Hello. Your top 10 (or whatever) of Bella's favorite ridiculous decisions or actions?
I'm not sure I have a particular order so I suppose I'll list out ten things off the top of my head.
Bella's Motivation to Move to Forks
Now, this is mostly just sad, and offers some very key insight into Bella's relationship with her mother and her general childhood, however, the decision making in and of itself is delightfully ridiculous.
Bella's going to stop being a burden to her mother by moving to Forks right after her mother got married. She will give no one a reasonable response of why she suddenly up and moved, with little warning, and will badly lie through her teeth that she loves Forks when she's hated it for years.
To Renee, this undoubtedly looks like a) Bella is mad at her for remarrying b) Bella hates Phil c) Potentially... Phil did something very bad to Bella.
Bella, however, has no idea.
It never crosses her mind in the narration that this is what people assumed happen.
She realizes her decision is a bit odd but she doesn't think it's utterly bizarre and is more wallowing in her completely self-imposed misery.
Granted, Bella's severely depressed here, but the whole Hallucination Edward arc is a ride.
First, when making a blatantly poor decision, Bella actually hallucinates Edward telling her not to do it. Rather than be mildly concerned that she hallucinated her boyfriend, Bella doubles down, and purposefully puts herself in as much peril as possible so as to keep hallucinating Edward.
She then never tells anyone she was doing any of this to hallucinate Edward and, again, doesn't seem to realize any of this was strange or concerning.
You don't hallucinate your ex-boyfriend?
I Will Stab Myself to Save the Day
Bella gets invited to a tribal meeting and Billy tells a story. The moral of the story is very clearly that vampires are man-eating demons who are the stuff of horror stories with no hint of humanity or compassion.
Bella skips that part and zeroes in on the third wife stabbing herself so as to distract the vampire.
"I can do that," Bella says.
Or rather, what she says is in a Troy Maclure voice, "It's the part I was born to play, baby."
Bella then proceeds to try to do this and gets Edward asking, "What the fuck, Bella?!"
And Bella's response is that she thought she was being helpful!
We Should Hide in the Place No One Will Ever Look: My Hometown
When Bella's on the run in Twilight from James she proposes that they go to Phoenix. Why?
She said she was going to Phoenix.
See, because she said it, James will never look there.
Nevermind that's the first place he's going to look because a) she said it, b) she has family there.
Nevertheless Bella, Edward, and Emmett consider this to be a tricksy, brilliant, plan.
James finds her less than twenty-four hours later.
Bella gets the weirdest things out of stories. She actually generally doesn't care what people say much if at all.
Edward goes on this long, rambly, monologue of how Carlisle was turned into a vampire. Bella's not uninterested, it sounds like an exciting story in theory, but what she zeroes in on is the idea of Carlisle swimming to France.
Edward stops and stares at her.
"Yes, Bella, humans do that too."
"Right, I knew that, it just sounded strange in context."
It didn't sound strange in context.
(Bella has a few other moments like this such as hyper focusing on Edward's human eyes being green when Carlisle's trying to tell her that Edward believes he has no soul and that if she became a vampire she'd become a soulless husk. Rosalie's story is a similar moment, though there it's more that Bella decides "well, I never wanted a baby, so I'm good" and not thinking anything else about what Rosalie said.)
Bella's Reaction to Edward's Everything
Edward says he planned to meticulously murder the entire Biology class, to murder Bella, so he could have her sweet sweet blood be warm for long enough to devour.
This is right after confessing that he is, in fact, a vampire.
Bella says essentially, "Cool story, bro" and thinks it proves his love to her that he likes her so much he overcame his burning desire to eat her all the time.
In the next sentence, he confesses to having at first despised her because her scent ruined his existence as well as the fact that his family voted on her assassination.
He then runs around a meadow, purposefully being terrifying (honestly, I imagine Jack Nicholson in the Shining here but with more glitter) and Bella thinks it's all wonderful.
This is a more normal, teenage, thing but Bella not only has the world's lowest self-esteem but she assumes everyone hates her. Someone didn't talk to her at lunch: they hate her. Jasper doesn't talk to her? He hates her too (even though he does this so as not to eat her).
Bella generally assumes people have strong negative feelings about her when they probably generally don't care in the least.
The Vote to Turn Bella into a Vampire
Right when Bella gets back to Forks she goes to the Cullen house and makes them, who barely know her, awkwardly vote to her face if she should join their family forever or not while Edward seethes in the background.
Granted, it was the only way to get it done and she'd lost all faith in Edward doing it, but despite losing all faith in Edward wanting to be with her forever... she tries to fix that by forcing his family to make her be with him forever...
And doesn't see this as a glaring red flag for their relationship...
I can't even imagine being a Cullen in that moment.
I could keep going, but honestly, it's every time Bella opens her mouth or thinks about anything.
I do feel for Edward in the sense that, if the novels weren't from Bella's point of view, we would have no idea what the fuck she's on about.
