#bilight makes you sad

[morelike-bi-light]

Do you ever think about Esme contemplating life and death before making the decision that would lead her to Carlisle and Edward? I do. Anyways, here’s a drawing.

[owlhousefansblog]

Escape

Luz knew that what she was going to do was a crazy plan, but she knew she couldn't put others in danger again. After all, it was her fault that they were left without families and they were all going to die because of that child, but in the end it was a babysitter a few years ago, It wasn't good ....BUT she can do it, he's just a child, a child GOD, that had kind of discouraged Luz a little, but she had to do it now that her palisman had come out again and managing to master it right now, she didn't have to worry anymore. ... right?

In the evening while everyone was asleep, Luz decided to sneak in, but she didn't know how to move so as not to wake Amity and Willow, who were sleeping scattered all over the room. Luz takes courage and stands up, taking care not to touch any arm or foot of their hill, and beckons her palisman to come and see that she had raised her head at the sound of her footsteps. Luz manages to take her glyphed jacket inside in case of anything and knocks on the door to leave but hears Willow from behind her.

Shit ... plz don't wake up, plz don't wake up * Luz thought to herself waiting for Willow to get up to say something, but nothing had happened Willow had just turned to the other side and Luz sighed in relief. Before closing the door, she looked at them for the last time. She wrote a letter in case she didn't return but she couldn't stay any longer , so she closed the door slowly and carefully. Now all that remained to be done was to take care of the boys because the door was coming directly into the living room and there she really had to take care of the boys sleeping on the couch. That should have been easy since today they all had a long day, even Luz was a little tired. But as she descended she saw a lighted lamp in the living room.

Yep she was dead If she was caugh so she has a plan.

She could wait until anyone turned off the lamp or went to the door making a stupid excuse being caught ..... the first idea seemed better and fortunately for her the lamp had gone out in 5 minutes then Luz went down with the palisman they shrugged down the stairs, but just as I was about to descend them all, a ladder creaked and she froze at Hunter's voices.

Luz, what are you doing? * he just seemed to wake up with small eyes and ruffled hair in all directions wearing those pajamas too big for him *

oh um me? I'm just going for a walk * said Luz visibly nervous *

Hunter shot her a suspicious look

What ? Don't you believe me? * Luz pretended to be hurt by this and began to dramatize *how can you not believe me? I am extremely credible * I take a few steps towards the door *

No, you're not, I'm sure as soon as you walk out this door you'll run into trouble plus no one walks alone in the middle of the night so what are you up to?

Ok come with me but that will stay between us * said Luz opening the door and Hunter went out after her and closed it *

YOU WANT TO DO WHAT ?! He's a God! literally! you're gonna be killed! I know you want to save everyoane but trust me YOU CAN'T it was our choise to leave with you and they and I was aware that we can lose families

No! you had no choice! it was either this or death! I want you to be happy and I want to find Eda and King who knows if they live or not, they were an important part of my family * said Luz almost crying *

We know that, but you have us and Bilight, so if something goes wrong, what will Amity do without you? Your mother, you can't be so selffish

see? you don't understand! and none of you will do it * said Luz indignantly *

you risk your life for nothing, to run will always be the easy variant but not the best * said Hunter somewhat finding himself in what he said *

you won't convince me to give back * said Luz confidently *

* sighs * I know, that's why I'll come with you * said Hunter confidently *

you WHAT? No you don't! I'm going alone and you are going to keep this secret ok?

No IT'S NOT OK! the last time you were going to die, we were dying because of Philip and he was still human! how will you deal with a god? * Hunter shouts in exasperation *

playing, I have a plan just don't tell them enything, I wrot a letter in case I don't come back wants to give it to you if I don't come back in a few weeks does that mean something happened ok and I want You to come after me ok ? * Luz said with sad but hopeful eyes *

Luz handed the letter to Hunter, Hunter looked at her sadly knowing that there was nothing he could do about it.

Take care of them for me, okay? * Luz said, getting up from the porch of the old and scary house * as soon as I walk through the portal I'll throw you the key okay?

