman who's an honest 6 feet tall, with hair as blond as the sun." Good lord.)

What did she do? She donated $100 to Prop. 8, we know that already. Why did it become the worst thing that ever happened to her? Because she was a manager at El Coyote, a formerly popular LA restaurant with a lot of gay customers. And those customers found out, and began staging protests and boycotts.

Now, if you follow the news, you know that socially conservative groups like the Southern Baptists periodically stage boycotts of companies with gay-friendly policies, like Disney, or McDonalds.

(Although, hmm, apparently the Southern Baptists ended their eight-year boycott of Disney in 2005. They claim that it was successful. Because, really, where was Disney during all that time?)

So what's the difference between boycotting a company for being gay-friendly, and boycotting a company for being anti-gay?

I suppose there are differences. Ms. Christoffersen was a manager of the restaurant, and had a prominent role in running it, and is the daughter of the owner, but she did not actually set an official anti-gay policy for the restaurant.

Oh, and, apparently, the boycott of El Coyote has been somewhat successful, probably because there's also a little recession going on. So, layoffs are looming for for the restaurant's 89 employees, which this article helpfully points out includes many gay employees. Ms. Christoffersen is on a voluntary leave of absence.

And now the article makes with the waterworks again, as Ms. Christoffersen whines "It's been so hard," and breaks down.

See, we should feel really sorry for this woman, because she told the reporter "she has no problem with gay people." "I love them like everybody else," she said.

OH YEAH AND OF COURSE THAT MAKES IT ALL BETTER, DOES IT?

You display love through action, Ms. Christoffersen. When a parent beats up on a child and says, "I hit you because I love you," do we believe him? No, we do not. You might tell yourself that you "love" gay people, but obviously you don't. Whether you think of it that way or not, you voted to take away a basic civil right from a persecuted minority group. And more than just voting, you voted with your dollars. You didn't just make a call in a voting booth, you actively worked to take away this civil right.

That is not love. I don't care what you call it.

Now the writer talks about his personal opposition to Prop. 8, before complaining about the "vilification" of individuals who were "voting their conscience." He seems to be trying to make a case that if we were to oppose the bigots boycotting Apple because the computer company donated $100,000 to the No on 8 campaign, that we should oppose El Coyote's customers boycotting that restaurant.

But he's missing the point -- if he just opposes boycotts in principle, he should say so. Any boycott runs the risk of some innocent person losing their job, after all. That's how boycotts work. But I would oppose a bigot boycott of Apple for the same reason I opposed the Southern Baptist boycott of Disney, because of the reason for the boycott. So I'm still just opposing the bigotry. Duh.

Now, you could make a case that it's not exactly fair to boycott a restaurant because of the bigotry of one employee, but the article makes it clear that Ms. Christoffersen was far more than just another employee. In fact, the article plays her important role in the restaurant as a major sympathy card. So I can't help but feel as if the writer is trying to have it both ways. It's wrong to boycott the restaurant -- because she was just an employee. And the boycott is tearing her up inside -- because she was more than just an employee.

Um. No. You have to pick one.

And now the writer gets back to his main point, trying to make us feel sorry for Ms. Christoffersen. She invited some gay customers to a free lunch so they could talk things over, but "she left in tears when asked if she would write a check to the group challenging Prop. 8."

I guess there is no free lunch after all.

At this point, I wonder why the author is bothering to still try to make us feel her pain. He just told us, in no uncertain terms, that she was given a chance to redeem herself, and instead she ran out of the room in tears. What did she think was going to happen, anyway? Did she think she could tell her gay customers, in person, "no, really, you don't understand, I love you?" And did she think they would say, "Oh, Margie, that's okay, we understand," and then there would be fabulous rainbow hugs all around?

Of course not. Her gay customers said, "You love us? Okay, prove it." And she chose not to. So, really, there's nothing more to say.

The author treats Ms. Christofferson's crying as a kind of trump card, as if he's saying to all of us out there who sympathize with the boycotters, "there, look what you did, you made her cry!"

And I say, so what?

People cry when they're emotionally overwhelmed. Some people cry more easily than others. People cry when they're happy, they cry when they're sad, they cry when they're angry. We even sometimes make ourselves cry on purpose by, for example, watching the works of Mr. Joss Whedon. Sometimes we can be made to cry by stupid manipulative movies that we actually hate, like Ghost, which used that song "Unchained Melody" to make me cry and then acted like it was the movie, but it wasn't! You cheaters! You lousy, stinking, manipulative...

