Why are we supposed to believe that Bella is All That? Edward has been mooning through a century of lovelessness, takes one look at her and swoons with blissful True Love?
Ditto Jacob.
She seems pretty “meh” to me, not particularly sparkly personality, average pretty. What’s the big draw?
And may I say that I don’t know if it’s a choice for the Bella character or just the way Kristin Stewart acts all the time, but the perpetual hesitancy she displays in every situation is grating as hell.
Viewer/reader identification character - you aren’t supposed to believe Bella deserves this attention, it’s the main premise of the story. Bella herself can’t believe it. The male love interests have to prove it through their actions to convince her.
It’s very wish fulfillment-y.
I have not read the books.
I have the seen the movies (thanks to my former SO having 2 daughters at “that age” (18 & 21 now)
The one thing that has always bugged me is exactly what you wrote - again, I’m writing not having read the books, but we know bupkis about Bella. Her talents, her hobbies, MaryAnn or Ginger - nothing.
She’s a cypher to me. I guess I should amend something and says she has no hobbies other than Edward. Or Jacob. Or both. Or - well, that’s what gripes me about the movies.
UT
I think that this might help.
http://theoatmeal.com/story/twilight
Yeah I read somewhere awhile back that the appeal to FANS is that Bella is a big zero, that way they can relate, but I was hoping that there was some attempt in the book to have it make a little more sense why the two magical superguys are so stupid over her.
Binarydrone:
Thank you so much for that. I see things clearly now. 
UT
I read the first book on the recommendation of my daughter. I could not get past an immortal vampire a hundred years old spending his time as a tenth grader in the local high school.
Well Jacob likes her because they were childhood friends (their Dads are close too). As for Edward, I got the impression that he was initially intrigued by her immunity to his mind reading powers. (Did they ever explain why she is immune to vampire powers?) OTOH I have no idea why her friends treat her like a celebrity. Maybe it’s a combination of her aloofness and a ‘new girl’ thing.
The term for it is Mary Sue. It’s a character that’s a blatant self-insertion of the author for the purpose of wish fulfillment fantasies. It’s just that in this case, the Mary Sue is so absolutely generic that anyone can impress their own self-image onto Bella and suddenly she is super relatable, and wow that girl that is JUST LIKE ME attracted the two most amazing boys in the world AWESOME.
Because that way Edward becomes the fulfillment of every woman’s fantasy: a man who wants to listen to her TALK ABOUT HER FEELINGS!
Wouldn’t the immunity thing go hand in hand with the fact she’s seemingly a null set?
UT
Cracked.com’s various interpretations have been most illuminating on the subject.
The only waythat this crap is even slightly tolerable
(Rifftrax samples)
Or what would happen if Edward the EmoSparklePire met The Slayer (Buffy)
I have read part of the book and seen the movie (there’s a great RiffTrax for it), and as far as I know the only reasons Edward likes Bella are that 1) he can read people’s minds, but not her’s, so she’s intriguing to him and 2) her blood smells delicious to him, to the extend that he must struggle to control his desire to kill her and drink it. No, really.
Based on what I’ve heard about the rest of the series, the true reason Jacob likes her is that he’s fated to marry her daughter. No, really.
While Bella in the movie seems pretty bland, Bella in the book is both bland and obnoxious. She’s constantly thinking about how hard her life is (her problems include “my dad bought me a car”, “three guys asked me to the dance”, and “even though I just started at this school, I’m already the most popular girl here”) and how much better she is than all of her classmates. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book with a less likable protagonist, and I’ve read A Clockwork Orange, Crime & Punishment, and Mansfield Park. It’s my impression that a lot of *Twilight *fans don’t even like her much, they’re mostly interested in the guys.
I said to my friend I watched the movie with that this reminded me of the “porn for women” episode of 30 Rock. This “porn” isn’t sexual, it’s a video where a handsome, nicely dressed man looks into the camera and pretends to be listening attentively to a woman talking about her day.
As for the in-universe reason why the guys fall for Bella, I’m pretty sure it’s all about Fate and/or Destiny and/or God’s Will, any of which is a super healthy basis for a relationship, I’m sure.
So Stephanie Meyer read Dead Until Dark (the first Sookie Stackhouse book, aka True Blood) and decided to reverse some of the characteristics to write her own vampire/real girl fantasy. Got it.
:eek:
I’ve never read the Stackhouse books, but what struck me about the special characteristics of Bella’s is that they are, as Chipacabra said, basically just fate. There’s no reason given for why Edward can’t read Bella’s mind, she doesn’t have psychic powers or anything. Bella doesn’t seem to smell unusually good to anyone else (human or vampire), only Edward. I guess this makes it pretty easy for some readers to imagine themselves in Bella’s place, since it could just as easily be someone else with these traits. It’s nothing Bella does that makes her appealing to Edward. It’s not even her looks or any other characteristic that is perceptible to others. She just happens to possess these two traits that no one else in the world would be aware of but that are irresistible to him.
What’s truly inexplicable is why the other kids at Bella’s new high school think she’s so awesome. In the book she actually says she had no friends at all at her old school and had never been on a date. The only reason offered for her sudden popularity in Washington is that she’s new and the town is so boring anything new seems awesome, but their reaction to her is so over the top that I kept expecting it to be revealed that they were all under the mental control of the vampire family or something.
In those, Sookie (who is human) is the one who is a mindreader and the allure of Bill (the vampire) is that she cannot read his mind.
This seems incredibly weak, although as far as wish fulfillment goes, it’s certainly a blockbuster for a certain category of reader…
You can no more judge Kristin Stewart’s talent or lack of same from the Twilight movies than you can judge Natalie Portman’s based only on The Phantom Menace. In both cases, the characters were so poorly written Meryl Fucking Streep couldn’t have made them interesting. See The Runaways with Stewart playing Joan Jett to get some idea of her acting ability. Or maybe Adventureland.
I honestly think that Twilight was the natural evolution of the vampire in modern fiction. Interview with a Vampire introduced an likable if evil vampire as a protagonist. By the time we get to Buffy, you get a vampire with a soul who is good and in love with a human. By Twilight, the love story is the primary story, specifically designed for girls.
That’s what Twilight is: a romance novel that happens to have vampires, and was dumbed down and pruded up until it was both appealing to girls and unobjectionable to parents of the same. (Removing the premarital sex is enough–the misogyny is irrelevant.)