Wait, how did you get Titan's blood?

it's ... a long story ... * presses the key and the portal opens * It was a pleasure to meet you Hunter * said luz smiling sadly *

yeah I was happy to meet you Luz The Human * Hunter smiles sad *

Luz entered the portal and, as promised, threw the key to Hunter, the door slammed shut in front of Hunter, and when he opened it he saw the inside of the house. She was gone ... she was really gone. Hunter stared at the door for a few more seconds when he heard a voice behind him

Hunter! Luz is gone! * screams from behind Amity and Gus *

Did you see her? * Willow asked and Hunter turned to them sadly in his eyes but said

N-No I don't know where she is * he had hidden his key in his pocket *

Why are you here? * asks Amity *

I had gone for a walk * Hunter said trying not to look sad *

Part 1

[morelike-bi-light]

This is a lot but I regret nothing, have some vampire Charlie edits

unplanned unexpected unwarranted vampire charlie au

au where bella decides she cant leave her dad behind like her mom did and convinces edward and carlisle to protect him too. carlisle ushers him out of the house and explains things to him, providing proof as needed - as much as he can. they go to arizona to hide out, charlie stumbling over his words to convince renee that he and bella were threatened and are in enough danger to need to hide out in a different state.

bella still gets the phone call, and renee doesn't answer when either of them call. when the others are distracted, she still gets away to meet james, but when the cullens go to save her, charlie's waiting outside with esme and rosalie (who are guarding him on the road instead). victoria is there too - and she gives them more trouble than they anticipated. emmett and jasper are distracted by the redhead and the noises from inside the studio getting louder and more concerning by the second.

when a scream rings out — he's never heard bella sound like this, not even when she was a mousy little girl buried under his seahawks baseball cap far too big for her head — charlie can't help but wrench open the door and run inside. his baby is cowering away from a bloodthirsty monster and there's not even a pause in his step as he sprints over to shield her form with his own, squeezing her against his chest and praying for the first time since he heard she wanted to come up to forks for the rest of school

his prayer's interrupted by a loud shattering sound and a malicious laugh. "aw, look at that! daddy's trying to save you. what a noble, pointless sacrifice!" a smack like stone hitting stone. "well far be it from me to deny a man his dying wish."

he doesn't hear what he says next - he doesn't hear anything, or see anything, because everything is white and sharp and pain, burning like a star, blooming in the crevice where his shoulder meets his collarbone. nothing exists right then but the cold fire in his skin, burrowing in his bone. it feels like hours before anything changes. the first thing to slip through is wet on his cheek and cool hands scrabbling to clutch at his.

"dad! dad!" bella? "edward! carlisle! anybody, any of you, please, I need help! my dad — needs help!" a hand on his cheek, trembling and frantic. "dad just hang in there! somebody help us!"

his fingers twitch, stretching towards her. "bella —you okay — bells — "

"im okay! im okay, im so sorry, dad, im so sorry! im sorry, it shouldnt have been you — this is all my fault — edward! edward please, you have to help him!"

hers is still the only voice he can discern but there are more emerging, blending together but getting closer. he catches snatches of words like 'bit', and 'spread', and 'minutes', and 'sorry', and 'safety'. a pale shape stands at the edge of his vision, and at once he's lifted from the floor. he convulses, eliciting another audible choke from his sweet daughter, and he recognizes a familiar, soothing voice from above.

"we can't stay here..."

"what? what do you mean?"

"we'll bring him back with us..."

"what are you going to do?"

"let him take him, bella, please"

"we'll watch over him, i promise."

"Im not leaving him, i can't just let him go!"

"i promise," softer. "jasper — will he sleep?"

the world softens and fully crumbles away. there's nothing left. nothing but fire.

time doesn't exist here, but then the fire, it doesn't go out. yet it stops hurting. it stops eating. it starts feeding. a single thought pops into his head that will make no sense to him when he recalls it later — a weary 'oh. i see.'

three days after the ballet studio, he wakes up to a brown popcorn ceiling. he blinks. he can see every crack and cranny in the plaster.