Where was I? Oh yeah, crying. Anyway, it doesn't make us right, just because we're the ones crying. It doesn't make us wrong, either. It just proves we're emotional about the topic. Crying has no truth value.

Ms. Christofferson's sobbing sounds to me like it's coming from cognitive dissonance, from her psychological pain as she tries to avoid realizing that there is a fundamental conflict between her religious-themed bigotry (she is a Mormon) and the love she tells herself that she feels for the gay people she knows. She's upset because, I suppose, it never occurred to her that if she acted like a bigot, she would be viewed as a bigot.

She's weeping because the truth hurts. Which... that's too bad, I suppose, but I don't feel sorry for her. The truth is the truth. And sometimes it does hurt. That's truth for you.

The article makes a lame attempt at emotional balance, by saying of Ms. Christofferson that her work has "been her life" and "she can't stand that it's been taken away." Then, "on the other side, thousands of gay people can't stand that their recent marriages could be taken away, and thousands more feel as though their civil rights have been violated."

Oh, yeah, that balances out. One sobbing woman's job versus thousands of people and their families. And her job wasn't "taken away" by some mythical nameless force. She lost it (if she has indeed lost it) as a natural and inevitable consequence of her own actions. She acted in hate against the people in her life and they responded by protesting and that made her sad. Boo-hoo.

And, "feel as though" their civil rights have been violated? Whuh? Under what crazy definition of civil rights is granting, then removing, a civil right not a violation of civil rights?

In the insane troll logic of the right wing church, I suppose, where the civil rights of one group are considered on equal balance with the "right" of a different group to take those rights away. Which sounds suspiciously like a "how dare you claim to be tolerant when you're so intolerant of my intolerance!" sort of argument. Which sounds stupid when ten-year-olds make it, let alone full-grown adult-type people.

And now, the article makes one last-ditch attempt to sway our sympathies, by talking to a couple of gay managers at the restaurant, who defend their co-worker by saying things like "'If she were a bigot or a homophobe, you wouldn't have had all these gay people' working at the restaurant or eating at it."

Except, of course, she obviously is a bigot. Does he think all bigots are loudmouthed Rush Limbaugh types who can't say a single word that isn't hateful and bigoted? Most bigots are more polite than that, and even the ones who aren't terribly polite aren't quite so obsessed as Mr. Limbaugh. Religious bigots in particular are often very nice people, and often very nice even to the people they are bigoted against. (Remember, they tell themselves that they "love" them.)

Also, people are complex. Remember Strom Thurmond's illegitimate black daughter? That guy was a bigot and a half, an infamous bigot, a man who made a career out of being a bigot. But it didn't stop him from sleeping with a black girl. And having a black daughter didn't stop him from conducting the longest filibuster in history against the Civil Rights Act of 1957. But he did pay for his daughter to go to college and stuff. And she claimed that she didn't come forward as his daughter until he died out of love and respect for him.

Respect for this extravagently bigoted man, who worked to deny her full civil rights, even while he was working to get her an education.

Yeah, bigots. They have facets. It doesn't make them not bigots.

The final line of the article is a quote from one of Ms. Christoffersen's gay co-workers. "You can express yourself as a citizen ... Not everyone has to believe the same things."

Which sounds all nice and dandy and balanced, except, honestly, how many times do I have to say this, IT DOESN'T BALANCE.

No, not everyone has to believe the same things. Ms. Christoffersen does not have to believe, in her heart, that gay married people are "really" married. Her church does not have to bless their union, or permit them to be members, or say that what they're doing is right. She doesn't have to have a gay couple over for dinner. If she gets invited to a gay wedding, she doesn't have to go.

But what she did was more than just expressing an opinion, she actively campaigned to take away a civil right that really had nothing to do with her. Except, I guess, its existence offended her because it violated the tenets of her religion. Well, guess what? In a non-theocratic society, THAT'S NOT A GOOD REASON.

There simply is no secular argument to be made against gay marriage. It breaks no-one's leg and picks no-one's pocket (in fact, there's money to be made!) People do all sorts of things every day in this country that violate somebody's deeply held beliefs -- does El Coyote serve pork dishes? Are they open on Sundays? Do they serve meat at all?

