crit shit lit and build better canon

If you ever take on the task of a Twilight rewrite your goal should be to make it worse, actually

& that's the TRUTH

I feel like some people need to relearn Genre Expectations... "Man, this tragedy sucks!!! Why didn't they just do XYZ, then everything could have ended happily!!" well, then it wouldn't be a tragedy, would it. "Man, this lighthearted teen romcom is terrible, it's so sappy and unrealistic!!" Well, yeah. If it had been gritty and dark, it wouldn't have been a lighthearted romcom, would it. Is the writing actually bad or are you just trying to order a milkshake from a Home Depot

tbh, New Moon ending with "Edward came back, and i snapped out of my crippling depression :)" feels scarier than actually healing from your severe mental illness. how terrifying would it be to spend six months slogging through hell, then suddenly waking up in your fairytale wonderland like nothing happened? i'd be clawing at the walls waiting for the other shoe to drop. idk how you can look at the love of your life & not wonder whether he was real, or a memory, or a delusion. are you dead? dying? asleep? crazy? if so, to what extent? when he goes hunting, can you be sure he was real? when he follows you to class, does he feel like a ghost? when you dream, do you dream of the real Edward? the past Edward? or the hallucination? where did the pain that reminded you you were alive go? why do you suddenly have an appetite after wasting away to skin and bones? even Bella "I'm good with weird" Swan has her limits, and tbh "my soulmate, who weaponized my worst insecurities & sent me into a psychosis-level depression, is finally back and i am Cured" seems like a mind-breaking denial of reality. her whole life changed overnight in the best way - and she's telling us she has no scars from the dark? hmm

i need Edward and Bella to be city rats together. dodging subway fares, finding the best underground music spots, bickering over the fastest route to get across town, waging psychological warfare against their rude neighbors & landlord. PLEASE

my favourite part of new moon is when edward is bagging on romeo for being dumb as shit and then is like “ohhh but actually i’m lowkey rlly jealous of him” and bella just naturally assumes he means bcs romeo is in love with the beautiful juliett and edward’s like “what? ew no i just wish i could kill myself”

this would have been so wholesome but unfortunately SM took “loves fashion” to mean “thoughtless and superficial slave to microtrends as a form of societal pressure to conform” as opposed to “love for and appreciation of textiles and fashion as a form of art and expression”

100%. fashion feels like more like a tool to indicate status & wealth than it does an actual hobby. Alice shops, dresses her family, commissions a designer for a wedding dress, but she never seems interested in the nitty gritty of textiles, fabric arts, etc. it makes it hard not to interpret it as a symptom of the mindless consumerist culture glorified in early 21st-century America. but i suppose if you're positioning the Cullens as the pinnacle of the early 21st-century white American dream, unfettered consumerism is a feature, not a bug

Renee canonically makes Bella a quilt. SHE sews. Bella absolutely should!!!

even more insane when you think about all the tangential skills Renee had to learn in order to make the t-shirt quilt she gifts Bella in Eclipse. she picks up a hobby every other week but manages to keep her focus long enough to sink in hours and hours of work? either she's a quilting prodigy or that's been a lifelong skill for her. which, if that's the case, makes Bella's lack of sewing skills even weirder