The Philippine Online Chronicles

I remember when I went to watch the first Twilight movie two years ago at Trinoma with my mom and sister. The lines to the ticket booth were outrageously long and comprised of teenagers—guys, girls, and gays of around 14-18 years of age. Sitting inside the movie house was like sitting in one gigantic classroom; quite literally, all that was missing were the paper airplanes and the spitballs.

Every time Robert Pattinson made an entrance or every time he uttered a cheesy line or every time he and Kristen Stewart kissed, the crowd (mostly the girls and the gays, anyway) would squeal in kilig. Meanwhile, I—who never really liked Twilight the novel and who was beginning to dislikeTwilight the movie with every blue-washed second of screen time—was alternating between raising my eyebrows and laughing outright in my seat.

I recall that while growing up, I was smack in the middle of two waves of near-fanatical interest in two famous titles under mainstream literature, namely the Harry Potter series and the Twilight saga. To be honest, I am fond of Harry Potter. Sure, it’s not exactly a literary work by classical standards, but it definitely leaves plenty of room for one’s imagination to fill in. If you go to sites such as mugglenet.com, you will find a sophisticated community of fans who hold (mostly) intelligent discussions on the plot, the foreshadowing, the symbolisms, and the cultural and mythical references, to name a few. As a pre-teen girl, I had some difficulty finding other Harry Potter fans I could discuss the series with—simply because very few of my batchmates thought of leisurely reading as a legitimate or fun pastime. At most, people would show up in full wizard get-up when the opportunity arose.

Half a decade later, along came Twilight. I got halfway through the first book before deciding, to put it very mildly, that it did not strike me as enjoyable. In fact, it did not strike me at all, despite my friend’s predictions that I too would find it a good read. Perhaps it was largely due to this sort of “literary depression” I had fallen under at the time: to my thinking, there were fewer and fewer good (read: literary) books coming out every year, and so what was the point of reading or writing? In any case, Twilight was only adequate for me, and I had not even finished reading it.

And yet, another friend of mine described it as “the book that got a whole generation of teenagers reading”, and that upset me for a little while. An honest-to-God fellow bookworm was already hard to find, and here was this vampire romance novel that became the first book many of my contemporaries picked up to read for pleasure—and no one I met for the first three years of the craze could talk to me about the books with weightier substance beyond “Edward Cullen is soooooooo hot” and “He’s the perfect man” and “I wish more guys were like that”.

Now, every fandom has its fair share of fanatics, but I am not particularly biased when I say that Twilight fans—they call themselves Twihards—can be quite scary. For one, they tend to break the sound barriers with their screaming. There is also a matter of personal space for some of them: I hear stories about Robert Pattinson’s frightening fan encounters; it’s no wonder he tends to denounce things like the Internet and such. Some of them, sadly, tend to write unauthorized companion guides.

[Note: I have actually skimmed through this book—my sister got a copy one Christmas ago. It really is just a grown woman writing a book-length essay on why it would be better to date Edward Cullen than Jacob Black—at the very least, it’s not even objective. Especially in the last section of the book, she had the tendency to connect completely unrelated topics in defense of the Twilight saga (even abortion). She was not even talking about the Twilight saga for most of it.]

But scarier than the fans are the effects the Twilight saga has on its readers. I have seen a little girl in the second grade carry a copy of Breaking Dawn around school and chat animatedly about it to her friends (for non-Twilight readers, Breaking Dawn is the one with the sex and the infamous savage Caesarian birth scene—I know kids are exposed to a lot of weird shiz these days, but come on). This livejournal entry will tell you of a 15 year old who got it on with a guy named Edward and decided to name her baby Renesmee Bella Stephenie—a combo of the names of the characters and the author.

And another thing, how is the standard set by the character of Edward Cullen supposed to be reached by the average Joes? We females complain about good men being hard to find just as we define all that makes a man a good man using a Byronic vampire as an example. Can you just taste the irony?

Like I said, I know that every fandom has its fair share of fanatics, but what is it about this series that incites so much of the craziness that both characterizes and stereotypes its’ fans?

