- Admittedly I'm not really a Twilight fan to start with, so, when I started seeing the trailers for New Moon with all the shirt-less wolf boys (who IIRR were fully clothed in the books) I just chalked it up to fan service and them trying to bring as many teenage girls in as possible (and a few boys, I guess). Then (after seeing the movie and wondering on it for way too long) I realised that those boys are just adjusting to being wolves meaning they're constantly losing control and transforming which shreds their clothes to bits. Of course they're going to wear as little as they can! - Oolia
- This is explicitly stated in the book. I thought there was a mention of it in the movie but to be totally honest my mind has pretty much blacked out every part of that movie that didn't turn up the narm to an eleven. Zig Zag
- Actually the books specifically say that the werewolves run several degrees warmer than humans. They don't wear shirts because they're always warm.note It's made relevant to the plot when Jacob has to share a sleeping bag with Bella to keep her from freezing to death.
- I hated the first half of the novel Twilight because there was too much of Bella obsessing over Edward. I thought it was hokey and dull adolescent literature crap. Then the second half of the novel was more interesting than the first. After I finished, the fridge brilliance hit me: Edward is a vampire. He drives women crazy with how beautiful he is - it's a part of him being a predator. Bella spent the first half of the book trying to understand WHY she was so obsessed with Edward.
- On the subject of Twilight and vampires-as-predators: the whole "sparkling" thing. At first, it just seemed, well, kind of silly. I mean, why? But then I remembered the whole little speech about being the "perfect predator," and it made sense. The sparkling is a lure for future victims; after all, ridiculous or not, wouldn't you do a double take if you saw someone sparkling? And people who are less wise (someone like Bella, for example) would probably go check out what's going on, leading to an easy way to get prey without causing a whole mess of attention. It's still a little odd to me, but it's no longer gratuitous.
- My moment of Fridge Brilliance ran something like this: "Why would it say on the cover that the author is a Mormon, isn't that completely irrelevant to the story? Unless it's not... Also, the sparkling as described would kind of look like a halo. Wait a minute... Oh!" I didn't find it any less hilarious when I learned that Edward looks exactly like Joseph Smith. In short: the vampires are Saints (presumably Latter Day ones), and that is why Bella keeps describing Edward as "angelic" and "God-like". It's not exactly subtle, but that's Stephenie Meyer for you.
- The only problem is that Edward addresses his perfection as a luring predator, and then mentions that everyone but Bella finds him and the rest of the Cullens crazy amounts of creepy. He returns to that point frequently, that she's so unusual for wanting to be anywhere near him or any other vampire. I guess this means that vampires prefer the blood of people experiencing Lust Induced Brain Freeze?
- Nope, still not making any sense to me. Meyer goes on and on and on about how fantastically super-duper strong/fast/indestructible all the meyerpires are. If they are so strong and fast why on earth would they need that split second advantage of a person doing a double-take? And for that matter, why would they need anything else to enhance their beauty when Meyer is physically incapable of writing a paragraph without mentioning how hot Edward and all the other vampires are?-Zig Zag
- Also, that completely and totally ignores the whole friggin point of vampires having to stay out of the sunlight. The sunlight is supposed to be detrimental to vampires, not make them even better killing machines! It's their weakness and having that weakness is an essential part of
all vampire lorevampire lore post-1922. I think this one is more a case of Meyer's habit of thinking that writing a perfect character is better than writing a character with flaws or weaknesses. - At least, not any flaws or weaknesses that she is aware of...
- I always thought that their sparkliness was a weakness. Instead of bursting into flames, they sparkled. While it does not cause death, the sparkling would require more investigation, and more investigation means that the world finds out about vampires.
- Except that people not believing in vampires is a fairly recent phenomenon, from a historical perspective.
- The main problem this troper has with the sparkling is that it breaks one of the two traits that the vast majority (if not all. Hey, I am only on the L's in the vampire dictionary right now. Give me a break, this book is thick) of vampires have: a strong attachment to the night. Sparkling like diamonds in the sun isn't exactly creature of the night material... And although it could be dismissed as Our Vampires Are Different, considering all the other deviations, you gotta wonder where the line is when something should stop being called a vampire and instead be like... a angel/faerie/SOMETHING instead. This led to this troper's fridge brilliance moment when she realized that the novels would have been a whole lot more kick butt if instead of vampires, the Cullen's and their ilk were gods like the Greek or other polytheistic ones. Shining/sparkling when revealing themselves to a mortal? Check the myth of Dionysis's mother! Requiring blood sacrifice? Well, the Inca gods needed it. And let us not forget immortality and creepy courting maneuvers... Sparkling would almost be awesome in this case.
- Anatomical properties aren't chosen, they just occur and persist through trial and error. Even if the sparklies do only give a split second extra advantage, that's something. Anything to add to their ultimate-predatorness. And it's only a weakness when the vampires are trying to exist in civilized society, where it makes them stand out. In their natural habitat, as animalistic hunters, it's not a weakness because looking inhuman doesn't matter.
- One thing this troper hated about the Twilight series is how every character, from the leads like Bella, Edward and Jacob, to the Big Bad of Eclipse, Victoria, and her right-hand-man, Riley, to the eponymous character of The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner, are cripplingly motivated by "love". Bella is catatonic for four months when Edward leaves her; Edward tries to kill himself when he thinks Bella is dead; Jacob tries to kill himself when he finds out Bella and Edward are married; Victoria assembles a newborn army to avenge her mate, James; Riley follows Victoria to his own demise, loving her and incorrectly believing that she loves him; and Bree Tanner, a newborn, overrides her most powerful instinct (self-preservation) when she realizes that Diego, who she has known all of two days, is dead. It made me sick to see how pathetic they all became... But then I realized that Stephanie Meyer is writing about a world where true love, real love, love worth fighting and dying for, actually exists. And suddenly, I was glad for it. Because, what's wrong with that? —Molly Walker
- Yeh, what's wrong with thinking that a man who stalks you, breaks into your house, watches you while you sleep without your knowledge, breaks your car to stop you from going to see your friends, threatens to commit suicide if you ever leave him, badly hurts you during sex, tries to force you to have an abortion (and mind, this troper's pro-choice, but that's the point, pro-choice), wants to murder you all the time and drink your blood, abandons you to four months of hell while knowing full well you're creepy obsessed and will go crazy because of it, forces you to marry him against your wishes in order to have sex with him and become a vampire even though you're barely legal, carries on a dangerous relationship with you in full knowledge that if you so much as trip, you're almost literal toast, and has murdered quite a lot of people in the past is totally romantic? People these days; so cynical.
- What's wrong with that is that it's not the way the real world works at all, and teaching impressionable adolescent girls to be morons at young ages over what they think must be true love because they read it in the perfect perfection of perfectness that is Twilight is a really bad idea?
- Sure, then let's proceed to Harry Potter, Narnia, and any fiction ever written. Because they just don't work like the real world and might impress our easily-influencable people to believe in all sorts of stupid stuff, like magic and parallel universes. Really, it's fiction, people making false assumptions about it being real shouldn't be an argument to put down concepts, however ridiculous they might seem to you.
- Because everyone who reads these books will TOTALLY label everything as fantasy, even the realistic elements of it (because snow isn't cold, and if you hit your head on the pavement you won't sometimes need a hospital, right?), and fantasy movles never have anything to say about reality that a reader can take away from it. And it's not like there are any cases of girls taking these books way too seriously anyway. Like I never heard girls in front of me in a class talking about how Edward was the perfect man, and they wanted a boyfriend like him on a consistent basis. Right.
- To the person who wrote the entry that started with "Sure, then let's proceed to Harry Potter, Narnia, and any fiction ever written." You completely missed the point. The problem isn't the unrealistic physics in Twilight, it's the unrealistic psychology, which anyone will agree is a problem. People who complain about magic not being realistic are better off avoiding fantasy works, but people complaining that "that's not how real people's psychology works" have a perfectly valid complaint, assuming that they are right.
- About the was Jacob imprinted on Renesmee. At first I thought that it was just idiotic, but then I realized that if someone made it happen, then it was a smart way to prevent war. And since god almost canonically exists in the series, maybe he, or some kind of twisted destiny, decided that it would be bad, very bad, if there was a war between the 'vampire hunters' and the 'good vampires'. The Cullens didn't want to fight the werewolfs in the first place, and this way, the werewolfs have a bond with the Cullens in a way that they're NOT ALLOWED to attack them.
