Twilight creator Stephanie Meyer has a gift for characterization. On first (and second, and third) reading, you might think the gift is defective, coated in Anthrax, made by slave labour in Shenzhen, China, and should be returned posthaste to the dollar store where she bought it.

But it’s true, she does write good characters…if you view characterization from a certain perspective. Complaining about Bella Swan being a bad character is like complaining about Georgi Markov’s ricin-tipped umbrella because it doesn’t keep you dry in the rain.

Bella’s supposed to have no motivations, no will, and no identifying details. This is intentional, because young girls are supposed to imagine that they are her. She’s a blank shape moving through the text with “YOUR FACE HERE” written on it. You’re supposed to close their eyes and imagine you’re Bella, being romanced by a handsome jerk. They say that cricket appeals to people because everyone thinks they’re good at it. Twilight seems like cricket – it packages a fantasy in a way that makes it seem like it could happen to you.

There are male equivalents. Ninety years before Twilight, there was a book called A Princess of Mars, where a man from our world is transported to Mars, and more or less becomes king of it, winning the heart of a beautiful woman. But Edgar Rice Burroughs made a mistake in John Carter’s characterisation – he was too tough. Tall, handsome, a soldier from the Civil War, he lacked that everyman quality. Maybe that was less of a problem in 1912, when you still met everymen who were like that, but still.

Ripoff books soon appeared that corrected this flaw. John Norman’s infamous Gor series eventually pupated into a diary of Norman’s unashamed and aberrent sexual fantasies, but the first book (Tarnsman of Gor) was a retread of A Princess of Mars with the intimidating alpha male hero changed into an unassuming college professor. That’s doing it right. To appeal to science fiction fans, you really want a nerd hero, not someone who resembles the jocks who bully them on the football field.

It creates realism problems: it doesn’t seem plausible that John Norman’s hero could so quickly pick up Bruce Lee-esque fighting abilities (at one point, defeating a dozen armed men with his hands literally tied behind his back). But that’s not the point. The hero has to code as a nerd. It doesn’t matter whether he actually does anything nerdy. It’s like The Social Network Movie – where Mark Zuckerberg effortlessly owns every conversation he’s in, has the eerie confidence of a cult leader, but he knows a lot about programming so I guess he’s a nerd.

In any case, “nerd becomes king of fantasyland” was the number one cliche of fantasy books for several decades (wielding several ancillary cliches such as “the first alien lifeform encountered on the planet is an attractive humanoid female”). It started to become annoying, because usually the author tried to both have his cake and eat it, by making their nerd suddenly a cool ass-kicking hero when the story required it.

This approach has metastasized into the world of videogames (where blank cipher Gordon Freeman is a dorky scientist who obviously can outfight teams of Black Ops specialists), as well as Hollywood movies (where the hottest girl in high school can’t get a date because she’s quirky and has a random sense of humor, or whatever).

Artists try to have it both ways, and we get characters that aren’t just fake but contradictory in a self-annihilatory fashion, like matter and antimatter mixed in a flask. Books, movies, etc are full of fat characters who wear size zero jeans, master generals who make utterly retarded decisions for the sake of author’s convenience, etc. In books, the labels always lie.

Reign in Blood has some great tracks – and not just the two everyone remembers, either.

“Epidemic,” for example, has an addictive syncopated gallop riff that’s worth tuning down to Eb so you can play along. “Postmortem” is punchy and powerful, and perfectly leads into “Raining Blood” (the two will be forever linked in the fans’ minds, due to a mastering error that put the first verse of “Raining Blood” at the end of “Postmortem”).

But much of it is an unfocused riff salad, full of tracks that don’t come off as songs but 2-3 minute explosions of energy. “Epidemic” is riff, verse, riff, verse, verse, break, riff, verse, fin! “Criminally Insane” is another half a song that speeds up and slows down in a spontaneous, unplanned way – there’s not really a musical thru-line of tension and release. It’s like it was written by a Turing-incompatible computer.

“Necrophobic” is super fast, but sounds more like four guys trying to set a land speed record than music.

The album’s greatest moment is “Angel of Death”, which has great riffs, a crushing middle break, and lyrics about Nazis. I refuse to believe this was not a marketing strategy. When you’re a female pop duo (think tATu or The Veronicas), you’ve got to have people thinking you’re lipstick lesbians. When you’re a metal band, you’ve got to have people thinking you’re Nazis or Satanists. It worked for KISS and Black Sabbath, so why not Slayer?

The album’s so heavy, fast, and evil that it’s almost overpowering…but I wish it was more consistent. Great riffs share flat space with dull “speed-pick one note until you die of boredom” time fillers. Heavy metal classics rub shoulders with tracks that don’t even sound finished. It’s very uneven moment to moment and minute to minute. Even the vaunted lyrics frequently dissolve turn into shouted tirades about Satan and slashings.

I like Dave Lombardo’s drumming. This is basically the benchmark for metal drumming in 1986. Nobody else was playing this fast or this technically – except perhaps for Dark Angel’s Gene Hoglan. The production is also quite good – sharp and clinical, with clear and crisp allocation of sonic space between the kicks, the rhythm guitars, the what-have-you. The whole affair clocks in at under 30 minutes – say what you will about it, but it does not overstay its welcome.

Recent years have been unkind to the dinosaurs, and unkind to this movie. I think the Cretaceous extinction event is still shooting a few final hoops against them as the clock runs down in 2015. We now know that dinosaurs had feathers. And we know that an apatosaurus, a tricerotops, and a pterodactyl in the same scene makes as much sense as a historical movie in which Cleopatra consults George Washington on the construction of the Great Wall of China. But this movie is still powerful.

And big. That’s mostly what I remembered – creatures inhabiting a landscape that makes everything seem small. That’s what separates it from Disney’s the Lion King – in this movie, nobody’s the king, and even mighty apex predators often end up behind the eightball. The dinosaurs aren’t masters of their domain, they’re struggling to survive in a changing world. The questing youngsters find a kind of sanctuary at the end, but after their travails it seems a bit mocking – like giving a child a lollipop after open heart surgery. That’s the other thing I remember, the gloom.

Otherwise The Land Before Time can be compared to The Lion King quite a bit – some parts line up shot for shot. Tiny creatures scurrying around gigantic paws. A warped, twisted landscape with a palette to match, full of ochre reds and cinerous grays. The death of a parent as a plot device, and divine intervention from that parent’s spirit to close an open plot parenthesis.

The Land Before Time bears the scars of the moviemaking process – certain scenes seem curiously truncated and brief, as if vital footage was slashed out of the movie with an axe. The whole enterprise seems strangely short – barely longer than an hour. Movies about dinosaurs usually slow down and bask in the experience. This one just has young and vulnerable dinosaurs running from danger to danger, which might stress younger viewers.

It’s probably the second best Don Bluth film, behind Secret of NIMH (whose laurels partly belong to another, as it was adapted from a book). Bluth’s animation studio never succeeded taking much market share from Disney, but they probably opened up animation to a few new people. Disney’s movies from this period are hard to watch as an adult – Bluth’s are not. There’s a nice depth to them: not depth in that they’re saying something profound (every Don Bluth movie can be essentially reduced to a “follow your heart” or “believe in yourself” message), but in that there’s a lot of cinematic space explored: subtle interplays of textures and sounds, and occasional unconventional artistic choices.

On the downside, all the dinosaurs have cutesy names for themselves (long-necks, sharp-teeth, etc), sparing us the indignity of antediluvian creatures uttering Latin phylogenetic classifications at the expense of causing my sister to think that those were the actual names for the dinosaurs.