I’ll be honest: Twilight is the first and only piece of media that ever truly stuck with me. I grew up listening to my older sister, my mum, and my nana rave about it, but I was about nine years old when I first watched the movie via my pink portable television. I became absolutely enthralled, going on to devour the books at a concerning speed and becoming fairly obsessed with the franchise for the next few years.
At that age, I had no concept of bad or good writing (or acting, for that matter) and certainly no idea whether something was cringeworthy or not. Even now, it’s hard to put my finger on what exactly it was that got me so hooked onto Twilight – I think it was a combination of the scenery, aesthetics and music with the excitement of a teenage romance far removed from my life in primary school.
Looking back on nine-year-old me, Twilight also answered one of the biggest concerns of my life at that time: my own mortality. Around that age, I had realised that I would eventually grow old and die, a thought that truly kept me up at night as I transitioned from childhood to my pre-teen years. Bella Swan’s fears about growing old and dying mirrored my own. Her immortal happily-ever-after spoke to more than just romance for me; it was a solution to this new fear of death that I had developed.
I was also never ‘Team Edward’ or ‘Team Jacob’ – if anything, I was Team Bella. Reading the books, I felt like Bella was a part of me: awkward, shy, struggling to make friends and imagining the weight of the world on her shoulders. Bella’s life at home and school mirrored my own at that time, and her ability to escape to this magical, supernatural underworld called to me as much as it did to her. Indulging in this series was my own way of escaping the real world, just like her.
This is why Twilight meant so much to me then, and why I think it always will.
During my time at secondary school, liking the Twilight series was never something I openly admitted to – or at least not until I was much, much older, and able to defend my interests. I always saw it as too girly, too embarrassing, too centered on romance. I did, however, make my obsession with The Walking Dead very public – a series whose terrible one-liners are probably equally as cringe-worthy, but one that made me look grown up and cool because it was the opposite of girly.
It’s now been twelve years since I first watched Twilight. I must have read the books at least fifteen times now, and I’ve probably spent a good hundred hours or so watching the movie – and that’s just the first one. Of course, as I’ve gotten older, I can make fun of its flaws – Kristen Stewart really cannot keep her mouth closed, Edward and Jacob can both be highly toxic and Stephanie Meyer is terrible at disguising her religious agenda or her cultural appropriation. But as problematic as it is, Twilight still sparks something in me, and I am not ashamed to admit it (in fact, I actually have a half-satirical A2 poster of Edward and Bella on my wall).
Twilight is what I turn to when I’m really going through it, when something happens that makes me need to rewind the clock and become nine again. It feels like me, through and through, no matter what happens, or where I’m living, or how much I change. And honestly, I do fall in love with it again each time. The books are incredibly comforting and immersive, and I will defend the production of the first movie until I die, with its blue filter, cosy small town aesthetic and perfect soundtrack.
It’s kind of incomprehensible to me that people became truly angered by Twilight at the height of its popularity. I can admit that it isn’t great writing or acting, but it’s fun, girly and escapist. There’s something about it that lingers within me, and in millions of other women – after all, it’s still relevant in internet culture twenty years after its publication, with the so-called “Twilight renaissance” that did the rounds on social media in 2020. Yes, it is cringe and problematic, but there’s plenty of cringe and problematic male-centric media that has never quite riled people up in the same way (AKA every action movie I’ve ever seen).
Ultimately, this is symptomatic of media catering to girls – written for us and consumed by us. The interests of women and especially teenage girls have always been mocked since the days of Beatlemania, and the Twilight series has probably roused more rage in people than any other franchise. I’d argue that Twilight and other media of its kind represent a kind of teenage feminism in their refusal to accept men into the picture (real ones that is, not fictional). No part of Twilight is aimed at a male audience, and it was never tweaked for the male gaze. Even its male love interests are entirely creations of a woman’s imagination, based on what she thought would be universally appealing to her female readers.
There’s something freeing, I find, in consuming media that entirely centres teenage girls – it feels like through liking Twilight, I’m in a secret club where we’re all indulging in a kind of eternal girlhood. When I’ve had mocking reactions to my giant Twilight poster, I automatically distrust that person – because honestly, even having the energy to feel so strongly about something based on its ‘cringe’ factor is questionable.
