I think one of the most compelling aspects of New Moon, for me, outside of the obvious found family with Jacob and the wolf pack, is how good that whole part is in the context of the rest of the series.
Smeyer is… not a very good writer. Obviously, the draw for readers has never been her prose. My New Moon reread in 2021 has me in pain over a LOT of the dialogue and writing choices. But there’s something so special about the middle chunk of New Moon, a breath of fresh air as Bella and Jacob not only learning about each other, but the world, too: they go motorbiking, hiking and jake even promises to take her cliff jumping. There is always a healthy amount of worry between the two.
And inbetween that, it’s moments like these just feel so healthy, like a refuge from everything else in the Twilight saga.
From Bella never feeling like Jacob’s inferior, never feeling like she has to work to be worthy of Jacob, to how natural their friendship and happiness is. It’s so cathartic and in such stark contrast to Edward, and his relationship to Bella.
Edward, always perfect and beautiful and hiding things from Bella out of misguided worry, always something unreachable to her. Their relationship is cold. Distant. And I know it’s there because Stephanie Meyer Mormon Chastity, but it never reads that way. Bella always wants more, wants to be more. Because she feels like she needs to catch up to Edward. And Edward never seeks more, punishing the both of them if they ever do.
Despite their being lovers, they’re never intimate. Physically or emotionally. Intimacy like Jacob noticing the small things about Bella without her ever having to say so.
We never get this in the rest of the series, with Edward. Small moments where Bella is known, and is loved for it. Jacob not only notices these things, but remembers. And he’s never unkind for it, just accommodating.
The rest of the series is just wish fulfilment hot rich boyfriend bullshit extravaganza. Bella is showered with material gifts: Edward’s ring, a new car, a new house. Nothing she ever truly wanted or needed.
What she needed, what was the true wish fulfilment, is like Jacob giving Bella a hand-crafted bracelet for her graduation. Something small and not worth much, but it means so much more to Bella. She wants love, not riches.
Bella says Jake is there to “fill the hole left by Edward” but, really, what he’s doing is helping her to heal and providing shelter from her trauma with the Cullens. He’s not masking her pain the way Edward does, fucking vapourising her trauma with his mere existence.
All of this is why it’s so bizarre to me that Smeyer wrote however many hundred pages of this only to inexplicably completely turn Bella and Jake’s dynamic on its head, because now Jacob is just another ridiculously strong supernatural monster that hurts Bella and vies for her affections. The fact that this Jacob - sunny, human - and the werewolf Jacob - colder, crueller - are written in the same book is just baffling to me.
I don’t have a point, exactly, but I think the existence of these pages and Jake is the reason a lot of fans liked Twilight enough for it to cross over from “like” to “obsession”, or in my case, hyperfixation special interest double whammy wombo combo brainhell.
And that’s kind of the tragedy of the series, I think. Of all the lost potential, I think these pages really encapsulate the limited good that Smeyer is capable of, and that she chooses to destroy.
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