Hello! I thought I’d make a post to introduce myself to people that have found my page.
My name is Maria. I’m currently in college studying literature and theology. I like reading, writing, listening to music, playing the piano, baking, and pretty much anything to do with arts or crafts. I also love animals. I have 2 dogs and 2 cats.
My main fandom right now is Twilight. I’ve been obsessed since I saw the movies about a year ago. My favorite character is Jasper (hence the profile picture). I’m really obsessed with him. I also recently started writing Twilight fanfiction. This is a place for me to share any thoughts that pop into my head, but most of my thoughts are about Twilight. Other fandoms I’m in are The Good Place, Monk, and Severance.
Most of my ships are non-canon (and a good chunk of those are rarepairs). I’m also very much a multishipper for most characters. Main exceptions for this are Rosalie/Emmett from Twilight, Monk/Trudy from Monk, and Chidi from The Good Place (I can only ship him with Eleanor, but I do also ship Eleanor with Tahani).
My favorite movies (in no particular order) are My Cousin Vinny, Oscar, Big Fish, While You Were Sleeping, Bowfinger, The Proposal, The Green Mile, Waking Ned Devine, and The Lion in Winter.
My music taste is mainly 80s rock and vintage satire songs. I’m pretty obsessed with Billy Joel and Tom Lehrer. I’m still pretty sad about Tom Lehrer’s death.
I’m open to DMs if anyone wants to chat. Just don’t be a creep.
My ideas for their designs! I always envisioned a Carlisle with glasses (to make himself appear older), so I threw them on Edward, too, because he's always mimicking his dad.
my twilight hot take is that bellas prom outfit isnt as bad as ppl say it is
like she didnt even want to GO to prom in the first place, shes in a walking boot, and its april in washington!!! at night!!! cold as hell!!!!
if i was forced to wear a knee length sleeveless dress when its that cold outside, especially as someone from ARIZONA, id put leggings on too💀 plus how the hell is she supposed to wear anything OTHER than sneakers, shes in A WALKING BOOT
tbh Esme was tragically underutilized in the twilight saga. like a woman who is forever frozen in the early stages of motherhood, turning the grief for her son into a fierce need to mother every person that walks into her home?? that Bella was a character who was in desperate need of a mother and Esme was right there in desperate need to always BE a mother?? and then she was literally never used unless she was mothering Edward or glued to Carlisle’s hip, despite the fact that she should have probably been more important to Bella than Carlisle ever was
Reasons Edward Cullen is Gray Ace (probably demisexual)
Based on things I personally related to reading Midnight Sun. I'm sure Meyer definitely didn't mean for any of her characters to be lgbtq+ but here we are.
He has never felt attracted to anyone beyond aesthetic attraction before Bella. (Meaning sure they're pretty but had no desires beyond that observation)
He gets to know Bella and is in love with her (romantic attraction) before realizing he is sexually attracted to her.
When he finally does realize that he is sexually attracted to Bella he is genuinely confused/terrified by these new feelings
Asexuality is a spectrum and with even just one of these points I would consider him an ace character especially the first one but all the is too much
Another one - his family think he is kind of weird for this and Esme specifically worries he was possibly changed too young to be able to express any interest in finding/having a mate. Edward hears this worry and wonders about it, but is content with not having a mate until Bella.
Stephenie Meyer had a lot of guts when writing Midnight Sun. She could have minimized a lot of the weird behaviors Edward displayed throughout the saga and made them seem not as bad. Instead she fully committed to it and made Edward even more of a little weirdo. And I love her for it.
During Breaking Dawn, a theory is presented that Bella has such amazing self control because she knew about vampires before she was transformed and was therefore prepared. And I wonder if something similar would apply to the wolves.
Minus the bloodlust, the new wolves deal with very similar problems as newborn vampires, ie the very strong mood swings and anger. The wolves also never know what’s coming before they shift. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the one wolf who did know about the wolves in advance (even if only by a minute or two), Seth, maintained his sunny personality after shifting and is never indicated as having struggled with the usual anger and mood swings. Maybe Seth is just that positive of a person, but I do think that even being minimally prepared allowed him to adjust better than the other wolves did.