"mr. swan?" a tinkling voice says, and he sits up. "good, I thought you'd be up." the little black haired cullen girl beams up at him, chipper but sorry. her hand is curled around his wrist. "bella will be back any moment, and carlisle soon after. they're just across the hall, actually. he says we'll need to look after you for a while, just in case, —"

she pauses, just soon enough to avoid being interrupted by the sound of beeping and pressing keys and the door swinging open. bella is whole and wonderful — he can see every inch of her and she's really actually fine, not even a scratch — and she freezes seeing him but then she's flinging herself forward, pale face contorting

"dad—!"

"b-bells," he stands up, quickly, too quickly, to meet her, tugging alice along with him, but edward catches his girlfriend's hand and holds her back as he voices her objections to her entering at all. charlie scowls at first, when a scent reaches his nose — a smell that might've made his stomach growl if it could. his eyes cast up in open question.

edward is stiff, eyes looking conflicted but legs poised to pounce. "it's her."

"oh." charlie shifts uncomfortably on his feet, properly spooked, willing the despairing thirst away. as moments pass since making the connection, the scent of blood — of food — fades, to the point he can hardly detect it at all. it's a sharp relief.

"you — how do you feel," bella forces out, eyes locked with his with an uncomfortable intensity that makes him squirm and anxiously rake a hand through his hair. carlisle and the others — esme and their other daughter that stayed behind to protect the town, too — filter in behind her and he's grateful for something else to look at, now he knows she's safe.

"better," he settles on. "than before, I mean. was that — did —" he waits for someone to interrupt him and fill him in, but it's quiet. "are you okay?"

a bark of laughter bursts from her chest and she assures him she's fine, eyes wide and brows furrowed like she can't believe he's a real person, the way she gets sometimes when he says something so awkward and sincere it makes her want to groan. but she doesn't want to groan anymore. instead she's torn between crying and singing.

"what do you remember?" carlisle asks, gently stepping forward, his gaze a mix of clinical fascination, wary confusion, and personal concern. charlie would flush beneath it... but the heat never comes to his cheeks.

"exactly how much are you looking for," he grumbles. "last thing i recall..." no need to go into the pain. "finding bella with that... guy at the studio."

"just finding her?"

"trying to protect her," he amends, focused on avoiding everyone's gaze. "and... it was..." then he notices how much there is to see, even when hes trying not to look at anything. he frowns. absorbing this much — it feels like a headache, minus the pain itself. overload. "it was him wasnt it. he bit me"

esme and jasper nod, but carlisle and bella just look away, the brunette visibly cringing. edward's jaw tightens, and for some inexplicable reason, the sight of that is what makes it all click for him.

"so," he fumbles for a second, but the word comes out so clean and sure when he says it, not at all like he feels. his mouth is physically incapable of tripping over itself like hes used to, no stammer, no stumbling. he grimaces and all the muscles pull exactly like he intends them too. he shakes his head. "he bit me. and? can i assume that's what's got me feeling so weird? the... some sort of effect of the bite?"

bella doesnt answer. neither does carlisle. surprisingly, it's that blonde girl that replies, though not to him.

"show him," she says, and after a moment, esme creeps forward, gesturing for his hand. he hesitates, but takes it. edward shifts to place bella behind him, as if she needs to be protected from him the way charlie protected her from james, a move that breaks his heart. gently, esme maneuvers him over to the bathroom. she turns on the lights, though she didn't really need to. he blinks. red. in the middle of a face with skin more suited to a shelf at a morgue than the tasteful backsplash of the bathroom, framed with dark, curling, concerningly long lashes, his irises were red. that wasn't it, either.

"am i..." he huffed. "am i seeing things, or am i way better looking than usual?"

a ripple of good humor disturbs the room, from esme's warm giggle, to a watery chuckle from bella, to a great, booming crow from emmett.

"way to focus on what's important, chief," alice nods, at the man's back in an instant. she doesn't sound nearly as sarcastic as those words should warrant. "finally, a man after my own heart."

"wait till you try running for the first time," emmett interjects, joining her behind him. "mind, blown."

some of the other family members sigh and shake their heads. charlie runs his eyes along his sharper jaw, still sprinkled with the stubble he'd acquired in the preceding chaos, now even and almost roguish where before hes pretty sure it made him look old and unkempt. he looks younger, he thinks, not young exactly, but good. better than his age.

he pulls away from his reflection, eyes flickering from face to face around him. he might even have said that he fit in with the mythically beautiful family. hes struck by how silly he was to dismiss the strangeness of the gorgeous, antisocial group out of hand, now that he sees how strange he's become himself, before his eyes fall to his daughter.

