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Good thread. I never made it past the halfway point in the first novel, though one of my friends was into it and witnessed the EL James drama go down in real time. (I got a lot of middle of the night texts updating me on everything, minute by minute.) In terms of Twilight and Bella, I actually think there was some potential here. Bella starts off as a whiny and ungrateful teenage girl but I always thought that was a decent starting place for a high school protagonist. She’s slightly spoiled becaus she’s the sole kid of a pair of divorced parents who live apart. She’s not very happy with herself, and she’s incredibly critical of her own appearance. I put forth that this resonated with a lot of teen girls. Part of the tragedy though is that Meyer had a legitimately good slice of life story on her hands. If it had been about Bella Swan growing up, becoming closer to her father (the scene with the snowchains stands out in my memory as being very good, especially from the POV of a young girl who loves her father but doesn’t know him or understand him) and getting over herself it would be a much better story. Shame about the vampires ruining it.
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Jun 23, 2019 20:56
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 15:12 |
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Twilight is a trashy novel in the same vein as Wuthering Heights and other gothic romances, it’s hamstrung by Meyer’s Mormon upbringing and her lack of skill. The amount of handwringing from Moral Guardians over whether people would become conditioned to accept abusive behavior as a result of reading it was ridiculous in the moment. It’s the same thinking that leads to linking violent videogames and school shootings. If we can’t trust an audience to tell the difference between fiction and reality then we would have to do away with fiction all together. All in all a thread like this is a lot more fun where you find the writing’s actual weaknesses.
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Jun 24, 2019 02:30
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We have not truly reached the nadir of Bella Swan. Brace yourselves!
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Jul 1, 2019 16:30
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No wonder he was down on the character, sheesh
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Jul 2, 2019 23:43
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Meyer has a tendency to repeat scenes over and over again, particularly scenes that woobify her protagonist and make them suffer over and over. Usually it’s to demonstrate what a tragic little hero they are. My aforementioned friend gave me The Host to read because she wanted me to appreciate Meyer (I don’t know why) and the writing there hit a lot of the same beats. lovely female protagonist, abusive male love interest, potentially interesting scifi fantasy backdrop that goes no where. The Host is an Animorphs rip off where Yeerks take over Earth and possess human bodies etc. It was okay for the first 20 chapters or so where the protag, one of the aliens, is captured by the humans and they torture her and mistreat her etc. The suffering just repeats itself over and over though, I ended up skipping 15 or so chapters and realized I had missed nothing because they were all dedicated to torturing the protagonist. It also ends on a similar pedophile beat; the protag is eventually given a soulless human corpse to possess and iirc its described like a fragile bisque doll with blonde hair, and it was supposed to be the body of a very little girl I think. The protag takes up a sexual and romantic relationship with the abusive male lead after that. But it’s also been a solid decade since I read it so who knows. I do remember being very freaked out by how little and young looking the soulless corpse was and how the host was supposed to grow up or something with it. I read it as the host taking over the body of an elementary schooler and then moving in with the older man. What I’m saying is, Meyer is a goddamn creep. It was weird.
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Jul 5, 2019 21:51
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godspeed my friend
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Jul 6, 2019 03:55
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Honestly this bit was handled better in the movie.
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Jul 25, 2019 18:10
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chitoryu12 posted:The Cullens at least show remorse. They've changed and struggle every day to remain good people in spite of their nature. Bella shows very limited ability for self-reflection and never really needs to grow or change for the story to keep going and for everyone to love her. I think that’s taking it too far to be honest. Having stupid opinions about characters doesn’t make a person crazy. Meyers biggest problem is most likely that she’s a bored housewife so she comes up with outlandish ideas about romance novels. And since her skills are so elementary she doesn’t have the experience to make it more complex or understand that it should be more complex. That’s something that’s always bothered me about Twilight criticism, it always devolves into diagnosing a woman that none of us actually know with mental illness. The actual explanation is that she’s not a good writer and that she’s making the same lame justifications journeyman writers always make before they gain experience.
