Twilight could've been so much better.

Submitted by mushroomgoth t3_zppymn in books

I know, I know. Twilight was ages ago, and everyone has moved on, but by God, does it irritate me. Mainly because of how simple it would've been to fix.

Imagine the whole thing from Bella's father's perspective. A small-town policeman finds out his best friend is a werewolf, and the local doctor he's trusted for years is a vampire. His estranged daughter gets mixed up in the mess, and as things get more and more dangerous, he can't ignore it anymore.

He starts hunting down rogue vampires to keep his daughter as safe as possible and gets stuck in the middle of an underground war. At the same time, there's inner conflict between werewolves and vampires, and both him and his daughter have to make hard choices about what actually matters.

Give the concept to an author who actually has some talent and tweak a few character relationships to get the reader attached, and it could've been a decent read.

I'm not upset, I'm just disappointed.

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Brainship t1_j0u31lf wrote

You know, you could still write this story. Twilight doesn't own urban fantasy, werewolves, or vampires.

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karmacrossing t1_j0vk7c9 wrote

EL James has made millions off of her Twilight fanfic

You could do worse lol

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disphugginflip t1_j132ade wrote

Wait what? How can she make money legally?

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karmacrossing t1_j14fezb wrote

The fanfic was originally free and gained a following- it was already a reimagining of Twilight so the plot wasn’t the same. All she had to do to publish it was change the characters names and a few locations to get around the copyright and boom 50 Shades.

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mushroomgoth OP t1_j0u36wr wrote

Honestly, I've considered it. But I refuse to be grouped into 'Twilight fanfic authors', mainly because of my intense hatred for 50 Shades of Grey. I'd sooner leap off a cliff than have anything in common with E.L. James

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MumsOfMiddleEarth t1_j0u4y88 wrote

Please don't let that stop you! Because the fact that you think that way, proves that you are the hero this world needs.
But seriously, you only live once. Write it

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Unlucky_Associate507 t1_j0u25se wrote

The problem with vampires is that they are fundamentally a metaphor for exploitative and parasitic people. They cannot be good-the best modern vampire tale I ever encountered was Being Human, were vampirism was an excellent metaphor for being a drug addict

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mushroomgoth OP t1_j0u4j6g wrote

I think my personal favourite type of vampire is the vampires in Skulduggery Pleasant. The sunlight binds them to their human form, and at night, they literally rip off their human skin to reveal this animalistic creature with no control.

There's also the fact that there's a vampire written into a few of the books that creepily obsesses over the main character and only exists to make fun of Edward Cullen, and I find it so stupidly funny

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Unlucky_Associate507 t1_j0u9v30 wrote

I think the skullduggery pleasant vampire is pretty brilliant and it works with the metaphor of vampires as exploiters. Like I see them as sort of like old men who marry young women and vampirically live off their youth... but your skullduggery pleasant is brilliant to: wealthy men like LISK (long Island serial killer) who appear normal and pleasant on the surface but have such horrible fantasies that they let out when no one can see them.

I think if Smeyers had wanted to create beautiful immortal people who can sometimes be prats but are basically so above humans that we can't really judge them... she could have used Fae. Heck Sarah Jay Maas even has her character become a Fae and Smeyers could've thought that up.

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PartyPorpoise t1_j0y16xe wrote

Nah, there's always room to recontextualize. In this case... Vampires are often a metaphor for sexual deviancy. If you're part of a group that is viewed as sexually deviant, then maybe you'd sympathize with vampires. I think vampire romance is so popular with women (and teen girls) because female sexuality is so stigmatized. (unless it's for male pleasure) Vampires are unashamed in their sexuality, so it's an appealing fantasy.

Sure, there are other aspects to the fantasy as well, but the sexuality of vampires plays into the traditional depictions.

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sysadminbj t1_j0u0cko wrote

Why are we talking about this? Twilight was wildly successful.

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lictoriusofthrax t1_j0u3pe9 wrote

I’m sure all those teenagers and young women who loved it would have loved it even more if it focused on a small town middle aged divorced cop father.

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mushroomgoth OP t1_j0u3a0y wrote

A lot of things are successful while being horribly bad. In my opinion, Twilight is one of those things

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Black-Sam-Bellamy t1_j0ubzqi wrote

The things that made it bad are the things that made it appealing to certain people. The characters were deliberately bland, so the reader could be like "this is just like me and my crush" it was set in high school for the same reason, etc etc.