- What's wrong with "True Love" in the Twilight 'Verse is that it does not account for compatibility. Not emotionally, not intellectually, not spiritually, not physically, not on any other level. Person A and Person B are "in love" just because the universe decided they are, no matter how wrong for each other they actually are. This "true love" compels you to stay together, even if the relationship is abusive, toxic, or just plain unfulfilling. This "true love" is so overwhelming that it's the only thing that can give life meaning, you're nothing before you have it, and if your "true love" leaves or dies, you fly into a suicidal rage or spiral into a suicidal depression — either way, you probably won't be living without your "true love" for very long. Oh, and only supernatural beings "get" to have this "true love," humans are SOL, unless you're a human "lucky" enough to be the "true love" of one of these supernatural creatures. It's psychologically unhealthy on every single level, and real people read these books and model their ideas about romantic relationships on them. Certainly, some are able to separate fact from fiction, the fantasy of "True Love" from the reality of relationships taking work and hardship and compatibility, but many more are just waiting for the universe to strangle them with the Red String. And even if that does happen, if they're basing their ideal of a romantic partner on the people held up in this series as the ideal romantic partner, they'll more likely than not end up with an abusive asshole. Criticizing the writing, filmmaking, storytelling, worldbuilding, and plot is one thing, but the story puts forth some genuinely dangerous relationship red flags and holds them up as ideals to aspire to. If there is a genuine god/goddess of love in the Twilight universe selecting these couples, he or she is one sick, twisted, sadistic deity.
- I hated how apathetic Bella was, or at least how she didn't take other people's suffering or even her own as seriously as normal humans would. And as I read the honeymoon chapter of Breaking Dawn, I was seriously wondering how she could take wounds matching those of severe domestic abuse so lightly. And then it hit me...Bella is the biggest sadomasochist on the face of the earth! If she's actually subconsciously enjoying every terrible thing that happens to her, her calmness about it seems totally plausible.
- If all these fridge theories about Twilight are correct, then this book would be the worst case of Misaimed Fandom ever!
- It dawned on me out of the blue yesterday: read through Twilight again (or the first time, whatever). Notice how Bella is always begging Edward to turn her into a vampire, but he refuses to do so until they're married? It's because Stephanie Meyer is using vampirism as a euphemism for sex. Edward, having come from the 1910's, is so old-fashioned that he doesn't believe in sex before marriage. And all the creepy touching that is described in the book? They have no choice, they have to get their hormones out somehow.
- Which turns into either Fridge Horror or a case of Metaphorgotten on Stephenie Meyer's part when you consider Carlisle, Esme, and all their children.
- Oh, it gets better. Remember all that talk about newborn vampire babies in Breaking Dawn? Yeah...
- Vampirism has been a sexual metaphor for as long as it's appeared in literature. Meyer wasn't doing anything clever there. In fact, looking at the way vampires are handled in a story is really telling about how the contemporary society views sex. Dracula was originally an ugly old man who seduced young women into being his slaves and whores, but one can't help but be drawn to him, for some reason — Victorian society on sex in a nutshell. This changes over time, as Dracula becomes a Man of Wealth and Taste, but still unrepentantly evil, on through vampires with variation, some more evil than others, until you hit the modern sexual revolutions and heavily romanticized vampires in Anne Rice novels and such. There is then a revival of the awareness of the dangers of sex and therefore vampirism but still a romanticized version present in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, where vampires seem to represent sexually aggressive individuals that the Superpowered-Empowered Action Girl must eliminate (and also enter into relationships and have sex with — though that's shown to have nasty consequences too). After all this, we get Twilight, penned by a Mormon housewife, about ultra-hot, Adonis-like, cold-as-marble-but-still-"perfect" vampires that the protagonist desperately wants to be with but can't, not until she's married, because she just can't, ok? And now you understand vampirism as a sexual metaphor.
- I thought it was stupid that in Twilight all the vampires are supposed to be at least 100 years old, and they act like hormonal teenagers (Edward especially). But then I realised even though they’ve lived 100 years, they’re frozen in teenage bodies; Edward’s brain hasn’t developed past that of a seventeen year old. His ‘Bella’s dead so I’m going to kill myself in the worst possible way, and potentially break The Masquerade’ isn’t so ridiculous when you remember he’s still mentally a seventeen year old, the parts of his brain that determine cause-and-effect haven’t finished developing, and never will. Simply Kelp
- You have to keep in mind, though, that Edward is supposed to be from the early 1900's. Edward himself talks about how seventeen-year-olds were more mature and allowed more responsibilities (i.e. getting married). Either his mental state depreciated, he was an exception to the norm, or Stephanie Meyer didn't bother with being historically accurate. Given that we never really hear his reasoning it's a tough call. Personally, I think his behavior is more like a fifteen-year-old in an immortal body.
- In another case of Fridge Brilliance though, what might better resolve Edward's reaction could be that he really does treat Bella as a 'drug'. He had described her blood as being like aged wine or something in the first book. Maybe he really was addicted to her (if only her 'fragrance') and when he left he was going through intense withdrawal. When she 'died' he panicked because his drug was really gone now, so he concluded it would be better to die than live on with her.
- Who knows; that whole book was supposedly written as a Shout-Out to Shakespeare...
- On the subject of Twilight and vampires-as-predators: the whole "sparkling" thing. At first, it just seemed, well, kind of silly. I mean, why? But then I remembered the whole little speech about being the "perfect predator," and it made sense. The sparkling is a lure for future victims; after all, ridiculous or not, wouldn't you do a double take if you saw someone sparkling? And people who are less wise (someone like Bella, for example) would probably go check out what's going on, leading to an easy way to get prey without causing a whole mess of attention. It's still a little odd to me, but it's no longer gratuitous.
- It suddenly dawned on me. All vampires are Christians - but the yellow-eyed are Mormons, and the red-eyed are Catholics. This because Catholics eat the body and drink the blood of Jesus in the Holy Communion.
- Isn't this fridge brilliance?
- Uh, except that Mormons symbolically eat the body and drink the blood of Jesus, too. They call it "Sacrament", and do it with little chunks of bread and thimble-sized cups of water.
- The difference is that Catholics believe in transubstantiation, meaning that, in their world view, it's not symbolic.
- So, everyone can agree that sparkly vampires is a load of BS. I thought this way from the moment I found out about it. But then I stumbled upon this article
. In a nutshell: World of Darkness-type rules which state that vampire-sparkliness is a disability which causes people to instinctively detect their true, predatory nature. And Bella's romantic-attraction is a Derangement. -Kimiko Muffin - In text Alice is shown to be obsessed with clothing and dressing other characters, and is described as rarely allowing them to reuse clothes. Then it hit me. By having control over what others wear she can determine time in her visions by clothing, and reuses outfits when a vision with the desired outcome shows the character wearing it.
- Before reading the first seven chapters of Twilight, everything I knew about Gothic literature, I learned from the Bronte sisters and Henry Tilney — the 19th century, after authors became Genre Savvy enough to play cleverly with Gothic tropes — and Twilight didn't seem similar to these at all. I've since read such Gothic literature from the 18th century as The Castle of Otranto (which I loved), Romance of the Forest, and The Mysteries of Udolpho (both of which I hated). Stephanie Meyer, Twilight is not a modern Wuthering Heights — it's a modern The Mysteries of Udolpho! The problem is, heroines like Matilda, Isabella, Adeline, Emily St. Aubert, and Bella Swann are ferociously outdated. A Flat Character with low self-esteem surrounded by people who want to protect her worked then; trying to play it straight now doesn't work, but it is a successful Call-Back to the original Gothic heroine. Udolpho and Twilight both also play All Girls Want Bad Boys painfully straight, which was also an outdated trope by the Bronte's time, possibly thanks to Jane Austen note . - Lale
- Except it really isn't like "Udolpho" at all. The romance doesn't take up much of that novel- after the first part of the book we spend most of the time with the imprisoned heroine, focussing more on the villainous schemes of her guardian and the strange happenings of the castle. The part about All Girls Want Bad Boys is also painfully untrue- the only person Emily ever shows interest in is Valancourt, and she makes it clear to him that she rejects his suit utterly once she hears about him falling into vice in Paris.
- I think there is some creedance to the idea of Twilight maybe not necessarily aping "Udolpho" but using tropes from Gothic fiction. This troper read somewhere that Smeyer went to college and majored in literature and it stands to reason that most, if not all her literary references came from that because the parts of the series I've read compared to the few examples of Gothic fiction this troper has read, there is some correlation with the character types (the Immposibly Chaste and Pure Heroine, the Byronic villain/hero) and the overwrought tone. (blending the horror with swoony flights of fancy and a barely concealed sexual undercurrent) I think that Smeyer read some, if not all of these books and maintained a surface level enjoyment of them (Only somebody completely dense would look at something like "Wuthering Heights" and find it a romantic story) and then tried to translate those characteristics into Twilight but like the original poster said, played everything completely straight. Its one thing in a nineteenth century work of fiction to have chaste and pure heroines that are beleaguered by lusty vampires and monsters but all the sexual politics come off as anachronistic now.
- I don't Know if this is fridge brilliance or Fridge Horror, but I just relised Bella is named after Bela Lugosi. I just threw up a little...
- According to Word of God? "Isabella" has always been a popular Gothic-character name because it was the name of the heroine of the "first" Gothic novel The Castle of Otranto. It's also the name of Heathcliff's wife in Bella's favorite novel Wuthering Heights.
- This Troper is crying with laughter right now. Yes, Isabella was Heathcliff's wife. He beat her, insulted her, controlled her and treated her like shit all the time. Fridge Brilliance indeed.