Imagine how you would feel if a radical Amish sect took over the government and tried to outlaw electricity, would you buy their argument that electricity was an abomination unto the Lord? More specifically, would you buy the argument that their beliefs about their concept of of their God required you to give up your computer and read by candlelight?

I don't know why the Mormons took this issue so much to heart. Maybe they're still bitter about Utah having to give up polygamy in order to join the United States. But the Mormon Church isn't out there fighting to get rights -- for example, the right of consenting adults numbering more than two to all be able to get married. They are fighting to take away the rights of other, non-Mormon citizens. And this time around they succeeded, because, I guess, people as a whole are still more bigoted than I want them to be.

Ms. Christoffersen worked to take away a right from other people, a right that couldn't possibly apply to her. It must have seemed like an easy choice. It must have seemed like a safe choice. She made a choice to inflict suffering on others, not thinking that she might suffer too. And then it turned out that she was wrong. And she suffers.But still she doesn't wake up.

Ms. Christofferson gets no tears from me.

Until, perhaps, the day when she does wake up, the day when she writes that check to the group challenging Prop. 8 after all. And then it will be tears of joy.

Many years ago --

(Before Anne Rice had written so much post-Interview dreck, and I still thought she was a good writer, instead of some kind of literary idiot savant -- and I imagine, in some alternate reality where she wrote only one book and that book was Interview with the Vampire, that she would have a better literary reputation than the one she has garnered from writing Interview plus a lot of rubbish -- although she probably has more money in this reality so I guess that works out.)

-- I was talking about vampire fiction with an acquaintance, let's call him Comic-Writing Dude.

Me: I assume you've read Anne Rice.

CWD: I thought the books were good but I have just one problem. The vampires in her books aren't really vampires.

Me: Okay... um, they're undead humans who feed on human blood, in what way are they not vampires?

CWD: Vampires aren't all angsty* and mopey* like that. They're just predators that like to play with their food.

*paraphrased. I don't remember the actual words used.

Looking back, I suppose this is just the sort of fatuous nonsense that people in their twenties are likely to say, but at the time his attitude really bugged me. I thought, what makes you so sure that you know what vampires "really" are? When they don't exist anyway?

I mean, I can say that "stomach flu" isn't really flu, because there is this thing called the influenza virus that flu is a nickname for, and the phenomenon we call stomach flu is not caused by this virus. That's an objective fact. Or my friend Grouchy Chris can point out that it is impossible for the sun to shine straight down into a narrow oubliette as shown in the movie version of Interview With the Vampire, because Paris is nowhere near the equator, and this is just an objective fact about the sun.

(And this doesn't change the fact that the aftermath, where the vampires have turned into perfect ash statues of themselves, which then poetically dissolve when touched, is still the coolest death-by-sunlight scene in vampire cinema.)

But vampires -- how can "vampire" be defined objectively?

I frequently encounter people -- usually at vampire-themed panels at science fiction conventions -- who are under the vague impression there is a folkloric definition for vampire that might be considered objective, the definition of a "real" vampire. I usually try to explain to them that they have this impression because Bram Stoker's 1897 Dracula has saturated our pop culture so thoroughly, and the idea of the vampire as an ancient monster of Transylvanian legend is one of the foundations of that novel.

Yes, Stoker researched the Transylvanian area of what is today Romania, and the history and traditional lore of the people of that region, before writing Dracula. But, Dracula resembles earlier 19th century romantic scoundrel vampires (such as Polidori's 1819 "The Vampyre") more than he resembles the vampires and vampire-like monsters of Carpathian gypsy folklore.

The casual scholar in search of folkloric vampires might turn to works such as The Vampire: His Kith and Kin by Montague Summers, but the books you'll find are not the myths upon which Stoker based his vampires. They are explorations of those myths written after Dracula, and inspired by its monumental popularity. The Summers book gathers together many entertaining legends of monsters from around the world, but the only reason we're inclined to group them all together under the heading of "vampire" is because of the way Dracula popularized the concept of vampires. Otherwise you might just call them "cool monsters from around the world."

(However, I never miss a chance to mention my favorite vampire-like monsters from the Summers book: Jiang Shi, the Chinese hopping vampire, and the awesome Filipino Manananggal, a beautiful woman by day who at night detatches her upper torso and flies around with all her guts hanging out, consuming the blood of the innocent. Oh, and, how could I avoid mentioning the vampire vegetables of Balkan legend?)