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AngelDeath2 t1_j0uwcyx wrote

Exactly! I feel like a lot of popular books are popular precisely because they are bad. In Twilight's case it's because society socializes young women to want relationships with narcissistic, predatory, older men. So when thay read a book about that happening, they think that they like it

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ClearWaves t1_j0upj7o wrote

Twilight was exactly the way it needed to be to appeal to the YA audience. That's like saying the Saddleclub novels could have been so much better if the girl didn't always end up successfully taming the wildest horse in the stable, or winning the blue ribbon, or the mean-rich girl always ending up as the loser. It's written for young girls who dream of winning that ribbon, of being the popular girl, and so on. It appeals to the target audience of horse obsessed girls and isn't meant to be great literature for adults. These stories have their place and serve their function. Let them be.

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PotterAndPitties t1_j0u0jeq wrote

I was dating a woman at the time who bought me all the books and insisted I read them.

The idea is solid. There are even a few interesting scenes. But the love story and everything else is just so vapid. I still don't know why they fell in love besides her finding him good looking and her smelling good to him.

In the hands of a better writer....

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mushroomgoth OP t1_j0u3t1r wrote

There really is no depth to be seen. I feel like Meyer tried to accomplish... something with the whole 'Edward used to kill people, but he only killed people who deserved to die' but it didn't add anything interesting to the character or the dynamic between him and other characters.

It's just two bland nothing-characters involved in a bland nothing-story with a few grains of interesting-adjacent content sprinkled on top

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Ahollowbullet-yet t1_j0umci1 wrote

I don't know. It's meant for 13 yr old girls. When I was one, I loved it. It seems almost charming in a way now, and less toxic than some of the books marketed nowadays to that same audience. I also think the criticism it got at the time was wildly unproportional to how bad it is.

Your idea sounds amazing though.

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shokalion t1_j0u8pcc wrote

I'm a dude, and was like in my early twenties when the Twilight books started gaining traction.

I've never cared at all about the perception of who particular books are "supposed to" be for, so I picked the first book up, and they kept me interested enough to read them all. Even read that one that was gender-flipped just to see what the deal was, and yeah thought that one was a clear cash grab. Whatever, nobody forced me to get it, it was what it was.

I stand by the opinion that they're the victims of their own success, and a whole lot of bandwagon jumping. There have been way worse books published than those. I enjoyed her other book too that gets no mentions these days, The Host. Though the movie of it was entirely forgettable. Yeah her books aren't works of towering prose, but they do what they set out to do, and I don't think they do it notably more badly than a whole host of books that are equally as popular.

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trashbin14 t1_j0xuefk wrote

That's a whole ass different genre and certainly not targeting 13 yo hormonal teenage girls. You could always make your ao3 version of it.

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PartyPorpoise t1_j0y1ar1 wrote

Dude, the series was intended for teenage girls. What you describe is for a totally different audience.

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EliMacca t1_j0vz92d wrote

I think people need to understand that these are teeny bobber books. There not supposed to be some great work of literature. Twilight is one of the books that has really gotten me into reading and I’m sure many others as well.

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Bubbly-PeachSherbert t1_j0w4llt wrote

Honestly, that would be a really great fun read. But it is a totally different concept.

​

I think Twilight had its glittering time in the sun, but there's a lot of other great books out there. And honestly, Twilight was not anywhere NEAR as bad as all of those zombie books that came after. Does anyone remember those? Like where humans would fall in love with zombies. What a weird time to be alive.

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lucy_valiant t1_j0u8ypy wrote

People have been saying things like this for so long, but I think people are confusing the symptom for the disease. The problem at the heart of Twilight is that Meyer was not a good writer.

Even if every change you suggested was implemented and the whole story was restructured and rewritten to star Charlie, Meyer would STILL fuck that up too and write a bad book, and maybe in that alternate universe, people would be crying out “The simple solution was to make the teenage daughter the protagonist!”

I’m being a little glib, but the truth of the matter as I see it isn’t that Twilight in its structure and details had to necessarily suck. In the hands of the right writer, who knows what it could have been — but in the hands of a bad writer, every premise is just going to be wasted potential. The problem is the writer, not the story.

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War_of_the_Theaters t1_j1munl9 wrote

In the hands of Meyer, it was perfect for tween and teenage girls. I don't know why people keep thinking the prose had to be phenomenal or that it's bad for not having a more adult or male audience. People don't shit on Sweet Valley High, and the quality is about the same. I'd argue that Twilight is significantly better than those books, and I very much enjoyed both series.