- I hate to say it, but I'm pretty sure all of that was unintentional. It seems much more likely to me that Bella was named simply so she could be called "Beautiful Swan". Yikes.
- Meyer says on her own website, on the Twilight page, that Isabella was a name she was saving for a daughter if she ever had one and gave it to Bella because she "loved her like a daughter" and that no other name was "good enough."
- That answers another question I've had for years. Someone who names a heroine "Isabella" simply because she likes the name, marries her to a man intended to be analogous to Heathcliff, openly compares their story to Wuthering Heights, and treats this as a good thing, has obviously never read Wuthering Heights.
- Sounds like it was Horror to you.
- According to Word of God? "Isabella" has always been a popular Gothic-character name because it was the name of the heroine of the "first" Gothic novel The Castle of Otranto. It's also the name of Heathcliff's wife in Bella's favorite novel Wuthering Heights.
- I owe this one to Doug Walker. Because TV Tropes ruined my life, the Oxford introduction to The Spanish Tragedy recently made me think that a Revenge Tragedy basically boils down to "You Killed My Father. Prepare to Die." That made me think of Chester A. Bum imitating Victoria in [[ Eclipse (2007) Eclipse]]. And that made me jokingly think, So, from a Perspective Flip, Victoria would be the heroine of a Revenge Tragedy. And who else wrote Revenge Tragedies? Our good friend William Shakespeare! So The Nostalgia Critic was absolutely right - Bella would make "a great Shakespeare villain."
- In Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, Jessica pulls a Bella (in a perhaps-deliberately-Romeo and Juliet-echoing balcony scene) and elopes with her lover and the rest of the local beautiful people. Jessica, like Bella, lives alone with a protective dad. The "beautiful people" are the Christians, utterly alien to Jessica, since she and her father are Jews. Although many of the Christians abuse Jews (as many of the vampires kill humans), Jessica isn't afraid—she wants Lorenzo to make her a Christian and marry her. There's even a Jacob hanging around—Jessica's roguish, comedic best friend Launcelot, and Lorenzo and Launcelot are jealous of one another for hanging around her and spar in a way that's very Edward-and-Jacob-like. Although, as in The Twilight Saga Twilight]], the couple get a sugary-sweet happy ending, Alternate Character Interpretation pegs Jessica as the villain for shunning her father. This means one of two things: 1) Stephenie Meyer is secretly a subversive, Shakespeare-referencing genius, or 2) Shakespeare saw Twilight coming. I'd love to believe the former, but I find the latter far more likely.
- Shakespeare was also smart enough to make this a side-plot rather than the A-plot of his play.
- I'm going with the theory that Meyer simply read some plays by Shakespeare for school, and her subconscious processed it and spat it back out into her book ten years later.
- In Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, Jessica pulls a Bella (in a perhaps-deliberately-Romeo and Juliet-echoing balcony scene) and elopes with her lover and the rest of the local beautiful people. Jessica, like Bella, lives alone with a protective dad. The "beautiful people" are the Christians, utterly alien to Jessica, since she and her father are Jews. Although many of the Christians abuse Jews (as many of the vampires kill humans), Jessica isn't afraid—she wants Lorenzo to make her a Christian and marry her. There's even a Jacob hanging around—Jessica's roguish, comedic best friend Launcelot, and Lorenzo and Launcelot are jealous of one another for hanging around her and spar in a way that's very Edward-and-Jacob-like. Although, as in The Twilight Saga Twilight]], the couple get a sugary-sweet happy ending, Alternate Character Interpretation pegs Jessica as the villain for shunning her father. This means one of two things: 1) Stephenie Meyer is secretly a subversive, Shakespeare-referencing genius, or 2) Shakespeare saw Twilight coming. I'd love to believe the former, but I find the latter far more likely.
- I just realized that there may be a reason Meyer abandoned pretty much every aspect of vampire lore apart from the bloodsucking. One of the traditional aspects of vampire lore is that a vampire has to be invited in to a house. If the Cullens were traditional vampires, Meyer wouldn't have been able to write the ever so romantic scenes of Edward breaking into Bella's house and watching her while she sleeps. —Ncfan
- That would make sense, but according to the author she just didn't know anything at all about vampires. Didn't even give 'em a googling. Unfortunately, I have to say that seems more plausible.
- Pick any vampire/werewolf movie, and tell me what the archetypal chase scene looks like. They're probably running through the woods, on a rainy night. Now turn the predator in question to a Dogged Nice Guy instead chasing the girl because he must show his feelings (and add in the unrealism that she loves him back for this), and you've got the honest perfect setting for such a premise. Always raining, very woody, and like much of the movies of this genre, the town is in the middle of nowhere.
- The reason that Stephenie Meyer strayed so much from traditional vampire lore may well be that she understands that even if a myth is true it makes sense for it to become distorted over time. The distortion would come about in many different ways, thus explaining all the different vampire myths.
- And maybe some of these myths were created by vampires themselves, as intentional misinformation. Imagine being a vampire hunter, engineering a situation where the vampire you've been hunting all night is going to be hit by sunlight at the first crack of dawn, because you're out of stakes but you know sunlight is deadly to it. The sun rises, hits it's skin... and all it does is sparkle. Probably before it rips your throat out.
- Why does Edward fit into the abusive boyfriend/stalker trope ? Because he's a Vampire, they tend to stalk people and even if they try to be good monsters, they are still monsters nontheless. Pretty much Edward is fighting his full instinct and loosing.
- A meta-entry: I noticed a few of these Fridge Brilliance examples are of things that are explicitly stated in the books, yet people are treating them like revelations. Why? Because the books are so traumatic that the mind attempts to block them out!
- Or like, your head try to understand what kind of complicated thing is in the text then later you understand it's more common/dumber than you initially thought. Evil Kid
- The movie-only scene about Bella's suggestion for a school paper article — eating disorders — foreshadowed her bulimic behavior in Breaking Dawn Part 1, as well as her ghastly transformation into extreme thinspo material (minus the belly, of course).
- Once you remember that Bella is an average teenager at the outset and barely into adulthood from the second book on, her reckless and ill-conceived behavior actually makes perfect sense. She's headstrong, impressionable, and lacks the wisdom she would need to realize just how bad the choices she's making throughout the narrative really are, and she makes choices that hurt the people around her because she hasn't grown up enough to think of anyone's happiness but her own. When you think about it, she's just making a lot of the same mistakes many other girls her age have made in the real world, fantastical elements aside.
- Alice's vision in the Breaking Dawn movie involving werewolves isn't a plothole. Given the Volturi were surprised about the existence of the shapeshifter style werewolves, it's likely Aro didn't know about them blocking her powers, and unless he was specifically looking for info on them, he likely didn't find out by rooting through anyone's head. She's outright bullshitting. She thought up a vision where Aro and his best soldiers died, and she bluffed him!
- Edward's controlling nature makes sense given the Word of God/Fanon rule that becoming a vampire locks you in the mental state of your death. Rosalie was "defiled" right before her wedding, and thus is obsessed with marriage, babies, and looking her best; Jasper was seduced by evil vampire women, so it's safe to say he died happy, hence his happy nature as a vampire; Alice likewise was too brain-fried to care about anything when she became a vampire, hence her bubbly nature; Emmet's death was simply a tragedy of nature, hence why he doesn't have any huge trauma or bitterness, but does pick fights with bears; Esme is obsessively maternal, because she tried to kill herself after losing a baby; and Edward? He died in an epidemic. He wasn't murdered, or killed by an animal he could fight, but slowly being killed and watching everyone around him be killed by an insidious force he couldn't control at all. So he compensates by trying to control Bella. Yikes!
Fridge Horror
- Meyer has said: "After three thousand years, you start to go nuts. That is what was intended for Aro in the book, and I hope it's in the movie." So, Aro's mental state is declining because of his immortality. This will happen to every vampire. Including the Cullens. She may have a good life for a while, but immortality doesn't let you go when you've had enough- eventually, Bella is going to go crazy.
- Try reading the series remembering that in traditional literature, vampires can put humans under their complete thrall. Suddenly, Bella's complete fascination with Edward and her willingness to forgive him anything almost seems like good writing...
- Imprinting. Most people focus on the fact that the girl who's imprinted on has no choice in the matter. While that's valid, there's also the werewolf's side. Using Quil as an example:
- Before imprinting on Claire, he was described as a lady's man. He even flirted withe Bella in a playful matter. Now that he's imprinted, he's described as living like a monk until Claire is old enough. So imprinting changes the werewolf's personality to suit the imprintee.
- The werewolf will also do whatever their imprintee wants short of leaving them (because it's too painful). Claire, a two year-old, has at her beck and call a guy who can turn into a giant wolf. What happens if she thinks her parents are being to unfair or a kid at school is being mean to her? What if she says "I wish they were dead?"
- Even worse, having grown up with someone who is incapable of doing anything but spoiling her rotten, what kind of monster is a kid like that going to grow up to be?
- There's a story out there called For You, I Will that pretty much lays out most of the problems for the imprinter. It has a wolf imprint on a total psychopath who makes him into an accessory to murder.
