The writing is mostly garbage(I still like some of the world building) and problematic. I haven’t read the series in full since high school. This isn’t even in defense of twilight but it makes complete sense that the Edward and his “siblings” were high school. It is one of the few logical points in the story that are clearly explained in both the books and films. The Cullens “kids” are not perpetually in high school. In fact, they rarely do high school at all. However, when they settle into a small town(where they are much more conspicuous than a major city), they must use a back story that will allow them to stay in the town for as long as possible without people noticing they aren’t aging. This is done by beginning in their new home as high school sophomores(Edward and Alice) and juniors(Jasper, Emmet, and Rosalie). They graduate, go to college, & go to graduate school. By the time they reach their mid to late 20s without aging, the towns people start to take notice and they leave. If they start at an older age, the fact they look like teenagers will be noticed in a shorter period time(this issue is unclear in the movies because they all look 30).
They had lived in Forks 70 or so years before, liked it, and wanted their second stay to last a long time. They had just moved there the year before Bella so still in the early phase of a planned 10-15 year stay in Forks. That’s why they were still in high school.
No idea what kind of new batshit backstories they’d have to make for themselves after adding Bella and the demon baby to their number.
Side note, so many problematic aspects about Twilight are discussed but is no one disturbed Stephanie Meyer’s dream man(the book was literally born out a dream she had of him) is a 17 year old boy? Like he doesn’t even have Robert Pattinson’s rugged and mature good looks. He’s thin(he was dying of the spanish flu when he was turned) and boyish looking. Weird.
by Mylifeis2021
36 Comments
Homeschooling
do i think twilight is trash and could have been written a billion times better? yes. will i also defend it with every breath left in my body? also yes because it’s MY garbage
I don’t really get your point though? This is a pretty straight forward plot point that’s explained in the first book.
I’ve heard plenty of criticism of Twilight but I’ve never heard people focus on this.
I dunno man I feel like writing some highschool based wish fulfilment is not all that crazy. Saying “at 17 I would have loved to have someone like Edward” is not the same thing as “I wanna fuck a 17 year old”.
Stephanie also stated that her original plan for book 2 was to age up to college years so that it could be a more mature romance novel, but the publishers suggested that that original formula was a winner. (She did actually write a draft of that first option, which was smuttier, and give it as a gift for her sisters birthday)
Of all the many criticisms I’ve heard about Twilight, the plot points have never been one of them.
I think that’s quite the stretch about Stephanie, however. Most YA writers are adults. She wrote a romance about two teenagers being idiotic but with fangs. Hardly groundbreaking but not really harmful and “weird”.
ETA: If you’re looking for creepiness look no further than an 18 year old “imprinting” on a literal baby. 🤮
It helps for them to start as teens because teenagers generally aren’t expected to have backgrounds that need to be explained intricately. Whatever their background generally ties into who their parents are and where they lived. It wouldn’t look weird to anyone that they don’t have all have a work history, driver’s licenses, or other documentation that adults more often must have. That leaves only two in the family who need more established background explanations.
To go to college or get any sort of job, they need to have some educational background and going to high school takes care of that with less necessary fraud.
> This isn’t even in defense of twilight but it makes complete sense that the Edward and his “siblings” were high school.
I know that if you’re 12, then 3 years can feel like an eternity. But the difference just isn’t significant for any reasonable cover story you’re cooking up.
“Oh no! The people in this small town will be confused about why my kids never moved out!”
No they won’t.
And if that’s a big concern, then just pick a different cover story.
Honestly, I don’t think it’s even poorly written. I wouldn’t call it good, but it’s not the trash people like to pretend it is. It’s popcorn fiction for high-school girls. It serves that purpose even if aspects of it are problematic as hell.
I love that this post is apparently out of nowhere and completely unnecessary, but you felt that strongly about it and you made your point very well. Bravo. This was good scrolling entertainment for a person who has never read Twilight and never will lol. I’m totally won over by your argument
They become apparent in sunlight. How do they go to school at all? Fawks washington is almost never sunny. But that’s not true of other towns.
The thing that has always bugged me the most about Twilight is how the weather is so consistent. If they were in England they would be found out within a week! 😂
I disagree that it’s “disturbing”. She was writing a YA romance book. Of course she wrote it about teenagers. She wasn’t necessarily dreaming about him as a teenager. Or maybe she was having a dream about being a teenager. We’ve all been teenagers. Not that crazy. We need to stop attacking adults for writing teen romance, an insanely popular genre.