Perhaps the pull lies in the books being marketed as darkly romantic novels and as vampire novels. Vampires have always been creatures of myth and mystery and have been so imagined for the last two or three hundred years. Romance, on the other hand, has always been a popular genre—attracting a mostly female following—resonating and sating, even just for a while, a person’s dreams about not having to go through life alone. Combining the two and executing it in certain literary ways will either get your work elevated to a classic or elevated to a cult classic (that said, it is rather unfair to attempt to read Twilight with the high standards of literature, as this article will tell you).

On the subject of dreams, that is another thing Twilight tends to feed (and arguably, feed on). I am talking about fanfiction here; for me, the Twilight saga reads like very long fanfiction: you have a clumsy, confidence-lacking, ordinary young woman (Bella) who is the object of intense affection of the story’s Gary Stu (Edward), and who is also the object of affection of the Best Friend, Jacob Black (also known as the Romantic Runner Up; and all the world is going crazy around her simply because she has begun to date someone who is supposedly the perfect man in vampire form. Readers familiar with fanfiction (of the badly-written sort in this context) will see that what I just noted here is trademark of such writings. (Robert Pattinson himself said that Twilight ultimately read like the author’s wish-fulfillment fantasy in this interview.) On the one hand, fanfiction is an outlet for fans with vivid imaginations coupled with a writing streak to show their love and support of a book, show, game, or movie. On the other hand, it is also a place where the more...uh...attention-deficient get to showcase how attention-deficient they are and how dull they think their realities are; whether it's through posting long-winded "epics" full of author-insertion and Mary Stu-ism (with little notes at the beginning about how people should stop flaming them for their masterpieces), or else replying to comments and reviews from their readers (both intelligible and less intelligible) with decidedly less intelligible comebacks. Either way, if you write something particularly good or something extremely horrible, you become a sort of rock star in cyberspace. (if you want further education on the burgeoning subculture that is fanfiction, this is a good place to go to if you're looking for something fun and witty.)

But going back to the Twilight saga, well, truth be told, what female does not dream of love and romance with a handsome young gentleman who could, literally and figuratively, sweep her off her feet? And despite this handsome young gentleman’s aura of danger, somehow, the lady is still assured a happy ending wherein they get married, have children, and she has become a case study of the classic Ugly-Duckling-Turned-Swan. The Twilight saga, especially the final book, Breaking Dawn, offers all this. (Breaking Dawn is perhaps the worst of the series, and that’s coming from my sister, a Twilightfan: it felt like a published fanfic, what with all the bizarre, far-fetched plot twists within the story).

All this aside, this is not to say that the subculture birthed with the advent of the Twilight craze does not have some good effects. Provided that the first-time adherents actually decide to move on to other books, “the book that got a whole generation of teenagers reading” will have lived up to its name in the truest sense of the word—my sister, in fact, has moved on to books by Shannon Hale, Eva Ibbotson, and Susan Collins. Hence, Twilight has awakened a renewed interest in books in general.

Also, in a world where reality is dominated by statistics, facts, one night stands and meaninglessness, Twilight got all its fans dreaming. Sure, dreaming about the extreme attractiveness of its hero and other characters, but dreaming nonetheless. The dreaming leads to taking the existing characters and putting them into non-canonical situations—fan art and fan fiction. People learn to write and to draw by imitation and a huge leap of imagination, and that applies to this case too. To be fair to fanfiction, I have peered over my sister's shoulder many times to get an idea of what kind of fanfics draw her in, and I was surprised to find that the ones she reads on Twilight are intelligently—even wittily—written.

That said, will the craze die down any time soon? It’s not likely, given that the last book has yet to be made into a movie, and that that movie is to be in two parts. Moreover, Edward Cullen and company have somehow become very recognizable characters in pop culture and extremely enduring figures in the collective and individual imaginations. Stephenie Meyer has managed to write something that awakened the most secret desires of many females; and once awakened, the beast refused to go back to the dark.

Oh, well. Either way, to the power of books, right?