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Aug 27, 2019 00:36
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chitoryu12 posted:The reason it shakes me is that in everything I've looked for, I've never actually seen Meyer talk about Bella suffering from any kind of mental illness. She writes a character that so perfectly encapsulates it down to even the minor details, but seems to be ignorant of it. It comes off as her writing a protagonist behaving in a way that she would find acceptable and agreeable because she can't understand how that behavior would be wrong. Lots of readers also did not think of Bella as mentally ill. That did not make those readers mentally ill themselves. Is it canon that Bella is mentally ill? I got pretty deep into these books and if I recall the only thing that she ever amounted to was being a brat, not that she got a formal diagnosis anywhere. I know that it was a very common reading back in the day. When ripping Twilight was popular lots of people projected their pet mental illnesses onto Bella and Meyer. My friends diagnosed them both with bipolar I and II, NPD, schizophrenia, schizoid disorder, drug resistant depression, and somewhere after the release of New Moon I remember a mutual on LJ posting a very serious screed about how she was convinced Meyer had been raped as a teenager and that she was expressing her post-rape trauma in Bella. As far as I know Meyer has never been attacked or assaulted, so the chances are pretty good my mutual created this theory out of her own head. My point is that yes, it’s valid to look at Bella’s behavior and go “this is the behavior of a mentally unwell person” but there’s also the imbroglio that we have no proof that Meyer is mentally ill or what kind of inner feelings she’s expressing through Bella. So while we can interpet Bella that way it is frankly bizarre to then project this reading onto Stephanie Meyer, who is a living breathing person that does not adhere to dramatic conventions, and has her own history that we don’t know about. I just find it strange that this is so consistent and that this also arises independently. People read a book and they think that they can read a writer’s entire life story from that book. You’re not the first person to go “this terrible writer Meyer is obviously mentally deranged!” Lots of people did that and are still doing it. Imo it’s just a lot more likely that a journeyman writer makes dumb decisions and doesn’t have the skill to know any better. These tropes often appear in fanfic written by high schoolers, are they all suffering mental illness? A 100% rate of mental unwellness seems pretty unlikely. 
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Aug 27, 2019 03:48
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Been lurking in the thread for a while just reading along. Forgot how poo poo this stuff was. So I think I've mentioned my high school buddy who was really into these books. She knew they were bad but it still appealed to her. I liked to let her chatter about it because it was like looking into another world lol. She often remarked that she didn't understand the "love triangle" angle because in her opinion there was never any question about Bella being in love with Edward, and she mostly felt sorry for Jacob because he was just being used as a replacement. This book though. Holy poo poo. It was an entire deal when it came out. One of the local high school moms held a book release party at her home. It reminded me of Harry Potter book release parties except it was all Halloween themed. (Iirc the fourth Twilight book came out in the summer.) The one cool feature about it was that the host had a good idea and put up a projector to show old vampire movies while we ate chips. There were also sheets of paper for us to draw on and decorate. I made sure to spread lots of Edward/Jacob propaganda (I did the cutesy hearts and gigantic bubble letters on the paper sheets to proclaim their OTPness) and iirc I tried to convince one of the high school girls attending the party that homosexual love was the only unselfish form of love because the two parties couldn't abuse each other for children or something lol. Then another mom drove up and she had boxes of the books in her backseat or something. It's fuzzy now, I still don't know why she had them but around 12:30 or 1:00an she was driving up with them and passing them out. To my memory it was very surreal because the middle aged moms were just as into it as their daughters. My only experience with book parties was Harry Potter and then it was my bemused Dad helping me put on the temporary tattoos on my forehead lol. And then my mom picked me up and I went home. My buddy was already reading the book but I made her promise that she would call me when she was done with it. WELL. 8am comes and my cell phone explodes. First with texts and then with her calls. I pick up and hooooleeeee shiiiiiiiiiit she was enraged. "BELLA HAS A BABY" "A...baby?" "YEAH A BABY" "Like in the book?" "YEAH SHE GOT PREGNANT AND HAD A BABY" "But isn't Edward like, dead? How are his balls still working?" "I DON'T KNOW NONE OF IT MAKES SENSE OH MY GOD BELLA HAS A BABY IT WAS SO GROSS" "What do you mean 'gross?'" "STEPHANIE WROTE THE BIRTHING SCENE BUT IT WAS AWFUL" "Like the baby coming out!?" "YEAH BUT SHE MADE IT loving DISGUSTING ITS EVEN WORSE THAN NORMAL OH MY GOD WHAT DID SHE DO TO POOR JACOB" I won't give additional details so as to not ruin the surprise. But that's my earliest memories of this book. Meyer just pushed it too far and the suspension of disbelief couldn't hold up.
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May 21, 2020 21:58
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Yeah, this was the stuff my high school friend haaaaaated so its entertaining to finally see it beought to light this way. She was horrified by the birthing chest burster scene. She could not believe that her romance was being suddenly ruined by body horror. (I asked her "did you expect a happy ending? They're vampires, they're supposed to be monsters." She didn't take that well  ) She was furious that Jacob was turned into a pedophile and didn't understand why Meyer made imprinting a thing. She was also grossed out by Edward being able to gently caress, apparently in the fandom it was a Big Deal that he was dead and obviously corpses shouldn't be able to have sex. There was a lot of fallout in the fandom over people defending the sex and the people angry about it because it was necrophilia. There was a lot of chatter with faux-scientific justification about how Edward's corpse-body must work and that's when I learned boomers were using icicles for dildos to try recreating the sex scenes.There were a lot of necrophiliacs in the Twilight fandom back in the day y'all. Be glad EL James was so vanilla in 50 Shades.
