I don’t believe I did, but if you managed to finish the book you’d know more about it than I do.
*In what way is this different from what I just posted? Edward falls for Bella because he likes the way she smells and he can’t read her mind. It has little if anything to do with her looks or her personality.
*Good thing I didn’t say that, then. I said she wasn’t considered particularly attractive when she lived in Phoenix. Given that she says she had no friends and had never dated before she moved to Forks, I think it’s reasonable to conclude that her classmates in Arizona didn’t consider her a major babe.
*IIRC she explicitly says she isn’t tall, and according to Wikipedia Meyer has described her (outside the books) as being 5’4". That’s the national average for American women. Meyer is also quoted in the Wiki article as saying she “left out a detailed description of Bella in the book so that the reader could more easily step into her shoes”, which suggests to me that Bella was not intended to be stunningly beautiful. She is a slim, pale-skinned brunette and is probably better looking than she thinks she is (which actually is realistic for an adolescent girl), but I don’t believe she was supposed to be more than girl-next-door pretty.
I’m not a Twilight fan, but I honestly don’t see it as being any worse than any Whedon-stuck-in-his-adolescence show including Buffy. Seriously.
Still, to each their own. Just because I don’t find value in something doesn’t mean it isn’t appealing to others. I’ve been known to like some pretty damned crappy movies for reasons I cannot explain.
Some “grown women” are not “grown women”. Trust me on this.
What I came in to post. The highlight:
“First off, the author creates a main character which is an empty shell. Her appearance isn’t described in detail; that way, any female can slip into it and easily fantasize about being this person. I read 400 pages of that book and barely had any idea of what the main character looked like; as far as I was concerned she was a giant Lego brick. Appearance aside, her personality is portrayed as insecure, fumbling, and awkward - a combination anyone who ever went through puberty can relate to. By creating this “empty shell,” the character becomes less of a person and more of something a female reader can put on and wear.”
So any swoon-prone chick of any height, build, or eye or hair color can easily imagine herself as Bella. QED
If anyone who has actually read the books can refute this, I will withdraw.
Believe it or not, there are people here who aren’t Joss Whedon fans. I don’t think we need yet another CS thread hijacked with a discussion of Buffy though, so maybe we could just leave it at that.
Meyer does describe Bella’s appearance early in the first book. As mentioned upthread, she’s a slim brunette of about average height. It’s true that this isn’t really a unique description, though. It sound like a good percentage of all the girls and women I’ve ever known, including my sister, my childhood best friend, and the woman in the office next to mine. If one allows wiggle room for at least one of these characteristics then a huge number of girls more-or-less fit Bella’s description. This probably has added to the appeal for many readers.
If Wikipedia can be trusted then Meyer did deliberately make Bella’s physical description pretty generic to make it easy for girls to imagine themselves in Bella’s place. And I honestly don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. As much as I hate to defend Twilight, it’s weird to criticize a book for not spending enough time on the narrator’s appearance. Plenty of great literary works have left the protagonist’s looks largely to the reader’s imagination (I couldn’t tell you what color Elizabeth Bennet’s hair or eyes are), and I doubt it would have made the series better or more popular if Meyer had gone into great detail about Bella’s appearance or given her less common physical traits.
Although this changes a bit as the series goes on, at first Edward wants Bella but thinks he can’t have her, so he remains somewhat distant, always disappearing and returning.
Thus he becomes not only a highly desirable male – physically perfect, brilliant, soulfully troubled, solicitous of your welfare, obsessed with you, able to kick the asses of your enemies but too nice to do so until driven by circumstances – but also a conveniently unavailable male. He wants you but he doesn’t lose his self-restraint and paw you or anything so tawdry.
You can pine for him and enjoy all the trembling-on-the-brink adolescent feelings, but you don’t actually have to live with him or work out the messy details of a day-to-day relationship. He’s got the appealing differences of an outsider, the hint of rebellion of an outsider, and he actually is an outsider – he’s not snoring on the couch or underfoot all the time, he shows up for appetite-whetting encounters, then vanishes for periods long enough to pine and sigh and doodle your names in hearts.
He’s “bad” but also safe (as hinted at by another poster, Edward driving fast is safe, because he’s stronger/faster/smarter/always in control/has superhuman senses, and because he’d never let anything happen to YOU), and also served up in just the right quantities; you never get too much of him at one sitting.