(Although, check out the wikipedia discussion page -- apparently the fact that vampire vegetables are mentioned in only one work of original scholarship, plus the high ridiculousness of the concept, means that some people are convinced the ethnologist's leg was being pulled and nobody ever seriously believed in vampire vegetables, not even in the Balkans. Which, if true, would disappoint me rather a lot. People honestly believe all sorts of hilarious things, why not vampiric gourds?)

Folkoric vampires are extremely varied in their characteristics, and have little in common with each other -- a scary thing that preys on humans is pretty much the only thing they all have in common. Sure, most of them are undead. Most of them drink blood. Most of them are nocturnal. But, really, if you want an actual originalist vampire, I would look to Dracula. Dracula established what we now generally recognize to be the characteristics of the vampire. What it did was, it invented them so well that we have collectively forgotten that they had to be invented.

Mythologies work like that. For example, take the readily acknowledged fact that zombies want to eat brains. This is not a characteristic of zombies in the George Romero Night of the Living Dead series -- his zombies eat human flesh generically.

(And, incidentally, Romero's 1968 film invented the infectiously bitey walking corpse that we now think of as the default zombie. Prior to Night the zombies in horror movies were much closer to the still-living living dead of Caribbean legend.)

Zombies that want braaaaaains! were invented in the 1985 movie Return of the Living Dead. But the concept instantly caught on, and now a craving for brains is one of those things we just take for granted as a zombie characteristic.

Similarly, the idea that sunlight is lethal to vampires was invented in Murnau's 1922 silent German film Nosferatu. It's simply not a characteristic of vampire fiction before that time, and it's not in Dracula, even though Nosferatu was considered enough of a ripoff at the time that Stoker's widow successfully sued Murnau for copyright infringement.

But now the lethality of sunlight has become an assumed vampire characteristic. It has been so thoroughly absorbed into the mythos that many people assume sunlight is lethal to the vampires in Dracula. Even people who have read the book sometimes misremember this point.

(I think there needs to be a name for that sort of thing, something like retronym? Where a characteristic of a derived work has become so integrated with popular culture that people mistakenly apply it to the original work? Sort of like how people assume that the romantic figure of Satan from Milton's Paradise Lost is actually in the original Bible?)

Anyway, not every vampire characteristic in every film or book gets absorbed into the default mythos. For example, looking at Nosferatu again -- the lethal sunlight characteristic became de rigeur, but the ugly, ratlike appearance of the vampire? Not so much. I do encounter people who sort of assume that the "original" folkloric vampire must have been more similar to the nosferatu, and the romantic seductor/seductress a more recent invention. But that depends entirely on what you would consider the "original" vampire, and also what you would consider recent. Polidori's story makes the romantic vampire trope nearly two hundred years old, at least.

So, again, what is a "real" vampire?

It's difficult to come up with a definitive vampire-or-not checklist, because with almost any characteristic you can think of, somebody, somewhere, has written a work with creatures that violate that particular characteristic and yet the creatures are still generally accepted as vampires. It might be better to view the concept "vampire" as being a focused cluster of characteristics, and vampire-or-not as a slow fade out from "obviously vampire" through "maybe sort of a vampire depending on how you want to call it" to "duh, not a vampire, what are you thinking?"

Which leads me to be able to pinpoint exactly why CWD's claim annoyed me so much. His definition of "vampire" ignored obvious central vampiric characteristics -- undead, immortal, feeds on human blood -- in favor of a vague and arbitrary peripheral concept. It felt like somebody saying that a martini made with Bombay Sapphire gin isn't really a martini because martinis aren't blue.

Now, I personally object to the common bar parlance in which absolutely any drink which is mostly alcohol and served straight up in a martini glass is called a "martini," and many of these drinks are blue, but really, if a drink is made up of gin, dry vermouth, and an olive, it's a martini, people! Those are the central identifying characteristics of a martini!

What are the central identifying characteristics of a vampire? I believe the absolute center of the cluster, the nucleus if you will, is "feeds on human blood." This is so central to the concept that even stories about fully human blood fetishists are commonly accepted as vampire stories. (Theodore Sturgeon's Some of Your Blood, or George Romero's Martin come to mind.)