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Jul 14, 2020 21:30
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chitoryu12 posted:Sorry, what was that? The older fans of Twilight were using icicles in their freezers as dildos to simulate sex with Edward Cullen. I'm so sorry: http://www.lamebook.com/twilight-saga-as-cold-as-ice/ This was the first post I came across with the evidence from a quick Google, I can hunt for more. But yes. Twilight fans were filling condoms with water, freezing them, stripping the condoms off the icicles and using them as sex toys. If my memory is correct there was way more on it than just that Facebook post it blew up on the various twilight forums. It's all because Edward is made of cold marble or whatever.
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Jul 15, 2020 00:08
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chitoryu12 posted:I feel myself slipping away. What was really hosed up was that it was the older fans interjecting this information in the same discussions that teens were having. So my high school friend would call me even weeks after the Breaking Dawn debacle (she was one of the people who returned their novel. There was an epidemic of fans returning their books or giving them to secondhand stores. For a hot minute you found Breaking Dawn next to Laurell K Hamilton.) to complain that the adult fans were inserting their sexual fantasies into teen spaces. That's where you find out about the icicle dildos, the EL James style porn, the weird roleplay these women kept roping their husbands and boyfriends into. (That was its own thing, a lot of marriages broke up because supposedly some people wanted their husbands to be more like Edward...or their wives to be more like Bella.) The teen fandom got really really mad, as you might expect, they hated seeing porn pics being posted (apparently there was a nightmarish post where a soccer mom internally injured herself with an ice dildo...I'm just glad I didn't see any of the photos but apparently it was a murder scene) from adults, it was a poo poo show. It's important to keep in mind that I got all of this secondhand so who knows how much of it is true but there were confirmation posts everywhere on LiveJournal and my bestie confirmed they were all true, tabloid websites also reported on them.
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Jul 15, 2020 00:46
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A Real Horse posted:This is absolutely horrifying. Just.... every aspect of this is awful. Yeah. The Twilight shitshow is what lead to a lot of the segregation that we see nowadays like AO3 being dominated by adults and the depornification of fanfiction.net. (Though that also had other factors like the Power Rangers porno leading to the first wave of bleaching adult material.) IMHO it was also the last gasp of forums for fandom in general. After that everyone migrated to twitter and tumblr where you had block functions and could use apps to block posts with keywords in them. Those features were not available on forums of the time though with Xenforo being a thing maybe that isn't the case anymore. (SA is the only forum I come back to so idk what those others do.) IMHO Twilight fandom was the first wave of people realizing that you can't put adults and teenagers into an unfiltered blender. Lysistrata posted:I remember hearing about that secondhand and all i could do was die inside or laugh. I chose the latter. Wasnt there some dildo that got made with sparkles that was done specifically to mimic ol' Eddies dazzlehammer? I guess we're just lucky Jacob never got that treatment... I remember this. I'll look it up.
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Jul 15, 2020 01:25
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Sorry for the double post but here's a 2010 interview with the og Twilight dildo designer. I wonder if this was the forerunner of insane monster dildo businesses: https://www.salon.com/2010/07/02/the_real_twilight_dildo_inventor/quote:On Monday, when Salon's Christine Mathias highlighted the 10 most baffling "Twilight" products in honor of the release of "Eclipse," we had no idea that we were feeding into a controversy in the world of Twilight-related sex toys. But, indeed, Jon Condit, the designer of "The Vamp" (NSFW, as are all of the following links) -- the original "Twilight" dildo -- wrote in to correct us. The Tantus Niagra Vibrator -- Twilight has apparently often been mistaken for the vampire-inspired version -- by media and consumers alike -- but "twilight" is merely a particular shade of purple that the company uses in many of its products. Now, the toy that Condit designed? It has "a deathly pale flesh tone reminiscent of the moon's soft glow" complete with sparkles that glint in sunlight.
