So, a little bit of background.
The year is 2007. I'm a senior in high school, and my vampire fandom was at its peak. I never dressed in black or wore fangs or anything, but if there was vampire fiction within reach, I was consuming it. I had been raised on a diet of Anne Rice and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I loved the original Dracula novel and the Bella Lugosi movie. Heck, I even liked the Anita Blake novels and the first Underworld movie. I still like those stories, even though I know they are trash, like delicious literary buttered popcorn. I, love, vampires.
I also liked girls, but being a nerd in high school before that was a popular trend (btw, it is still weird to me that being a nerd is now chic), I was not precisely a suave ladies man. But I did try my hand at dating, and made a few awkward attempts. I failed, but that did not stop me from trying.
There was a girl I liked. She may have liked me back, but I was too timid to ask her out, so we just flirted at each other across the American History AP classroom. However, one day, this girl turned to me and said, "You like vampires, right?"
My heart skipped a beat, and she recommended that I check out this really excellent vampire novel she was reading.
I liked this girl.
I liked vampires.
This girl liked this vampire novel! It seemed to be a perfectly aligned love triangle which, having read enough vampire smut fiction, I knew to be exactly the sort of dark erotic subtext that got people dates. I went to the library, checked out the novel and its sequel, and started reading.
I am sorry to say that the relationship never went anywhere, because that novel was Twilight.
It would not be controversial for me to say that Twilight and its sequels are not good novels. There are many, many problems with these books (bad main characters, bad moral lessons, insipid dialogue, bad moral lessons, poor writing, really terrible abstinence porn, bad moral lessons, the list goes on), but these have been discussed to death already, and I do not want to repeat whatever other people already said. Instead, I would like to discuss something that I've rarely heard anyone else talk about, something that might be slightly controversial, because hidden within the Twilight series is something that is honestly, seriously, good.
Put the stake down, Buffy, and let me finish.
The lore of Twilight is good, far, far better than a series of such a low caliber deserves. While reading these novels, I hated the main characters and the primary plots, but every time I came across a paragraph of backstory, I was hooked. These background stories are seriously interesting, intriguing, and thought-provoking. And the greatest crime? They’re buried behind a pair of characters who might as well be named "Pants" and "Count Norman von Bates."
Let's discuss a few examples which, without fail, would have made better novels and movies than what we sadly got.
First, let's get this out of the way: most of the Twilight girls are boring. Supremely boring. The vampiric mother character "Esme's" entire backstory involves getting knocked up, dumped by the daddy, and then trying to kill herself after she loses the child. Alice, Edward's "sister," has premonitions, is locked up in an asylum, then is turned by one old vampire to protect her from another vampire? They’re clearly supposed to be perfect mormon role models, despite being bloodsucking vampires.
Eh. Fuck this novel.
But then you get Rosalie, a sister who exists just to oppose Bella for no reason, but whose backstory is basically Kill Bill meets Let The Right One In. Ironically, the female character you are supposed to dislike is the one I am most interested in seeing more. God DAMN does she have a revenge plot. She starts as a vain little rich girl who wants all the pretty things, and so gets engaged to a rich pretty boy. However, through some random circumstance, her husband-to-be gets drunk, gets his friends together, and when they run into Rosalie, they beat her and gang-rape her to death. Carlisle turns her into a vampire out of pity, but before she settles down to be a good vegetarian, she hunts down the bastards who hurt her and eviscerates them. A female empowerment revenge plot with vampires? A combination of failed romance and terrifying horror? I would watch the shit out of that.
Not all the boys get to have interesting plots. Emmett's backstory is that he was mauled by a bear, and, that's it. Wow. Super interesting.
