Footnotes! (Since can never really be done talking about Twilight, can we?)
1. I cannot recommend the ContraPoints video about Twilight enough. I didn’t write about our cultural ambivalence towards dark romance, or the role of fiction in culture, or the gendered aspect of both Twilight’s appeal and its criticisms, but trust me, you don’t need me to. Natalie Wynn spends 3 hours going into incredible depth on all these topics, much more thoroughly, thoughtfully, and humorously than I would have. The video is also how Twilight ended up on my radar after all these years.
2. I likewise recommend the Truth vs. Twilight project, put out as a collaboration between the Quileute tribe and the Burke Museum. It offers a lot of insight into Quileute culture and history (and how they’ve been misrepresented in Twilight), as well as the difficult legacy of the series’ popularity on the Quileute community. I thought the section on “Imaginary Indians,” exploring the representation of Indigenous people in popular (settler-colonizer) media, was especially interesting.
3. If you’re curious, here’s my review of the Twilight series as a whole (and whose #Team I’m on):
2.5/5 stars
I think Twilight is trying to be a romantasy but it doesn’t know how. As a result, it’s alternately a romance and an adventure fantasy, and the two parts don’t really mesh. The action scenes feel like they come out of nowhere, because they do: none of the books truly set up their dramatic climaxes, so their resolutions don’t feel earned. That being said, the fantasy-adventure parts of the story were my favorites (but I might be biased, since the only thing I love more than fairytales is the Olympic Peninsula.)
The majority of the story is its romance, which I found dry and uncompelling. I’ve got nothing against romance as a genre (speaking as someone who’s watched both major Pride and Prejudice adaptations about 250 times), but this romance didn’t reel me in. The barriers are overcome too easily, with no real consequences, so the story doesn’t feel like it has genuine stakes. I also had no investment whatsoever in the love triangle and just wanted Jacob to shut up and stop acting like an incel.
I still can’t buy the idea of vampires going to high school. Especially Jasper. You’re telling me the guy who can’t even be in the same room as Bella’s papercut without flying into a bloodthirsty rage can reliably control himself in gym class every day? One skinned knee in volleyball practice and it’s game over for all of them.
The prose is not nearly as bad as Twilight’s detractors make it out to be. For every truly terrible line, there’s another line that’s legitimately beautiful, and I certainly didn’t think the writing was any worse than most popular young adult fiction. Even when some of the lines made me cringe, the writing never pulled me out of the story.
The story struggles under the weight of unnecessary details (think: nearly every scene with Mike or Jessica, accounts of every last one of Jacob’s facial muscle movements during a conversation, a multi-sentence description of how Bella corrects Charlie’s mistake of putting pasta sauce in the microwave without first removing the metal lid, et cetera). Meyer could’ve used an editor with a much heavier hand. But, if the fat were trimmed, it’s really not a bad story – problematic in many ways, yes, but on a plot-and-character-arc level, it’s alright. The books mostly kept my attention despite their tedious stretches, and I did care about what happened to Bella (though admittedly, not to Edward or Jacob).
Despite my lack of interest in it, it speaks to Meyer’s talent that she was able to write a love triangle compelling enough to spawn such intense #TeamEdward vs. #TeamJacob debates among fans. Who readers ‘ship in the series becomes a kind of Rorschach test for our own personalities and desires. That’s cool.
As you might have guessed, I am neither #TeamEdward nor #TeamJacob. I am #TeamAlice. Of every potential love interest in the story, I thought she was the most compatible with Bella’s needs from a partner, and they had, by far, the best chemistry and most sexual tension. In my head canon, Jasper accidentally bites a kid in gym class and gets killed by the Volturi, then Alice and Bella run away to live happily ever after. The end.