I really wish people could learn the different between a fact of the setting, and a fact of the characters. Vampires pretending to be high school students is a fact of the characters, not a fact of the setting. The Cullens are canonically huge weirdos among their kind, and this is a major contributing factor. What other vampires have full time jobs?? And school enrolments??? No, other vampires roam from town to town, unless they’re rich and influential, in which case they invest in some sort of hidden mansion and send people out to hunt far away from their home. The only other vegetarian coven don’t seem to have jobs – I guess they’re, what, professional cougars? But if you sort of just hunt wild moose and don’t need to sleep and you’re impervious to the elements then I guess you could just build a cabin in a national park, no one would bother you unless someone found oil there, and I’m sure plenty of human Alaskans tell the oil prospectors to fuck off if they show up.
A fact of the setting needs to hold up to logic. A fact of the character only needs to be consistent with the character motivations or tell us something about the characters, and in this case, “want to be human so badly they’d repeatedly sit through this weird fascimile of being a teenager” is a hell of a character statement!
It always makes me laugh how people pick this book to pieces. Questions about, “Does Edboi smell the menses” “Why did Charlie move to Forks” “Why do the wolves have a thing for babies” I’m not getting into some Mormon ladies’ fantasy world- I’ve read SO MUCH worse, and this just happened to be what got popular because Sqweee cute boys. I do agree with you OP. Everytime I see this argument about them being in school brought up, I think the same things you wrote out. It was so they could blend and stay longer… maybe now they just home-school their “children.”
One note on the Edboi, and his appearance, he was originally based on Henry Cavill. S.Meyer pictured him as Edward, but he had aged out by the time they began the casting process- so RPatz was not exactly the image she had fantasized.
I’ve not read the books, so I’ll take your word for it and assume its all much clearer there. The movie, however, *definitely* makes it seem like the vampires are perpetually in High School and that’s what they want to spend eternity doing with their lives. I think that’s probably where the apparent misconception comes from?
I still love this series and don’t think it’s problematic…I also refuse to watch the twilight movies because I don’t think Robert Pattinson is attractive and the Edward in my head looks a lot better
And it makes sense their skin sparkles!!! Because compressed carbon is diamond!
I feel like a lot of the hate for the twilight saga is more because it’s fun to hate than because people actually read it and thought it was bad. They were some of my favorite books and while the ending got kinda sus, there was a lot of good writing as well, especially the depiction of Bella suffering from depression during New Moon. I think if you read them and your response is “wow, Edward sucks and is hella abusive” then that just means you have good reading comprehension, it’s absolutely a story about people dealing with unhealthy relationships. Hell, the last book is practically a horror novel. The only part that really felt like it was a bad writing choice was wrapping up Jacob’s storyline by imprinting him on their kid, since it really lessened a lot of his development, but she clearly wasn’t going to take the better option (Charlie and Jacob would have made sure a hilarious couple)
The critique of twilight as “problematic” because an adult woman wrote a YA romance is so tired. What is this, 2008? The series is no worse than any harlequin romance ever, including everyone’s precious Outlander series. But because teenage girls liked it, it got a bunch of hate. Lay off with the used, insipid early 2000s Tumblr Twilight commentary.
>Stephanie Meyer’s dream man(the book was literally born out a dream she had of him) is a 17 year old boy?
Far be it for me to defend her writings, but imagine that, it is adults who write Young Adult Books. Always have.
From Tolkien to Suzanne Collins.
17 years old are not going to write multiple books at that age.
And older people can still remember what they experienced in their high school years and what they were like as teenagers or see it in their own children.
Also the conclusion that Edwards is Meyer’s dream man (as in she wants to fuck him when she’s an adult) at whatever age she wrote those books is your own. Like.. wow… projecting much?
She could have had a crush on someone like him when she was a teenager or some child (maybe her own, her nieces, a friend’s) she knows had a crush on guy like that or she just wrote a story about teenagers falling in love but not projecting her own desire. Ever thought of that?
Never-mind that the idea came to her in a dream.
(“It was June 2nd, 2003,” she said. “I had this completely amazing dream that was just, you know, about first love. It was this boy and a girl in a meadow. And they were having this conversation that I was eavesdropping on in my dream. And it was about how compelled they were to be with each other and yet how hard it was for him not to kill her every second they were together. And I just thought, ‘Whoo!'”