Later in the series this isn’t quite so much the case, but the hook has been set by then.
That strikes me as a pretty good explanation of Edward’s appeal, Sailboat.
I think the big difference between readers/viewers who like the character and those of us who think he’s a creepy stalker is that the former are willing to take him at face value. For instance, in the book he says he followed Bella to Port Angeles because he was concerned about her safety. He does in fact wind up saving her from peril on the mean streets of PA, so within the story that works out well for Bella.
I personally find it easier to suspend my disbelief about the existence of vampires than I do to accept that a guy who follows a girl he barely knows on trips out of town, breaks into her room at night to watch her sleep, etc., is doing so because he’s chivalrous rather than because he’s a freaking psycho. But that’s what we’re asked to believe in Twilight, and it doesn’t work unless you do. A lot of teen girls are apparently willing to buy what Meyer is selling. To some extent I think that is because she’s come up with a character who’s basically the embodiment of a typical teen girl’s fantasies about her favorite rock star. If you take Edward at face value then his presence in Bella’s room at night is no more threatening than a poster of a celebrity hunk. He’s just hanging around, looking good and being desirable. He represents an unfamiliar world, but he’s not demanding anything or even directly offering an experience the girl isn’t sure she’s ready for.
It disturbing to think about this scenario playing out with a real person instead of a fantasy guy, but fans of the series are probably well aware that Edward isn’t realistic. He isn’t meant to be.
I’m aware of that. I mentioned Buffy because it’s already been brought up in the thread. Several times, in fact. Not sure why my post tripped your trigger on the topic and not the others, but there ya have it.
I hate to tell you but I hadn’t even read your response. Read most of the responses and started skimming the ones that seemed to go into detail about what Bella looks like since I have no desire to learn more about that.
I don’t really want to start a fight, but I am curious now that I’ve read your response directly before mine but several hours earlier. How would my response have anything to do with yours? And if it did, do you really think that you directing me what content I should post is appropriate considering Buffy is vampire stuff and so is Twilight?
Butterflies: I took Lamia’s post to mean that* she* didn’t need to say anymore about how much she hates Whedon after her contributions to the thread on the origins of ‘I’ll be in my bunk.’
I thought you were telling me to stop being critical of Twilight because it’s not any worse than Buffy. It wasn’t particularly relevant to the discussion about how Bella’s appearance is described, but it wasn’t particularly relevant to anything on the current page of the thread or the OP either. If you’d quoted one of the posts that mentioned Buffy or otherwise indicated who you were talking to then it would have been clear you were responding to comments from earlier in the thread.
That’s basically it. I don’t expect everyone to keep up with every CS thread and thus know that I said just the other day that I hate Joss Whedon, but I also don’t feel it’s appropriate to spend much time on the subject in a thread about Twilight. I felt it was enough to point out that not everyone who disliked Twilight liked Buffy and suggest letting the matter drop. Otherwise I figured we were in for a bunch of posts defending Buffy and a total hijack of the thread.
I see now I may inadvertently have sent us down the rabbit hole of having a hijack about NOT hijacking the thread, but I hope we can all get back on topic now.
On that note, I was Googling around earlier and found a preview of The Twilight Companion: The Unauthorized Guide to the Series on Google Books. The author asks a rather more panting version of the OP’s question: “What is it about Edward Cullen that makes him so desirable, hot, and sexy?” Her answer is…because Stephenie Meyer describes him as being extremely good-looking. Which strikes me as a boneheaded answer, but I can’t really argue with it – people who are very good-looking are indeed often considered “desirable, hot, and sexy.” The books say Edward is totally gorgeous, and plenty of people think actor Robert Pattinson is a handsome guy, so it’s no wonder lots of girls think Pattinson-as-Edward is totally hot.
There must also be some girls who’ve gone to see the Twilight movies not because they give a damn about the characters or plot, but because they want to enjoy the parade of eye candy. I hear that, aside from Pattinson, the later films in the series have a bunch of muscular hunks who (for very important plot-related reasons) go around in nothing but their shorts. If this were a PG-13 film series that prominently featured attractive young women without many clothes on then there’d be no mystery why teen boys were interested.