On the other hand, Jasper is a former confederate soldier who fought in several battles before catching the eye of a female vampire named Maria. She turns him into a vampire so that he can be her general, Leading battalion of newborn child-vampire soldiers in a bloody internecine vampire conflict. However, in Stephanie Meyers' vampire world, newborn vampires are incredibly strong, but their power quickly fades. This means that Jasper has to quickly train new "recruits" to a battle-ready state, then use them up as fast as possible. When their newborn strength dissipates, Jasper executes the new vamps so that they don't become a drain on the war effort. What a brutal, nasty, psychological war story. I'd watch the shit out of it.
Finally, we come to Carlisle, the father figure in this little vampire family. and possibly the possessor of the best backstory of the bunch. Carlisle Cullen was the son of a 17th-century vampire-hunting priest (for my Buffy and Angel fans out there, think Holtz, but before he came to the future and lost all his interesting characteristics). Unfortunately for Carlisle, he was not as much of a monster-slaying badass as his dad, and he was captured by vampires and turned as an act of revenge. Cast out and hunted by his father, Carlisle fled, wrestling with himself over his new form and the conflicts it generated with his faith. These turbulent thoughts led him to self-destructive behavior, going so far as to make him attempt suicide, but he failed. He sought out the most learned vampires, eventually coming to rest with the Volturi, a group of enlightened Renaissance vampires living in Italy, but he left them when he could no longer stand their murderous ways. Finally, Carlisle became a doctor so that he could try to undo all the damage he had caused for years as a vampire, healing people to make up for those he had harmed. A morally complex, character-driven redemption tale spanning centuries is exactly the sort of vampire movie I'd like to see.
We've exhausted the main characters, but don't worry. We're not done yet, because there is more interesting backstory hidden in these terrible, terrible novels.
First, I would like to talk about the Volturi. The Volturi are the vampire aristocracy and, yeah, just hammer on my hot buttons there. Vampire aristocrats, being all old-world and European and having the perspective of a few hundred years of history? Already, I am more intrigued than by some boring whiny white girl who is automatically loved by everyone with no effort and has no defining characteristics at all.
Then again, if I’m looking for aristocratic vampires, then I already have this movie/novel. It's called Interview With a Vampire.
But there are differences. In the history of Twilight, the wars that Jasper fought were covert, secret, small-scale affairs, which had to be kept quiet lest the Volturi return to the American south to finish what they had started. And what had they started? Well, by the 1830s, the vampire wars had gotten so bad that the Volturi purged the Antebellum south and much of Mexico of all vampires. Seriously, they went full-on scorched Earth, murdering every vampire they could find in order to put an end to this destructive conflict which the short-sighted American vampires continued to pursue, despite the threat of revealing vampirism to humanity. Can I get a Hollywood director to make that movie? A late colonial/Antebellum Southern Gothic Vampire War movie ending in the Volturi invasion and devastation of an entire region? It'd be like Cold Mountain, Colder Graves. You're welcome, Hollywood. The title's on me.
Another quirk of the Volturi is their drive to collect "special" vampires. See, in the Twilight world, some vampires have special powers, like being able to read minds or see the future (which are all useless against Bella, because she is too special for special powers to work on her. Seriously, fuck this novel). When the Volturi find these special vampires, they go through all efforts to acquire them. I could see dozens of ways in which this scenario could play out. Maybe a special vampire does not want to become part of the Volturi and resists, playing out like a horror movie as she is "enticed" to join. Maybe the special vampires compete with one another to see who is best. Yes, I know, the Twilight novels kind of follow that first plot, but seriously, it is done so poorly and in the novels, the final fight is averted (because what people want instead of a climactic battle between superpowered immortals is an uninteresting denouement where people talk at each other across an open field and kinda slouch away). But imagine if that plot had been done with a modicum of drama, and without terrifying, horribly-named half-vampire babies.