- The Twilight Saga Twilight]] has one: who actually says that the vampires -die- after being burned if nothing else can kill them?
- Interview with the Vampire actually mentions this in-book, saying that no-one knows if vampires die upon being burned.
- It gets explained in subsequent books in the Chronicles. The older a vampire is, the stronger their blood is, and they're able to withstand things that would kill a fledgling (including fire, which becomes brutally clear in Queen of the Damned). Interview reads much differently if you've read it after The Vampire Lestat, knowing that prior to coming to the New World, Lestat repeatedly fed from Akasha, the very first and most powerful vampire. Then it becomes clear just how he survived what otherwise looks like a pair of Disney Deaths at the hands of Louis and Claudia.
- Interview with the Vampire actually mentions this in-book, saying that no-one knows if vampires die upon being burned.
- Though Rennesme is able to communicate somewhat, a child with full adult awareness in their eyes would be scary, not cute. Also the fact that she is fully aware and fully intends to marry the man who has been changing her diapers while her parents have sex that she is telepathically tuned into, and it becomes an enormous bundle of disgusting.
- What are you talking about? Renesme can't read her parents' thoughts, she can only share her own with them.
- But she's in the little house in the forest, sleeping, while her parents have the most passionate bed-breaking vampire sex in the world in the next room. Perhaps Meyer really thinks that since she sleeps, it's okay, but in reality even people in a coma can hear things. Looks like Bella took her own parents' neglect and used it on her own baby.
- Not to mention, think of all the "cutesy" things little Nessie does, which seem perfectly normal for a baby. She ruins the family's best silverware, bites Jacob when he doesn't feed her quickly enough, screams when Bella doesn't pay attention to her, and fusses and whines as the adults try to figure out if her mother killed someone or not. It's understandable for a baby to show such selfish behavior...but then, remember that she isn't a baby. She has an adult's mind. Now picture an adult carelessly destroying expensive heirlooms, hurting her boyfriend for not catering to her whims quickly enough, and throwing fits when she isn't the center of attention. Suddenly, little Nessie seems much worse, doesn't she?
- What are you talking about? Renesme can't read her parents' thoughts, she can only share her own with them.
- Imprinting... think about that for a moment. Imprinting is so powerful that it will obliterate all feelings of romantic love that a werewolf feels for someone on whom he hasn't imprinted, effectively altering the werewolf's entire personality. A werewolf can imprint on any person at any time. He will do whatever it takes to please the person on whom he has imprinted, using techniques that sound suspiciously like child grooming. Also, it's possible for a werewolf to imprint on a baby, and after being in a quasi-parental / quasi-fraternal relationship with the child for years, he will expect the girl to turn around and welcome her semi-father/semi-brother
as lover and husband. Oh, and werewolf society can't seem to conceive of a reason that the girl would refuse a guy who'd been grooming her to be his bride since birth or a man who beat and disfigured her; they don't really see why the girl wouldn't choose someone who would do ANYTHING for her, or why she might want to be free to choose. (And Meyer never considers that the woman might love and prefer a man who hasn't imprinted on her, or that the baby girl might grow up and not be attracted to men at all.)- On a related note, Jacob's reasoning on why the girl always ends up returning the wolf's feelings? It's impossible to resist that level of devotion. Yeah, tell that to anyone who has had a stalker.
- Meyer is a real life Heteronormative Crusader and incredibly fundamentalist in her religious beliefs I doubt she wants to admit women can BE gay.
- Ironic, considering the Ho Yay in Twilight.
- In a world where Soul Mates is basically Canon, there can be a subversion: imprinting just shows you your True Love, thus previous lovers should be happy their mate imprinted as their love was already doomed from the start. On the other hand, the imprinted couple are Soul Mates, so all the problems you mentioned will be settled by the Power of Love, and, after all, the imprinted is doing the right thing, making the other feel loved, protected.... Then we realize those arguments are the same used by certain kind of stalkers, pedophiles and all kind of sexual offenders to justify themselves, and that many fangirls are (or were) in love with the idea, because they don't yet recognize this behaviour for what it is! Someone pass the Brain Bleach, please.
- Not quite. Most Latterday Saints believe that, after they are sealed forever to their spouses, they will continue to have "spirit children" throughout the afterlife, and graduate to become gods of a planet of their own, so that their spirit children can be born and grow up as good Mormons on that world, marry and have spirit children of their own... The idea of "Imprinting", then, isn't much of a stretch if you approach from this cultural-religious viewpoint. Big age differences haven't ever been much of a turnoff in the history of the LDS church, either, considering that some early leaders are known to have been sealed to very young girls (although when those marriages were consumated is debatable).
- Regarding Renesmee, it gets even better. According to the official guide, half-vampires have full adult awareness the instant they come out of the womb. Which means that all of those times Renesmee was an infant and going on about how Jacob was "hers"? It wasn't being used in the sense of a child being possessive...
- Look, folks. I think you're all kind of missing the point. It is something you don't fully realize right away because of the insistance Meyer puts on the romantic side of imprinting. But you have to face the fact. JACOB... IS IN LOVE... WITH A BABY!!!!!! I'm sorry, but I have to say this: it's called pedophilia!! And if you think it's romantic that an adult werewolf patiently watches a baby grow up to later have physical love with it, you need to see a shrink!!!
- Plus, other werewolves fall in love with baby girls. Am I the only one who thinks this is sick?
- I think it's less that no one notices, and more that the fact is so desperately obvious that it doesn't occur to most of us to state the fact. Moreso, no one feels the need to explain why this is bad. It's kind of a universal truth. Instead everybody's explaining the less obvious aspects.
- Seconded. Nobody thinks otherwise, it's just that there's nothing to talk about - even proponents of child-marriage think that's seriously iffy. The Unfortunate Implications of it, on the other hand, are a bit less straightforward.
- If it makes it any better (it very well might not), the movies at least seem to portray imprinting as more akin to Undying Loyalty, and not necessarily romantic love.
- The powers. They're supposedly based on qualities possessed as a human, i.e. Jasper was charismatic, so he's an empath, Edward was perceptive so he can read minds, etc. Little Jane's power is to cause extreme pain. What does that say about her life pre-vamp?!
- She was going to be burned at the stake. It can be assumed she was probably accused of being a witch. That would point to her living a life of being a social pariah, i.e. a life full of pain.
- This one may be a bit of a stretch, but it's also a valid theory: As mentioned above, Jane and Alec were set to be burned at the stake. Obviously, the Volturi must have "rescued" them—and these two children would have no idea what was going on. If they nabbed the kids and turned them immediately with little attempt at explanation, what would their final thoughts be before the pain made thinking impossible? Now imagine that Alec is bitten first. He's in unbearable pain, and sees the Volturi going for his sister. He would be very, very focused on the thought "I want to shield her from this, please, I want to protect her from the pain!" and so that's the power he gained. Jane, on the other hand, is shown to be the much more impulsive, easily-angered type, and would be more likely to think "I want to hurt these bastards as much as they're hurting my brother!" Thus, that's the ability she got.
- Another one about Jane and Alec, relating to the above: They're never sent out together. It's always either Jane or Alec—which makes no sense, as they're more powerful together...If that theory is true, they may work for the Volturi because if they don't, they'll kill their twin.
- I am somewhat convinced that this is the same thing as what was going on with some of the characters in ElfQuest. Basically, I think Jane's talent was Healing, but emotional and physical pain thwarted her talent and made it cause pain instead of relieving it.
- Vampires and half-vampires live forever unless killed - their immortality is an intrinsic part of what they are. Werewolves, on the other hand, may have extended lifespans, but generally are expected to, once there is no longer a vampiric threat in the area, settle down and stop shifting, allowing them to raise a family and live out the human life they'd put on hold to deal with the vampires. Jacob has imprinted on a half-vampire, though, so to stop shifting would mean allowing her to outlive him, possibly by centuries (assuming that he could stop, being around vampires on a daily basis). If Jacob is still mostly mentally human, what happens when Who Wants to Live Forever? starts to set in?
- When Renesmee needs him to live forever, I suppose he will.
- You know, Renesmee is going to run out of egg cells and go through menopause at some point. Then what?
- Either she gets a new egg cell set when she runs out because of her half-bred status, or she and Jacob would rob sperm banks every 30 years or so.
- When Renesmee needs him to live forever, I suppose he will.
- According to the official guide, vampires are forever locked in whatever mental state they were in when they were transformed. Keep in mind that Esme was transformed when she was suicidal and probably suffering from postpartum depression. Keep in mind that Rosalie was turned after she was gang raped by her fiance and his friends. Both of those women get to spend an eternity in that mindset. What fun!
- The implication is that Esme died loving her baby so much that rather than live without him, she would die by cliffdive. So she is forever locked in her dependence on feeling maternal towards... someone. Even an adult vampire.
- Alice too, whose father murdered her mother and planned to kill her too, and when she tried to report it to the police, she was deemed insane and locked up in a mental asylum. The reason she has no memories of her human life? Amnesia caused by electric shock therapy.