Further evidence: The X-Files featured any number of monsters of the week that fed on some part of the human body: cancer, fat, liver, brains, maybe nervous tissue, I don't know, there were a lot of them, it seemed to be the writers' fallback position for coming up with a threat. Fans often nicknamed these MOW "X vampires" as in, "cancer vampire" or "fat vampire." This is a bit like calling something a "vodka martini."

The X-Files also had two episodes which are commonly seen as being about actual vampire vampires. There is the episode "3," the plot of which I continue to find inexplicable no matter how many times I watch it, but I think it's about one blood fetishist and two or possibly three actual vampires? And there is also the thoroughly delightful "Bad Blood," which is about trailer trash vampires with obsessive-compulsive disorder.

The difference in fan reaction is pretty simple: consuming human blood makes you a vampire, consuming some other human substance makes you a vodka martini.

Other central characteristics might be "undead," "immortal except through injury," "appears mostly human most of the time," and "invulnerable to things that would injure or disable a human, but vulnerable to things that would not."

Moving out from there, it gets a lot more vague, and there's a lot of room for argument. Are psychic vampires really vampires? Are creatures that were never human really vampires? What about the concept of the sexual vampire? And what, oh what, about vampires that sparkle?

Writer 1: I'm writing a vampire story.

Writer 2: Yeah?

W1: Only my vampires aren't vulnerable to sunlight.

W2: Okay.

W1: And they don't react to holy objects, or silver, or garlic.

W2: All right.

W1: They're not immortal.

W2: Mm-hmm.

W1: And they don't drink blood.

W2: Really?

W1: And they're from another planet.

W2: I see.

W1: They fly. They're super-strong.

W2: Sure.

W1: Bullets bounce off of their flesh.

W2: Uh--

W1: They have just one vulnerability, to a substance from their homeworld called Kryptonite.

W2: Now, just a minute --

W1: And there's only one.

W2: His name wouldn't by any chance be "Superman"?

W1: Don't be silly. He's a vampire. His name is Ravenwing Darkchylde.

Saw Twilight over the weekend. It was better than syphilis.

I'm also pretty sure it was better than a couple of the movies in the previews, Bride Wars and Confessions of a Shopaholic, both of which made me sort of want to shoot someone in the face.

Twilight is frequently dull and pretty stupid, which is an unfortunate combination -- two strikes and its almost out. It didn't make me deeply, deeply angry, which was a plus. It has lovely scenery and an appealing cast. And some of the funny jokes are even intentional.
But, as a vampire movie, I just didn't like it. As a teen romance... well, I wouldn't have bothered to watch it, so I'm going to talk about it as a vampire movie.

Twilight tells a story that I know I liked when it was Buffy and Angel: trying-to-be-good-guy vampire falls for teenage girl, struggles with his blood lust and the other kind of lust, both of them confront trust issues, and there's lots of sexy temptation and whatnot. Sure, vampires struggling with abstinence can be a metaphor for teen sex, why not?

This version doesn't work, though, because it simply doesn't get vampires right. And I don't mean because they aren't vulnerable to holy objects, sunlight, or, apparently, stakings -- although that's part of it. And it's not because they don't have fangs, although that's part of it. And it's not even, good lord, because they sparkle, although, good lord, that's part of it.

It's because the story uses vampires (correctly) as a metaphor for ambivalence, and then isn't at all ambivalent about them.
I often have this complaint in the other direction, when straight-ahead horror movies ignore the fact that to be interesting vampires generally need to incite some kind of seduction or sympathy, and make them simple monsters instead of complex monsters. The problem with Twilight is that the vampires aren't monsters at all. AT ALL. Especially not Edward, the romantic hero. The only thing scary about him is his enormously high 80s-band pouf of hair, and the fact that he sparkles, and frankly, THAT'S THE WRONG KIND OF SCARY.

Really, nothing about the movie is sufficiently scary. It takes forever for something scary to happen, and then when it does, it's mostly offscreen. The good guy vampires aren't scary, the bad guy vampires are barely scary, the tribal native werewolves are cool but hardly on screen and they don't get to actually do anything scary although they manage to project the distinct sense that they could do something scary if the situation required, which is more than anybody else in the movie does, so, go werewolves!

The movie is certainly hampered by the source material, on all accounts. The director did not devise the plot, or the sparkling.

