Still don't understand what SM was going for with the idea that Rosalie and Edward go to medical school to 'keep Carlisle current.' Continuing medical education is a thing. Surely he's reading medical journals, he's going to conferences, he's actively practicing medicine; I don't understand how someone else going to medical school is better than that??
How is it supposed to work?? They go to class and then come home and use perfect vampire memory to just repeat verbatim what they learned that day? How is that not a tremendous waste of everyone's time. Very silly.
I think the REAL reason Edward and Rosalie went to medical school is that Edward hero worships Carlisle and wants to be like him. And Rosalie was just sick of hearing Edward talking about his 'advanced degrees in medicine" and was like "What, like it's hard?" and went herself to prove she could do it and that Edward's not special.
wedding dresses are white specifically so that if the bride goes axe-crazy you can rest assured you will see the blood stains all over her and it'll be sick as fuck
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.
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)
just as a reminder to all, the real Quileute tribe was not consulted whatsoever on the twilight series and had a lot of their culture just fully lied about & made up, which is not a remotely harmless act. you should donate to fund their cultural preservation and moving of vital centers out of tsunami zones! i try to throw in a few bucks any time i watch any twilight related media.
Most fandoms recommending media: yeah you should check this out it’s pretty good
Buffy fans recommending Buffy: omg I love Buffy except for the racism, the misogyny, the occasional homophobia, the way sexual assault’s handled, a couple episodes I personally hate, David Boreanaz’s Irish accent and also the fact that Joss Whedon killed my entire family. You gotta watch Buffy though. You gotta.