Which brings me to another point. In the Twilight universe, there are vampire babies. While on the surface, this sounds like the WORST of ideas, I can actually see some dramatic value to it. Baby vampires (Immortal Children) are apparently cute. Just, the cutest, like, omigawd so cute you guys. Honestly, I can't see the appeal of owning a two-year-old who will never grow into a real person, but I fly for business, and have been trapped in a steel tube 30,000 feet above the ground with a screaming infant too many times to count. Paradoxically, that experience has brought an idea into my head for a novel or movie. You see, in the world of Twilight, these vampire babies are uncontrollable. While they are so adorable that all who see them love them, they also have vampire superpowers and an unquenchable thirst for blood. So, not unlike real babies, who hunger for my tears? Anyways, these vambabies will toddle into a town and MURDER EVERYBODY, and no one will stop them because they are too cute.
Nobody, that is, except the Volturi. The Volturi took one look at this abominable practice and said, "Wow. That's gross and creepy." As they damned well should. And they outlawed the practice, as they damned well should. And a bunch of vampire mothers got so upset with it that they tried to resist, and had their own vambabies who murdered tons of people. And they damned well should have known better. And the Volturi are then painted as the bad guys for exterminating this threat.
WHY? VAMBABIES ARE A THREAT TO ALL VAMPIRE KIND! They cannot be controlled. They cannot learn. And they will never, EVER grow up! They are the ultimate expression of destructive self-importance. I suppose they are supposed to appeal to mothers, but they deny the idea of motherhood, which is to raise a child to adulthood! Not only did you just create a child which will keep you in a perpetual state of bondage, but you MURDERED A CHILD TO DO IT! You just deprived a child of it's chance to grow up and a mother of her offspring, not to mention the loss to the father, siblings, other family members, all for your selfish greed.
This would be the most twisted of the movies I recommend. Unlike in Stephanie Meyers' novels, where the impulse to kidnap a human child, murder it, and turn it into an object of your own happiness while it threatens the very secrecy which your species relies upon is described as a good impulse, or at least an understandable impulse, in my movie, these mom-pires will be seen as the villains they rightly are. This depraved look into the mind of someone so damaged that they need a perpetual toddler to make their immortal lives matter, and the lengths to which they will go to protect that self-indulgent fantasy against the righteous might of the greater good as the Volturi hunt them down to save the vampire world? I would watch the shit out of that.
But there is an even more awesome Vampire story, the one that I most ardently hope will come to fruition someday.
At the end of the fourth book, just before the one fight that might have redeemed the series was scuttled to have a stupid, feel-good ending where next to nobody dies (sigh), the Cullens are assembling an army to face the forces of the Volturi. They bring together all the "good" vampires of the world, and everyone has superpowers, and I cannot tell if the Undead X-Men are cool or if they are the stupidest thing put on paper. But, amidst the cannibalistic Care Bears team they are creating, two creepy old vampires with thick eastern European accents show up. No one really wants them to join the side of good, but everyone respects their power. When asked why they want to join the good guys despite being seriously evil, the vampires say (and I paraphrase), "We ruled the night until the Volturi burned our castles. We seek revenge."
So wait, wait one gorramn second.
Are you telling me that there is a story in this universe where the enlightened, Renaissance vampires of Italy waged a war against the ruling medieval covens in Transylvania, a war which ended when the Volturi exterminated all but two of the Romanian vampires and burned their castles into blackened ruins?
WHY IS THAT NOT THE PLOT OF THE TWILIGHT BOOKS? Holy crap, would I read the SHIT out of that! Medieval knights, footsoldiers, halberdiers and pikemen, crossbowmen and horse archers, all going at each other with vampiric powers! The beginning of gunpowder warfare, with hand gonnes and giant, castle-leveling bombards like the Turks used at Constantinople! All the while, the vampires manipulating their human thralls and each other to try and gain control of the world of the night! God damn, that novel sounds so awesome, I am half-tempted to write it myself.
This is one of the many things that angers me about Twilight. There were dozens of excellent stories waiting to be told, but instead, we got Twilight. How depressing.
So what do we do about it? Well, as I can see it, our only hope is rampant plagiarism. After all, if it worked for 50 Shades of Grey, surely it could work for one of these stories.