Look, Breaking Dawn just makes all of Eclipse pointless. Whether you like Eclipse or not, the whole point of it was Edward and Bella working out their compromises about what was important to them personally, to their partner, and to them as a couple and hashing out the details. Edward wanted marriage, Bella wanted vampirism and sex, and they worked out their deal where they would get married first, then sex, then vampirism.
And sure, in retrospect that specific order does scream "this is only happening in this way so Renesmee can exist" but it was genuinely interesting that they had solved the impasse from the first book, in which Edward didn't want to make her a vampire. It was also interesting that they were actively choosing to vampirize a healthy, not-dying Bella.
Everyone else in the Cullen family became a vampire because they were either a) attacked/hunted by one or b) were dying and it was the only way to 'save' them. None of them chose it. None of them were well-informed beforehand. None of them romanticized it like Bella did (she wanted Edward's venom specifically to poison her system, remember!). I was looking forward to seeing all that play out. Would Edward be guilt-ridden forever? Would Bella regret it? What would the newborn experience be like (remember, also: The whole point of Bree was for Bella to see a newborn and wonder if she would be like that. The chapter is literally called "Mirror" for goodness' sake!)?
And then Bella is dying and needs an emergency transformation just like Edward and Esme and Rosalie and Emmett. It's not what Eclipse set up. Not what Eclipse promised. It's still a choice in that Bella wanted it anyway, but the emergency transformation (now with bonus Informed Consent!) completely absolves Edward and Bella of any guilt about it. She doesn't have to sit with the worry that maybe she gave up human experiences, or got turned too young, or whatever. She HAD to! She was DYING! And Edward doesn't have to worry about what he took from her, because wow, miracle baby, and also she was dying. Edward said in Twilight that he never resented what Carlisle did because Edward's life was over. Now it's the same with Bella.
And then she's the best vampire ever, because she "braced herself" and she chose it beforehand, so it's a perfect have her cake and eat it too thing in that, yeah, she DID choose it, but she was also dying. The best of both worlds!! So we don't have to worry about maybe it's monstrously selfish to opt-in to eternal youth and beauty and power with the trade-off of wanting to kill people. She gave her life up for her baby! They HAD to vampirize her! No guilt! Don't think about Bree and the mirror. Don't even worry about it. Don't think about the three books worth of 'no no being a vampire is awful, it's nothing any of us would have chosen, it's rising above the hand we were dealt, it's constant pain, ps. we might have lost our souls?' It's fine. It's good.
Breaking Dawn was a re-working of a book (Forever Dawn) written before Eclipse and New Moon even existed, and it shows. It shows so much. I'm so curious what a true follow-up to Eclipse would have looked like, vs going back to the earlier planned ending.
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