Tanya Erzen - Fanpire: The Twilight Saga and the Women Who Love it

For Matilda and Clive

For the sake of the fans privacy, I have changed their names and some of their personal characteristics. I use the actual names of public officials in Forks, Washington, and of the creators of fan websites who are well-known figures. There are no composite characters in this book.

INTRODUCTION
Welcome to the Twilight Zone

CHAPTER 1
Im in Love with a Fictional Character

CHEAT SHEET
Twilight

CHAPTER 2
Sparkle, You Fool, Sparkle!

CHEAT SHEET
New Moon

CHAPTER 3
Families That Prey Together, Stay Together

CHEAT SHEET
Eclipse

CHAPTER 4
The Forbidden Fruit Tastes the Sweetest

CHEAT SHEET
Breaking Dawn

CHAPTER 5
Where to Spend Those Twilight Dollars

AFTERWORD
The Fog of Twilight

As I sit attentively in the lecture So Many Species, So Little Time: The Men of Twilight, a teenage girl wearily plunks herself down beside me. Rachels face is obscured by stringy blonde and purple-streaked hair, but I can see her wrists, clad in dozens of black rubber bracelets. One reads, Im in love with a fictional character. She scribbles notes, and when she nonchalantly meets my gaze, I see that Rachels unnaturally golden-brown irises are encircled by orange and black, the result of vampire-inspired contact lenses. Our classroom door has a sign that reads, No Vampires beyond Here! and as the talk ends, a scratchy but authoritative voice explodes from the intercom system: Will Bella Swan please report to the principals office! Rachel eagerly confides with me whether shed like a boyfriend to be a human, vampire, or werewolf. Vampire, or rather the revamped twenty-first-century version of the vampire, wins by a landslide. To Rachel and others like her, hes old-fashioned but still sexy, loyal but tantalizingly dangerous, brooding and anguished about his bloodthirsty nature, young with an artfully disheveled head of hair.

I have officially entered the Twilight Zone, as the banner over the high school where were sitting proclaims. Rachel is indeed a student, but not here at Forks High School in Washington State, which is hosting a Summer School symposium on the Twilight saga. Rather, shes a self-described twi-hard, just one of the millions of fervent fans, who range from ages ten to eighty. The beloved series is an ongoing young-adult romance between the exceptionally clumsy teenager Bella Swan and a swoon-inspiring vampire named Edward Cullen, who has been seventeen years old since 1918. Thousands of fans like Rachel have flocked to Forks, Washington, an economically depressed former logging town, eager to immerse themselves in the setting for the books. Forks has responded by remodeling itself as a destination for all things Twilight.

The Twilight fanpire spans the globe, but Rachel traveled from Bloomington, Indiana, to be here at the Twilight Summer School. Her obsession with the series began when a friend recommended it to her. Entranced, Rachel spent the night in the bathtub finishing the first book as the water cooled and her skin puckered. She proceeded to tear through the other books in the series, but those werent enough to satisfy her enthrallment. She logged onto fan sites like His Golden Eyes and Twilighters Anonymous for at least one hour each day to chat with other fans and peruse the latest Twilight gossip. When I spoke with Rachel at the Summer School symposium, she told me that the current buzz in the fanpire centered around a YouTube video of a recent screening of Eclipse where a man proposed to his girlfriend on bended knee in front of the theatre audience. The couple then rejoined the cheering crowd to watch the film.

Rachels wardrobe consists of Twilight-themed shirts reading, Bite Me: Vampires Only Please and Its an Edward Thing, You Wouldnt Understand. After months of pestering, shed convinced her mom and her cousins, whod finally succumbed to Twilight mania, to wait in line at Barnes and Nobles with hundreds of other girls for the midnight release of Breaking Dawn, the final book in the series. An enormous poster of Robert Pattinson, the actor who plays Edward, looms over her bed where he watches her sleep. No boy at her high school can pass muster next to the impossibly sparkly perfection of Edward.

Rachel describes the process of reading Twilight as being spellbound, a sensation akin to the bliss of encountering a favorite book for the first time. I dont know what it is about the Twilight series that has captivated me, she tells me. Once I had read Twilight, my life was changed. Fans call this phenomenon Twitten, reading the first book and getting bit by the Twilight bug, the inexplicable force that drove them to read all the books in (practically) one sitting. At the elementary school down the block from my house in Washington, fifth graders segregate themselves in the schoolyard according to their allegiances to various male characters, Team Jacob or Team Edward. Friends are forsaken as a result of affiliating with one emblem of eros over another. Other fans dissect the personalities of the Cullens, Edwards fabulously wealthy and attractive vampire family, and bicker over the merits of the Quileute werewolf pack. They write fan fiction, serial novels in countless genres, including the popular fade to black fiction with its explicit erotic and sexual details.

Many Twilight fans had never read an entire book before picking up the series, and now they are inhaling it in repeated readings of ten, fifteen, or fifty times. They build websites like Twilight Singapore, gay and lesbian fans create Facebook pages dedicated to the series, and through it discover lifelong friends. At conventions, they donate blood, exchange extra Twilight buttons and t-shirts, and bond over bonfires, lunches, and volleyball games. They book tickets for the Twilight cruise to Alaska to mingle with fans and celebrities from the films, read the Twilight graphic novel, meet up with a Twilight moms group, or buy Twilight merchandise like Sweetarts, a heart-shaped candy that says bite me or soul mate. They wear the au courant raincoat from Nordstroms Twilight-inspired fashion line. Fans like Rachel do not want to merely read the books; they want to climb inside them and live there.

This book is about the pleasures of the millions of devoted Twilight fans like Rachel who have transformed the Twilight saga into a cultural phenomenon. Thirteen million copies of the books have been sold in the United States; 116 million copies, worldwide, with translations into thirty-seven languages. The film adaptations are some of the highest-grossing movies of all time. Meanwhile, the Twilight saga has spent more time on the New York Times best-seller list than even the Harry Potter novels. Its appeal can be encapsulated in the fact that it was recommended to me by my daughters forty-year-old preschool teacher, a fourteen-year-old neighbor, and a university colleague as must-reads.

Fanpire, one of the collective terms Twilight fans use to describe themselves, evokes the ubiquity and popularity of the Twilight phenomenon, as well as the fact that its readers cross generations, economic strata, and countries. Fans from Romania to Salt Lake City have invented a Twilight-inspired universe that encompasses all aspects of their lives: from Edward-addiction groups and twi-rock music to Cullenism, a religion based on the values of Edwards family of vegetarian vampires. There is a lexicon of fan terms: