the choice between Edward & Jacob is not a question of which relationship is healthier or which partner is best suitable for Bella. neither is correct. neither is best. neither produces a happy ending for Bella. at the end of the day this is still a vampire novel. any choice Bella could make would yield, at best, a bittersweet happily ever after.
if she chooses Edward, she gets the terrifying Breaking Dawn ending: a girl who rejected her call to grow up has hung her love & her eternity on an emotionally stunted partner who hates himself marginally less than he loves her. she's a teen mom with a kid she never wanted who perpetuates the generational trauma passed down from her parents. by keeping this child, the Cullens have set the stage for an uprising/cold war against the Volturi who are likely to take revenge in order to maintain power. Bella is living in a tenuous "dream come true" wrapped in a nightmare & doesn't realize it.
choosing Jacob is the true coming-of-age ending that rips the stitches out of a wound that never fully healed. even if we ignore the fact that she ends up with a man who sexually assaulted her (we must bear in mind Jacob's character is influenced by smeyer's racism, but it did happen), they can't have a secure romantic relationship. based on the high imprinting rate of the pack, Jacob will likely find his imprint in his lifetime & will lose himself to the imprintee. he will no longer be her Jacob. he will inevitably abandon her (whether he wants to or not), & she must reconcile with the reality that she will always be inadequate to Jacob's imprint. & say he never manages to escape the vampires? he will presumably not age for a long time, meaning the relationship Bella always feared with Edward (her being an old grandmother while he stays forever young) remains a possibility. this is the story of a girl who slaps a Band Aid on an open wound & calls herself healed while flinching every time she sees the shadow of the knife that cut her.
if she chooses neither (team therapy), her healing requires her to lose or be at least partially disconnected from everyone she cares about. Bella must spend the rest of her life shut out from one world while never fully existing in her human world ever again. she must always keep secrets. she can never go back home. even in the unlikely event that she manages to escape the Volturi, the threat of being hunted by vampires will never leave her. in addition, she must face her worst fears (aging, losing Edward) while always keeping in mind the immortal life that could have been hers, if only.
even the "healthiest" option produces scars that will never quite heal.
Twilight is a horror. Twilight is a vampire novel. Twilight is gothic. Twilight is fiction. neither Edward nor Jacob is a "bad" choice because neither will give Bella her happily ever after. the choice between Edward & Jacob is simply a matter of which horror story you prefer to read.
I know technically in canon it could be written off as Bella and Edward just not noticing, but I feel like Rosalie should have been way more conflicted about asking Carlisle to change Emmett
Miss “I wish someone had been there to vote no for me” who was changed to stop her from dying should have felt some type of way for not giving Emmett what she herself wanted. And it could have been great characterization!
On the one hand she’s mad at Carlisle for what he did but at the same time when put in the same position she knows she did the exact same thing. And she’d be so upset with herself that she allowed emotion to get to her in that moment when she prides herself on being rational.
Maybe she even pushes to keep Bella human to in a way repay the debt of making Emmett a vampire. It’s just crazy that it’s part of the plot that she saved Emmett and asked Carlisle to change him while also saying she wished she had died rather than be turned into a vampire and the two just never meaningfully connect in canon? Edward should have looked at Rosalie and Emmett and seen himself and Bella, seen Emmett blissfully fine with everything while Rosalie is never able to fully let go of the guilt both that she turned him but also that part of her thinks she should have let the man she loves die
I feel like it’s just sort of hand waved with “eh Emmett likes being a vampire so it all worked out” but I say Rosalie should have had some deep and lasting conflict over this. Should have told Edward that she understands the impulse to change someone you have feelings for but that you will then spend eternity knowing that every life they take and every moment of hurt they have is because you did this to them
And yeah there may have been a line or two in the books about it but I mean it should have been as much of the conversation as her own turning
Rereading Twilight through an adult's perspective is always an interesting experience. Obviously, Edward and Bella have to have the narrative autonomy of adults to a certain extent. For example, Bella being "born middle-aged" and having pretty laid-back parents (compared to some) allows her to move through the plot more easily. Sure she gets grounded every now and then, but she can pretty much come and go as needed. Naturally, Edward and his siblings aren't going to be treated as "children" what with most of them being 80-100 years old.
That being said, there are times throughout the story when I wish Carlisle and Esme were a little more "parental" towards Edward and Bella specifically. It wouldn't even have to be proper parenting- if they showed a little more active concern and offered guidance, that would be enough.
When Bella shows up with a broken wrist and a story about her "best friend" kissing her against her will, it would have been nice if Esme had talked with her. Even "I know you're having relationship problems, and I'm here if you want to talk" would have been good. I think it would have been especially interesting if Carlisle and Esme had looked at Charlie and realized that he couldn't fully guide Bella because he didn't have the full picture of everything she was dealing with, so they stepped in to support her more.
I know having active parents kind of kills the teen drama of it all. These books would never work if Edward and Bella were wise and mature all the time. But there are still times when I wish the parents had seen these teens floundering and stepped in a bit more.