Okay, let me talk about the sparkling.

Oh, my god. Sparkling.

First of all, there is no way for the sparkling not to look stupid on screen, and that's because there is no way for it not to look stupid in real life, which, okay, I guess, the many fans of these novels simply never much thought about. But worst of all it's just a terrible gutless metaphor. These vampires hide from sunlight because it reveals their true nature, fair enough. But couldn't their true nature have been something just the teensiest bit unnerving or creepy, the tiniest bit, you know, monstrous? Like, I dunno, maybe they're translucent in sunlight and you can see their veins or something. That might have looked gross and kind of stupid, but at least it would have been heading in metaphorically the right direction.

And there's a scene where Edward chivalrously Rescues Our Hapless Heroine Bella from A Bunch of Port Angeles Toughs with Evil on Their Minds -- it might have been an opportunity to show Bella a little unnerved by his capacity for violence, to make him actually seem a little scary to the audience. But, alas, no. He doesn't fight them by ripping limbs or even bashing heads, he just kind of -- glares at them and they back down. Then he drives away. But in the car he talks about how he'd like to go back and kill them all!

All of Edward's monstrous nature is telling, not showing. He tells her that he feeds on animal blood, but we never see him actually do it. We don't even see a good strong indication that he does it, like, he never sniffs while a deer walks past and says, "Just a minute" and goes running off into the woods after it and comes back wiping his mouth.

He talks about how being in love with Bella makes him dangerous to her (well, really, it's some dumb thing about her very special personal scent which seems to blow out of her hair or whatever but I just pretended that whole concept didn't exist and that the reason he's so tempted by her is because he's in love), that he might eat her or something, but we never really see it. In this movie intense vampire lust is played with extreme closeups where Edward looks like he has a headache or something. And intense lust for a vampire is played with extreme closeups where Bella flutters her eyelids like she's about to faint and gnaws on her lower lip. Okay, really, the human is the one doing the gnawing? What kind of vampires are these, anyway?

Vampires who love baseball.

Which, uh, I don't know, I guess -- baseball? Maybe it could have worked in the context of a completely different story, but the scene in this movie is achingly cutesy, and serves only as yet another demonstration of cuddly, wholesome vampire superpowers. And then the bad vampires show up and want to play too, which strongly implies that all vampires love baseball, in fact, love it so much that they are lured from afar by the distinct sounds of other vampires hitting a ball so fast that they have to play during thunderstorms to hide the noise from humans (in Forks??!??) and also use a special reinforced ball and bat.

Okay, I made up that last bit. They don't use a special reinforced ball and bat. But they really ought to.

And... let's talk about superpowers for a minute.

Vampires usually have superpowers -- it's part of what makes them scary. They're really fast, really strong, they're immortal, they can see in the dark, maybe they have psychic abilities, maybe they're shapechangers, maybe they can fly. (I don't really mind that the vampires can fly, but I don't like to see it on screen because it usually ends up looking pretty stupid and this movie is no exception. In fact, it ends up looking stupider than usual.) But the thing that makes vampires different from superheroes is the downside -- the need for blood, the beast within, the vulnerability to ordinary things like sunlight.

Except these vampires don't have any of that.

Leaving aside Edward's singular blood lust for Bella, the good guy vampires never indicate that it's the least bit challenging for them to avoid chowing down on human necks. They seem even less passionate and violence-prone than regular teenagers. They're not vulnerable to sunlight, holy objects, or silver -- in fact, it seems like the only way to kill one is to dismember him and burn the pieces, and the only people with the strength to do that are other vampires. (And maybe werewolves, but that's probably in the sequel.)

It's also astonishingly easy to become a vampire in this story. All you have to do is get bit by a vampire that doesn't succeed in killing you all the way. Edward talks it up like this is very hard because vampires, once they start to feed, find it difficult not to go all the way. (Gosh, do you think that could be a metaphor for something?) And maybe it is hard for the vampire to just stop on his own. But geez, it's pretty easy to get interrupted, dude. With a scenario like this, I need an excellent explanation for why it's not all I Am Legend out there and 99 percent vampire within a few years.

Also, Edward makes a big deal about not turning Bella into a vampire, but this story gives him no conceivable reason on the face of the earth for not doing it. In this world, there is no downside to being a vampire.

Except the sparkling thing. That would drive me nuts.