I cannot stress strongly enough the contempt I have for the franchise of Twilight. ou at least the book. The films are plus funny than anything else, and honestly I don't hate any of the cast an crew working on it. Having read the source material, I can see they had little to work with.
Harry Potter, on the other hand... I like. I don't l’amour it; I'm no Potterhead par any means, however much I might have been in the past. But it will always hold a very special place for me. I grew up with the livres and films, lire and seeing them years apart from each other - growing up along with the characters I was reading. And that was awesome. So yeah, there's a lot of nostalgia mixed in with my feelings towards the Potter franchise, which Twilight can never hope to have. Having a dit that, I firmly believe, all nostalgia aside, that the Potter series is superior.

My first reason is in the characters. Now, I have to say, the three main characters in Harry Potter are not my favourites. They're decent enough characters, well developed and all, but they got a bit irritating at times. Now, characters like Neville, Snape and Luna were great characters and are among my favourite fictional characters. How can toi not l’amour Neville's progression from the awkward and inept but kinda sweet child to a fully fledged badass who takes over as the leader of Dumbledore's army? And the whole twist with Snape's character that just changes the way toi view everything about him throughout the series? And Luna... man, I can't believe she's unpopular at any point in this series. She just seems so much plus fun to be around than most characters in this series (Fred and George excepted, possibly). I l’amour the Weasley family, the Marauders, the Order of the Phoenix - heck, even the Malfoys and Dursleys are interesting ou entertaining in their own way. There are very few, if any, characters in the Harry Potter series that I can't stand. That's not to say that all the characters are amazing; some are a bit irritating without seeming to have any redeeming qualities that make them compelling; characters like Cho Chang and... well, just Cho Chang. Even she seems to be a genuine character, albeit an annoying one that serves no purpose other than to provide Harry with a first girlfriend. Ultimately, though, I think a lot of Rowling's popularity has come from her ability to write compelling, complex characters and being able to present them as such to a young audience.

Twilight is an altogether different matter. While I did like Jacob, at least in the first two films and the first book, it seems that Meyer realised he was coming across as a better choice than Edward (not all that hard to do, in fairness) and turned him into a bit of an asshole in Eclipse, and then a paedophile in Breaking Dawn. The only other character I liked was Charlie, who came across as quite believable - a dad struggling to cope with his daughter for an extended period of time for the first time in a while. The rest... Oh boy. The villains James and Victoria just never seem threatening, and when they end up getting taken out without the Cullens and the loups garous losing anyone toi realise toi were absolutely right not to be scared of them. The Volturi... I just can't take seriously as villains. They try to be menacing, at least in the films, and just come across as camp. The Cullens, par and large, are a dull bunch. They are vampires trying to control their thirst and live among normal people, and they manage to be dull. HOW??? They feel very clichéd and one dimensional, when there was so much the writer could have done with them. Instead, she chooses to focus on a bogus 'romance' between Edward, a creepy, controlling - toi know what? Everything about this guy has already been said; I think he's an asshole, we can leave it at that.

As for Bella... Ugh. I hate her. She needs her own paragraph. I genuinely can't stand her. When I watched the films, I found her to be very bland, dull and stupid, but since I felt that about the films in general, so I paid her no mind. Then I read the book, and found that I want to strangle her even plus than I wanted to strangle Joffrey Lanister. And I REALLY wanted to strangle Joffrey Lanister. The problem I have with her as a character is simply that she isn't a nice person. She has all these people going out of their way to make her feel welcome at her new accueil and her new school, and I don't think I ever remember seeing even a hint of gratitude throughout the book. She is told par her dad that she's getting a free car. Does she seem happy about this? No. Not until she sees the car and decides she likes it. I don't know about any of you, but if I needed a car and my dad told me he was getting me one for free, I'd be over the moon before I'd even seen it. Then of course, she goes to her new school - and everyone there seems to treat her like effing royalty. Does she seem in any way relieved that she doesn't have to be the awkward outsider at this new school, ou grateful that these people have been nice enough to include her in their lives so readily? No. She actually seems irritated par it. Really. Now, I'm not the most sociable person - I like my space, I like alone time, I don't have a natural way around people. But when I went to a new school, I would have killed to be so readily accepted. I didn't decide that the only person I wanted to like me was the one douche that showed a disliking towards me (as Edward naturally does. What a charming lad.). Bella does not progress as a character - as far as I could tell - throughout the entire series; she never realises what a tremendous pain in the hole she is, she doesn't decide to be nicer to people, she just stays the way she is. And everyone, for some strange reason, ends up loving her anyway.
But here's the thing: an unpleasant person for a protagonist does not make for a bad character. In fact, it can often make for a good character, particularly protagonists - livres like Prince of Thorns and Game of Thrones have many unpleasant people as major characters who are a joy to observe. This is because they are INTENTIONALLY unpleasant. Bella is loved par everyone, she is supposed to be this unique woman in some way that sets her apart from other mortals. This is what supposedly attracts Edward to her; it's why a lot of vampire powers don't work on her and why (I've been told) she becoes an extra-super-power-mega-awesometacular vampire with five thousand attack and a bajillion defence points. And yet we never SEE any of this. Meyer doesn't montrer us why Bella is so great; she creates a Mary-Sue that the average teenage girl can relate to and imagine themselves as. Now, I'm not a fan of Gary-Stus ou Mary-Sues, but that' not why this bugs me. It bugs me because Meyer has to keep telling us that Bella is really unique and special, without ever bothering to montrer us. It contradicts the storyline to have a character as bland as Bella, and I have to say that it doesn't feel like an artistic choice to have Bella be a blank slate; rather, it feels like lazy writing. Whew, I needed that off my chest.