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lucy_valiant t1_j1nfwh6 wrote

I obviously disagree. Having once been a teenage girl, Twilight was never a thing for me, even when I was younger, and personally, I’ve always found it misogynistic and patronizing to say, in effect, “It doesn’t matter if it’s shit, it’s for girls and that’s what they like.” As if teenage girls don’t deserve something better than Twilight because quality can’t possibly matter to them, they’re teenage girls. Like, no offense, but if someone’s standards are low, don’t rope me into that just because we share a gender. I didn’t want Twilight to have a more male or adult audience. Like, as a lifelong female reader, I didn’t care about the demographics of Twilight’s audience —in fact, in my personal experience, it definitely was older women who were fans of that book, women who were adults in contrast to me and my teenage book-reader friends. So it was definitely a matter of wanting more than Twilight for me, wanting to be taken seriously as a reader, to be treated as if I deserved more than some very bad prose and shallow characterization strung together with tepid romance.

So I’ve never really accepted the “But it’s for teenage girls!” argument when I once was a teenage girl and it was very much not for me. That line of reasoning just seems like a No True Scotsman fallacy for me.

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War_of_the_Theaters t1_j1p18hg wrote

I was ten or eleven when the books came out. I loved them. They were perfect for me at the time, which is to say they were literary junk food. Why would I want to be taken "seriously as a reader" at that age when I didn't even take myself seriously? I loved the shallow characterization because it meant it was easy to insert myself into the book. I loved the so-called "tepid" romance because it meant that the book wasn't delving into particularly deep or serious issues that would be less fun. (I would also argue that at ten or eleven, it was far, far from tepid.)

None of this is a bad thing, nor does it make the books "shit" given that they never pretended to be anything else. Nobody who picked up the book and read the summary was surprised by the content or quality. There are plenty of other authors - YA or otherwise - that don't cater to fans of cheesy romances, and there are others yet who write more critically acclaimed romances if you want to keep to the genre. Want to exchange Edward for Heathcliff? Be my guest, but I'll take both, thank you kindly.

Side note, it's incredibly patronizing to say that the books are shit and that the millions of fans (many young despite your anecdotal experience) have low standards just because you wanted something different. I read Twilight alongside a variety of other literary works. I can have both deep-fried Oreos and beef Wellington without thinking the former should be cooked differently.

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heykittums t1_j0ub0id wrote

I read them all when I was in high school. I remember being SO disappointed that the climax of the whole series was this standoff where NOTHING HAPPENED.

It was so lame. And I'm still mad about it.

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LizzyWednesday t1_j0uyb2t wrote

I wanted to hurl the last book across the room when I finished it. (Note, I was in my late 20s when I read the books. It gave me something to chat about with my teenaged nieces & we had LOADS of amazing discussions about toxic relationships, bad writing, and #TeamJacob so I feel like I really won in the end for the books bringing me closer to them.)

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bofh000 t1_j0utbbw wrote

Except the whole idea was to tell the story from the girl’s point of view. It could’ve been better only if they’d changed the whole mesmerized into loving a predator thing.

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Mavricivs t1_j0unwzy wrote

The problem with Twilight and most every other piece of relatively modern vampire literature is that the author forgets or omits that all vampires are by definition malevolent, undead monsters and turns them into sexy high elves with funny dietary requirements.

The seductiveness and beauty of Count Dracula and Carmilla wasn’t in opposition to their terrible nature, it made them more dangerous and scarier. They can’t be well meaning or good people for the same reason that a tiger can’t be well meaning and good natured, an undead and immortal being that depends on blood for sustenance just can’t live in the same sort of moral universe as a human being.

Aside from Stoker and Le Fanu, the other works of vampire literature that I would recommend are: Lord Byron’s The Giaour, Coleridge’s Christabel and Wuthering Heights, even though Heathcliff isn’t actually an undead bloodsucker he embodies the spirit of one. I find very little to be redeemed in things like Varney the Vampire, The Hunger, I Am Legend, Salem’s Lot, the Barnabas Collins novels or Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles.

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LizzyWednesday t1_j0uylnn wrote

'Salem's Lot is part reaction to Dracula and part meditation on the insidious banality of Evil. It's not supposed to be redemptive; it's supposed to scare the sh!t out of you.

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Clue_1985_ t1_j0wxdwi wrote

I think you might enjoy Our Vampires, Ourselves by Nina Auerbach

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