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)
so apparently the guy at the tayvis wedding that people said works for ice actually owned a company that merged with a different company that now has a contract with ice but he stepped down years ago after that merger and is no longer affiliated with them. and he openly holds very progressive anti racist and pro lgbt views but people are slandering his name because he went to the wedding of his adopted son’s friend and the internet is always searching for a valid reason to dogpile on the bride. ok
(btw i’m going to link a couple of videos that provide sources on this. no, i’m not citing tiktok videos as a source! these people simply compiled other sources that you can verify for yourself!)