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Jul 15, 2020 01:34
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Lysistrata posted:All of this jives very well with what i recall. I ran a fandom forum for eight-ish years and have run the community (now on tumblr (sorta), twitter, discord) for almost twenty; it is a very, very bad idea to be laissez-faire about teens mixing with adults and we had to institute strict moderator rules about how to treat teens so that they were not sheltered but also not allowed into genuinely dangerous interactions. It helps that my fandom was small, persistent, and the work we're fans of included exploitative adult-teen relationships as part of the text, so the adults and moderators were all very conscious of the younger members' safety. That tracks with what I remember too. An advantage that Established Fandom had over Twilight fandom was that there was a lot more unspoken rules and experience. Adults stayed on one side of the fence in their fandoms (Star Trek, Stargate, mostly live action western properties) whereas teens stayed in anime and video game spaces. If you walked into one space then you had to blend in which meant you didn't try to complain much or stand out because then the others might sniff you out. Twilight fandom was the first time normal people were partaking in fan consumption of an established property. They didn't know the rules, that adults don't mix with teens and that teens weren't supposed to pry into adult spaces without attempting to act grown up. They just got into a lot of stupid fights, grown women doxxing teens over Edward vs Jacob, teens stealing personal info from adults in petty revenge. Imo one of the reasons the internet is a mess right now is because Twilight destroyed those rules. It was always fragile but it was like it gave adults permission to bully children and of course kids don't have a sense of proportion so they would use their tech know how to fight back leading to harassment campaigns. The idea of acting somewhat respectably in fandom spaces was destroyed by Twilight fandom and the insane stupid normies running it shoving ice dildos up their pussies. It still exists in some places but its even worse now because of the lack of respect for fandom traditions. Just the other loving day I was passed screencaps of idiots posting gay porn fanfic under their real names and with theit faces as their avatars. Just unreal. edit: just to add on, this is also why hatred for Twilight was so intense and virulent. People like me were watching our communities slowly being destroyed by the insane behavior of the Twilight fans. It wasn't just the terrible emotionally abusive content, it was the normie fans who insisted on doxxing themselves, passing out their personal info, bullying others into doing the same. The harassment campaigns and bullying from Twilight fandom spread like poison. We started out laughing at them but sooner or later we started acting like them. HIJK fucked around with this message at 02:12 on Jul 15, 2020 |
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Jul 15, 2020 02:02
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Leng posted:Alright I take back what I said about the Mormon Church probably being cool with Twilight - all of that stuff is incredibly not cool and messed up on so many levels, that there is no way anybody sane would have been cool with this. Breaking Dawn destroyed a lot of the fandom. It also turned a lot of people against Meyer because of the birthing scene and the mere fact that she alluded to marital hetero intercourse. IIRC she got interviews on places like Glenn Beck's show because the first three books didn't have "naughty bits" in them but were still super duper romantic AND safe for children uwu unlike those Danielle Steel novels that wives kept under their pillows. But then Breaking Dawn happened. The conservative backlash was impressive. They were sickened by the birthing scene of course but iirc they felt like Meyer was mocking them with the pro-life stuff. And then the pedophilia led to a lot of freak outs too. My school had a soft ban on Breaking Dawn because of Jacob's pedophilia. It also led to a minor fracture on the religious right because a lot of Protestants associated the pedophilia with Mormonism especially once ex-Mormons started wading in to explain the finer points of Mormon polygamy and how Mormons had a history of kidnapping prepubescent girls away from their families to marry and rape them if I recall my religious history right. To this day I wonder if Breaking Dawn was the reason why Mormonism ended up being rejected by Protestants in later years. Breaking Dawn was so terrible that even anti-abortionists hated it. Always thought that was impressive. Lysistrata posted:I get you, seriously. I managed to protect my little anime niche by making sure that poo poo wasnt tolerated, but it is tiny in comparison so that was a lot easier to push out when it started encroaching. I see it happening all around the edges now-- all of the doxxing and the bullying became so normalized in fandom spaces that it seems like absolute madness to participate in any kind of popular fandom now. And yeah, it started with Twilight. The current fandom seems to have grown up a lot. The kids grew up and chilled out. (But man at what cost...) HIJK fucked around with this message at 03:01 on Jul 15, 2020 |
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Jul 15, 2020 02:58
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Lysistrata posted:You remember correctly. There was a big scandal about Mormon girls being married off at 12 or 13 in Canada, and i can link a documentary about Warren Jeffs and his stable of young mormon wives if anyone is interested (he was eventually arrested, thank god). Young brides are a thing in some parts of Mormonism. I've never been so disappointed in being right  quote:Hey, we just pick up the pieces and keep going, right? As for me personally, as long as i have a safe place to watch it from... Quite right. Who knows, maybe we can rebuild some day. quote:There's that child bride thing in Mormonism again... I actually read The Host on my bestie's recommendation. She was trying to turn me on to Meyer for some reason. Anyway I got halfway through it before I realized Meyer was doing the Mary Sue thing where the perfect protag gets tortured endlessly for no reason but that I would miss nothing if I skipped to the end. I did. I gotta tell you guys, when I read about the girl body they gave to the protag, I straight up thought that she was a 9 year old girl. It never occurred to me that she was a "child like" woman. I do recall sending my bestie a text to the effect of "The end of the Host is proof that Meyer is a pedo and she probably has mountains of CP on her computer. Stop buying her books, let the FBI take care of the rest" or something like that. What I'm saying is Meyer is a pedophile that fetishizes very young girl children being romanced and raped by old men. Earlier in the thread I talked about how it wasn't really fair to talk about Meyer's mental state but now I think I was wrong on that front. I didn't know the pedophilia in Breaking Dawn was so upfront and stark.
