Fandom In Context: Welcome To The Twilight Renaissance

It's been nearly a decade since the last Twilight movie. In that time, the young stars have moved on. Robert Pattinson is an arthouse darling and future Batman, while Kirsten Stewart enjoys an eclectic career as a Hollywood star and up-and-coming director. But what of the series that made them famous?

To the mainstream culture, Twilight is something of a dirty word. It's not taken seriously, like the anarchic clown of the recent Joker movie. Nor is it allowed to be the only book series some people read, like Harry Potter. The Twilight Saga is a black mark on careers and an easy target whenever its former stars try to move on. Last year, when Warner Bros. announced that Pattinson would be the latest actor to observe his parents' murder and decide that putting on a bat costume was better than therapy, fans erupted with jokes, memes, and concerns. How could the sparkly vampire from Twilight take on such a role? In 2020, Twilight is still a punchline.

But the sun never set on Twilight's popularity. In August, Stephenie Meyer, the saga’s author, released Midnight Sun, a retelling of the series’ first book from the perspective of vampire Edward Cullen. It sold more than a million copies in its first week. To the casual observer, the novel might sound like a thought exercise at best, and a cash grab at worst. But to fans, it's the end of a 15-year-long wait. Twilight's army of fan fiction writers, cosplayers, artists and general obsessives are in the midst of a Twilight renaissance. Midnight Sun is just the bloody cherry on top.

"We have been asking for Midnight Sun for over a decade," says paternalpadfoot, a mod on the /r/Twilight subreddit, "and to finally receive it created an explosion of love and interest for the series."

"The Twilight community, while never dead, has picked up significantly in Midnight Sun’s wake, and a lot of fans are finally coming out of the shadows, willing to admit how they enjoy the series, as they are no longer afraid of the bullying fans received during the heyday."

This bullying might help explain Twilight's 10-year slumber. Few fandoms get knocked as hard as Team Edward and Team Jacob do. It's not solely due to the quality of the series. Plenty of popular franchises are reviled by critics and insufferable to outsiders. For example, few fandoms are as strong as the one surrounding director Zack Snyder. But anyone looking to #ReleaseTheSnyderCut will tell you, this is for the fans, not the critics. Zack Snyder and Stephenie Meyer devotees have an intensely personal stake in the work of their favored creators. But while Snyder fans mobilized, Twilight went underground. And with good reason.

Like other female-led fan communities, Twilight's fandom is unfairly targeted. Many fans blame plain-old sexism for this. "If we were all men going crazy for a football team or a Marvel movie or even Star Wars — no one would ask us questions like this," says Lori Joffs, a drama teacher, and the co-founder of Twilight Lexicon, a long-running fansite. "But because it’s women in a female-driven franchise — written by a female — screenplay and book — people have a problem with it. It’s a sad reflection on sexism that females can't love something without people questioning why." This type of response behavior isn't exclusive to Twilight_. Fans of "_Captain Marvel":/memes/subcultures/captain-marvel had to deal with a deluge of hate that continues today. The same is true for Hunger Games, which despite its overwhelming popularity in the early 2010s, never got the same respect that other fandoms got. Boy band fans in the early 2000s also got this treatment. "Anything marketed to teenage girls specifically is coded as silly or bad by everyone else, writes Heidi Samuelson in her article The Social Implications of Dismissing 'Boy Bands'. "Teenage girls are still used as the punchline of jokes, especially when they are portrayed as vapid, boy crazy, and shallow[…]Teenage boys are almost always taken seriously, except for the 'dumb jock' (but he still wins football games, and is thus socially valuable)."

at this point I'm genuinely hoping there's some kind of restraining order situation here pic.twitter.com/6js8I11IBv

— Jack Saint (@LackingSaint) October 1, 2020

Twilight may have been a punchline of the late aughts, but that didn’t stop its fans from making fandom history. Joff says, "It was the first fandom to use hashtags. The first to have reaction videos. The first to build on social media." This trend continues today. The current Twilight renaissance is an online experience. Earlier this year, the teens of TikTok made liking Twilight cool. Their enjoyment of the series hints at the things all Twilight fans enjoy about it: the romance, the silliness and the flaws. One of the videos that kicked the TikTok Twilight trend off is a girl laughing at how many times Stefanie Meyer uses the word "chuckled." Fans are aware that this might not be high art. But inspiration flows from its pages all the same as fans turn Twilight into fanfiction, artwork, cosplay, discussion groups and memes.

