i think we should stop calling them baby names so people remember theyāre not just naming a baby but also a future twenty seven year old with a resume
Carlisle doesn't have a heart. Early on in his Trying to Kill Himself Era he ripped it out with his bare hands and threw it in the fire to see if it would kill him. The gaping hole in his chest healed over after a few decades but there's still a huge scar in the center of his chest. After destroying his heart did nothing, he tried to go for the brain, which is how he figured out that vampire bones (scull included) might be the hardest thing in the known universe.
He still wonders how completely you could hollow out a vampire's body before they ceased to function, and hypothesizes that a vampire could be completely empty so long as you didn't burn their bones.
yall gotta learn the difference between "this character is an asshole" and "this character was supposed to be super cool but the author is an asshole" and "this character is a teenage girl who was mean once"
the fact that renesmee's allure works the exact same way as immortal children is such a great detail that is absolutely never brought up. like everyone she touches wants to defend her to the death? meanwhile characters like the romanians and amun/kebi don't let her use her gift and they're the ones that leave the quickest after the volturi confrontation. this is absolutely going to be built on if stephenie publishes a renesmee book right?
what if you slept all day and woke at night, lonely and frustrated. what if you couldn't go to social events, or even mundane public spaces like stores. what if you couldn't see the sun. what if you couldn't go to the pool, or the beach, or the creek. what if you couldn't eat what everyone else is eating. what if you couldn't eat at all. what if your basic needs came at the cost of your loved ones' quality of life. what if you became agitated, confused, maybe even violent if your needs weren't met. what if people blamed your behavior on demons, or worse, your own inherent evil. what if people saw you as a threat to your own community. what if the default response to your suffering was either indifference or violence. what if people thought you were better off dead, that you no longer count as human, that they're doing you a favor by letting you disappear. what if people assumed you must somehow deserve all of this. what about that.
In Life and Death SMeyer wanted to show how everything would be the same with flipped genders, but we all know it wouldn't work like that.
So, based on their flipped genders and kind of changed backstories (especially in Jessamine's case), which special abilities do you think the Cullens should have?
I think Carine still works with compassion or something compassion-adjacent (not a super power technically but you get the idea). And actually I wonder if people would be less critical of her actions vs Carlisle? That is, I don't really see people talking about consent and damnation when it comes to Sasha of the Denali creating her "daughters" (none of whom were on the verge of death so far as we know). Maybe there's some subconscious thing where a woman making vampire 'children' is more akin to birth (no one chose to be a vampire, but no one chose to be born either), whereas the power dynamics of a man making the choice for someone else, especially women, weirds people out? I don't know, maybe I'm way off base there, but I feel like there might be SOMETHING.
Carine's story is pretty much the same, just limited by what women were allowed to do in the medical field. There's also a bit of a "punish a man by hurting a woman" there in that the vampire who bit her explicitly did so to punish Pastor Cullen, but since I already sort of headcanoned that for Carlisle anyway, it didn't bother me much.
The difference was the Carine wasn't out doing the vampire hunting herself; likewise Jessamine had much less agency than Jasper, who actively chose to lie about his age to enlist. Jessamine was just kidnapped from her home. (And again, the dynamics of a male vampire breaking into someone's home and kidnapping her to turn her into a vampire just feels very different than three vampire women being approached by a man who thought they needed help. Yas Maria, slay Maria! Ew, gross Mariano!) So we have no evidence really Jessamine had the same power as Jasper as a human; she also had no military experience so she would have had a much steeper learning curve than Jasper in terms of learning how to fight, how to train, how to command. I've always thought that Jasper's power should have been mental anyway so let's make Jessamine's power mental instead. She can still sense and manipulate emotions but no more of that weird heartbeat and endorphin stuff (that doesn't seem like would apply to vampires anyway??), it's mental. Wouldn't work on Beau/Bella then I guess.
