Twilosophy: I am NOT the number 1 Twilight fan!

Dear Twilight and fellow LTT-ers,

Recently a girl I sorta know found out about the blogs and asked me “so you’re like the number one Twilight fan, huh?!” and I wholeheartedly and vehemently said NO! No I am NOT the number one Twilight fan cause in my mind number one fan is some crazy lunatic with Twilight tattoos, owns the entire line of tshirts from Hot Topic, sleeps on the sidewalk for days on end…  number one fan brings to mind visions of that show, FANatic on MTV and how some crazy person deemed an artist’s number one fan went apeshit when they met SugarRay or Britney Spears and that’s about the farthest thing from what I’d do if I ever REALLY met any of these people in real life. In reality I’d pretty much look the other way while hoping they didn’t think I was staring at them. Far from having a fangirl freak out or even acknowledging that I know who they are and NEVER ever in a million years mentioning that I write a blog about them or the books every day.

Yup, number one fan, that's me!

But just because I’m not those things that make me think #1 fan does that make me any less of one? Maybe I really am a number 1 fan. I run this blog, I’ve been to more than my fair share of Twilight related events, heck I have business cards in my handbag with this blog’s URL on it… somehow in my mind this does not equate number one fan but to the outside world, aka the rest of the population, who only know Twilight as that thing “the kids are into” I probably look like the biggest fan that ever lived.

I shudder to think!

So what does it all mean? Follow the cut to see what I come up with…
Continue…

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Choices: A fork in the road. Jacob, Edward or Bella?

Omg, is it November yet?

Dear Twilosophy Majors-

This picture from New Moon just came out yesterday. A picture of a scene that I’m very much looking forward to and also dreading at the same time. (I think) It’s the scene after Bella cliff dives and Jacob’s taking her back home after they get the news about Harry Clearwater. They’re sitting in the truck and Bella starts contemplating the ‘What If’s” of her and Jacob and then of course Alice shows up. The whole scene just kills me because she’s right on the verge, she’s at the fork in her road of making this decision to finally move on from Edward and choose to be happy again with Jacob. And no matter which way she goes, the thought of her choosing either makes me angry. Because I can see the Jacob side of the argument and well hello, the other side is Edward and really truth be told I don’t really think she deserves either of them.

So the whole thing got me thinking… what if she didn’t choose either of them? What if she decided to choose HERSELF?

And maybe this is the fierce, adult, independent, college graduate, living on her own in me talking but I think Bella needs to find herself before she can ever really love either one of them they way they need to be loved and they way she needs to love. And that’s pretty evident by her shenanigans in the following book, Eclipse. Bella is an eighteen year old girl! I don’t know about anyone else out there but I am about a 180 from who I was mentally, emotionally and experience wise when I was 18. This is not meant as a diss to anyone younger but just from my own experience and I was a mature 18 too. I truly don’t believe Bella is at a place to even make these decisions. She’s semi fresh off a break up with her first true love, she meets a good guy friend, she regularly contemplates dangerous activities and one can argue suicide from the cliff diving incident alone and then an hour later she’s trying to decide if she should commit to another serious relationship with a boy?

HOLD UP, wait a minute! Bella, please stop running from boy to boy looking for what’s missing, when what’s missing is something that is only fixable by YOU, inside YOU! Bella needs to choose to be alright. She needs to choose to not let her entire being be defined by her relationships with the opposite sex.

I know that’s not easy an easy road to go down at any age much less at 17 but it’s an important journey that I think would have made the character of Bella infinitely more interesting and relatable. And not to mention a healthy role model for young girls.

So let’s open this up to the class…

Am I some crazy Destiny’s Child Independent Woman up in here or am I right in the assumption that Bella needs to take a step back and figure out herself?

Can you truly know yourself at 18? Or 21? Or even 50 for that matter?

Can you be in a “healthy” relationship if you’re not healthy yourself? If you’re not confident in who you are apart of your partner?

And discuss…
Themoonisdown

Read more Twilosophy!
Celebrate National Cougar Day with Rob and UC at Letters to Rob
Break it down more over at The Forum!

Picture from LA Times

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Twilosophy – Sad enough to quit reading the Twilight Saga?

Dear Twilosophy Majors-

I recently had an email conversation with an old friend who has just finished reading Twilight. I was excited (of course! a new convert!) and asked her if she’d finished the entire saga. She told me no, and that she decided to stop at the end of Twilight because it was consuming her thought life, her real life and making her depressed and sad. I was quite taken aback and wasn’t really sure what to say because OF COURSE I had been emotionally affected by the series how could you not be? And isn’t that normal? But that never once made me want to quit, in fact quite the opposite. I HAD to know how it ended. I had to know that even through it all: the drama, the conflict, the separation the October, November, December, January for God’s sake, that Bella and Edward would be together in the end. That they really would make it.

Which got me to thinking… can a book (or any work of art for that matter) be “good” if it doesn’t make you feel something?

Think about your favorite song, your favorite movie, your favorite piece of art… why do you like it? Sure music can be fun to listen to, movies entertaining, and art “pretty” but at the end of the day if it’s emotionally vacant it doesn’t stay with you. The stuff you connect with, the stuff that becomes your favorite speaks to you! I’ve always said what matters most to me about a piece of music are the lyrics. They’re the heart of the song for me because that’s what I remember and what gives me something to relate to. When I’m sad I wanna listen to Joni Mitchell for a reason, when I’m nostalgic for home I listen to Jimmy Eat World for a reason.

It’s the same with the Twilight Saga, it has all those components that we can relate to in our lives: Twilight has that first love jitters, New Moon has the deep dark sadness of losing someone, Eclipse has that feeling of being torn between two things you really care about and finally Breaking Dawn takes us in about every direction. But that’s why we love it! If it was a bland sugar coated fairy tale we wouldn’t all be sitting around here every day shooting the shit. God knows there’s a lot of other stuff to be doing, but because we’ve somehow all been personally touched by the Saga we want to discuss it and find other people like us here who can relate.

Don’t get me wrong I commend my friend for knowing herself enough to stop if something, even a book, was being personally destructive for her… but I also wonder if we don’t have those kinds of reactions to art or life in general what would the world be like? A lot of lukewarm moments, boring taupe walls and Kenny G songs?

Painting this wall red!
Themoonisdown

PS Stay tuned for the next Twilosophy installment when I break down the rest of my email discussion, involving relationships in and out of the Twi-dom

PPS Read other Twilosophy lectures

What do you think? Too emotional, must quit? Or must go on?

Update: LTT & LTR were mentioned (along w/ some of our other fav blogs) in the Greek version of Glamour mag. Weird? Crazy? Awesome! Whatever.. we love it! LTT/LTR mention in Greek Glamour

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