#hvsbaomw

Yes, there was a lot of problematic stuff about the relationship dynamic in Twilight. (See Cinema Therapy's critiques of that relationship.) But people started using it as a springboard to find more problems with it, seemingly to virtue signal. (Or maybe to have an excuse to spotlight, on a broadly visible popular venue at the time, a real world problem with grooming's normalization? A topic which we as a society should be confronting, but unsure if making people walk on eggshells about "vampires/humans dating" is the way to do it.) It went to the point where they were nitpicking such a fantastical, unrealistic, "suspended disbelief" aspect of fantasy stories, with realistic standards that weren't really relevant to a story's themes. The entire fantasy genre had glossed-over age gaps between immortals/mortals before, because there were more important things in the story. It used to be, we'd have romances between long-lived elves and fairies and gods and other supernatural beings, with a human protagonist, and no one made accusations of grooming or problematic age gaps. We were already suspending disbelief over the fairy thing; no one was thinking about "ew, that eternally-young old man is dating a decades-younger woman". But now it's something that fandoms think about...concerning supernatural beings that don't exist...and completely fictitious stories. I dunno...Even the Cinema Therapy I just cited (if I recall correctly), also asks, "What does a hundred year old vampire have in common with a teenage human?" Those were not the discussions we used to have in the fantasy genre. Now I'm afraid to let people see me ship Bleach shinigami with human characters, or The Highlander with their significant other of the century, or Buffy/Angel. Should I be ashamed of shipping Inuyasha with Kagome? Should any ship between The Doctor and any human be called "grooming"? How about any god and the mortal mother of a demi-god? These fictitious age gaps were not the problem with those myths. These are ridiculous questions.