Royal can keep beauty, Eleanor can keep strength. I like how those upend expectations. And Eleanor's backstory stayed pretty much the same: being mauled by a bear. Good for her! I appreciate that SM still had them get married repeatedly; although I don't remember if it's still because Royal likes to do it. I hope so because again, it upends expectations (the man being wedding-obsessed) and it keeps them closer to their original characterizations.
Earnest's story is very different than Esme's (and again, I must ask, why not 'Ezra?' It's right there and just feels right! Even feels like the name of a kid who grew up on a farm). But again, I like upending expectations by having this sweet, loving house-husband while Carine is out there working. I do wonder, if we had seen more of Earnest, if SM would have made that Power of Heart more dad-like ("step into my office" "let's play catch" "You can tell your old man anything") than the just sort of bubble of love surrounding Esme but I don't know. It might also manifest differently because Earnest's child was older and was actively murdered by his wife. Esme only had her child for a few days and he died of natural causes. Those experiences are very different and might shape what form the Power to Love Passionately takes and how Earnest applies it to his family. He might be a bit more anxious? More protective? He knows his new children are basically indestructible but that helplessness he felt when he lost his human daughter might color how he reacts.
That leaves Archie and Edythe. You can't really change their powers too much because so much of the plot relies on them. And really I haven't changed much of the others either. I think the powers would be pretty similar because they are based on traits shared between the two versions of the characters, but how they used them, how they manifested, might be different because of their different lived experiences. Archie growing up as an eldest son rather than an eldest daughter (and does this mean his mother hires someone to kill his father and his mother and step-father lock him up? How deep does the gender swap go?) might change things like, perhaps he's more or less likely to tell people about his visions because of different societal expectations. Perhaps Edythe's latent ability to "read" people is seen as less impressive than Edward's, like, "oh she's a girl of course she has strong emotional intelligence" or whatever vs Edward being this sensitive piano prodigy was more of an outlier.
Life and Death is such an interesting experience because SM kept a lot of the dialogue word-for-word from Twilight. Earnest has almost all the same lines as Esme, etc. But she changed the backstories to fit gender expectations.
Couldn't find the original post this morning but was thinking again about how Bella survived almost everything that 'killed' the other Cullens.
She survived (and remained human) being hunted by James (Alice).
She survived (and remained human) being bitten by a vampire (Carlisle, Jasper).
She survived jumping off a cliff (Esme).
She was saved from being attacked by a group of men (Rosalie).
Didn't she have the flu or something in New Moon? (Edward)
The only one she didn't was Emmett. But you could argue Paul phasing and Jacob protecting her is sort of similar to a 'bear' attack?
I remember someone brought this up to SM at a Q&A once and she was like, "oh interesting, I hadn't thought of that!" so it doesn't seem to have been intentional, or at least not consciously so. It's probably just a function of the 'danger magnet' stuff and Bella being the MC who needed to survive for the story to continue.
Wouldāve been funny if Charlie knew the Cullens were vampires really early on in the series (maybe even before Bella arrived in Forks??) and just. Didnāt care. People havenāt been going missing in Forks since they arrived so obviously theyāre not eating local, at least. So itās none of his business
I feel like a lot of the complaints about Bella and Edwardās relationship lose their edge when you keep the inspiration for the series (a dream about a boy and a girl in a meadow talking about the difficulties of being in love with him wanting to kill herā heās a vampire) in mind
If you start there and work backwards, then of course theyāre going to have a whirlwind, all-consuming, all around bonkers start in their relationship. Smeyer really leaned into the āhe wanted to kill herā bit (best decision she ever made tbh), so for the relationship to be worth the constant risk and struggle, the feelings had to be drastic.
For example: it causes the boy pain (literal and emotional!! Bloodlust is crazy in twilightverse!!) just to be around the girl, so heās got to be so irrationally obsessed with her that he wants to watch her sleep, to even put up with being around her. Now the girlās got to be enough of a freak to match him, otherwise thereās no story
Smeyerās writing has plenty of problems, donāt get me wrong. But Bella and Edward being freak4freak is a feature, not a bug
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