"I like to think the fact that I personally scolded him about it before BD had an effect because it’s not quite as bad in BD." Dude you absolutely cannot drop that without further explanation. Story time, I beg you
The story is somewhat boring? Understand first that I have no shame. If I like something, you’re either coming along with me, or we’re not talking. I am not shy; I possess only a small amount of tact, and I tend to call people out publicly as needed.
I read the books for the first time while I was in the beginning of grad school. Totally fell in love with the character of Carlisle; that was the end of that. That was the heyday of Twidom: BD had just come out, the first movie had just come out, Twilight was a Hall H event at San Diego Comic Con.
There was a separate company that did these little mini Twilight fancons in cities all over the country. The LA one would have Rob and Kristen, but the rest of them just had a string of support cast: Tinsel Korey was a common guest; Boo Boo Stewart as well; and Peter was at just about all of them.
Anyway, they came to my city in my third year of grad school, after Eclipse had come out and right when I was taking a TON of phonetics classes. Peter’s accent drove me up a motherfucking wall, so I decided to use my new knowledge and practice some skills and analyze it. I used acoustic analysis software to map out his entire vowel system as he produces it naturally and then took measurements of vowels from his performances in NM and EC (spoiler: they are wildly inconsistent). I also measured his use of /ɹ/, again, super inconsistent and also makes no sense—17th century London was a rhotic (r-full) English, and by the time he got to the US, the prestige variety was rhotic also.
So I stood in line for his autograph which was like $10 but I really paid $10 to yell at him. He took my book to autograph and I plunked down two analyses and went, “Do you have a dialect coach? Because they should be fired.” And then I told him about the rhoticity thing and showed him how his vowels were all over the fucking place. And he laughed and said thanks and I said, “I just want you to get my favorite character right” and he hugged me and we moved on to the next person in line.
But his performance in BD was markedly better. I’m sure he’s not wandering around like “Oh yeah, that one twenty-something woman from that one city; she gave me all this stuff.” But I like to think every time he had to produce a word with one of the worst vowels or an /ɹ/ sound, he caught himself up short and fixed it...a little.
