People love to dunk on the Twilight books, and their reasons are always the same:

1. The relationship is abusive and toxic and dangerous
2. The writing is bad
3. They’re dumb

Number three is steeped in our favorite American pastime: hating things teen girls love. That’s not a real reason, so I’m dismissing it entirely.

Number two is subjective but I can say confidently that there are plenty of worse-written books being traditionally published. You might dislike some of her writing quirks, like having lots of em-dashes (particularly in conversations) or using simple and straightforward language, but that doesn’t make it automatically bad. Hemingway used straightforward simple language and Emily Dickinson toyed with ‘creative’ punctuation. Style choices are subjective and some of the greats have made questionable style choices.

Number one is worth debating, especially if you have a teen in your life who you care about. Defining toxic relationships is important, but A) defining this particular relationship as “abusive” usually ignores the fact that he’s an actual monster and she’s a human trying to survive in a monster world and B) this is hardly the only book series in which an immortal man falls in love with a teen girl. I don’t think I manage to go six months without reading a book with a multi-century age gap in it that no one has complained about. Immortal, impossibly rich, impossibly strong men are a trope and a fantasy all rolled into one. Gross? Maybe. But Twilight isn’t to blame for it. Lash out at… the entire publishing industry, and maybe society as a whole, I guess.

I personally believe that a lot of the judgment around the series is actually aimed at the movies, not the books. The movies were plagued by low budgets, a writer’s strike, an inconsistent team at the helm, and a rapid-release schedule that sought to capitalize on a fad rather than making quality films. Many of the things people make fun of (the depressing tone, “I know what you are…”, “hop on spidermonkey”, awkward silences and excessive blinking…) are all from the films only; none of it is in the books.

Defining Success

Even if you stand firm in your opinion that these are bad books, for whatever reason, the fact remains that they have sold a combined total of 120 million copies and spawned a movie and merch fandom that has brought in just over $3.4 billion-with-a-B. Stephenie Meyer reportedly made just over $50,000,000 in just 2009.

Maybe you don’t care about commercial success. Maybe you care that your stories connect with fans. One look at all the fanart, merch, and fan clubs will tell you that people connected with the Twilight stories, maybe in a way that they hadn’t connected with novels… ever? I don’t know, maybe I’m too young to remember a time in which hoards of people were so enthusiastic about a book that they wanted to buy shirts so badly that they resorted to making their own… just for the book launch party at their local bookstore. Like, yeah, maybe a few dozen people did that for some book in the 90s, but hundreds? Thousands at a time?

Bottom line: People connected with these stories.

Whichever way you define success — whether commercially, financially, or by the way people connect with your stories — Twilight was successful.

Why, though?

Dismissing these stories as “well, popular stuff is always dumb, people are dumb, teenagers are sheep” is deeply offensive and flat-out false. You might not be writing YA paranormal romance, but you can learn from Meyer and her writing.

Yes. You can.

What Twilight Did Right

Chapters end on absolute bangers

When discussing what Twilight does well, most people will go directly to “pacing.” And while that’s true, it’s tougher to nail down the specifics. These books yank you through the story, and while her beats and plotting are part of it, I think her chapter endings are actually the thing you can mimic here.

A collection of lines that close out some chapters:

• That was the first night I dreamed of Edward Cullen.
• “Now,” he said significantly, “It’s your turn.”
• I wouldn’t forget.
• Could he really believe in the impossible legends his son had scoffed at? Yes. Yes he could.
• Edward seemed to take a deep breath, and then he stepped out into the bright glow of the midday sun.
• “Come on then,” he encouraged. “I’ll show you.”
• And then I sealed away my heart.
• Dazed and disoriented, I looked up from the bright red blood pulsing out of my arm — into the fevered eyes of the six suddenly ravenous vampires.
• I did not resurface.
• Goodbye, I love you, was my last thought.
• I blinked into the sudden light, and saw that someone was there, waiting for me.
• We couldn’t get through the ornate door at the end of the hallway before the screaming began.

