Vampires and werewolves used to be scary lead characters in Halloween tales, not
heartthrobs in love stories that make teenage girls everywhere pine for interspecies romance.
It has been 13 years since Twilight sparkled its way into the pop-culture
conversation in 2005
However the franchise didn't really blow up
Nor did the discourse around it start to turn into why it was the worst thing that ever happened to Western civilization
Until around 2008
" you're beautiful"
The discourse around Twilight went from teenagers and twi-moms liking a thing...
" Edward all the way!"
" Twilightmoms.com We have our own Twilight moms here"
...to the rest of the internet deciding that the popularity of Twilight was the last Herald of the end times in about five minutes
But as a 22-year old, way to into Transformers, college grad with a night job working for the Nielsen Company
I didn't really have it in me to give a shit about this particular culture war except for this one thing that
Really rubbed me the wrong way about Stephenie Meyer.
It came from an article on cracked.com by forum contributor "Okami-Spirit" on August 19, 2009
Alleging all sorts of things about Meyer
Not just as an author, but as a person, that someone who doesn't like Twilight would obviously take as gospel describing Meyer as a
self-obsessed, narcissistic hypocritical and infantile woman.
Most egregious according to Okami spirit was
Stephanie using her brother Seth as a shield for criticism. He runs her site and also comes off as arrogant.
He does not allow any emails to reach his sister that say anything short of
"OMG Stephanie you are amazing and a literary Jesus and God
Lol, I love your books. They are masterpieces"
The article goes on to excoriate Meyer and her brother Seth for filtering Meyers fan mail.
Particularly his decision not to forward a particularly entitled missive demanding an explanation for certain creative decisions Meyer took in Breaking Dawn.
Okami Spirit Then paints Seth as completely unreasonable for declining to forward this letter to Stephanie
and then explaining why he declined to do so to this aggrieved group of fans, and here's the thing at the time,
I actually sided with the fans.
If you are in the public eye, and you are not able to consider and respond to
every ounce of criticism that is thrown your way, valid or not then you don't deserve to be there.
Right?After all, the discourse around Twilight in 2008-2009 was totally reasonable. Right?
Well, it's been 10 years and with a hopefully a more mature hindsight
I feel like there isn't really much of a conversation in the discourse reexamining
Not only how we treated Twilight, but how we treated Meyer herself, so I guess I'll be the one to get this ball rolling.
Dear Stephenie Meyer,
I am sorry.
Twilight is a 2005 paranormal romance novel about a teenage girl who moves to a new town and
Immediately falls in love with a hot sad boy. Who turns out to be a vampire.
He is obsessed with her, and he wants to love her forever,
and she's super into it. This goes on for four books, and there's also a love triangle with a cute werewolf.
I didn't read Twilight until 2013 when we were developing
the Twilight parody awoken for our book themed show who's your own adventure.
So even in writing this episode
I have rediscovered the fact that I was apparently one of those sh*tty garbage people who rated Twilight
1-star back in 2009 despite having not even read it.
I gave it 2 stars after I actually did read it. Though in hindsight,
Id probably be a little more charitable because even in 2013 I was mindlessly going along with the groupthink
narrative that Twilight was a blight upon literacy, but I'm going to admit here
and now, and I want you to bear with me
Twilight it isn't that bad.
[Booing]
I Know I know heresy
I'm not saying it should have won the Booker Prize or anything and it might be because I had Twilight as a chaser for books like
Cinder and Divergent, which I genuinely thought were way worse, but Twilight reads like perfectly passable commercial fiction.
It is emotion driven rather than prose or plot driven
But that's true of a lot of contemporary young adult fiction and especially of romance novels.
I wasn't gonna go recommending it to anyone,
But I didn't have any problem getting through it unlike certain derivatives
when I say commercial fiction, by design it has to have a lower barrier of entry
because more people are reading it and YA fiction even more so
because its target audience is 14 year-olds.
Whether or not a book is marketed as commercial fiction has more to do with marketability than of quality.