"im sorry dad" she mumbles, humor evaporating, and a pain resounds like a crack in his chest.

slowly, carefully, he moves forward, and the rest of the vampires stand on high alert as they realize what he's about to do. bella's eyes are bloodshot and he presses his lips together in a bittersweet line as he wraps her in his arms and tucks her close, just under his chin. a shudder runs down his spine as a phantom pain ghosts over his shoulder, but he brushes it aside and it evaporates like water. when he breathes in, she smells the way she always has, and he is not hungry.

"it's okay, kiddo. we'll get through this. im just glad you're okay."

and they do. charlie's vampiric powers are related to shielding, like his daughter, but his are more like putting things on mute, if that makes sense. small things, obviously, and usually physical. he's got a great deal more resistance to thirst than most newborns, for example, because it's muted by his powers, particularly for those he cares about. unfortunately this makes it likelier for him to, uh, die of thirst, as it's possible for him to forget to feed. and he can't block edward from hearing his thoughts completely, but they're muffled naturally by his powers (and always will be. hes not helping anyone into his head any time soon, especially not his daughter's boyfriend). he can also mute his own scent to the shapeshifters — which means he and billy, after things are all sorted, will still be able to hang out and be best friends!! he can also mute his own footsteps,

anyways this started as a meme post intending to go into how comedic it would be if charlie got changed and bella spent the rest of the series complaining that edward wanted to spend the rest of eternity with her father but not with her but then i got struck with some mad charlie feels and this happened so anyways vampire!charlie everyone @charlieswanismyrealdad @effervescent-emmett @cullen-trash @emmettmccartycullen @jaspell @leahclearwaterdefensesquad is this anything

[morelike-bi-light]

@xxmultiangela Absolutely! That makes sense - I definitely should've expanded more on that, and been more deliberate with my wording. Thank you for replying so nicely too - I really appreciate it. Writing the original post, I was concerned primarily with staying on topic, so I threw that line in as a sort of placeholder, like with Sam, since I didn’t have the energy or space to explain in depth. Now that you’ve made the mistake of giving me a reason to blather on about it again, however, it’s a different story! Thanks for reminding me btw!

Here’s what I should’ve said: from my own reading, Smeyer writes Emily less as a character than as a narrative device that serves story mechanics that are likely unintentionally, but idc upholding racist and misogynist ideas. Within the canon text, her backstory and characterization is limited to her relationships with Sam, Leah, the pack, and the tribe. We aren’t told anything else much about her, past these connections to more relevant characters which is strange seeing as how she, like Bella, is the lone human in a supernatural family. Now, this is a problem a lot of authors deal with and isn’t always -ism related necessarily, but it is far more common for characters of color/female characters/LGBT+ characters/disabled characters/etc.

Still, even in Twilight, this isn’t specific to Emily. We see something similar in Esme. In both cases, they are represented as the "good victim". Unfortunately, the typical good vs bad victim for domestic abuse isn’t touched upon on the tvtropes page, but it’s pretty easy to cobble together an idea in this case from the way Smeyer frames Esme and Emily in comparison to Rosalie and Leah (who are both ‘bad victims’ of a different scale and type of mistreatment - I think I could easily write multiple essays on this topic).

According to Smeyer, a “good” domestic abuse victim:

responds passively, even receptively, to the abuse. Esme stays with Charles for years. Emily chooses to accept Sam after he mauls her face.

is willing to suffer and forgive due to community-related circumstances. Esme accepted Charles to please her parents and endured his treatment because her family “urged her to keep quiet”. Emily has to forgive Sam and lie about his actions because, beyond the role of magic in their relationship, telling the truth would also put the pack/tribe in jeopardy.

rejects/denies the man who abuses her for the sake of others, esp. her family. Esme only chooses to leave Charles because she is impregnated and staying with him would endanger their safety. Emily initially rejects and hides from Sam because of the pain it would cause Leah.

