Fox News- Enough Said

It's almost 1am and I am unable to sleep because, like an idiot, I watched a Fox News segment tonight. Why do I torture myself by voluntarily exposing myself to televised idiocy? Some blond female reporter was bashing the Twilight books and movie because of the positive light in which the FICTIONAL stories position the MYTHOLOGICAL vampire. Wow. . .wow. I understand criticizing a book or movie because of bad writing, thin plot lines, vapid characters, etc. I can even handle someone bashing a book because it doesn't accurately portray this group or that one. The problem here is that vampires DO NOT REALLY EXIST! For this reason, a writer can portray them anyway they wish. They are a myth, to which no one has exclusive artistic claim. The newscaster's issue was that Stephanie Meyers's vampires are not evil and scorned by God; this must mean that the book is anti-god (unlikely considering that Stephanie Meyers is a practicing Mormon).
The problem here is two-fold. First of all, there are no anti-god messages that can be validated by reading the books or watching the movie. There just aren't. If anything Meyers's work supports the Christian stance of abstinence. Second and MOST IMPORTANT, is the fact that vampires do not actually exist, they are a myth as I have said. Therefore, they cannot be appropriately or inappropriately represented. They do not have any real characteristics, only fake ones dreamed up by writers. If one writers says "In my fictional world the mythical creature the vampire is scorned by God", all this means is that, in that writer's fake world, vampires are blood sucking preternatural creatures, the Christian God exists, and he's not down with the blood suckers created by said author. On the other hand, another writer may say, "In my fictional world, vampires exist as creatures that live off of blood (whether animated by magic or virus or whatever), God may or may not exist in my world, and vampires are not necessarily evil but, like people, differ depending on the individual". The two writers are using the same myth as a spring board for writing, sure, but in either case the fact remains that vampires do not really exist, and therefore are not for or against God outside the scope of the book, if God even exists in the book. You don't hear people saying, "Gee, I hope this movie appropriately represents unicorns, cause that last one I saw made it seem like they would have voted for Obama, which we all know a Unicorn would never do." Why? Because unicorns do not exists and therefore can have no political opinion to be misrepresented. If someone has a problem with the way myths are represented, their problem is actually with the writer's point of view, which he or she is expressing through the characters. Meyer's doesn't end her books with all of the vampires being killed off or miserable because they were against God and were therefore punished. Therefore, since vampires are not evil or good in real life since they don't exist, and since there is no underlying anti-Christian message Meyers is trying to hide in her book, Fox News is talking out of their ass.

Then again, Christians seem to have a problem with anything that doesn't sing the praises of their religion. So maybe their problem is that Stephanie Meyers didn't write a book about how freakin awesome she thinks God is. That is why the newscaster was having an orgasm over Anne Rice; her vampires were tortured souls, separated from God (the assumptions being that God exists and being separated from him means you are evil, which is a circular argument that only works if vampires are bad and their punishment is no God, which is an artistic choice), and Anne Rice stopped writing vampire books to write about God and Christianity. Of course, if the people at Fox News had really read Rice's work, they would have noticed how ridiculously homoerotic her works are, the gay characters not always vampires (Blackwood Farm's main character manages to practice homosexuality, masturbation, and incest all in one scene). Since they are so pro-christian, shouldn't they have a problem with this? That is very poor reading. Or maybe no one at Fox News reads above a ninth grade reading level?

Once again the ignorant right-wing Christians are up in arms about anything they think could threaten their precarious hold on the masses, even things they either didn't read, or read but couldn't understand.