Which itself is somewhat subjective
That said, in recent days other works of commercial fiction are being reexamined for perhaps being... not good.
Dan Brown is fascinated with puzzles and logic and that's what made him famous,
But calling his characters even two-dimensional would be charitable
and his prose is bad to the point of parody.
Same for Ready Player One
premised solely on the idea that there is a meaningful reward in life
for tying one's personal identity to the mindless consumption and regurgitation of
pop-culture artifacts.
Also, it's bad.
"Fincher, Kubrick, Lucas, Spielberg, Del Toro, Tarantino and of course Kevin Smith.
I studied Monty Python and not just Holy Grail either"
"Everyone became calling them the Sixers.
These days most Gunter's referred to them as teh sux0rs
because they sucked"
"she leaned over and kissed me it felt just like all those songs and poems had promised it would
it felt wonderful like being struck by lightning".
I Am NOT saying that Twilight deserves to be reevaluated because it was secretly good the whole time
but rather that the level of virulent bile that came to define it and Meyer herself was actually not in proportion to
Twilight's badness or anything Stephenie Meyer herself did.
Melissa Rosenberg who wrote the screenplay for Twilight said in a 2012 interview with indieWIRE...
The backlash around Twilight that began in the late 00s came on three main fronts
1. bad prose and story structure problems namely that there is no plot up until the last fifty pages of the book.
"Nothing's gonna happen.There's seven of us and there's two of them"
This is the most difficult to dispute the first two-thirds of the book are just Edward and Bella mooning over each other
and then all of a sudden a bad guy shows up, and he wants to eat her,
But then they kill him and then that's that.
2. Pure baseline thinly-veiled misogyny
that looks down on everything marketed towards teenage girls;
And as long as I'm committing heresy ,I know I may get blowback for stating
what is kind of the obvious to everyone of all stripes,
But we, and by we I mean our culture. We kind of hate teenage girls.
We hate their music
"🎵You don't know you're beautiful. oh oh oh🎵"
We hate their insipid backstabbing
we hate their vanity
We hate their selfie sticks
we hate their makeup
we hate their stupid books and the stupid sexy actors
They made famous and their stupid sparkly vampires.
And then we wonder why so many girls are eager to distance themselves from being the object of societal contempt.
"Aren't most girls more interested in the pretty maidens from the songs
Jonquil with flowers in their hair"
"most girls are idiots."
Hell. There's a reason Why in 1999 I went hard on the nu metal
while openly broadcasting my disdain for the boy bands that other,
lesser more womany girls voted for on TRL.
[Limp Bizkit song plays]
Boy did I bet on the wrong horse
[Limp Bizkit song continues playing]
Again according to Melissa Rosenberg
so it wasn't just that Twilight was popular its who Twilight was popular with- teenage girls and the mothers of teenage girls.
And the vast majority of the virulent hatred towards Twilight didn't really come from grown men
But from other girls and women who were more than eager
to distance themselves from something so unapologetically female.
And as an aside not only do I think we done wrong by Stephenie Meyer,
We done wrong by teenage girls too.
Like being a teenager is hard enough
But there's something damaging about being made to feel shame because you relate more to Bella
than some other feminists approved strong female character
who don't need no man to rescue her.
And I'm not saying that trope doesn't have toxic elements or warrant discussion,
But I also don't think it speaks to some character deficit if your fantasy is being rescued by a sparkly vampire prince.
Yes, being saved from implied gang rape is lazy and cliched writing, but it's also popular for a reason.
And you're not stupid if that's your fantasy.
I described three fronts when really these are often interconnected,
that yes your pop feminist hot takes can have elements of internalized misogyny.
Namely the visceral aversion to a thing that women and teenage girls
Like while giving a pass to or ignoring altogether other equally high profile media of the day
"ayy hey"
"Bumblebee,stop lubricating the man".
That has the moral benefit of not needing to provide strong role models for teenage girls.
"So I think that they're both they're both really good people
But I still don't think you should be using the fictional characters as role models."
Which leads me to the Third Front of attack and what has become the most popular.