isn’t responsible for the circumstances leading to a relationship between her and her abuser, and would not have chosen to be with her abuser if not for these circumstances. Esme marries Charles for the sake of her family, written with no romantic interest in him, or in fact any other man besides her soulmate, Carlisle. Emily dates a few other boys casually as a teenager and yet shows exactly no interest in her cousin’s boyfriend, until after Sam has imprinted, pursued her relentlessly, and assaulted her.

is feminine, nonthreatening, and a natural caretaker. Esme automatically assumes a maternal role to Edward and later the rest of the coven. She is described as warm, gentle, and kind. Emily explicitly takes on the position of ‘pack mom’, spending the majority of the time we see her housing, cleaning up after, clothing, chiding, baking for and feeding the pack.

retains a more submissive role in her relationship with her ‘true love’, who holds some sort of power over her. Esme’s soulmate, Carlisle, is her sire. Less importantly, he is centuries older, and first met her when she was a minor. Emily’s soulmate, Sam, is a shapeshifter alpha, and she is not. If he wanted to hurt her, either with his supernatural strength, his wolf form or through the pack, she would be in no position to stop him.

As ‘good’ victims, Emily and Esme are introduced and continually framed by their good qualities and the good things they do for their loved ones, in contrast to Rosalie and Leah who, even when having their trauma explained, are framed by their mistakes and their disagreement w Bella. Ultimately, this sort of character work contributes to misleading and harmful stereotypes about female domestic abuse victims, as well as more generally the madonna/whore binary.

Despite all of these similarities between Emily and Esme, there are differences in: a. the way the abuse they suffer and the abuser who inflicts it is portrayed, and b. the ending they get. This difference is tied narratively into the difference between vampires and shapeshifters, which is intrinsically linked to race. If you’re native, you’re with the shapeshifters. You run with vampires if you’re non-native, specifically the ‘best’ vampires if you’re white. (How vampires of colors in the text are ‘othered’ is a whole other topic for a whole other post.)

Now, as a white person, I have a lot less authority in regards to how race is portrayed in speculative fiction as opposed to sexism, but it’s pretty obvious, and well understood by the majority of the fan community I run with that Twilight is pretty toxic in its handling of native vs non-native (specifically white) characters, so I’ll tackle this as best I can.

The relationship between Sam and Emily is the most important aspect of this. Sam is done just as dirty in this regard, but since we’re looking specifically at how Smeyer failed Emily, it’s important to understand what Sam represents specifically to Emily. Imprinting is intended to be read as fate’s way of correcting of the character’s hearts. An imprint may be inconvenient, even inappropriate, but according to Smeyer, if you’re a good person then morality, happiness, and obedience to fate/God are ultimately conflated. Thus, Sam’s relentless and aggressive pursuit of Emily is portrayed as tragic, but also romantic, and more importantly, necessary. Emily’s initial refusal is to be read as understandable, honorable even, proof of just how selfless she is. 

But ultimately, she is supposed to be with Sam, even if she’s uncomfortable with that. She is supposed to be happy in this specific way, and if she doesn’t accept him, if she prioritizes freedom and sisterhood over Sam’s feelings, if she points out the hypocrisy in Sam’s entitlement to her feelings, then she will get hurt, and if she tries to escape him and his feelings, she will not be happy - even if he does hurt her. Which is why she doesn’t - she learns her lesson. She’s a ‘good victim’ and if the victim and the abuser are meant to be, then the ‘good victim’ chooses to stay. If the ‘good victim’ did something to make their abuser hit them, then they reflect and learn better than to do that thing again. If the abuser is right, the ‘good victim’ gives in.

So what does this have to do with race? Well, here’s the thing. Rosalie and Esme both suffer abuse from love interests at some point in their backstory, but neither of them end up with their abuser, regardless of whether they’re a good or bad victim. Leah, although she isn’t physically abused, is emotionally abused and violated by the pack, lead by Sam, but like Emily, her journey culminates in her begrudgingly learning to bury the pain, stop resisting fate, and change herself where there is chafing against the natural order. 