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And TikTok isn’t the only place to see the Twilight fandom in action. "With over a decade between Breaking Dawn and Midnight Sun’s releases," elysianism, an Australian /r/Twilight mod, "the community had to get creative to fill in the parts of the world we didn’t know about — and with such a rich world, there was plenty of opportunity for fans to get creative." And moving around the internet, you can see these efforts in action. In the decade between Breaking Dawn and Midnight Sun, fans were hard at work keeping their sparkly vampiric dreams alive, or at least undead. "The fandom has fleshed out and mythologized aspects of the series where Meyer had left holes, and this 'fan canon' has become a driving force," says paternalpadfoot. For some, the payoff changed their lives. E.L. James’ grandma-approved BDSM bestseller, 50 Shades of Grey famously started as Twilight fan fiction. But not everyone can be James. paternalpadfoot says, "I learned grammar and syntax through writing and reading Twilight fanfiction, and am now a professional writer, something I don’t think would have happened without having Twilight in my life." Fanfiction is popular within Twilight community, and following in the footsteps of E.L. James, a lot of it is on the riskier side.

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There's no getting around that sex is a big part of Twilight. The wanton stares, Jacob's pecs and an obsession with losing your virginity are baked into the DNA of Meyers' work. To make fan fiction that wasn't erotic would be denying the spirit of the thing. All fandoms have erotic fanfiction and artwork, but few demand it. Gothic horror and romance, particularly vampire stories, have long been analogies for sexuality. The vampire's penetrative bite being a stand-in for sex. Why should the modern-day vampires of Twilight be any different? Luckily for fans, Meyer gave them the space to explore.

Twilight fans pick up where the author left off. According to psymom, the founder of the Twilight fan fiction hub Twilighted.net, "The story is filled with a lot of anticipation and build-up of heat and sexual tension, but it is never brought to fruition for the reader — the author employs a 'fade to black' approach, so we never get a satisfying resolution to all of that tension. As a result, fanfiction writers have taken it upon themselves to create it." Despite the fandom's interest in erotic fiction, Twilight itself is surprisingly chaste. Much of the story revolves around Bella's desire to become a vampire and her fear of becoming too old and wrinkly to interest Edward. However, when things get hot and heavy, Bella tends to pass out and awaken post-coital. This quasi-rape fantasy has sketchy connotations, but the fans don't seem to mind. The "fade to black approach" allows fans to publish titles like "Honey, Where's Your Car?," the winner of the Judges' Choice award at the 2011 Erotica Challenge on FanFiction.net, an objectively funny title for a story that we're all happy exists. This is part of the appeal.

There's a silliness to Twilight that went underreported at the peak of its mainstream popularity. Fans are sincere about their love. Why else would they make the trek to the setting for Twilight: Forks, Washington? Not to say Forks isn't a fine place, but it probably wouldn't be their first vacation choice. Fans on TikTok lean into the campiness of Twilight, the confusing characterizations and clichés that were weaponized against the saga. Kristen Stewart's near-constant scowling, brow furrowing and hair tossing are part of the things that fans love, even though it's, you know, kind of dumb. It might be silly, but what's wrong with silliness? Without silliness, we might not have "Honey, Where's Your Car?"

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Defanging Twilight helps newer fans contextualize the more problematic aspects of the story. In 2020, Edward Cullen, a 100-year-old man stalking and pursuing a 17-year-old girl, would be canceled in an instant. Something needs to take the sting out of the bite. "I think as more young women are finding power in feminism," says psymom, "it will be more difficult for the modern reader to connect to stories like Twilight, but I'm excited to see what romantic novels look like for the next generation — there's so much room for change for the better." By breaking down Twilight's storytelling foibles, younger fans can filter it into something digestible even if it doesn't jibe with their politics.

In her YouTube live stream, "15 Years of Twilight," Joff invites 19 Twilight fanatics, including podcasters, fan-fiction writers and artists, to talk about what they love about the series. The most common answer is the fans. The community Twilight fans have built, and continue to build, is a strong one. Twilight is a lot of things to a lot of people. It's romantic. It's stupid. It's sexy. It's sexist. It's scary. It's hilarious. But what most people miss is that it's all of those things at once. And, to the subculture that found a love for all those things, that connection is eternal.