- Alice's mate manipulates emotional states of those around him. Alice being all chirpy and happy all the time is not natural, it is a mixture of the shock therapy and constantly being around a guy who magically alters her mood.
- Even worse. The Illustrated Guide says that her memory loss caused her to revert back to her cheerful personality, essentially making her childlike and happy via torture. She's stuck like that forever. In a mental state that is arguably not her own.
- Here's one: Meyer's vampires apparently cannot cry or sweat and just generally seem unable to secrete oils and the like. So are their eyes somehow still lubricated, or are they completely dry?
- I don't want to sound like a pervert, but... to have sexual intercourse, a woman needs to emit body fluids, right?
- In one of Meyer's...uh, scientific explanations of her vampires, she said that any bodily fluids a human emits is replaced with their "venom", except the venom still acts like the fluid it replaced and only the venom from the teeth can transform a human. Of course, that also raises plenty of horror, since all the venom is supposed to be highly acidic and agonizing to the touch. Also, this troper is pretty sure Word of God confirmed that vampires have dry eyes, because there's nothing that can scratch them, so they don't need the protection of lubrication. Somehow.
- How are her contact lenses dissolving if she doesn't have venom in her eyes?
- The world of Twilight in general is horrific. By the end of the series, we see that the vampires are all around the world. They can outrun and overpower any human. They can read minds and see the future and cause hallucinations and control the elements. They are constantly thirsty and see humans as cattle. There is no escape if one goes to kill you. And in [1], we see that the only group who defends humans from the vampires - the wolves in La Push - are willing to turn a blind eye and let humans die. Lovely.
- What made this troper REALLY wince, was the fact that unlike any other vampire story, Twilight has no humans willing to fight the vampires. And despite the sparkle thing, Twilight-vampires are not fluffy and wussy, they are bloodthirsty creatures that will kill. Worse, while Carliste's clan is 'vegetarian', they do it basically for the same reason a person might not want to eat meat. They do not judge vampires who do drink blood, and in one book in fact allow it for their guests. It's very clear that there seems to be little if any moral hang-ups about killing humans. And the humans? They are apathetic, almost like cattle with no will to fight back. Twilight universe is the vampire paradise...
- To that extent, lets look back on some of the events in the series. Bella and Edward are more concerned with gazing into each others' eyes than the fact that people are being eaten in the very next room, still more concerned with themselves and each other than the fact that a good number of people are being killed to make up and feed Victoria's vampire army that was created for the sole purpose of killing Bella, and still more concerned with themselves to the point that they're perfectly willing to let innocent and unaware humans be killed and eaten to get support from their other vampire friends that wouldn't even be needed to stand up to some evil vampires who wouldn't even do anything, in a situation that could have been avoided if they had just made a simple phone call in the first place. And these are supposed to be the GOOD guys, and yet NOBODY calls them on this. Nobody who matters, anyway...
- Going on this fridge horror just hit me. Carisle and his family probably don't care about other vampires eating humans BECAUSE they are vampires. Humans to vampires are PREY naturally so it's very likely that all vampires loose the idea that humans are one of them when changed. Not even carnivorous animals eat their own kin unless circumstances are dire. The Cullen family probably doesn't consider humans people anymore but pets. In fact, this mindset is clear from pretty much everything they do.
- And going off of that, the way vampires talk and act, they seem to stop seeing humans as sentient beings and more as stupid animals almost immediately after transforming. They don't spend centuries losing their humanity. It comes all at once. Edward even says that he "resented" pretty quickly how Carlisle wouldn't let him eat humans. Makes you wonder if vampirism doesn't brainwash its victims...
- Building on that, does that make what Bella and Edward want to do Bestiality?
- What made this troper REALLY wince, was the fact that unlike any other vampire story, Twilight has no humans willing to fight the vampires. And despite the sparkle thing, Twilight-vampires are not fluffy and wussy, they are bloodthirsty creatures that will kill. Worse, while Carliste's clan is 'vegetarian', they do it basically for the same reason a person might not want to eat meat. They do not judge vampires who do drink blood, and in one book in fact allow it for their guests. It's very clear that there seems to be little if any moral hang-ups about killing humans. And the humans? They are apathetic, almost like cattle with no will to fight back. Twilight universe is the vampire paradise...
- As mentioned above, pretty much all of humanity doesn't know that vampires are real. What would they do if they found out? Most likely, panic and go into a full out war. And if the vampires had no reason to hide anymore... It would be a literal blood bath, with humans being hunted down every minute of every day and anyone trying to physically fight them being killed on the spot. Most of the world's population would be gone with in weeks, even days. Even worse, what if humans decided to use tactical or strategic nuclear weapons? In the 1980s, at the height of the Cold War, it was calculated that treating those wounded in a single attack upon Detroit would exhaust the entire medical resources of North America - and that's not even going into the short-mid-term implications of fall-out for agriculture. Since nukes are generally used to kill people with their blast wave (i.e. through shrapnel and/or blunt force), the Vampires could well survive that... and if there's rain afterward, or it was a groundburst-weapon, they would also be radioactive. But since they can't kill all the humans at once, they might start making human camps for the sole purpose of procreation of new food. They would have to institute a society like that in Daybreakers if they didn't want to die out.
- "Radioactive vampires" would be A Good Name for a Rock Band.
- Actually, in [2], Aro specifically says that human technology has progressed to the point where humans can actually pose a danger to vampires and even kill them. (Humans have hypervelocity ammo, armor-piercing rounds for systems like Metalstorm and tracers/thermal rounds, CIWS-derived point-defense weapons, miniguns and rotary cannons, MLRS missile batteries with lots and lots of submunitions, not to mention Reaper and Predator drones, Claymores, 'Bouncing Bettys', and advanced mines... Did I mention that we even have actual laser weapons, which would mean instant death to any vampire hit by one, tasers (which are just as deadly to vampires, considering the flammability of vampire venom - and since we've started to develop railguns (as well as possessing the targeting systems to hit multiple small, fast-moving targets from miles away)... Even more importantly, the humans would find the numbers and the will to never stop in their mission to destroy vampires until they had found them all... which means that for the vampires, the discovery of their existence would lead to the Twilight setting becoming (at best) a Crapsack World.
- Those things are nice, but 'technology' is often misleading in war. The most complicated, expensive, and recently-produced device is not always the best - and this would not be a Conventional or Limited War. Such expensive, resource-intensive, hard-to-maintain devices could never be the chief weapons of the world's war effort. It would be a Guerilla War like The Philippines, North China, Cuba, Belarus, Afghanistan - and a Total War like World War I or World War II. Centres of government and administration, utilities and transport, and the munitions factories and petroleum industries needed to continue the war would all be horribly vulnerable and frankly impossible to defend alongside the entire civilian population. Either large areas and populations would have to go undefended, or lightly-armed militia (coupled with a willingness to devastate huge areas with the use of fire-support regardless of civilian deaths and maimings) would have to be a stop-gap before they received sufficient heavy weapons 2-10 years after the mobilisation to a Total War World Economy - and this is assuming that the vehicle-portable heavy weapons are even able to hit and kill the damned creatures in the first place. If they are not, then the fighting would have to depend on fire-support up to and perhaps including tactical nuclear weapons. Victory over the Vampires could be possible, but the world would have much if not most of its people killed in the toughest and biggest unconventional war humanity had ever executed.
- The things actually shown to kill vampires aren't actually outside of the bounds of conventional weaponry, a decently high-powered sniper rifle (which many hunting rifles qualify as in a pinch) is in the same general category as things shown to crack them open, and to an explosive weapon there is no difference whatsoever between a weak squishy humanoid and a strong squishy humanoid in a diamond shell (if anything, the shell might make the concussion effect worse). The vampire war would be rough right up to the point that someone realized that the vampires have to get into melee to kick ass and immediately charge anything that's bleeding. One soldier cutting open his palm with a knife and exclaiming "oh, no, I am alone and bleeding" form behind a mine-field later, the war is over and the humans start a new industry based on diamond-leather.
- Of course, it's probably that Meyer doesn't know how explosives and bullets actually work, but it seems more charitable to give her the benefit of the doubt and assume she was intentionally making her vampires basically immune to 1500s tech but vulnerable to common 1800s tech to explain why the masquerade started around the time of the US's founding.
- When one takes into account that vampires have extremely corrosive bodily fluids – strong enough to melt contacts lenses and cause humans to endure great pain when bitten – how would it be possible for Edward and Bella to have sex much less a baby?
- Also considering that Edward displayed enough super strength to bust the bed’s headboard during the marital mamba, how did Bella manage to survive?
- So if Bella had chosen Jacob, and they got married and had a kid, would Jacob imprint on the kid?
- . . . Excuse me, I need to go carve out my brains with a spoon.
- Oh god, please pass it over when you're done.
- What if Jacob and Edward had succeeded in forcing Bella to have an abortion? Would Jacob imprint on the remains or something?
- No, think of it—you've suddenly taken away his entire purpose and meaning in life; how is he likely to react to that?
- Jacob's object of imprinting in this world would no longer exist, and he may well have just been...released from imprinting on her or whatever would happen. But, if imprinting is based on destiny as this troper would believe, Jacob would have never loved Bella if Renesmee was to be aborted.
