Twilight Coven Philippines

TWILIGHT GAY 03: When the sparkle hit the fan, may bumayo
By: Ronald

Have you guys missed me? It's been almost a month since my last post – not that anybody's been keeping track – and quite a lot has happened amongst the Twilight faithful.

The biggest thing to happen, of course, was the quick rise and equally quick descent of that cultural abortion that is "Takipsilim". If all of you were thinking that this issue is a horse already beaten to death, then you're wrong, because I haven't gotten my kicks in yet.

Of course every Filipino Twilighter knows the story: Some time around the holidays, word began to spread that ABS-CBN would be making Takipsilim, a Filipino adaptation of Twilight starring Rayver "Fishlips" Cruz and Shaina "Lookit! Mah boobs!" Magdayao.

Cue everyone running around screaming like Godzilla was all up in this bitch. Cue online petitions, online insults, and online wishes of death upon the ABS-CBN infidels. From all the ruckus, you would have thought Armageddon was coming, in the form of a teleserye.

People, people, people. Look at me. Take a deep breath. Listen carefully. GET A GRIP.

It's not that anybody ever thought that Takipsilim would be a great idea. While our local stations make the occasional great drama every once in a while, fantasy series have never been their specialty. My two personal favorties, Marina and Kampanerang Kuba, while camp classics, were far from being any kind of "good". Watching most Filipino fantaseryes is like sucking very warm shit through a very short straw.

What was so distressing to me, and probably to the saner Twilighters, was the somewhat subconscious hate some people displayed towards being Filipino.

There was a lot of hand-wringing as to how the (in)famous lion/lamb conversation would sound like in Filipino, with one particularly rabid commenter noting that "leon/tupa" doesn't have the same delicious flavor as lion/lamb.

Honey, the lion/lamb conversation is bad, and no amount of translation, in Elvish or otherwise, is going to make it sound any better. Even SMeyer agrees with me. You probably didn't mean to sound like an annoying, pretentious twat, but you did.

The ease with which most people threw our country under the bus was equally disconcerting. "Oh, how embarrassing! Them white people will laugh at us! All we ever do is remake stuff!" As if Hollywood is the bastion of originality. As if the people who comment on Perez Hilton are the cream of the intellectual crop. His whole schtick is putting cum stains on people's pictures! And their idea of witty reparte is "First!" and "Whoreanus!"

A lot of people were so eager to condemn a Filipino company daring to adapt a Western work that nobody even cared to ask how reliable a source a Pinoy Exchange forum poster is. While ABS-CBN showed their ineptitude and idiocy with their handling of the mess once the story broke, why didn't any one think that a $1 million investment isn't something you just calmly let loose on a public message board without any sort of fanfare? And as Clair de Lune pointed out, does nobody use fact checkers anymore? Not even the paper I work for?

There are so many valid reasons to hate the possibility of Takipsilim. Hate it because Rayver Cruz, Joross Gamboa, and Carlos Agassi can't act thier way out of a wet paper bag. Hate it because the special effects will no doubt look like something I could have just as easily done on Powerpoint. But don't use it as a convenient excuse to display your own insecurities about being brown.