Ever since I put down the book Bella Should Have Dumped Edward: Controversial Views & Debates on the Twilight Series, edited by Michelle Pan, I have been amazed. The first part that amazes me is that Michelle Pan is in high school, and she published this book only after becoming an established blog administrator and being approached by a major publisher, Ulysses Press. Although this may seem tangential to our research, I love that Twilight has given a young girl, and perhaps more young people, the opportunity to come into her own and shine in the book selling world.
The second, and more relevant, part that amazes me is the sheer creativity of the book. It is not one person’s philosophical musings about the Twilight saga—although there is definitely plenty of that out there. Instead, it is a compilation of some of the most thoughtful internet posts on the blog BellaAndEdward.com, organized by topic. It gave me an opportunity to examine a small sampling of which questions are important to Twilight fans and what many fans are thinking about them.
One of the most provocative questions in the book is, “Which Twilight saga book is the worst?” A certain response to this question made me step back and think about a set of categories that is certainly crucial to Twilight fans and central to the way we all live our lives: reality and fantasy. This response came from a fan named Rachel, who believes that Breaking Dawn is the worst book in the saga. Why? She says,
My honest question is, how can a story with that many vampires on opposing sides, randomly pumped into the plot, manage to have everyone survive in the end? I understand that writers can do whatever they choose, but it takes away from the sincerity and believability of the characters just so the writer can have a ‘happily ever after’ fairytale ending. I know this is a fantasy novel, but the writing is trying to make it real for the reader. Unfortunately, in reality not all of your beloved characters survive such a formidable battle.
At first, I laughed at the irony of the response. This fan is criticizing the vampire and werewolf behavior in Breaking Dawn for being unrealistic, yet implicit in her criticism is the ultimate acceptance of Stephenie Meyer’s world of vampires and werewolves as real. In essence, she is willing to believe in the existence of the Volturi, vegetarian vampires, and shape-shifting Native American teenagers, but she is unwilling to accept that these creatures would not engage in a full-on battle. But, looking more closely at her response, it is apparent that this fan’s prototypes of reality and fantasy are not the same as those of non-Twilight culture. What many people may lump together as all fantasy, she distinguishes into separate categories of fantasy and reality.
Intrigued by this noticeable shift in prototypes, I began to look for more discussion about what is realistic and unrealistic within the Twilight saga. While scanning through the Twilight Lexicon, I found a thread titled Bella Swan Cullen #3. I clicked on it just out of curiosity, not expecting to find exactly what I was looking for. What I did find was a lively discussion about chromosomes, genetics, gravity, and the scientific validity of events in Breaking Dawn. Feel free to take a look—I’ll report back tomorrow, and we can start to take a look at what makes something ‘real’ in the Twilight world.
Till then,
Student L