I don't think the 'Bella emailing Alice to no avail' took place in the books, but if it had, would it have been addressed at any point after New Moon/during Eclipse? In the films it's implied Bella's writing a fair few of these, but would Alice have read them eventually or pretended she didn't see them?
Oh, anon, it very much happened in the books. Sorry, anon, it was not better in the books, not at all. It was, in fact, much worse as Bella sends hundreds of emails to a dead server.
The emails, however, bounce back that the email address no longer exists, because Bella has been blocked.
And in the books it's addressed... in the most unsatisfying manner Alice could have possibly devised but Bella's so desperate she doesn't care.
Alice explains in New Moon that Edward told all of them to cut contact with Bella completely, and so to prove Edward's a stupid idiot who can't live without Bella, Alice did everything Edward wanted even though it really really hurt her to do it.
She's sorry she never responded to her fifty billion emails or calls.
The fuss Bella raises plays into her demanding the Cullen vote to turn her into a vampire, which happened for a lot of reasons, but one of the unadmitted ones was to be a Cullen for real so this would never, ever, happen again.
(Once again, I love the movies including these things, then kind of glossing over them anyway).
Me: [pacing in my cell] That anyone can believe Bella and Edward are not compatible because they are just ~projecting an ideal onto each other, or simply that they are vastly different people, is increasingly ludicrous to me. They are alike even in their more unhinged traits. For instance, Edward’s infamous stalking of Bella without her knowledge and consent. Edward is a stalker, all right...and so is Bella. In New Moon, when a frustrated Alice says that she just might turn Bella herself, Bella is overjoyed and insists Alice do it. This is taken by fans as proof that Bella wants vampirism apart from (and even more than) Edward. But then Bella gives this reasoning: “If Alice made good on her promise—and if she didn’t kill me—then Edward could run after his distractions all he wanted, and I could follow. I wouldn’t let him be distracted. Maybe, when I was beautiful and strong, he wouldn’t want distractions” (p. 437). Keep in mind that at this point, Bella 100% believes Edward doesn’t want her anymore. But that doesn’t matter; homegirl would still stalk him to the ends of the earth. Because ultimately, Bella doesn’t want vampirism without Edward. Yes, she has an affinity with vampires, is fascinated by them, and in many ways she is destined for it. But that’s because Edward is a vampire, and Bella is his destined mate. I don’t know, does that make sense?
When Carlisle first drinks blood of animal, he becomes half-vampire. What happens next?
For the sake of the funny I shall interpret your ask in a way you certainly did not intend: every time Carlisle drinks blood of an animal, he becomes half of the vampire that he was, that is to say, his size is 50% reduced. We shall consider a new animal to be a new feeding.
As Carlisle famously lost control with a herd of deer the first time he fed on animals, he has been greatly diminished in size already, assuming the herd consisted of 3 or more deer his size of originall 188 cm has been diminished by 50% three times - he stood 94 cm tall after the first deer, then 47 cm, then 23 cm (or, 9 inches). It is reasonable he stops at this point, as the size of his prey so greatly outpaces his own and he has no more room to drink further.
Being now 9 inches tall, Carlisle has an unforeseen problem as he stands there in the English woods. We may assume he continues shrinking, devouring ever smaller animals) until he has to feed on (what would be to him) giant mosquitoes.
Assuming these mosquitoes have drunk human blood and human blood can mitigate the shrinking issue, he may experience either becoming a full vampire again, instantly soaring to 188 cm tall (in which case the merry dance starts over) from a single mosquito's blood, or he shall have a 50% size increase each time he eats a mosquito.
His life becomes one of carefully balancing his animal blood-to-mosquito ratio so as to be able to live a somewhat normal life.
Upon learning of the incredible shrinking vampire, Aro wonders if this is simply a hitherto undiscovered anomaly to vampire biology and whether it's worth making his guard drink animal blood to turn into teeny tiny spies (decides against it because it's too demeaning), while Carlisle discovers on turning Edward that anon's ask was phrased as Carlisle, specificlaly, having this issue and no one else shrinks.
A small New Moon Volturi thinkpiece because I wanna be rawdogged by them so bad I love them eternally.
Let me preface my ramblings by saying that none of the Volturi actually like humans. In fact, they don’t even tolerate them. I truly believe that they think of us with utmost indifference on a good day and utter contempt on an average one, the same way as one would think about unsavoury, slithering worms crawling underneath one’s feet. The interesting thing is how this manifests in each king differently & how their disdain for humans comes from wildly different places. And it’s extra fun to explore their attitudes through their clothes!
1. Caius
Caius is an angry, angry man, the only one of the kings without a gift. The only reason he’s been allowed to perch on the royal throne in the first place is due to his lapdog loyalty to Aro (cough cough Didyme murder). He is his right hand, the person Aro can trust with any secret and any job and as a reward for such lovely behaviour our talentless Caius gets to enjoy eternal rule over the vampire world. But it doesn’t take away from the anger he must feel at his perceived inadequacy, seeing as even derelict Marcus has a gift so powerful, so precious that he’s literally being chained to his throne by the powers of Chelsea while Caius, no doubt the greatest and most worthy vampire in his own mind, has nothing. I do believe it makes him irate and really hurts his already fragile ego, resulting in him being the most purposefully vicious of the three - he doesn’t just disdain humans, he despises them, abhors them as creatures so insignificant they’re not even worthy to crawl underneath his feet. Caius is violent but not overly sadistic so if he gets to eat you enjoy a very painful but relatively quick death as he can’t be bothered listening to the whines and groans of some withering creature touching his delicate ears.