- I don't believe he would have. This troper has heard an interesting theory, and believes it may be correct. Basically, Jacob was never drawn to Bella because he loved her, he was drawn to her because he always loved Renesmee, and Renesmee was within Bella all along. Had Edward and Bella never gotten together, Renesmee never would have been born and Jacob would never be able to imprint on her, and thus would simply remain devoted to Bella. The basic idea is that Jacob was drawn to Bella because it was always her destiny to be with Edward and have Renesmee, his object of imprinting.
- Actually, the egg that created Renesmee had a good chance of being lost during Bella's periods. And it's the sperm that decides the child's sex so, unless Meyer was willing to let Jacob be with the child male or female, he should have been attracted to Edward, not Bella.
- Considering Renesmee is the genetical product of Bella and Edward in equal parts, logic would dictate that Jacob felt attracted to Bella and Edward equally. Let's not forget that his and Edward's animosity ends pretty much the moment Renesmee is born...
- To be fair, this series seems to operate on a completely inescapable level of fate. Somehow the imprinting/soul mate/whatever knew for a fact exactly everything that would happen.
- Jacob imprinting on his daughter (if he had had one with Bella) would make for a pretty interesting horror story. Technically though Jacob should have gotten over his feelings for Bella a while ago then as the one comment above states.
- . . . Excuse me, I need to go carve out my brains with a spoon.
- Vampires can't sleep. Ever. Ever. They are constantly awake and aware of everything going on around them. What happens if a person with clinical depression is turned into a vampire? Hell, what happens if even a stable person goes through a shitty emotional period? Most people, when in a depressed state, begin sleeping a lot more often and for a lot longer than is considered normal. They do this to get away from the pain. What if you can't? You can't ever stop thinking, can't ever stop feeling, can't ever just "sleep" on a problem. The conscious mind never has a chance to rest. Physiologically, vampires may not need to sleep, but psychologically...? For some people, it would be And I Must Scream Lite.
- You are describing Marcus.
- If Bella had followed the example of Third Wife and stabbed herself in the stomach, it would basically have forced Edward to change her. It's not like she got away with less, as she was basically gutted like a fish for her ceasarean.
- Take into account the Cullen family goes and hunts down at least several endangered animals per week. So much for being vegetarian.
- Well, it's still better than eating people, right?
- Not if you're a member of PETA.
- And not since there are plenty of animals like deer, who could have their numbers cut down reasonably without endangering any ecosystems.
- It's actually explained why they prefer other predators. It's because they like the way bear blood and mountain lion blood tastes more than deer blood. Our heroes.
- Well, it's still better than eating people, right?
- In [3], Alice makes Jasper stay behind instead of following her to Volterra, in case something goes wrong; her explanation is a heartbroken "He'd fight them and, Bella, I can't lose Jasper like that." Fast-forward to the fight scene in the last movie... No wonder Alice snapped. The Volturi killing Jasper so they could kidnap her is Alice's worst fear.
- I had a moment where I looked into the hypothetical fridge and thought: "James really did everything Edward said he wanted to do. Wait a minute..." Maybe, just maybe, James and Victoria are meant to represent Edward and Bella - only their dark side. They are and do everything Bella and Edward wish they could do and be: James drinks human blood, and he gets to hurt and try to kill Bella. (If you don't think Edward wanted to do this, reread the chapter Confessions in Twilight.) Victoria is a mated vampire, who by all accounts has wild, passionate, unmarital sex with her mate. (If you think Bella's wishes were deeper than this, you never read the Twilight Saga.) Even their talents are mirrored: No one can hide their thoughts from mindreader Edward, as much as no one can hide physically from tracker James; Bella's gifts allow her to hide her thoughts, even from Edward, whereas Victoria's gift is hiding, physically, and as such being uncatchable. (For all we know it even works on James.)
- In the BD1 movie, chess is a metaphor for sex. (They didn't even play until they were married.) The pregnancy has to be a metaphor for their relationship - unexpected, inevitable, fucked up, derailing, sucking the lifeforce out of Bella and eventually killing her.
- If a human finds out about vampires, the human must be turned or killed. They are not allowed to turn children. That means any kids who find out will be murdered.
- Or, alternatively, kidnapped and raised to be turned if they showed promise like Alec and Jane did. Or, maybe kids don't count since no one would believe they were being serious.
- When Rosalie treats Bella to her backstory, she says: "I was... pleased that men's eyes watched me everywhere I went, from the year I turned twelve." If I have to explain what's wrong with this line...
- Some grown men will absolutely oogle a beautiful, well-developed 12-year-old. And because she's too young to fully understand the disturbing implications of this, she might well think it's complimentary rather than creepy.
- In Rosalie's time, it was pretty normal because of the higher infant mortality rates. Sure, we look at it as bad now, with our super low infant mortality rates, but back then, they needed to breed earlier to stay alive in old age.
- WTF? Rosalie was born in 1915, not 1515. That was not that long ago. The average age of first marriage in the 1930s was 21-23 for women. Life expectancy was in the sixties.
- If you think about it, the Immortal Children concept is even worse than the idea of having a bloodthirsty Creepy Child running around. Keep in mind that the way vampire feeding is described, even if full of blood, it's nearly impossible for a vampire to stop drinking before the human is killed. Now, think about how a baby has much less blood in the body than an adult. Now, think about how many babies must have been killed before a vampire could muster the willpower to only change one and not kill it. The alternative - that the vampires that made Immortal Children deliberately drained countless adults of blood to be full enough to stop in time - is hardly much better. Also, keep in mind that the vampires of the world of Twilight often will kill just because they can. Not only are they kidnapping countless children and babies from their parents, but they likely killed said child or baby's family, just to cover up the theft. Now keep in mind how the actual transformation occurs. It's a process that takes several days, during which time the person goes through unendurable pain. An infant is put through this. From then on, all they'd have to look forward to is an eternity of suffering third-degree burns on their throats. And the entire reason Immortal Children were banned was because they lacked the ability to reason, so there's no way they could understand what was happening to them. So they'd be a group of children who are in constant pain and have no idea why and just want it to end. Now keep in mind exactly why the Immortal Children were made - apparently a large number of vampires just were so danged broody, they had to do it. They kidnapped children, probably killed a good many, put the children through unspeakable pain, and all so they could have something cute to look after. The whole thing is horrifying!
- Meta-level Fridge Horror: Bella Swan is clearly meant to represent Stephanie Meyer. Thus it wouldn't be too far off(especially in the case of Meyer) that Charlie Swan is meant to represent Stephanie's father. Consider how despite being an unintentional Only Sane Man and a character even the haters like, Charlie is treated as the bad guy, and Bella treats him with apathy at best. Either that's Unfortunate Implications at it's worst or Meyer has some serious Daddy Issues.
- Not to mention, there are several squicky moments where Bella seems to have a...daddy complex, either through having Edward treat her as his daughter (him constantly singing her to sleep, carrying her everywhere, sitting her in his lap or carrying her on his back, etc) or her own actions towards her father. (For instance, at one point in [4], she talks about how tempting he smells. Consider that bloodsucking is a metaphor for sex and... well...). Also, Esme fell in love with Carlisle when she was a young girl and is metaphorically his vampire daughter (he changed her), Claire is expected to grow up to fall in love with her "Uncle Quil", and Renesmee will apparently eventually marry the guy who delivered her and served as her nanny.
- Sigmund Feud would have a field day with Stephanie Meyer.
- Fridge Tear Jerker: These types of issues often form as a result of severe emotional neglect and/or abuse, usually the sexual kind. (and mental illness, but that's another story.) Suddenly this entire series takes on a sad, dark light.
- Not to mention, there are several squicky moments where Bella seems to have a...daddy complex, either through having Edward treat her as his daughter (him constantly singing her to sleep, carrying her everywhere, sitting her in his lap or carrying her on his back, etc) or her own actions towards her father. (For instance, at one point in [4], she talks about how tempting he smells. Consider that bloodsucking is a metaphor for sex and... well...). Also, Esme fell in love with Carlisle when she was a young girl and is metaphorically his vampire daughter (he changed her), Claire is expected to grow up to fall in love with her "Uncle Quil", and Renesmee will apparently eventually marry the guy who delivered her and served as her nanny.
- Both Carlisle's intentions with Rosalie and Edward's reaction to her after she was gang-raped have unsettling implications for the characters, given the situation. Carlisle found her dying, realized what had happened to her, and then turned her into the eternal undead without her permission through an agonizing process. One of many horrible aspects of this is that Edward revealed that the reason was that Carlisle decided to turn Rosalie — whom he had just found beaten, raped, and near death — was that he wanted her to to be Edward's mate, despite little — if any — interaction between her and Edward beforehand and nothing to indicate that they would even be compatible. Then while she was still turning, Rosalie overheard Edward sounding disgusted and even insulted over Carlisle's choice in turning her (remember, Edward can read thoughts, so he knew that Carlisle hoped Rosalie would be Edward's mate). He said this while Rosalie was in the room, conscious, in pain, and in the aftermath of a vicious beating and series of rapes. And since he could read her mind, he knew that she could hear him. He knew what she was going through, and yet he still talked about her like that, without even having the decency to address her directly and try to comfort her, or to at least say it out of earshot. It becomes all the more appalling when you remember the Cullens' views on sexual "purity" and the views they would have had of rape due to the time they lived as humans — not that it was a horrific attack on a human being, but that it "spoiled" women for marriage and robbed them of that "purity." Edward's disgust at Carlisle's choice in intending Rosalie for him, and the way he treats her afterward, might well stem from deeper issues than him not liking her attitude... With a "family" like that, it's no wonder Rosalie's so freaking unhappy all the time.
