For a thousand years
Who had Port Sherry defending Twilight in 2024 on their bingo card?
Look, I’m not gonna fight anyone over the quality of the books and movies, but I do find it strange how people gloss over the reason the series was so popular in the first place. Don’t know about the actual execution, but I do get what it was trying to do and I think it managed to tap into something worth paying attention to…
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All right, you’ve managed to convince me that maybe, JUST MAYBE, people reading Twilight is okay.
I mean that’s how they getcha though – they smuggle in all these toxic tropes under the cover of “you get to be special to someone”
To be frank, I’ve watched the movies nearly a dozen times (they’re part of the Rifftrax catalog) and I just don’t see this often mentioned toxicity. I see a a fantasy of ideal devotion, protection, empowerment… People like to bring up the “I like to watch you sleep” scene, but every love story will seem creepy if you figure one person might not be into it as the other, which isn’t the case here.
I don’t know… on one hand, when I look back at the time the movies were coming out, it does feel like there was a lot of misogyny involved in the criticism of the book – about a female author turning badass monsters like vampires and werewolves into girly romance novel fodder.
But there was also a feminist backlash against the books and movies too – Bella doesn’t have a lot of agency and seems to be attracted to the vibe of violence and danger Edward and Jacob exhibit, Edward is more powerful, worldly and older than her, her journey through the books is just getting married and having kids – only then she gets her vampire powers…
I’ve only read the first book and watched the first movie, so I can’t really judge how fair the criticism around the other books is. But I remember someone saying, back then, that the issue was that Twilight was the only game in town when it comes to fantasy aimed at young girls, so the reason it got so popular was because girls didn’t have much alternatives then.
My main criticism of the story, really, was that it was terribly boring.
Twilight is to the stereotypical awkward tween girl what harem anime is to the stereotypical basement dwelling otaku, and for the same reason as this comic posits: it allows its audience to feel special, even when they know it could never happen like that in real life.
To be fair, this describes a large chunk of fantasy fiction, including many famous works like Narnia, LotR, The Neverending Story and Harry Potter. The defining characteristic of a world-saving fantasy protagonist isn’t extraordinary competence, wisdom or might (the Gandalfs and Aragorns, despite their in-universe importance, are usually supporting characters) but being an ordinary person with ordinary virtues. That’s why “the chosen one” is such a common cliche – it allows a complete nobody to believably become the most important guy/girl around.
It’s not necessarily bad though, it’s just the convention in which the genre operates.