The girl, who would become Bella in the novels, was just an average teenager. The boy, Edward, was a *vegetarian* vampire, constantly fighting his desire to drink human blood.) https://www.cbsnews.com/news/stephenie-meyers-latest-vampire-tale/
Your side note reeks purity culture. And I’m not here for it.
The thing is, as a 25 year old, I meet people everyday who I think could be between the ages of 20 and 40. If they look old enough to be in college, they should start in college and live into adulthood a little longer.
And in general I think society needs to let go of this high school trope designed for adult viewers. I started reading Twilight in 5th grade, but my adult step mom was reading it at the same time and I wasn’t allowed to watch the movies until later. I’d argue that their conversations about sex, marriage, morality, and souls are for adult audiences and in general the story would have been better in a lot of ways if everyone was like 3 years older.
> Stephanie Meyer’s dream man(the book was literally born out a dream she had of him) is a 17 year old boy?
Is having a dream that includes a character the same as having conscious/awake desires for that character?
You all forgetting the point that this book is young adult, aimed at a certain audience, so 17 y o pretty boys are a must in this category. When I was 17 and a huge fan of Buffy, I found this series quite charming, now though I would not be able to read it for understandable reasons.
Twilight has some great vampire lore and the internet will never make me hate it. I loved it as a teen, and I love it as an adult. Yeah, some scenes are pretty cringy, but that’s what being a teenager in love is all about.
YES!!! Genuinely it’s so frustrating to see criticisms about that plot point because its literally explained in the books!!! People just say shit about Twilight without even reading it… There’s so many other, much more valid, plot points to critique.
Thin and boyish is actually just the Romantic ideal. Except instead of the classic tuberculosis they went with Spanish flu. He’s pretty much your classic Byronic hero.
Twilight’s success is in Meyer’s expert use of inserting Universal Fantasies into the text. They are often derided, but there’s a reason I might turn on a show like Grey’s Anatomy rather than watch an Oscar nominated film. I may want to eat junk food sometime.
I think the derision for books like Twilight shows more about our own shame than it does about Meyer’s writing.
I’m with you 100%. I’m putting Twilight next to Stanley mugs and the musical Cats as one of those things that I will defend to the death against all outside criticism, and then turn right around and laugh at how dumb it is.
Of course it’s dumb. But it’s not dumb because of all the things in it that make for normal dark fantasy teen lit. It’s dumb because the *werewolf in the love triangle imprints on the baby. Also the baby is named Renesmee.* I lovingly laughed my way through every single one of those books, and I was like *this far* from naming my cat Edwob Charlile, and I don’t want to hear a negative thing you have to say about this awful series if you don’t *love to hate* it as much as I do.
Go touch grass.
But get off my lawn!
Sincerely,
34 year old dude that read every book as they came out and saw every midnight showing
Most of the “problems” with twilight aren’t really that bad. I remember many, including Stephen King I believe, saying Bellas reaction/depression upon Edward leaving was harmful. It was one of the most realistic things in the book. Hell when I was 15 and my first GF had to breakup with me when her family moved…I litterialy and I do mean Litterialy fell ill.
My conspiracy theory was always that the Cullens got their ID’s and birth certificates and such from the Quileute tribe, who use their semi-autonomous government nature to create the necessary documents without drawing too much attention. It’s a win-win, the Cullens get to live relatively normal lives while the Quileutes get to keep the Cullens, who they consider it their duty to protect the world from, under a close watch.
I’m pretty sure the author is mormon, no? The book storyline makes way more sense if you know anything about Mormons… there’s definitely a lot of influence there. Legit LDS womens’ main purpose in life is to marry and punt out babies as soon as they’re out of high school.
Oh good, not a defense for imprinting, carry on
That’s all fine and dandy, but what about Carlisle? It’s a lot harder to fudge your background if you want to get a job as a Doctor.
The thing that always bugged me is how they play baseball. They are hitting the ball further, but there’s no proportional increase in the distance between the bases.
High schoolers and college kids are also easy to manipulate.
I guess they couldn’t really live in a big city like New York to blend in, because clearly most of them have some control issues. But also…if I was a FUCKING IMMORTAL VAMPIRE, I’m sure as shit pretending I’m a college freshman, go through college, and then an industry professional of some sort. You can pull that off from age “18” to “mid thirties,” imo. The extra couple years from high school literally aren’t worth it.