Now, I'm not saying that every relationship with a happy ending has to be completely drama-free or healthy in every way. My favorite Twilight ship is Victoria/Leah, and hell knows that as cute as it would be, there's no way on the planet that everything would go smoothly for those two. However, I think it's pretty problematic that the only romantic relationship between two living native characters of the same age in the series officially launches with a violent supernatural assault resulting in facial scarring and a short coma. And not only that, the abuse is tied to the man's heritage - he attacks her on instinct, in a way that is specifically tied to native heritage. That's not drama or depth - that's a statement, intended or otherwise. Violence against native women is not appropriate material for drama, especially if it's coded as 'fated', 'natural', or 'necessary'.

Again, I don’t really think that Smeyer understood all this when she decided to write Emily Young into the series. Emily largely seems to exist for the same reason that Quil’s imprint does - to illustrate and familiarize the reader with the concept of imprinting so that later, when Jacob imprints on Rename, we already know what’s going on. She exists for the same reason that Crookshanks does in Harry Potter - she’s a planted lead to a more important plot twist. She is also one of two native women who get direct interaction and dialogue with perspective characters in more than one book. And the other female character serves a similar purpose, but reversed - Leah is the flipside to imprinting, an illustration of what it means to give in to a fate that’s unfair to you because it’s how things are supposed to be and refusing to play along is selfish. It all comes back to this very organized-religion idea of love, fate, and trust in/obedience to God which is at the center of Smeyer's works. But the intention doesn't have to exist for Smeyer's problematic perception of the world and people in it to get built into the narrative in fundamentally damaging ways.

Okay, so this is starting to get stupidly long, and also, at some point Tumblr erased a whole two paragraphs of written analysis that I am not entirely sure can be rewritten, so I think I'll finish here. I hope I explained in detail enough? There's like, a million other things that could be covered or discussed, but I am by no means an expert on, uh, anything. This is just a lengthy explanation of my personal, little-researched perspective on the canon material, but I had a lot of fun expanding on it, and it got me excited to work some more on the post about the potential of Sam as a foil to Carlisle. I hope this is somehow legible lol, and thanks for replying! 😊

As much as I love our meme culture where we romanticize or slam our favs, I do genuinely think there's really interesting flaws to explore with all of the Twilight vampires. It's not developed super well in the series, not front and center since whether we see main characters make mistakes with consequences largely depends on how Meyers personally feels about them and what they represent to her, but the complexity exists and there's a whole heap of potential to explore.

Like Carlisle's need to 'save' and how it conflicts with itself. There's that post that points out exactly how selfish his decision was, seeing as how he views vampirism as damnation, and yes! That makes it so much more interesting. What would he be without this conflict? A pretty one dimensional saint figure with a million PhDs. I love that Carlisle spent hundreds of years denying himself company and then crumbled beneath a single Chicago mother's plea to save her son, in my mind as an excuse to soothe his own crippling loneliness. And then when he had someone to exist beside, he just... he did it again, ostensibly because Esme deserved better. And again, this time for Edward. Then he did it for Rose. And then they picked up Alice and Jasper, and I wonder if he felt that much more guilty knowing that if he'd just waited a decade or so more, he might've found family anyways without having to 'damn' the others. Exploring how that interacts with his religious beliefs? Sign me up.

Then there's Rosalie's resentment. It's been covered in much better depth by other users, and I think I've reblogged those posts, but the validity of her anger and fear of losing the only things that give her comfort in a life she never chose bears repeating. Not to mention how this possibly affects her relationship with her coven - it's like when your child or spouse or sibling or best friend who has depression. How do you interact with a loved one who wishes they were dead? Who thinks life, even with you, whom they claim to love, is a prison? How do you interact with the man you believe to be your soulmate when you genuinely believe that you would be better off having died before meeting him? What does it say about her sense of self prior to death versus as an immortal?

Which leads perfectly into Edward's self-flagellation. He murders and feeds, because he's a monster who deserves to feel like one - but he's not the only one who suffers from that (though we give him some points for understanding that from the get-go and targeting people he thinks deserve it). But then he feels bad for acting like a monster and he has another reason to punish himself. He deprives himself of joy and distances himself from his family because how dare a monster like he ever find comfort in others like him, and how dare he enjoy a life that's so unnatural - but his family suffers alongside him. But then he feels guilty for being a dick to them, which gives him another reason to punish himself. He sends Bella mixed signals by alternating between caring, coldness, and cruelty, because he wants her to be happy but he also doesn't want himself to be happy - but Bella suffers because of this. Then he feels guilty about putting her safety at risk, which gives him another reason to punish himself. It goes on and on, and this line of thinking hinders his growth as a character through the entire series without being properly addressed.