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Jul 15, 2020 03:44
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A Real Horse posted:But no, you see, it's good and pure and innocent. Jacob just is absolutely obsessed with the infant/toddler/small child, but it's because he's such a good protector for her!  Twilight fans are so loving stupid. They just let Meyer stealth pedophilia past them and make jokes about their babies being groomed. This loving poo poo man.
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Jul 15, 2020 04:22
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It's swings and roundabouts. The minors did a lot to gently caress themselves too and they were not innocent. The most common thing I saw was mother-daughter pairs that got into Twilight together but the teenagers would get angry at their moms (usually over Edward vs Jacob) and there was a spat of identity theft with teens posting their parents credit cards, destroying their credit scores, I think there was even a case where someone gave out her mother's social security number because she was mad that her mother wouldn't let her read porny fanfic and blocked certain websites with Trend Micro. And it created this revenge subculture of teens desperately consuming porn and getting mad after they infiltrate those 18+ spaces even after adults started putting up walls after Breaking Dawn and finally started age-restricting their adult material. Part of the problem with the boundaries thing in Current Year (that Twilight is responsible for) is that teens are now charging into 18+ spaces, announcing "I AM AN UNDERAGE MINOR" and then calling all of the adults pedophiles for writing porn. In the Hamilton stageshow fandom, teens were accusing adults of being pedophiles and child molesters because they would write gay sex fanfic about the stageshow versions of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton. Of course Hamilton was in his twenties (?) at the time and Washington was in his forties. But the self admitted teenagers who also posted their personal info and confirmed their underagedom in their twitter bios were calling adults pedophiles for writing about two consenting of age adults. It is now very very common for minors to lie about their age (some of them as young as 11 years old), download tons of adult porn, read and watch all of it, and then try to use it to doxx and harass grown ups when those adults have age-restricted their content. When Twilight fandom started splitting off into adult spaces versus teen spaces after Breaking Dawn, a lot of the teen fandom got super pissed because the adults wrote all the good porn and teens love porn even though they shouldn't be consuming it. In the latter days of the fandom it was a big problem with teens invading those spaces as well and it codified the behavior we see in a lot of fandoms now. This is what I mean when I mentioned kids have no sense of proportion but it all stems from Twilight fandom. Teenagers stalking, doxxing, and harassing adult women started there. Twilight was never intended to be YA. It was a bored housewife trying to recapture her youth with her perfect man. Lots of people go through that, and I don't think its inherently immoral...and if it had just stayed there we wouldn't be having this conversation probably. The pedophilia changed everything but it's important to remember that Twilight was also marketed as "a bodice ripper but it's completely safe for work! You can read it with your kids!" Something important to remember: adult Twilight fandom realized early on that that these books were super generic and that they could make money by writing fanfiction if they changed the names. EL James wasn't writing fanfic because she wanted to write about Edward and Bella, she was using the Twilight fandom to test out reception for her novel. Hundreds of indie romance novels have been published this way. She didn't care about Twilight, it was very common for writers to use Twilight to get feedback, take down the fic, and republish it with different character names. It was never about Edward and Bella, it was always about adults using Twilight as their internet beta for profit. HIJK fucked around with this message at 19:42 on Jul 15, 2020 |
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Jul 15, 2020 19:31
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HopperUK posted:I'm sure she's said before that she didn't consume much vampire media at all. Why was she married to the idea that werewolves and vampires don't get along? I still don't know why they wouldn't to be honest. I know it's common in media, the media she said she hadn't seen. It's sunk into pop culture and it was a pretty common conception even before Twilight. If she mentioned vampires or writing a vampire book to anyone the topic of werewolves being their enemies would have come up eventually I bet.
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Aug 30, 2020 19:04
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