She argues that, although the Twilight books and movies were “regressive” in their politics at the time and remain so now, fans used Meyer’s work to engage with the issues that were presented to them in ways that were often more compelling than the original texts. “I wouldn’t say the backlash was wholly undeserved, but I would say it didn’t always recognise how subtle fans are,” says Dr Sara Wasson, lecturer in gothic studies at Lancaster University. The internet was awash with vitriol and two feature films – Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer’s miserably unamusing Vampires Suck, and the largely unnoticed Breaking Wind – took aim at the perceived failings of the movie franchise and its fans.
So why did Twilight provoke its own specific brand of ire? In a world already gaga over Harry Potter, it wasn’t the first young adult literary series to become a movie franchise, and nor was it the last – 2008 also marked the publication of the first book in Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy – but it was the only one to provoke such a fearsome and ferocious response.
Audience surrogate Bella Swan meets vampire Edward Cullen and embarks on a tumultuous, complicated path to everlasting romance involving hyper-sensitive hunters, a clan of murderous supernatural law enforcers and, of course, a permanently shirtless werewolf to add a third point to the obligatory YA love triangle.
The stories are simple – wish-fulfillment tales for audiences too young to enjoy the conservative romances of Mills & Boon. That’s not to mention the Fifty Shades of Grey franchise, which started life as online fan-fiction involving Meyer’s characters, before spinning off into a multimedia success story of its own. Legions of devotees – predominantly female, but varying from preteens all the way through to middle-age – helped the films make more than $3bn at the global box office.
That didn’t stop the aforementioned fans from lapping up everything Meyer’s books and their movies had to offer.
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