I think that if potential wolves were told what was going to happen to them before they shifted, they’d struggle a lot less after shifting and would be more well adjusted.
ok, here's my two cents. twilight is a romance. by authorial intent & plot conventions & marketing, which is the reason 'genres' even exist in the first place, it's romance. it's got elements of horror, monsters and violence and some weirdly graphic body stuff with bella's pregnancy, but those are set dressing to the plot and characters and themes, which are a story about finding your one true love. even her vampires are, quite literally, defanged.
(like, twilight's kind of THE "YA paranormal romance" that created a genre to haunt teen sections of libraries for decades to come and arguably domino-d to romantasy. even though it wasn't the first one of those, it was certainly the one to popularize it!)
that said. because it's a romance. i get to read it as horror.
because the thing about romance fiction is, much like horror, it is a mirror of the culture in which it was written. horror reflects cultural anxieties, its monsters showing us who is the "other," the un-person. (maybe in the best horror, it questions the paradigms that create those monsters in the first place.)
and romance? romance shows us the ur-person. the one we should all aspire to, because THAT is the path to a happily ever after.
so, let's talk about bella swan. let's talk about a pretty, (but not too pretty--she wouldn't call herself that!), white teenage girl, who is quiet and hardworking and less shallow than all her peers who care about things like boys and makeup and dresses. she falls in love with a man who of course Wants to hurt her, but Chooses Not To, which is the best thing a man can do.
she marries him. she has a child with him (even though she thought she never wanted kids--she wants edward's child, because he is uniquely perfect for her so his child is uniquely perfect!), sealing them into an eternal nuclear family where they will always be young and wealthy and unchangingly, conventionally beautiful. and white. love literally makes them whiter.
this is, culturally, What We Should Want.
and to someone on the margins? being told to want that is horror in and of itself. because i know how false it is.
i look at bella swan, and instead of a dream, i see my high school loves now married to men, in the closet to this day, holding the door shut with both hands. i see my friends who were pregnant by eighteen, who never went to art school or finished that education degree or cut it at the big engineering school, despite all the scholarships, because somebody had to stay home with the broken-condom baby. i see my friends who detransitioned because it was easier, and i can't even resent them for no longer speaking to me--we buzzed our heads together for the first in the same bathroom sinks.
i see the horror of being frozen forever at eighteen, never to dye your hair or pierce your ears or get a tattoo or gain comfortable weight, to make your body yours--the horror of never getting to grow up! there is a reason it is a tragedy when someone dies at 18. there is so much potential never realized.
i see the horror of being trapped in a "family" who are the only real friends you will ever have because no one else is allowed in, because they don't know the truth you do. i see the horror of the simple fact of being married to a man! when all the wealth is his, all the decisions are his, and your entire social circle becomes his family and friends, just as a matter of course. when no matter how much he has hurt you, you are sure it was because he loved you. what happened to you? where did your identity and your beliefs go? what is horror if not that?
i am white, but i can certainly still see the horror in having your culture and community and ACTUAL LITERAL MELANIN IN YOUR SKIN stripped away because you exist in a world where it is ontologically true that being "perfected" means becoming white, and being anything else means all the worst stereotypes about you are true.
and even if you aren't on the margins--even if you are stephenie fucking meyer, an upper-middle class, white, heterosexual, cisgender, able-bodied Mormon woman writing this in the early aughts in the bad old US of A--
we all see the horror bleeding in. we see the bloody, painful, terrifying birth after the pregnancy that distorts bella's body in horrific ways. we see the cracks straining where all of the messy, real parts of motherhood are fast-forwarded through and hand-waved away, almost as if someone is trying not to admit they didn't love it. we see alice pushing bella into taking things that she "doesn't want" because it would, of course, be wrong to want them, even if it's so much fun to fantasize about having them. we see edward, controlling and demanding and angry, jacob, even worse, teachers fantasizing about their young female students, assault everywhere, dripping off the pages, misogyny so heavy even good relationships like the one with bella's kindly father are buckling under it--and we know stephenie meyer isn't horrified of it herself, but she still can't keep the dissatisfaction from creeping in, even in her fantasy--
in other words:
We chase romance, we structure our lives around it, we fashion much of our art and culture from it. The romance story is not only a narrative but becomes also, more disturbingly, an imperative.
