Interesting that you brought up Ford from Buffy. He at least had some motivation to his selfishness that was understandable even if it was flawed. He had terminal cancer and was going to die anyway. The strength of Buffy was always that it told ordinary tales in an extraordinary manner--puberty and maturity told as the creation and progression of the Slayer, etc. In Ford's case, cancer is an ordinary thing. Tragic, yes, but something we can understand--the fear of death, the frustration and anger at missing out on life and dying so young.

Ford took it to an ugly place--he was, after all, a villain--but his underlying motivation was understandable. He was a sympathetic villain. Bella seems to be the opposite: an unsympathetic hero. Nothing in Bella's life is going explicitly wrong and she seems vindictive and spiteful and hateful for no reason, so it's hard to like her. But she's not killing people or telling her vampire lover to break his resolve and go eat some people, so she's technically a hero. Technically.

I haven't read the story, but nothing about what I've seen excerpted makes me hopeful. I read a review of the latest book in Entertainment Weekly, and it turned my stomach. Me! I can handle anything. But the descriptions of what goes on related to one plot point had me gagging. I suppose I must blame the teenagers as you do--they're equally at home with self-interested angst as they are violence.