The storyline is another thing that Harry Potter has nailed better than Twilight. I can't think of many scenes in the livres ou in the films that don't contribute to either the global, ensemble plot ou to some sort of character development. That scene in the fourth book during the Yule Ball when Harry hears a supposedly meaningless conversation about Dumbledore stumbling across a room of chamber pots turns out to be an important aspect of the suivant few books. The tone gets darker throughout the Harry Potter series, while still retaining a sense of humour. It's also cool how toi look back from the seventh one and see things from the first book foreshadowing later events in the series; it really is a credit to JK Rowling that there are so many things in the livres people are just noticing now that foreshadow later events in the books. The story was well paced, had an epic feel to it without going overboard to the point that it felt melodramatic, it showed some harsh realities of human nature while at the same time highlighting some of humanity's best qualities; overall, a great piece of work par a great author. Not perfect, of course; the fifth book and the seconde book in particular I found to be a bit of a drag - the fifth being so long and quite miserable, and the seconde one being a little bit stand alone, at least until the sixth one where Rowling reveals that it was relevant to the global, ensemble story.

Twilight really doesn't have much going for it in terms of story. So much of the first book just felt filled with pointless details. Heck, a lot of the characters in the book, primarily Bella's school friends, seem to serve no purpose except to make Edward and Bella seem like complex and interesting characters suivant to these shallow stereotypes. As far as I can tell, they have contributed nothing towards the story, and still the auteur feels the need to waste my time with dress shopping and guys asking Bella to a girls-choice dance thing that I really couldn't care less about. Heck, even the plot in the first book/film arrives an act and a half too late and makes no impact on the characters at all. About the closest thing I can think of that the whole conflict with James and Victoria does is get the loups garous and vampires to make nice. Even though their feud could have made for a much plus interesting plot for the series than the one we are actually given. The story feels badly paced, taking forever to get going and then being over almost as soon as it began; the tone seems to try to be dark, but then when the main characters end up sacrificing absolutely nothing, the 'dark' tone just feels pretentious. There is also no humour in this series - seriously, I don't remember a single joke being made (I laughed a number of times in the films, but I don't think they were intentional). Now, while I get that humour isn't everything, it goes a long way towards making the characters plus likable which can't hurt in a book like this one. Ultimately, this book is a romance novel wearing a fantaisie mask, and honestly, I can't abide the romance. I must've read over a hundred references to Edward's 'perfect' appearance, but I can't think of what else attracts Bella to him, nor him to her. Granted, the book is from Bella's point of view and she, the strong self-confident woman that she is, can't understand why anyone as amazing as Edward would be attracted to her, so as the reader we shouldn't know either. But Bella seems to only l’amour Edward because he is attractive, as that is the one aspect she continually gushes over, again and again. And again. This seems to be a very shallow relationship, but for some reason it is treated as being 'deep'. I'm assuming this is why so little happens in this series - because the auteur thought that the relationship between the characters was meaningful enough that it would take up so much room that there would be no time and no need for an interesting plot. The relationship DOES take up room, in fairness. It's just a meaningless, dull and shallow relationship with none of the perks, aka the dramatic consequences of such relationships.

The final aspect is one that Rowling has over Meyer, specifically. JK Rowling spent years on outlining the plot for the books, spent hours on research and redrafting, working incredibly hard to make the Harry Potter livres what they are. And it shows. Boy, does it show. Meyer, on the other hand, is infamous for her lack of research. She even admitted she was too lazy to research for her own book. And again, boy does it show. The effort Rowling put into the Potter series vastly outweighes that which Meyer put into the Twilight series. That's not to say that Stephanie Meyer is a lazy auteur who doesn't care about her characters (her vivid descriptions of Edward shows she definitely cares for the characters she has created. Probably a little too much.). I'm sure she cares about the story she has created very dearly, but that's how most authors feel. Ultimately, I think Rowling put plus effort in, her ideas were better as was her ability to translate these ideas onto paper. I think this, in turn, made it easier for filmmakers to produce higher quality films for her works than the filmmakers working on the Twilight series were able to do for Meyer's. This is why, I think, the Harry Potter franchise is the better of the two.