Once critics get over the problematic relationships in the Twilight series, the next criticism is always that nothing happens. This book (and movie) series is so boring! Where did Stephenie Meyer learn about pacing? The problems these people highlight usually fall into two broad categories: first, the conflict always starts too late, in the last few chapters of each book; second, Bella and Edward are very chaste, so there isn't even much of that kind of action either.
My previous essay acknowledged, even supported, the criticisms of Edward and Jacob's portrayals. But as for the critique that nothing happens in Twilight? I just don't agree. In fact, the lack of action (in both senses of the word) is one of my favourite aspects of Twilight.
No pacing this conflict
If you note down when the "major conflict" starts in each Twilight book, an uncanny pattern appears. In the first book, James-the-antagonist shows up in the seventeenth chapter, with seven chapters of the book remaining. In New Moon, the comparable inciting incident is even later, in the eighteenth chapter with six chapters of the book remaining. Eclipse, widely regarded as having the best narrative pacing, gets the conflict really rolling in chapter sixteen with eleven remaining. Spot a trend?
Because these major conflicts don't get started until the last few chapters of each book, reviewers say the remaining majority are pointless, boring, and directionless. These reviewers have missed the point of the whole series. None of these "major conflicts" are what the books are really about! The actual central conflict is not of the standard type: it does not escalate, then resolve. Instead, it begins straight away at full intensity, when Edward locks eyes with Bella in that biology classroom, and the characters are left to marinate in it with no end in sight. Ultimately, the books tell a story of two people in fundamental opposition: one of them is a human, but the other is a vampire. That's the tension: he wants to eat her. And it simply can't be resolved.
There are two layers to this tension. The first is personal, small-scale. Edward is a vampire, so he wants to eat Bella. But he also cares about his own morality, so he doesn't want to give into his instincts. But also they love each other, so they want to spend time together, which constantly exposes them both to the risk that Edward snap and have himself a yummy snack. And it simply can't be resolved. And so the cycle repeats. These three motivations together make a push and pull that is fantastical, yes, yet also mundane. How can these two people work through their differences? Can they learn to compromise when they are incompatible in a way that is so basic it can't be changed? In every moment, as they manuoever around each other carefully, as they learn boundaries only after accidentally overstepping them, they grow in their relationship. Bella learns how close to Edward she can stand before he gets too uncomfortable. Edward learns to remember that Bella has to stop to eat three times a day. Though we the audience can't relate to the specific vampire-flavoured problems they face, we are familiar with this dance more broadly: the steps of creating a relationship. Crucially, our own real-life romances don't have the externally-driven conflicts of a neat Hollywood script. Instead, most of the difficulties arise between the two partners: whether fundamental differences in beliefs, culture, or simply how often to clean the toilet. The Twilight books mirror this experience.
The second layer is fantastical, societal. As these two small lives negotiate the daily details of how to be in a relationship with each other, they represent the larger question: can a human and a vampire be together? In other words, can two individuals from naturally opposing species learn to live and love each other? After all, it has never been done before. The surrounding characters are divided on the issue, even within Edward's own family: another reality of relationships in which the audience can easily see themselves. How do other people react to and influence our our own relationships, and how do the impacts of our relationships end up spiralling back outwards? While Edward's mother believes wholeheartedly that the two of them will work out, even if she can't imagine how, one of Edward's older brothers thinks it is impossible and unnatural. He isn't intolerant, just incredulous. As Bella and Edward stay together, through the course of three books, he changes his mind and comes to accept Edward's relationship with Bella. He even ends up becoming friends with Bella, when he had never in his vampire life even had a conversation with a human. Edward and Bella's story is at once just about two people, but also reflects and indeed transforms the people around them.
Neither of these conflicts, if you can even call them conflicts, are addressed with a big showdown. They simply can't be, just like the parallel tensions in our own relationships. The tension is character-based rather than villain-based, so the characters interact with it on a character level: over time, introspectively and interpersonally, through a cumulation of efforts and conversations. The conversations are often childish, sure, but what do you expect? They're high school students. Despite, or maybe even partially because of, the immaturity, the relationship between the two of them grows in a believable progression that the audience can recognise in their own lives. Most of our own romantic arcs or conflicts do not have to do with external villains with a neat setup, climax, and resolution. Instead, they're a repeated, messy, non-linear, attempt to complement your life with someone else's. Just as Meyer uses the supernatural elements to exaggerate the prototypical roles of her male leads, she also uses them to capture the relationship dynamics that we all face when developing a partnership with someone else. Though not factually, the Twilight books are the most emotionally honest books I have read.
The Fifty Shades of it all
Of all the perplexing things that arose from the Twilight fandom, the Fifty Shades franchise might be at first glance the strangest. Twilight is famous for it discomfort around sex. "Reading Twilight For The First Time" YouTubers have tittered over all the dramatic gazing at each other's eyes in which Bella and Edward indulge, the hours of delicate face-holding, the "sexually repressed" sidelong brushes of fingers. It's so cringey! Just get it on already and stop boring me with this weird Mormon foreplay. Well, I'll say it. If Stephenie Meyer weren't Mormon, no one would have blinked an eye at a YA romance whose protagonists only go as far as sensual neck-breathing and chaste kissing.
Besides, it should be that way. Edward's inner demons want to eat Bella. If the main challenge of the series is the contradiction of a human-vampire relationship, how they can work through being together when inherently each could harm the other, then they can't just get that close, can they? It would show that Edward can effortlessly be as close as he please to Bella, with his brain off and his instincts driving. It would destroy the central tension of the series, the whole point.
That Bella and Edward aren't (very) physical isn't just consistent with their characters: it also actively makes room for the main story to develop. I have observed, in my other writing, that romance novelists who develop the physical relationship between the characters quickly tend not to focus enough on drawing out the emotional relationship. In the Twilight series, this development is the key message, the crux around which everything else in the novels revolve. Rather than anything physical, then, the books rightfully focuses the story on the conversations Bella and Edward have, on their careful exploration, on their arguments.
Yes, it is not a coincidence that Meyer, a Mormon, wrote a book series where the protagonists don't do much but kiss, don't even see each other undress until after marriage. But it is coherent with the plot, the characters, and serves the central driving force of the narrative. It's even strongly consistent with Edward's character specifically, since his primary internal struggle is how to live with himself morally as a vampire (an important topic on its own that will receive its own essay). And, again, is it really so out of the ordinary in a book series primarily for teenagers?
A whole new world
The Twilight series is experiential. Its pacing and minimal "classic conflict structure" makes way for what it's really about: an exploration of the dynamics of a relationship, the high personal stakes that appear mundane from the outside. Narratively, the supernatural aspect actually materialises these risks: you and I might feel like we'd die if something wrong happened with our relationships, but Bella truly might. Importantly, though, the vampires (and werewolves) don't change the nature of the relationship's difficulties: it's still a story about two people, who the world would never think to put together, trying to be with each other anyway. It's not really about heroic external conflict, but the interpersonal conflict that any pair would face when they just aren't sure they're right for each other, or how to be right for each other. The slow pace and the daily (sometimes silly) struggles that Bella and Edward face together: it feels real, thus reassuring, by capturing a near universal side of the human experience.
Fans of Twilight recognise, if subconsciously, this familiarity when they say that the series paradoxically feels both cozy and suffocating. Reading the books is like stepping into a world that isn't so different from our own, except it's always raining and also the specific way a boy might break your heart is by eating you. Those are just small details, though. Overall, there is no dramatic love triangle, no nation at stake, and, who can forget, no sex: these misguided criticisms are actually what make Twilight great.
And, for all these reasons, I hate Breaking Dawn.