#and for it to become part of fandom lexicon… oh god

[panlight]

Before BD came out I remember reading fan theories about the ending of the saga. In one of them Bella becomes a vampire but then realizes she was attracted to Edward because of his vampire “glamour” (or whatever it is that makes humans attracted to them). So she gets to be a vampire like she wanted but realizes that she was never truly in love with him and now that they are equals she doesn’t feel attracted to him anymore. What do you think about that?

There were definitely some theories that BD was going to change everything and Bella’d choose Jacob in the end, or choose to go her own way and leave both boys behind. I think that’s part of what the HUGE backlash against BD was about: everyone had their own theories about what the story was really about, thinking it was, in some cases, this deep exploration of what it means to be human, or that it was a coming-of-age story, or that we’d get some Tuck Everlasting sort of ending where Bella would realize the downsides of living forever and choose humanity/mortality, or at the very least it would be a “be careful what you wish for” thing, sort of like you described. A lot of fans were assuming it was That Deep and then Breaking Dawn kind of revealed that . ..no, it wasn’t. It was a YA fantasy romance and we were all reading too much into it.  I think people were expecting too much from the last book, and I was certainly guilty of that, too. I was already reading them primarily as vampire stories rather than romances, so that was always my focus and the lens through which I experienced them. I was certainly expecting some sort of “oh god I’m a vampire” angst because … that… just comes with the genre? The whole “I was born for this! I’m so blissfully happy!” thing was not what I wanted/expected, although in retrospect I guess it’s kind of interesting in how it subverts expectations. But I was HERE for the vampire stuff and wanted to explore that, so Bella just being all “tra la la this is AWESOME” was personally disappointing for me. It’s not that I wanted her to be miserable, but I wanted more vampire tropes and fewer romance ones, I guess. But at the end of the day it was a romance and it was pretty clear SM’s intention was that E/B were true love and I guess we shouldn’t have been too surprised with how it went down. The baby stuff was a trip though and totally unexpected. SM had answered some question on the Lexicon that seemed to pretty thoroughly debunk “vampires can have babies,” which kind of came back to bite her. I mean technically she didn’t address human/vampire hybrid babies, but the fandom as a whole believed vampires having children was impossible and complained about fanfics that had them as being “unrealistic” and “against canon” and then BD happened and everyone was all “…”