Bella's bull-headedness. Jasper's survivalism. There is so, so much to be said here. Even with the three least developed of the coven, Alice has her impulsivity, Esme has her passivity, Emmett has his impatience.

On the flip side, we have the native characters, who are all either poorly developed or most characterized through off hand, arm's-length negativity, so as to make the vamps look better, and all I want for them is more content exploring all the good they have to offer.

Like, Jake's defining quality is his loyalty - Smeyer may have butchered his character, but I'm not talking about the bullshit she had him do in the last two books. I want to see more exploring how warm and good and patient and generous he is with his friends, no matter what it is he's up against, be it social conflict or an emotional crisis. I mean, in the books, we only ever get to see him really care about Bella. What about Embry and Quil? There's an entire foundation to their friendship that's hardly brushed by canon. I want to see his loyalty to his father and sisters and the memory of his mother. IT is interesting when loyalties conflict, preferably with greater nuance and weight than the Uley vs Cullen dilemma, but what's more satisfying is getting to see Jacob act in his element. I wanna see his other good traits explored too, the ones that exist outside of the necessity that he be a good friend/alternate LI for Bella - like the passion he has and his down to earth attitude.

And don't get me started on the Uley pack. Sam himself had so much potential to be a nuanced foil to Carlisle - I'm going to need to make an entire other post on it, it gets me so worked up, so keep an eye out for that! But also there's Paul, who is literally just an angry caricature version of Emmett, Emily whose entire characterization is built on a mess of racist and sexist tropes, and how many of the others even get characterized at all?

And Leah. Was she done the dirtiest of not only all the native characters, but also all the females? Arguably, yeah. I'd say so. Again, there was so, so much potential to explore her even in subtle ways through the later narrative and literally next to none of it was fulfilled. By the end of Breaking Dawn I was genuinely irritated, even as a kid, because it felt like Leah had been pointed out time and time again as being so special - only important native woman, only pack member to have been ostracized through the entire series, and the only female werewolf, hello - only for none of it to be relevant literally at all to the major plot. There wasn't even any follow up. Why is she the first female wolf? What does that mean for the future of the shapeshifters? (I'm absolutely thinking about this for my - probably shorter than planned - fic, jsyk.)

Thank God for Seth, I guess. We all love Seth, but still I think even he is basically just a puppy's personality given human form. It's as if Smeyer thinks that complexity is counter blank to goodness, friendliness, and openness. (And I think this is an issue with Emmett, Alice, Esme, and Angela, too, to be fair. It's just that where those four are just Defined by a trait - boisterous, fun, gentle, and nice in turn - Seth's behavior specifically plays into a... cutesy... paternalism? That makes me narrow my eyes a bit.) Anyways, I wouldve liked to see his feelings about Charlie and Sue, or about his sister's transformation and his father's death, or uh, any of the violence against the newborns many of whom were literally his age from Eclipse? And not just in an, oh, sad boy is sad kind of way. He's not a care bear - there's gotta be some conflict about what he's been through seeing as it's a LOT.

To be real, though? In some ways, I'm actually okay with it that Smeyer dropped the ball on so many of her characters, while still giving us what we have to work with - largely because it's actually so cool to think about all the potential buried in the content we have, waiting to be unearthed. It's why, regardless of when or why it started and how long it should've lasted, I don't see myself exiting the Twilight fandom for a long time. There's so much work to be done, you know, stuff to be said, and I think it's been and is and will be a beautiful conversation. This was just meant to be a long meta, but really, I have to take a moment and celebrate everyone in the fandom who has kept it alive and funny and interesting, whether you're a staple like @howlonghaveyoubeenseventeen and @shittytwilightaus or you're just here to reblog and enjoy. We all sort of rediscovered this thing we liked in our childhood and just collectively decided to fix it and make it something worth loving as the people we are, and it makes me proud to be here!