That something is valuable, and worth a closer look. It’s pop culture at its most effervescent and disposable.īut something in this franchise spoke deeply to the hearts of thousands of girls. It was a growing pain, a late 2000s blip in our collective development away from the purity rings of the Bush era and toward the woke cosmopolitanism of the Obama era - a tiny span when many were obsessed with Mormon vampires who glitter in the sunlight. Twilight is, in many ways, a cultural relic. And then they were taught that they should hate themselves for it, because smart girls weren’t supposed to like Twilight. A microgeneration of teen girls imprinted on these books. Because even as the Twilight franchise was reviled, it was also massively successful. But it turns out that no, even though Ready Player One is also terrible, Midnight Sun is really a very bad book.)īut the return of Twilight does give us a chance to dive into all of the things that made the franchise a phenomenon the first time around. (I did wonder, as I picked up Midnight Sun, whether it would turn out that all my circa-2009 hatred for Twilight was purely internalized misogyny, and I would end up loving this franchise.

It’s by now pretty clear that the not-so-secret reason everyone had so much fun mocking Twilight online 10 years ago is that our culture loves to mock stuff made for teenage girls. It also remains the case, as many critics have by now argued, that the backlash against Twilight was much more vitriolic than the backlash against other trashy bestsellers of the era like Ready Player One that were marketed to boys rather than to girls.

It has the same insistence that stalking and emotional abuse is romantic, the same casual racism toward Indigenous people, and every other fault that made the franchise a general pop culture punching bag when it was at the height of its cultural saturation 10 years ago. It has all the same clunky, leaden sentences you remember from the first time Twilight came out in 2005, and the same bizarre pacing, where nothing really happens until maybe 50 pages from the ending. Is Midnight Sun a good book? Of course it’s not, it’s a Twilight book.

It’s been lightly revised from that leaked first draft, and when you hold it in your hands, it feels like 2009 is back all over again. Thirteen years after it was first leaked to the internet, Stephenie Meyer’s Midnight Sun, which retells the first volume of the Twilight saga from Edward’s point of view, is finally out in print. Into this Year of the Plague, like the half-forgotten relic of a simpler, lower-stakes culture war, has sparkled the most famous Spanish flu survivor in American popular culture: Twilight’s Edward Cullen is back.

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