That’s just from the first two books. Even out of context, those lines all share a few characteristics. First, they’re short and punchy. Second, they all hint at or flat-out promise doom or adventure right around the corner.

Short and punchy fits the genre of YA paranormal romance, and it also speaks to a fast pace in the story. Long, poetic sentences beg you to read slowly, to immerse yourself in the language. Short, punchy sentences invite you to read quickly, to focus on plot, to always be looking for what’s next.

The hint of doom or adventure isn’t a secret; every story has to hint that there’s more coming in the future, or else you wouldn’t keep turning the pages. But what Meyer does in all these examples is promise that either doom or adventure is coming like right now. It makes you want to get to the next chapter immediately. Even if the promise isn’t fulfilled on the next page, you’ve already psychologically committed yourself to ‘reading another chapter’ so you keep going. And then find yourself face-to-face with yet another banger of a closing line and the next thing you know you’ve been reading for nineteen hours straight and haven’t eaten anything but sliced cheese and dry cereal because you can’t put the book down.

Ahem.

There’s a balance between the magical and the mundane

Bella spends a lot of time doing very boring, normal teenage things. She does chores and homework. She listens to petty gossip and tries to make friends at a new school. She reads paperback novels and listens to music in her room.

All this mundane activity grounds the story in reality, makes the reader feel like they can relate to Bella. They’ve been dress shopping for prom! They’ve been in a silent fight with some girl at school and they don’t know why! They have to do their laundry!

Sprinkled in with the mundane, though, is the magical. In this case, there’s the literal magic of vampires and werewolves (shapeshifters), but there’s also the ‘normal’ magic of falling in love for the first time.

If Bella arrived in Forks and then literally everything about her world turned upside down, it wouldn’t be as intriguing of a story. If she was turned into a vampire the very next day, thrown in front of the Volturi, and forced to broker peace between shapeshifters and vampires … it would be a very different book. It might be good, it might even sell well, but I really do think it’s the constant teeter-tottering between “I’m trying so hard to be a normal teenager” and “I’m in love with a monster and his world will kill me” that makes the story so exciting to read.

The stories were diverse long before it was “trendy”

Diversity shouldn’t be seen as trendy. You know it, I know it. But publishing is a business and businesses are always going to treat any shift or change as a trend to capitalize on. I hope the recent push for diverse stories makes permanent changes to the publishing landscape. So many people have done so much work, and that work deserves to be recognized and rewarded with long-term, permanent success.

On the pages of Twilight, almost a decade before the We Need Diverse Books foundation was launched, Meyer wrote about poverty, broken families, mental health struggles, disability, racial diversity, income inequality, and the effects of an unfair education system.

Is Meyer perfect at any of this? No.

I’m not the expert on almost any of these communities or identities, so I’ll leave it to others to speak much more eloquently than I can on these topics.

But she was doing it without public pressure and without a hashtag to encourage her.

Her depiction of situational depression is heartbreaking, just empty pages with nothing but the names of the months passing by, one at a time, demonstrating the loneliness and hopelessness of depression. Bella went to school and did all the things she was supposed to do, but she was a shell of herself. I don’t think I’ve seen depression depicted so brutally honestly before or since in a YA book without it being an ‘issue’ book in which the author is campaigning for better mental health supports or suicide prevention.

They’re funnier than you remember

The films are so solemn that it’s easy to forget that the books are funny. Bella has a New Girl/Zooey D/Jess Day vibe and Edward is clever and Alice especially is very witty.

A lot of the imitators that came after Twilight were imitators of the films as much as they were the books, or else they sought to be darker as a way to differentiate themselves from Twilight. Other paranormal romances from the late 00s and early 10s were darker, more violent, more somber. There was a lot less humor and a lot more sex. They tended to follow the footsteps of the Sookie Stackhouse stories (which were also a lot funnier than the TV show True Blood was).