(The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Romance Fiction; ed. Jayashree Kamblé, Eric Murphy Selinger, Hsu-Ming Teo)
How I Would’ve Named Renesmee in Twilight (except I know ball):
Renesmee Carlie Cullen. A name that has divided a fandom for years. And controversially, I don’t actually hate this name-
I know, I know. It sucks. But it is exactly the kind of name that a teenager would pick for their baby; which wasn’t SMeyer’s intention
But that’s not the point of this post. The point is how I would’ve done it better
What’s important to note is that Bella placed an emphasis on family names when naming Renesmee. She wanted to honor their parents and she did, in true 18 year old fashion, by creating a portmanteau
However, she really didn’t need to do that because there’s a better option:
Charlotte Elisabeth Cullen, “Carlie” for short
Charlotte, for Charlie, and the nickname Carlie to honor Carlisle.
Elizabeth was Edward’s mother’s name and its known that they had a very close relationship before her death
Soften Elizabeth with an “s” to honor Esme, the mother whose raised him for nearly a century, giving us Elisabeth
And don’t include Renee because wow, she sucks, and so does book!Charlie but that’s not the point
And that’s how I would’ve renamed Renesmee without giving her a name that will get her relentlessly bullied in the decades of high school that she has to look forward to
just remember, every time you say something mean about edward cullen, you are being mean to seth clearwater’s bestie. you are hurting seth clearwater’s feelings. what is wrong with you.
What’s crazy is that 50 shades makes no sense as a twilight fanfic because Edward would not do any of that. But if you told me it was actually about BELLA being a dominatrix CEO who gets weird awkward virgin Edward to sign a sex contract and be her submissive… yeah I could see that.
edward and bella are so special to me. you are both so fucking weird. bella is only prolife about edward's baby any other baby could get punted into the sun and edward is only prolife about bella. he has killed other people and stood by it
I think it’s damn near canon that Edward would wish to become human. It’s for Bella, but not affecting her directly. He’d much rather risk his own skin in case the wish backfires. He probably doesn’t believe the willow will work, but he’s paranoid so he’s very careful with his wording nonetheless
Bella is less predictable, but I think she would use it to become a vampire without putting Edward through the guilt of causing her pain or whathaveyou. Or she insists on using her wish for someone else (my first thought is making it possible for Rose to have a baby, idk). There isn’t a ton Bella wants for herself that she doesn’t already have*. She intends to be very careful with the wording but has some bright idea last-minute and fucks up so hard. The consequences are both horrific and hilarious. Cringefail queen
*…unless she happens upon the One Wish Willow in New Moon. Then her ass is wishing to be good enough for Edward. She’s too depressed to realize how vague that is, and as far as Edward/the universe is concerned she is already good enough, so the willow does not snap for her as long as that is her wish. She figures it’s broken/fake, shoves it under her bed, and forgets about it
Wait. If this happens during Eclipse, Bella impulsively wishes Edward could safely have sex with her. This manifests as Edward becoming human. He is thrilled about this until his 1918 immune system immediately falls victim to a 21st century disease and Carlisle has to change him again. Edward is saved (again)… Except now he has newborn bloodlust, making it impossible to even be near Bella. So he uses his wish to cancel out Bella’s/give him his centenarian control back. Whomp whomp
crying over the fact that the Cullens gathering witnesses in Breaking Dawn is basically Edward and Bella going around being like 'yeah he rocked my shit #noprotection'
