Every Day Is a 'Twilight' Renaissance for Me
On young girls' impact on pop culture and reaffirming my love for Twilight
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The Twilight Saga is back on Hulu, and it’s all I’ve watched for the last week.
Right after I wrote that, I instantly started thinking about how to justify watching the Twilight movies on an endless loop. I bounced between “I’m not watching that much, I’m only being dramatic,” “I was feeling nostalgic,” “They’re so silly that they’re easy to watch,” and “I’m only throwing them on for background noise.”
16 years after Twilight debuted in theaters, I am still defining my interest in and (complicated) love for this franchise within the societally accepted parameters.
Frankly, I don’t want to do that anymore. This newsletter is my place to like the things I do as loudly as I want to—I’d write my posts in big, bubble letters with a glitter pen if I could. (Imagine it for me!) I like The Twilight Saga. I love it, actually!
I won’t pretend it doesn’t have its concerning, misogynistic, inaccurate, and racist faults (to say the very least)—it does. Those shouldn’t be glanced over or ignored.
I’m only pointing out that I remember a time when my ever-waking thought was about The Twilight Saga (I was 11 when the first movie came out), and kids at school made fun of me for liking a book and movie about a girl falling in love with a vampire and a werewolf. My friend and I would make bookmarks with photos collaged on Microsoft Word (Oh, what I would’ve given to have Canva or Pinterest then!), but we’d have to wait to show each other until lunch because we would become buds of jokes if we showed each other before class started.
I have so many memories of hiding my very beat-up (loved) copy of the book under my desk so no one would know I was reading it again. I remember tucking Eclipse—a larger, hardback copy compared to my trade paperback, with the movie-tie-in-cover copy of Twilight—between textbooks so other students wouldn’t see it when I went to different classes. I always felt I had to hide that I loved Twilight.
I only understood why when I got older. Rarely was it because of the genuine (and plentiful) criticisms the books and movies deserved. More often than not, it was because they were made for girls’ and women’s enjoyment.
As the franchise became record-breakingly successful, making fun of Twilight and those who enjoyed it became increasingly popular. But I’ve realized that with every Twilight Renaissance over the years, the people who were mean to those who liked it have gotten quieter. Even better, I couldn’t hear them over the people, primarily girls and women, refusing to be quiet about whatever they liked.