Subject: Any thoughts on Mayer's The Host?
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Posted on: 2015-06-28 14:20:00 UTC
Because for me personally, I hated it and the aliens who have to be the dumbest, hypocritical and selfish parasitic aliens in sci-fi I've ever seen. And that I wished were made extinct at the end of the book.
Remember, there was that one species that committed mass suicide before allowing these guys take them over. And there were resistance groups.
The Host was not that good, but it was not really bad either. Better than Twilight, that's for sure.
But it still baffles me how a species that more than likely dealt with emotional species and are supposedly geniuses couldn't understand what they were doing wrong. That and the fact that they save the environment of the worlds they visit but steal sapient species' bodies and erase their minds from existence sounds very exploitive as they get to have the worlds all to themselves (that's my interpretation and it really doesn't match how they act, so it is more or less where the problem is for me). Everything about the Souls screams self-righteous, pretentious, stupid, greedy, sociopathic and hypocritical.
I consider them worse than the Chaos Gods and Nyarlathotep, or Joffery and Umbridge (and yes, I know what I mean when I say those characters names and claim the Souls are worse than them).
I would recommend better sci-fi from Dune, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Star Trek, Firefly and Star Wars over The Host any day.
... it's kind of like eating, imprisoning, massacring, and destroying the environment of every other species that even comes close to your own level of intelligence?
Hmm, can't think of anyone who does that.
hS
... I can't tell if Meyer's actually started to get better at story writing or simply got lucky now that you pointed that out (though humanity is not a species that follows one personality, most of the time).
Have to admit the idea is good but it's sacrificed for the romance and love triangle (again).
Which is really weird and sad because some of Meyer's ideax are not bad and Dracula could stand in the sunlight in the original novel but was weakened by it. Her main problem though is that the good ideas are tossed off of the boat for the 'romantic plot tumours' which quite frankly horribly done and plain uninteresting.
The ending of The Host tossed the whole value of free will that it was building up when the humans, against Wanderer's will and wish, decided to put her into a dead human girl's body.
Admittedly, it was less rage inducing than Twilight's attempt at addressing the topic of abortion or Jacob imprinting on a baby...
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/WallBangers/Twilight
I know that it sounds like bashing but didn't Meyers have at least an editor or a naysayer to help avoid sinkholes?
(Her name is Stephenie Meyer, by the way; I don't think you've gotten her name right yet.)
Anyway: Steph likes happy endings, to the extent that she'll force them onto her characters. Jacob imprints on Stupidname because it lets him get over Bella. Wanda survives because her dying would be sad. Bella is able to have babies after turning into a vampire despite the fact that vampires can't have babies because she'd be happier if she had babies.
It's bad writing, absolutely. Though she's hardly the only one to do it... writers like their characters to make sacrifices, but they really don't like them to live with the consequences. I prefer the Tolkien-Duane-Butcher method, in which sacrifices 'stick' - they don't just get magically fixed - but the characters are able to pull through the consequences and find a different happy ending. Yes, it's often bittersweet - but it beats 'nooooo how can this happen oh nevermind it's all better now'.
hS
I know how it feels to try and put a rather harsh painful consequence on characters. The problem is that you get emotionally attach to them as the readers would.
And I'd have to agree on the Tolkien-Daune-Butcher method. It gives the characters some development and it's more impressive when they get their happy ending.
Unfortunately, the recent trend of Spider-man comics starting from One More Day shows there's a difference between a fair lose and having them crawl on their hands and knees with a mountain on their back... only to find themselves having gone around in a circle.
Hi there, Joffery!