Example:

“Breakfast time,” he said eventually, casually — to prove, I’m sure, that he remembered all my human frailties.
So I clutched my throat with both hands and stared at him with wide eyes. Shock crossed his face.
“Kidding!” I snickered. “And you said I couldn’t act!”
He frowned in disgust. “That wasn’t funny.”
“It was very funny, and you know it.”

Alice (who can see the future) and Edward (who can read her mind) sit down to play chess. They both sit perfectly still for a couple minutes while she predicts every move he’ll make and he reads her mind. Then she knocks over her queen, forfeits, and walks away from the game.

I don’t care who you are — THAT SHIT IS HILARIOUS. There are not enough stories in which superpowered characters use their superpowers for silly things. I know it happens, but not often enough, and Meyer did that.

A super-strong vampire held up a car so his wife could lay on the ground and work on the engine. Like, he just sat there and held the car up with one hand. That is funny, and nothing like that made it into the movies.

They fulfilled their promises

Twilight is a young adult paranormal romance. Every one of those qualifiers comes with a certain set of promises and expectations.

Young adult fiction is marketed at teenagers, almost always with a teen protagonist and a set of problems that normal teens face. Moving to a new school, falling in love for the first time, trying to get along with a non-custodial parent. All things that teens experience.

Young adult fiction, like other kidlit categories, often uses self-inserting protagonists. The protagonists are pretty vanilla so that readers can insert themselves into the shoes of the protagonist without feeling alienated. Bella is supposed to be kinda boring and unremarkable. That’s not a bug; it’s a feature.

Paranormal romance is inherently kinda dark and kinda problematic. Can a human ever really consent with a vampire? Or a demon king? Or a vampire-hunter? Sex and violence get all tangled up, the lines between fighting and falling in love blurring.

Twilight delivers on those promises. It doesn’t pretend to be something it’s not. There’s no condescension. It steps into the tropes and fulfills them all.

Popularity is its Own Kind of Death Sentence

In the end, I honestly think Twilight takes the sheer volume of criticism it does because it was way too popular way too fast. Meyer was the bestselling author of the 2000s and she didn’t even release her first book until 2005. Three years later, the first film was the 8th-highest grossing film in America (behind Batman, Iron Man, Indiana Jones, a Pixar movie, Hancock, Kung Fu Panda, and a Madagascar sequel). Five years from the release of the first book, the third movie was the most widely-released movie in U.S. history, playing on more than 4,400 screens on opening day. Within seven years of the release of the first book, the Twilight franchise was worth more than three billion dollars.

That’s $3,000,000,000.00 or roughly 4,000 times what Meyer was paid for the books in the first place.

That’s a hell of a lot of success in a really short time.

Add in the fact that these books appealed mainly to teenaged girls and made exactly zero apologies for that and you can see why the backlash was so widespread. America loves nothing more than to hate the things that teenaged girls love, and here was a thing that teenaged girls loved a whole lot more than they loved anything else.

Yes, there were adult women who crossed serious boundaries by making ultra-creepy comments about the character Jacob Black (and by extension, teenaged Taylor Lautner). That was unacceptable behavior.

Yes, the movies were poorly made.

Yes, the books are light reads. They aren’t full of dense, intricate prose and heavy literary themes.

Yes, it’s worth discussing the problematic elements of Bella’s romantic entanglements. But remember that Bella punches Jacob in the face when he kisses her without her consent. Edward constantly tells her that he’ll leave if she asks him to, and then he really does leave when he thinks it’s for the best but she’s incapable of asking him to. And Bella is a breakable human surrounded by vampires. The gender-swapped version worked. A female vampire saving her human boyfriend made sense. Compared to vampires, humans are frail.

But creepy fans are not the fault of the author or the publisher; these books had been marketed to teens. If adult women cannot control themselves, that is 100% on them and you should call out and shame anyone who behaves that way.

Twilight is far from the only book with a problematic romance at its heart. Hell, the Mortal Instruments books were being published around the same time and the author kept the audience believing that the main romance was incestuous for two and a half books.

You can dislike the books, you can ignore the books, you can advocate against them if you want.

But you have to admit they were successful, and that success was because they did a lot of things right.

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