This attitude is, of course, reflected in his clothing choices - a red silken scarf draped elegantly around his neck a la 1950s suicidal MGM moviestar, a matching red shirt tucked into black fitted trousers with a pair of slick black shoes covered by a weighty cloak made of rich dark velvet to signify his status and his ancient origin - all semi-modern human inventions that he decides to robe himself in, yet without particular style or purpose. He will pick and choose whatever he likes of the human fashions (colour-wise specifically, look at this blazing angry shade of red on him, a reflection of his temperament and his nature) showcasing his absolute disdain for the trends of the living in the process. You will never catch him interested in the latest human obsessions, silly things that the living are dying for (pun intended). How idiotic.
2. Aro
Aro is fascinating as he too despises humans but, unlike Caius, doesn’t loathe them. To him they’re as occasionally intriguing as his own personal ant colony in a jar that he likes to stir every once in a while, destroying their habitats and taking their lives, observing the upheaving chaos of it all with mild amusement. After all, it really alleviates the boredom of eternal life… for a couple of hours. This ‘interest’ in humans is nothing more than a façade as Aro is just as indifferent and as vicious as his brother. But, after all, he is deliciously manipulative and wonderfully dramatic so why shouldn’t he appear dashingly charming, even to the lowest of the low? Your death is surprisingly swift and almost painless as you won’t register much except the wild blood-red eyes of your killer as they gaze into your fading ones with fading amusement.
Aro is the most ‚modern’ looking of the three, his 2 piece suit sharp and custom-made, his trousers fitted and ironed to perfection. He lacks the heavy robe that drapes over the backs of his brothers, there’s no west or other garment to be found underneath his impeccably simple suit - how thoroughly contemporary! Yet Aro’s ‘modern air’ is but a ruse, a mirage crafted carefully to distract you from the fact that you’re in the presence of an ancient king, a vicious creature of the night. He’s also the only one not wearing a tie, or any neck adornment for that matter, another layer that adds to his deceptively modern look. Ah, my darling manipulator
3. Marcus
Marcus’s indifference towards humans is his indifference towards everything. What care has he about the lives of some puny creatures that he is drains for breakfast, lunch and dinner? What do they matter to him, these stupid foolish beings while the only thing he can muster interest in is their hot blood that he’s required by nature to desire? He pays them as much thought as he pays attention to the clothes he’s wearing. When he eats, your death will be slow and unhurried but not because Marcus is savouring every single drop of your blood. He simply sees no point in rushing, no point in thirsting, no reason in throwing his dinner around. You’ll fade gradually and try as you might to look into the eyes of your doom he won’t see you. He doesn’t hide from you but simply doesn’t acknowledge you, as if you’re not really there. And to him you truly aren’t. Nothing is.
He‘s sitting in a mismatch of eras, put on his back without a single care: grey modern trousers (in contrast with his brothers’ more formal, more appropriate black ones), nicely ironed, no fold, comfortable embroidered Victorian slippers that you put on at home when the need for presentation is at its lowest (and he is holding audiences in the throne room!), a faded, richly embroidered tunic from a bygone era, not even tucked into the trousers because who cares? An incredible cravat, as ancient as Marcus himself, all faded gold and silver thread. All concealed underneath a fur-trimmed heavy robe, his status symbol, his kingly garment. He’s a waning shell of a being held together by the powers of his subjects and the heaviness of his status. Marcus needs a break and a hug and to finally die and, honestly, same. I want him bad
I think it's time to address the fact that people seem to be confused about Edward shoving Bella back into the table and using it as some sort of proof he doesn't care (or whatever the other accusations are).
If you read the books, or have common sense, you know he had to hold himself back so much at all times so he did not hurt her.
When Jasper's thirst got triggered, Edward was acting on reflex. Instinct. He needed to get Bella away from Jasper. So, he tried to push her back a ways. But, he forgot his strength in his panic and she flew into the table.
This can be seen in real life all the time. Especially in mothers who are in a panic and trying to yank or push their kid away from danger and not remembering how fragile the child is.
It was the last straw. In Midnight Sun, we know Edward wants to leave at the end of Twilight because he knows he is a danger to Bella. He tried to see if things could possibly get better, then the event with Jasper happened.
Cue his meltdown and why he left even though he loved Bella. He was trying to protect her, and he genuinely thought Victoria would have gone after him. Not only that, but the wolves were in Forks as well.
If you take a moment and actually think about things from Edward's perspective, even without having read the books, his behavior makes sense. Especially considering he is mentally 17 for eternity since Twilight vampires cannot and do not mature after being turned.