- Think about what Stephanie Meyer's portrayal of "true love" and "normal" relationships implies about her own upbringing and subculture. And the culture of some of the hardcore fans who see nothing abusive in Edward and Bella or Sam and Emily's relationship. Keep in mind that many average conservative Christians highly disapprove of the shallow and abusive idea of "love" in this book. Exactly what type of "family values" do Meyer and her fans come from? We probably don't want to know.
- If one goes by the idea that shapeshifters imprint on girls as young as newborn in order to have the best genetics for future generations, and remember that they're technically a Slave Race because of their lack of free will post-imprinting, well? I'm getting the poor feeling that Emily would eventually be worn out by having to bare dozens of sons, which could cause her to have a shorter lifespan alongside her being forced to do all the housework and be forced to have sex with Sam about every single night. And it could be possible that their sons would also be shapeshifters and imprint on other girls, resulting in hundreds of grandchildren. And so on.
And then, there's Jacob and his devil wife Renesmee. She's a fully grown woman by age 7. If she were to become pregnant, it could be possible that she'd also have a short one with her children, as 1/4 vampire, 1/4 human, and 1/2 shapeshifter, probably reaching physical adulthood by age 7 as well. And if all her children are sons who can imprint while having some vampire traits... what would the future hold for humanity by the year 3000 if they're mainly descended from Jacob and Renesmee, who'd still be around and having children by then if she's been keeping her egg cells in check? - Alice's visions. As discussed in the Nightmare Fuel page, when you take a closer look at it, her brand of future vision is far from being just a handy cheat-sheet to help the main cast stay a step ahead of the game. Let's break it down:
- First, there's the nature of the visions themselves. It is made extremely clear throughout the series that Alice can only see the future as it is most likely to unfold at the time that a vision occurs to her, regardless of whether she actively seeks out a certain part of the future or not. Between her chess games with Edward and her commentary regarding the state of the future whenever somebody commits themselves to a major decision, we have plenty of evidence that it's not a matter of seeing what will happen if she flips a coin and it lands on heads; rather, she's seeing that the coin is currently 'most likely' to land on heads unless she or someone else alters their current plans or behaviors. Which is fine, until you realize this means that any time she receives a vision of someone being hunted, or injured, or killed, she is seeing the most likely course of that person's fate.
- While Alice is capable of actively monitoring the future, there are instances where a vision occurs to her entirely at random - most notably, her vision regarding the Volturi deciding to move against the Cullens. This means that it is possible for Alice to receive a vision of someone she loves coming to harm completely at random; additionally, since her visions only occur after a decision has been made which causes a specific outcome to become the most likely course of fate, under the right circumstances it is also entirely possible that she can receive a vision of someone's grisly death without there being any obvious hint of danger at the present moment.
- Because her visions only occur after someone has already committed to a course of action that will impact the future, Alice must also be ready for the future to change in an instant - if she doesn't have at least a couple of contingency plans, one person's snap decision could cause everything to fall apart around her.
- To make matters worse, any choice she makes that directly involves a future she has foreseen will cause her to become part of that particular chain of events, which means her decisions may also alter the future - perhaps even negatively so. In other words, if Alice foresees someone's death and chooses to prevent it, she might receive further visions where her interference will make things worse. This bit alone makes her visions high-octane nightmare fuel for anyone who struggles with paranoia, anxiety, or poor self-image: On top of monitoring and managing the decisions of her friends and enemies alike, Alice also has to hyperanalyze herself every time she chooses to impact the future.
- Vampires are explicitly stated and shown to have perfect recall, down to the tiniest detail. Because Edward can see her visions through the use of his own gift, we know with absolute certainty that Alice's visions occur within her mind. This means that Alice is able to perfectly remember every detail of every vision she has ever received, and unlike in her mortal life, there's no shock therapy that can wipe those memories away now. Any time she sees a vision of someone's death, regardless of whether or not the vision becomes reality, Alice will be left with a perfect, crystal-clear memory of that vision. Forever.
- Alice cannot sleep. Sleep, as mentioned above, is imperative to one's emotional and psychological wellbeing, and the lack of it may well contribute to the declining sanity of older vampires like Aro. The REM stage of sleep in particular is essential for allowing the unconscious mind to process information gathered throughout the day in the form of dreams. Alice might have nightmares if she could sleep, but instead she has the visions themselves haunting her every waking moment, with not even the chance of exhausted, dreamless collapse to help her escape from them.
- And as insult to injury: Nobody else in the entire series seems to have realized any of this. Not Edward, not Jasper, not Carlisle or Bella or any of the Cullens at all - nobody who benefits from Alice's future vision ever once acknowledges the full extent of the burden her "gift" places on her. The most anyone ever does is apologize for the strain they put on her while they all gleefully use her like a walking 8-ball, and it's always in the context of apologizing for the effort she puts into watching the future, rather than the horrors she might be watching when she does or the hellish memories she'll be left with. No one ever expresses a desire to help her cope with anything that she sees. No one ever so much as stops to wonder whether they're being fair by throwing Alice at a problem without much more than a quick "thanks" after everything is said and done. Alice is stuck with an absolutely nightmarish "gift" and even the people she loves best don't seem to realize or care how awful it can truly be.
- Jasper and Alice do seem more private in their relationship than any of the other vampire couples among the good guys. Maybe - hopefully - Jasper is aware, and can use his gift to at least take the edge off the horror for her... when he isn't having to focus more on not slaughtering nearby humans, in any event.
- Aro, who wants so desperately to draw Alice into the fold that he's entirely willing to bait her into attacking him by killing her mate in front of her just so that she can be taken prisoner and ultimately brainwashed into joining, likely wouldn't care even if any of this did occur to him. If she has a rough time among her own coven, who despite their faults do genuinely seem to have grown to love each other, think how much worse it would be if the Volturi got their hands on her.
- The idea that Jacob imprinting on Renesmee and will eventually marry her when she's only seven years old is toooootally fine because, after all, Renesmee has the intelligence of an adult and grows up faster, right? Yeah, Meyer probably didn't think of this, but "she's mature for her age" and "she doesn't look like a child" are justifications given by real life pedophiles and ephebophiles. The idea that an adult shacking up with a minor is okay if said minor is "mature for their age" is utter nonsense, half-vampire aging weirdness aside.
- While I get what you're saying and imprinting is definitively creepy (especially if the imprintee is a baby), dhampyrs obviously don't age in the same way humans do. With the logic you're using dogs aren't old enough to mate with each other because they're only "two years old", even though for their species they are physiologically mature enough to mate. We shouldn't try to use human aging logic when referring to creatures who obviously aren't human.
Fridge Logic
- Why does Bella's father, a police officer, not suspect anything in New Moon? His daughter has been found in the woods, in a near catatonic state, and she keeps repeating "He's gone". Taken out of context, it sounds like Edward took her out to the middle of the woods, drugged her, and then raped her. Her dad makes it clear he doesn't approve of Edward, so why doesn't he ever mention this?
- She becomes depressed for a long time, no longer cares about life, cuts off friendships, cries and screams in her sleep, gets paler and thinner...
- If someone is raped (even when drugged) there's usually physical signs- i.e. bruising on the victim, a disturbed scene, as well as bodily secretions normally associated with sex- which as a policeman, he would recognize. Even if he disapproves of the kid, it's a big leap from disapproval to suspecting him of rape, particularly is there's no physical evidence to back it up.
- Not always. Rape victims often don't fight back, leading to no bruising, or disturbed scene. Besides fight and flight, there's a third reaction - freeze. It's completely normal, but it leads to rape victims sometimes feeling incredibly guilty because they didn't fight. And if they didn't fight, it wasn't "real" rape. Except, obviously, it is. And, you know. Condoms are a thing. Rapists use them, too.
- Even so, there are plenty of other things Charlie could have suspected Edward did to Bella, even if rape was ruled out. Generally, people don't act the way Bella did unless something pretty traumatic happened to them, and a breakup usually doesn't reach that level.
- Also Charlie could have suspected that Edward cleaned the scene. He knows Edward is smart and knows Carlisle is a doctor so one could expect that Edward may have the foresight to have removed any evidence of him hurting or violating Bella. That said reading the scene itself and her reaction afterwards could leave a reader to actually suspect that Edward did rape Bella, at least this troper thought that when she read the book (at age 15 no less) and left quite a bad taste in her mouth when Bella took him back.