That which focuses on the problematic elements of the story
Bella is 17 and Edward is over 100.
He saves her from attempted gang-raped by randos
Which is lame and fanfic-y but I totally wrote that fanfic when I was 16,
so, stones, glass houses
Bella is annoyed by her perfectly loving family.
Bella has no interests outside of her vampire boyfriend
There's this
"I like watching you sleep"
but Twilight is far from unique in any of those regards.
Sometimes I'll see some other piece of media that hits some of the same beats as the original Twilight novel
spark little or no outrage or even discussion.
" alright what room are you in"
"I'm not telling you that"
"I see you were in Room 625"
" Room 625, thank you"
Unless that person is me because I'm the only person left in the world who cares about this
Buffy the Vampire Slayer has the ancient vampire hooking up with a minor,
But you rarely see that treated with anything resembling the moral outrage over Twilight doing the same.
The Game of Thrones books have much more iffy age difference dynamics than in the show.
Daenerys is 14 when she gets pregnant and yet the sex with her older husband Khal Drogo
is way more consensual than in the show.
Martin meant this to be a reflection of how young people in medieval Europe
the time period on which A Song of Ice and Fire is based got married,
but you see more push against the TV series for taking
what are in the book consensual acts and turning them non-consensual.
While kind of ignoring the fact that in this day and age
it is generally agreed upon that 13 year olds even 13 year olds in 1463
Can't consent to sex with a grown-ass man.
More recently. There's the anime The Ancient Magus Bride
which hits a lot of the same Beats that people take issue with in Twilight, but
umm...more?
The protagonist is 15 instead of 17, sells herself into slavery,
And is then bought by this guy who is considerably more than 100.
He creates a situation in which she is utterly dependent on him
this happens
Oh yeah, and he also kind of wants to eat her,that's there
oh and also this
Well then! and yes, we could talk about different cultural standards
And what constitutes a yikes in what country in what context and when teenagers can even consent.
But you know that's its own rabbit hole, and you know I'm gonna not.
"Actually the federal age of consent law acts as a floor and most prefectures in Japan raise the age of consent to sixteen or eighteen
And for your information teenage girls are sexually mature and puritanical Americans. Just don't understand"
*White noise*
Their relationship isn't overtly sexual
But I wouldn't necessarily call it asexual either
It exists in this sort of non-committal middle ground like Twilight did,
and the not quite sexual nature speaks to the appeal of both when
You're a teenage girl who is still in the process of figuring out her sexuality.
The general response as to why the above examples are acceptable
where Twilight is not is that they contain appropriate levels of deconstruction
Which I guess sure,Magus Bride and Buffy are much more
consciously deconstructive about the tropes they utilize.
"That must have been so embarrassing when you thought he had read your diary
But then it turned out he hadn't, but that he felt the same way"
"I'm listening"
But it's not like Twilight is completely without internal examination.
"That's Edward Cullen, he's totally gorgeous. Obviously, but apparently nobody here is good enough for him. Like I care, you know"
There are quotes in Twilight that are often taken out of context like "Do I dazzle you?"which brings to mind a sparkly Fabio
But in the book is actually kind of more played as like a cutesy joke.
Maybe not a good joke but Twilight is not completely lacking in self-awareness as it is so often assumed to be.
Yes, Jacob imprinting on an infant is creepy and the in-universe explanation is, Ehh?
"It's like gravity, your whole center shifts"
But it's not like that creepiness goes unremarked upon in the text.
"She's a baby!"
(Jacob) "It's not like that"
"She's mine"
I'm not saying that all criticism of Twilight was disingenuous
But after a while the "it's problematic argument"
starts to feel like a lazy excuse to hate on a popular thing teenage girls liked, rather than good faith criticism.
When I see the bile that was generated because a mother of three started to write a wish fulfillment young adult novel
about a cute sparkly vampire,
and was then expected both by her fans and her detractors to personally bear the burden of every angry brain fart some half-educated
internet randos had about it when her book series unexpectedly sold 120 million copies.
