Twihard ‘till you die-hard
“So, did you stab Edward Cullen with a pencil or what? I’ve never seen him act like that.” Mike Newton, Twilight.
One of the worst feelings a person can experience has to be disappointment. To have your hopes and dreams built up, for your pulse to be racing, and your heart to be thumping, just to be let down and left with that dull numbing feeling of disappointment. That’s how 13-year-old me felt as I walked sombrely away from the midnight screening I’d so eagerly anticipated: Breaking Dawn part Two, the disappointing final segment of the cinematic masterpiece that is Twilight.
In the first film, Twilight, Edward turns to Bella and states ‘you are my life now’, this is a line that, as a youthful and dedicated fan, always deeply resonated with me, as it’s the exact way I felt about the film series itself. Not to sound dramatic, but the franchise became my life. Never was I seen without that black book with two pale hands cradling a crisp red apple. I had practically memorised the story cover to blurb, the spine of the book misshapen from creases where I had bent it back. I aspired to have sharp pointy canine teeth, glistening skin, and golden coloured eyes. I was obsessed. I was a Twihard. But in all honesty, I wasted my time.
Though I stand by my original assessment that the books are incredibly well written and narrate a compelling and beautiful story, it must be said that this was not successfully conveyed on-screen. There are certainly a few things I wish I had known before investing such a huge portion of my life into the world of Twilight, the main one being how devastatingly unsatisfactory the final film would be. I was left on the floor of the cinema screaming at the screen, having fallen off my seat in a state of pure shock and disdain at how the film unfolded. We are all taught in school as soon as you start learning story writing methods that the most unoriginal way to finalise a story is with ‘…and then they woke up, and it was all a dream’. The script writers of Breaking Dawn part 2 must have skipped this lesson as children, as they broke away from the narrative and (spoiler alert) killed off several key characters, all of whom never even came close to death in the original books. It was then revealed that this was all a vision of the future, and the credits started to roll, I was outraged. I had spent 4 years of my life, which as a 13-year-old was a pretty big percentage, dedicated to this franchise just for it to end so carelessly. Disappointment is an understatement. I felt like a part of me had been left behind in the cinema that day. Perhaps if I could go back and warn my past self of the distress that was to come, I could have avoided the whole ordeal and never picked up that fateful book.
