The Twilight Epidemic: The Fine Line Between Fantasy and Reality

By Ella Sivertsen and Olivia Baker, M&M TIPsters

There seems to be only one question on the minds of countless teenage girls these days: “Team Edward, or Team Jacob?”

You can always find a Twilight t-shirt at Wal-Mart, thousands of fans rush to the movie theaters at six-o’-clock in the morning to catch the first midnight showing of the latest addition to the saga, and Taylor Lautner probably appears shirtless on the walls of giggling girls more frequently than he would ever care to find out, ever.

But while fans are debating whether Pattinson or Lautner is hotter, there is often something more going on in the minds of true Twilight fans. Thoughts swim around about the definition of love and of protection, the boundary between teenage romance and a darker side to Edward and Bella, and why the knight in shining armor/vampire in shining Volvo can’t come for every girl.

So when does fiction wander too far into the real world?

“[It’s] really annoying [all the attention it’s received]; it’s kinda ruined it for me,” a local Athens teen says. Twilight books have sold around 5.3 million copies, and that’s just in the U.S. The movies have grossed approximately $1.5 billion worldwide! There is now Twilight Saga bedding, clothing, jewelry, makeup, perfume, Barbies, lunch boxes, mugs, board games, and key chains. Someone even prints Twilight toilet paper.

Twilight has become very widely known. Hundreds of thousands of screaming “Twilighters” line up for movie premieres and book signings just to get a glimpse of their favorite stars. While “Twi-hards” take their fan base and posters very seriously, many simply find the craze to be hilarious, and others still have more opinionated, solemn responses to the “epidemic.”

“A lot of the girls who are reading it are really young, like, twelve, thirteen, and fourteen, and that’s a REALLY impressionable age,” says Rose Dasher, a young, working woman in Athens. Miss Dasher has personally read the Twilight Saga and is, to put it kindly, not a big fan. It’s not because fans have ruined her experience or because she doesn’t like the casting for the movie; she opposes the messages portrayed to Twilight’s young readers. “[It] presents some rather skewed messages to younger girls… It’s like there’s a lot of messages I disagree with about love and relationships and about women’s roles in relation to men.”

For all of you who don’t know, Bella is extremely dependent on Edward, Jacob, and all the Cullens. Dasher also says that if this relationship was real, it would be “something for the feds to handle.” Regarding things from female dependency to pre-marital sex, Twilight is highly debated the world over. People don’t sparkle; taking the books too realistically can blur the line between reality and fantasy.

Don’t worry too much about those Twi-hards, though. Most find that, like the Backstreet Boys, Twilight is a passing trend.

“There’s always something teenagers will love,” says an Athens resident, “if it’s Jonas Brothers, Justin Bieber, or Twilight.”

As for the future, like all other fads, Twilight will be eclipsed by something new, with a breaking dawn to a new era. Pun intended.

Ella Sivertsen, 14, is a ninth grader at Whitewater High School in Fayetteville, GA.

Olivia Baker, 15, is a tenth grader at the University School of Jackson in Jackson, TN.