It's like "Guys, Come on"
Imagine getting this constant deluge of feedback be it either
"You changed my life for the better
And I'm building a shrine to you in my hometown of Oshkosh, Nebraska.
And I will kill myself if you don't come see it by this weekend"
or "You are the anti-feminist Antichrist and I hope you burn in hell".
Hundreds maybe even thousands of messages every day and then being vilified for not bowing to every possible criticism.
Why was Stephenie Meyer so loathed?
She didn't do anything. She wrote a wish fulfillment book.
It's not great, but it is far from the worst of its genre.
And yeah It is goofy and parodying it is fun.
And I'm also not saying I'm sorry for Awoken.
Which I am still pretty fond of and I don't consider a mean-spirited parody.
Or for our fake YA author Sara Ellenson.
Who wasn't so much a critique of Stephenie Meyer,
But of the type of thin-skinned YA author who started fights with people who leave bad reviews on Goodreads.
Which Meyer was not.
Considering just how much E.L. James infringed on Meyers copyright, outright stole her ideas.
Imagine if Stephenie Meyer was the vindictive narcissists that the
2009 Internet made her out to be and actually had gone after E.L. James for what basically amounts to copyright infringement.
Like, what if she had been like an Anne Rice type and the whole Fifty Shades
debacle ended up getting litigated in court.
That probably would have ended up with the legality of fan fiction in general getting litigated.
And nobody wants that!
So Meyer had to take the high road and
you know,
It's fine.
She's fine. It's fine.
She's you know; She's fine. This is fine
50 Shades of Grey, it's fine. It's fine
She's fine. It's fine. This is fine.
It's fine.
"I don't make love...
I Fuck"
Yes, Twilight is silly.
"You better hold on tight spider monkey"
Alot of pop culture is silly.
Imagine the same level of vitriol being leveled at the equally silly Fast and the Furious franchise.
Both franchises are dumb cheese, but they are dumb cheese targeting different markets.
So why is one dumb cheese the object of so much pearl clutching over who's a good role model for teenage girls and the other "You know it's fine"?
"You want it?This is yours"
The backlash to Twilight just wasn't in proportion to what it or its author had done wrong;
And I think by now a lot of us have forgotten just how bad it got.
Stephenie Meyer just kind of dared to live her bliss in that Tommy Wiseau kind of way,
That's just a little too personal, a little too revealing.
"But when she said I was based on a dream
And it's like oh I had this dream, about this really sexy guy
And she just writes his book about it. And like some things about Edward are so specific.
It was like, I was just convinced that it's like this woman is mad.
She's completely mad.
And she's in love with her own fictional creation"
And said bliss ended up blowing up and do a huge success.
She couldn't just be a normal Mormon mom who made it big. There had to be a narrative about
Stephenie Meyer bad person, who wrote a deeply problematic book and her fans are too stupid to realize what a bad person she is.
Honestly that Stephenie Meyer has gone into that long post Twilight goodnight
without so much as a well-deserved and hearty F*ck you to E.L. James
and the garbage entitled portion of her fan base is downright gracious;
And says more about her than any of the mean and downright misogynist projection the world at large did.
"How does it make you feel that E.L. James took something that you sort of created it and using it as inspiration for something
that's pretty raunchy and that made her a lot of money"
I'm glad that she is doing well and succeeding and that's cool.
The raunchy part I wish that wasn't attached to Twilight just because I don't like to think of it that way.
But you know it doesn't it doesn't hurt Twilight. Twilight is its own thing and it's separate and it's fine.
(In pitch deepened voice)It's fine It's fine."
So Twilight fans, you know your franchise is not beyond reproach
But you should not be made to feel shame for what is ultimately just cheesy romance with sparkly vampires.
and Stephenie Meyer I'm not saying you're some underappreciated genius,
but you did not deserve the haranguing and entitlement and hatred that was lobbed at you;
And for ever buying into it for that
I am sorry
(Natalie)Okay, this is pedophilia advocacy for Lindsay- Take one.