- Does it matter? Bella was near-catatonic for the months following. Even if Charlie did suspect Edward of anything, with Edward on the other side of the world and Bella barely speaking, his investigation would've never gotten far anyway.
- She becomes depressed for a long time, no longer cares about life, cuts off friendships, cries and screams in her sleep, gets paler and thinner...
- The one thing universally deadly to vampires is fire. The Cullens had an ally with the ability to manipulate fire. Gee, Benjamin, that might have come in handy during the confrontation with the Volturi.
- Credits to Reasoning With Vampires: Vampire's teeth are razorsharp, and covered in venom which turns humans into vampires. Every time Edward and Bella kiss, she could potentially cut her tongue or her lip on his teeth and turn into a vampire, either intentionally or unintentionally... and she's pretty clear about her wishes to become a vampire. Does that mean that Edward could only kiss her with his mouth closed? That's hot.
- Isn't this just another instance of Bella being exceptionally stupid? Her brain doesn't work with logic, but rather with emotions and pretentiousness.
- Why didn't Jasper react to Bella when she was wounded from being thrown into a mirror, but lost control to her getting a paper cut?
- Presumably, this was because when they were running to save her from James he knew perfectly well that she would likely be bleeding, and had time to mentally prepare himself, and probably empathically link with Alice so she could soothe the edge off the hunger. Also, he was able to redirect his predatory urges into brutally murdering James. I imagine as soon as that was done, he fled the scene to avoid killing Bella. With the paper cut (which don't actually normally bleed that much, Bella, you should probably get that looked at...) he had no warning, and he had also been forced to be around her for several hours in close contact, which would play merry hell with his self-control.
- This might have been brought up elsewhere on this page, but what's a guy who turns into a slavering monster over a papercut, and is stated to be working on his self-control issues doing in a high school!?!
- Playing one incredibly arrogant game of "I can do this" without caring all that much about the humans? I'm with you there. What baffles me even more is the fact that being in a high school means that there has to be at least one girl there every single day that is menstruating. Nasty blood or not, that is taking a ridiculous chance.
- According to Smeyer its "dead blood". According to some of my family members who are nurses and people who paid attention in sex-ed, menstrual blood is actually packed with nutrients considering that its purpose is to support a potential new life. So if anything Jasper (and by extension all the meyerpires) would be driven even more bloodthirsty than usual, which is saying something. However even if you ignore that its a school with about 400 kids at least one person is going to get a paper cut a day, and at least once it'll happen within Jasper's presence. What the hell is Alice going to do when its right up his nose? But to answer the question, he's trying to "get used to" being near humans and seeing them as people and not prey. Not that any of the Cullens feel that way to begin with.
- Playing one incredibly arrogant game of "I can do this" without caring all that much about the humans? I'm with you there. What baffles me even more is the fact that being in a high school means that there has to be at least one girl there every single day that is menstruating. Nasty blood or not, that is taking a ridiculous chance.
- Edward is a vampire. Vampires are dead, i.e. no heartbeat. No heartbeat, no blood flow. No erection. No mind-numbing bed shattering crazy awesome vampire sex. That's just f%&king physics Stephanie Meyer.
- It's less physics and more biology. Still pretty dumb, though.
- And if he's dead, how exactly does Edward produce the spermatozoa necessary to impregnate Bella?
- It's hypothesized that Edward's cold body temperature keeps the sperm he had as a human preserved, similar to the medical procedure today to preserve eggs.
- So his ice cold weiny (snickers) keeps the sperm cold. Okay, fine. But how was the sperm able to thaw?
- A much better question is: how was Edward able to father a child at all? Males need to make sperm, they can store it but once that's used up they need to make some more. If the sperm in Edward's body is preserved from when he was still living, then it is likely to be 'all he has and he has only one shot of becoming a father. Getting a woman pregnant by having sex once is possible, but considerably unlikely depending on Bella's cycle, if the egg implants and a number of completely random things that can happen before a woman even realizes she's pregnant. And this is assuming that Bella can carry it to term, as early miscarriage is a very real threat (about 1 in 4 pregnancies I think). And this is besides the point if Edward even had one"date with Rosie Palms" in the hundred or so years of his existence being trapped in the body of a seventeen year old teenager. And if Smeyer says that would never have happened, then she doesn't know men.
- If vampires sparkle in light, why don't they sparkle constantly under any kind of light? Why is direct sunlight the only light their skin sparkles under?
- Maybe it is the UV.
- If that was the case, wouldn't the constant cloudiness of Forks be a moot point?
- You can only go so far pretending there is logic in this series.
- Or maybe sparkling is analogous to photosynthesis. Stephenie has thoroughly demonstrated her lack of understanding of biology, so you can't expect her to get that right.
- Maybe it is the UV.
- If the venom bleaches a vampire's skin, how come Laurent is still so dark-skinned?
- It's an Adaptation-Induced Plot Hole, actually. In the books, his skin was very pale, only with a slightly olive undertone the Cullen's lacked.
- This crosses over into Fridge Horror and some seriously Unfortunate Implications, when you consider that Meyer said at separate occasions that the process of turning into a vampire makes you beautiful and turns non-white people white.
- This crosses over into Fridge Horror and some seriously
- It's an Adaptation-Induced Plot Hole, actually. In the books, his skin was very pale, only with a slightly olive undertone the Cullen's lacked.
- The Word of God that vamps can survive a nuclear blast, despite the only way to kill them being to tear them apart and burn the pieces. Is Meyer at all familiar with how much heat and kinetic energy even a tactical nuke puts out?
- Did she specify how far from ground zero? Vampire are ridiculously tough, so they probably can survive the blast overpressure far closer than a human could, and they probably completely ignore the radiation effects.
- Seeing how the "LD50" line (the distance from ground zero where the number of survivors closer than that point equals the number of deaths further away) is taken to be the 5 psi overpressure gradient, and a 5 psi overpressure is sufficient to demolish structures not made from reinforced concrete, it's another mistake on Meyer's part. Not to mention the little fact that the 5 psi distance is also about equal to the point where ambient air temperature is in the several hundred (~300 F) degree range for those not protected. Even worse, the 20 psi gradient (about a third of the distance to ground zero as the 5 psi gradient) is sufficiently strong to blow apart steel reinforced concrete structures and ambient air temperature is in the high hundreds (~700 F) degrees, which is sufficient to incinerate exposed humans (i.e. no body left, just ash). At the 1000 psi gradient (roughly 1/10th the 5 psi distance), no known structure can survive, and things are 'vaporized, due to 1500+ degree heat. FYI - a typical 1 MT nuclear warhead has a 5 psi radius of around 6 km, while a small 20kt (like Hiroshima) has a 5 psi radius of under 2km. Yes, the rare extra-lucky human can survive around the 20 psi distance, if shielded by a structure. A vampire in the open couldn't make it there, no matter how tough Meyer claims they are.
- If Renesmee had been a male child, would his name have been Charlisle?
- I wish. No, in canon Bella thought she was having a boy and wanted to name him Edward Jacob, IIRC. Welcome to yet another level of messed up.
- Renesmee's middle name is Carlie, so that's the combination Bella would have picked if she'd gone down that route with a male child.
- According to the official Guide, Aro killed Didyme, her sister and Marcus's mate, in order to keep Marcus under his thumb. Except that not only Didyme was absolutely loyal to his brother, Marcus's power is Relationship Perception. Meaning that he should have been able to identify Aro as "murderer of [his] mate" the instant he glanced at him.
- I saw it as Marcus knew that Aro had killed Didyme, but because of Chelsea's power she was able to keep him loyal to the Volturi. He is depressed because he is being forced to be loyal to the man who took his mate away.
- IIRC, the Cullens had returned to Forks not long before Bella arrived. And they feed on animals. Wouldn't some public official have noticed that some new predator(s) had shown up, one that was draining blood instead of eating the animals? And even if the Cullens are disposing of the animal corpses, someone would still notice the sudden change in animal population, especially since it's stated they're pretty indiscriminate about what kind of animal they feed on (predators as well as prey)? At the very least, the rangers or whoever would probably warn the local sheriff that there's some mysterious new predator running around in the woods.
- The Cullens can run what sounds like at least 100mph. Most likely they don't always hunt in the same place. From their magic speed powers, I can see them going to Northern California and back in an evening, having dined on puma. The next feedings could be in Montana, Oregon, Nevada, etc.
- So vampires in this verse are extremely cold. So cold that when Bella is cuddling with Edward she's shivering even with a blanket wrapped around her! When they had sex while she was human wouldn't he probably freeze her? Or cause frostbite? Wouldn't it be more painful than pleasurable? Also wouldn't his junk essentially act like a ice box for his sperm, constantly keeping it frozen thus making it impossible for her to get pregnant? My brain hurts.
- So imprinting is intended to get the best mate for the new generation of wolves. Age isn't an issue, and species isn't an issue (since Jacob imprinted on Renesmee, a half-vampire). Does that mean that werewolves can imprint on wolves and/or dogs, since they would be able to have sex with them in wolf form?
