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draculaney · 2 years ago

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A (not so) brief history of Twilight & me

I was only vaguely aware of it in middle school as it came out, I remember seeing multiple copies floating around in the hands of girls I didn’t really hang out with. High school me hated it on principle and was loud about it. I didn’t like that they had deviated so much from what vampires have “always been”. (like I was some expert lmfao) Vamps to me at that time were gothic or super badass. Buffy, Queen of the Damned, Blade, etc. On the flip side, there was the cartoony vampire like The Count on Sesame Street, Count Chocula, or the Disney movie “Mom’s Got a Date with A Vampire”

I had a group of friends in high school lovingly chide me into reading it before passing judgment. I liked supernatural books already, so I was like “uuuugh fine.” I loved it, and quietly hopped right onto the hype train in about 2009. I remember getting swept up in the thought of it all and wanted my life to have a lot of the adventure and overwhelming emotional love that Bella experienced while also feeling the drudgery of my normal life. I remember having a desire to leave all of what my life was for something better for the Twi version of vampirism (superhuman abilities, impervious skin, venom based plastic surgery, etc). it was a way to feel like I was a person who could experience the same things as Bella, since she was pretty boring and I was very interesting (lmao)

Enter my tumblr phase: Getting introduced to feminism and learning how to critique media in the same breath, I found a hoard of blogs dedicated to telling my why Twilight was bad actually, but for abuse reasons, and how it was such a bad influence on young girls lives. I had a new reason to beat my chest about how bad twilight was, memes and vitriol included. I ran with it, unchecked for many years without examining the weird undercurrent of misogyny that a lot of these memes and stuff had attached to them. Have you ever had to listen to a grown man tell you what he thinks about something that’s popular for teenagers? Why was I putting so much stock into this hatred? I also went through a VERY intense Buffy the Vampire Slayer phase at this point in my life as well, which on the internet were always put at odds with one another. (side note: I'm gonna k*ll Joss Whedon for the buffy movie version having menstrual cramps when vamps are near. I'm gonna commit a moider.)

One night in like 2017ish, I talked my roommate into watching the first movie with me, as we had a time honored tradition in putting on “bad movie” nights. We both found that while Twilight sucks, its actually like….fun? And it’s bad in a campy way? Like, once you let yourself be taken on the ride of Twilight outside of the context of the Discourse and teenage hormonal soup, it is a buckwild story told by a well meaning but misguided Mormon woman about wish fulfillment.

I'm also someone who has lived with mental illness for my post-adolescent life. on a rewatch/reread of twilight, I resonated with the depiction of Bella more than I used to. The more knowledge I had about my own symptoms and presentations of my own mental health, the more I saw in Bella. It feels like a lot of it was so easy to brush off back in the late 2000s -oh she's just an emotional teenage girl. -oh she's boring and not proactive in her life. -she had no thoughts and gets everything solved for her. it is so easy to introject those ideas and apply them to my own life and experiences. I have also been so heartbroken I don't want to move. I have also acted out in order to feel the smallest inkling of a happy feeling. I have also been terrified of abandonment and watched it come true before my very eyes.

Learning how to have empathy for the character of Bella swan was an exercise in learning how to have empathy for the parts of myself that exist in a messy and perpetual teenage state. When I hated Bella swan, I denied a huge part of myself that resonated with her originally when I was a fan. When the stories on tumblr were smugly reblogging the "Edward is a domestic abuser" posts, it felt so easy to fall into the headspace of "yeah, I am so different from Bella that I would never fall for that kind of emotional manipulation!!" but I did, as do so many others.

There is never a twilight meme page that exists today that doesn't have a post that depicts Bella as useless or a burden; how she is the reason everyone in the series suffers. Bella is blamed for the brunt of the actions that happen against her. She's blamed for being too sweet smelling, for being the cause of Edward's obsession. She's blamed for not falling in love with Jacob, eternally friendzoned and who takes it out on her emotionally. She is blamed for not reacting properly when her heart is broken. She is blamed for the Cullens killing James, which begins Victoria's hunt. She is blamed for the hybrid baby which brings on a possible vampire war with the Volturi. She internalizes all of it, as we see in the series.

The part of me that started to care about Bella is the part of me that started to take interest in looking back in my past and realizing that when people hurt me, it wasn't my fault. Pop psychology calls it "healing the inner child" and one huge step is realizing that when you are hurt or blamed about something that happened as a child, you were a child. Bella is a teenager, the awkward stage between childhood and adulthood. where you want to grow up so fast without realizing what that means yet, without realizing what you're leaving behind. Bella is shown to never have a healthy childhood, the hints we get at her upbringing was full of strife and responsibility that any adolescent should never be put through.

So here we are now. A 30 year old who can’t seem to get this out of my head. I might as well write about it in graphic detail, yknow?

#twilight #twilight saga #bella swan #edward cullen

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