It doesn’t matter if Twilight is bad, or cringe, or problematic – I and many other women enjoy it. It reminds me of my younger self, and I think it will always be ingrained into my personality in some way or another.
But this has all been said before. I’m pretty sure it’s common knowledge now, or at least among feminist circles, that the interests of women and especially teenage girls will always be mocked, ridiculed and framed as intellectually inferior. To this day, I will defend Twilight with my life, and I will always stand my ground when it comes to my girly interests – or so I thought.
However, I recently caught myself feeling the same shame about my own interests as I did with Twilight in secondary school, and it’s thrown me for a loop. My older sister recently got into A Court of Thorns and Roses, and bought me the series so we could talk about it together. I was sceptical at first, having heard a general consensus about it being a poorly written, cringe-worthy mockery of the fantasy genre that is 90% smut. But something about ACOTAR took me right back to Twilight (but with sex this time). Perhaps it was the world-building, or the romance, or that element of immortality that always gets me, but suddenly, I was nine again and escaping my hectic life – this time, through the eyes of Feyre Archeron.
I saw so much of Twilight in ACOTAR: the power dynamics of the romances, the battle finale, the last-minute miracle motherhood, the teenage main character who has to grow up too quickly, even the main love interest’s family mirroring Edward Cullen’s siblings. I’ll admit, it can be cringe, and there are definitely certain plot lines and relationship dynamics that I question.
But it serves the same purpose that Twilight did twenty years ago – it’s a fantasy world where women’s desires are at the centre of the action and the romance; where the men actually listen to what women want. It puts you into the mind of a teenage girl with her exciting (and slightly toxic) teenage romance, whatever age you are. I genuinely enjoyed the lore of Feyre’s world, the descriptions of each court, the slow-burn romance and the twists and turns of the conflict which drives the series. It may not reach Twilight prominence in the trajectory of my life, but I do have several future re-readings to go yet.
On a side note, I also very much disagree with the general contempt of its smut content – for a series which often gets pegged as insulting the fantasy genre with cringeworthy porn, it has very few smutty scenes. On this, I do question why that critique isn’t applied to a series like Game of Thrones – can sex only be inserted into fantasy if it’s non-consensual or not romantic or not female-centred?
We might have moved away somewhat from the mockery and hatred that Twilight stirred up in the early 2010s, but this has just shifted forms. When I mention having read ACOTAR, or someone sees the series on my shelf and questions my reading choices, I often revert automatically to poking fun at it, to reciting a spiel about my sister buying it for me, and offhandedly calling it “fairy porn”. But this is still someone’s work, and a work that so many women love. My sister loved ACOTAR enough that she bought it for me so that we could enjoy it together and bond over it, just as we (and many other girls) did over the Twilight series. I’ve now passed the ACOTAR books onto my nana, and onto my younger sister, so we can gush about this smutty, escapist fairy romance together like we’re fourteen again.
So I ask myself now: where have my Twilight-defending principles gone? Why do I mock my own interests before people can beat me to it? I defend Twilight as the epitome of teenage girlhood, but perhaps ACOTAR gets less grace for its aiming at twenty-or-thirty-something-year-olds. It seems an even guiltier pleasure to escape my twenties than it was to escape my pre-teens.
Whether the writing is bad, the plot is problematic, or the acting is shockingly terrible, romantasy series like Twilight and ACOTAR are enjoyed by millions of women, including myself and the women in my family – even my 67-year-old nana. They represent a kind of eternal girlhood, a medium of escaping real life into a fantasy which is just as much about a women-centric world as it is about magical fae, vampires and immortality. My academic life is so centred around men’s perspectives that reading for the sake of re-experiencing girlhood is a much-needed indulgence in my free time. The mockery of these series written for women, about women and consumed by women is inherently misogynistic: society just loves to trash on our interests. So as my little bit of defiance, I will proudly and openly read my “fairy porn” and I will be Team Bella for the rest of my life.