epershand | FUCK YOU I LOVE BELLA SWAN

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Crossposts: http://darkest-light.livejournal.com/310620.html

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FUCK YOU I LOVE BELLA SWAN

This morning I got my ranty-pants on on the subject of Bella Swan. The following is presented almost entirely unedited; though I've removed my interlocutor's portion of the conversation to protect the innocent.

mostly i am just bitter people keep bashing bella swan in favor of katniss
bella swan's my GIRL
I FUCKING LOVE BELLA SWAN, and everyone needs to step off

every time I read another article that is like "this katniss is awesome unlike that wet blanket bella swan" I am like :((((

I really need to write my IN DEFENSE OF BELLA SWAN essay

LOOK EVERYBODY TWILIGHT IS A SERIES OF BOOKS ABOUT A NORMAL GIRL UNDER INTENSE PRESSURE TO BE PERFECT WHO HAS TO PARENT BOTH HER PARENTS
AND THEN NOBODY TRUSTS HER WHEN SHE TELLS THEM WHAT SHE WANTS AND SHE IS LIKE "FUCK YOU" AND TAKES IT ANYWAY
BELLA SWAN KICKS ASS
and then when she gets her vampire super power it is SUPER-PROTECTIVENESS

and she is an atheist who mostly wants to get laid and the only time edward does things she doesn't like it is romantic things
and she is like BACK OFF I CAN TAKE CARE OF MYSELF. DON'T GIVE ME A CAR RADIO
SCREW YOU I DON'T WANT TO PUT ON A PRETTY DRESS AND GO TO PROM
and then she is like GIVE ME SEXIN
and edward is like BUT YOU ARE A DELICATE FLOWER
and she is like FUCK THAT NONSENSE
and he is like OK I ADMIT IT I AM ACTUALLY THE DELICATE FLOWER
and she is like AWWW OK I GUESS I WILL GET MARRIED BUT ONLY TO GET LAID *rolleyes*
bella is the best

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lol lol lol A FAIR AND VALID DEFENSE. I GUESS.

BELLA IS THE BEST.

This is amazing.

\o/ JUST LIKE BELLA

I FEEL SO MUCH OF THIS POST MY GOD

my complaint wrt bella is the story she is couched within. twilight is turrible. but bella is a weird kinkster and i respect that. (sometimes liz phair's entire album "whip-smart" plays out in my mind as the twilight au about the little bella that could)

I WAS SO FUCKING MAD AT EDWARD FOR KINK-SHAMING HER OKAY

ME TOO.

The thing that makes me maddest is Alice bullying her CONSTANTLY into social situations she hates and performing some vision of femininity that is not her own. OMFG. BELLA IS A FUCKING INTROVERT AND SHE DOESN'T NEED YOU TO DRESS HER SHE IS A GROWN PERSON GODDAMN!!!!!!! The fact that this is painted as friendship despite Bella hating it 100% of the time makes me want to scream.

Ugh seriously. Alice was SO MUCH WORSE THAN EDWARD.

Bella was NOT HER FUCKING DOLL :(

Seriously. I love it when Edward is all "I am too dangerous for you. I must leave you for your own good."

And she is like "ARE YOU KIDDING ME WITH THIS? GUESS I'D BETTER TAKE UP CLIFF DIVING AND RECKLESS MOTORCYCLING."

Seriously nobody in that story gave her the credit she deserved.

THAT IS WHY NEW MOON IS MY FAVORITE AND WHEN I GOT RID OF ALL THE BOOKS I BOUGHT IN A MOMENT OF WEAKNESS I KEPT THAT ONE

EDWARD IS GONE THE ENTIRE TIME

AND BELLA'S IDEA OF FUN IS PURPOSEFUL BRUSHES WITH DEATH

WHAT A BIZARRE BADASS

I think the main reason my inner 14-year-old girl identified so hard with Bella Swan was because of her love of purple prose.

THIS IS A VALID AND DEFINING CHARACTER TRAIT OKAY. IT MAY BE THE AUTHOR SEEPING THROUGH BUT IT IS STILL A CHARACTER TRAIT. AND IT SIMULTANEOUSLY GETS TRASHED AND THEN NOT EVEN ACKNOWLEDGED AS PART OF HER CHARACTERIZATION.

The series also gives me the embarrassment squick because I *remember* being that teenage girl, except I was not actually that popular.

... Huh, that's an interesting point. Bella has traces of fear-of-being-bullied that normally I might not expect to see in someone who has not been bullied, but that never really winds up happening to her in Forks. I wonder how bad her last school was?

Ooooh, that REALLY IS INTERESTING. She's got all this "I'm nothing special, I am just gawky and awkward except I have literally no sense of fear and basically assume that everyone will try to control me and let me down and I have walls so thick the psychic can't get through them." There's got to be some intense trauma in her past to account for all that.

And yesss. I ADORED her love of purple prose. And even more than that I loved her tendency to read her life onto all the novels she read. She was so iddily great and also mottsy.

I bet there was some point in her childhood where she was all "Look at me I am the special badass" and then HER BODY BETRAYED HER and everybody laughed.

... I can't remember whether her mother stuffing her into ballet lessons was canon or just INSIDE MY HEAD. But that would totally make sense. The ONE MOMENT she thought she might be special, and then NOPE TOTALLY NOT.

Hmmm, I don't remember any ballet lessons, but my memory is notoriously shoddy.

I largely attribute Bella's stuff to having had to grow up fast to handle the fact that both of her parents are children. She's a teenager, and she's the one responsible for getting food on the table, and there's the strong implication that when she was living with her mom, she was responsible for getting the bills paid as well. She spends a lot of time in the first book being miserable about living in Forks, but it's not so much that she hates the town as that she's worried that without her, her mother might end up on the street.

No wonder she doesn't trust anyone to take care of her.

I think Charlie is far more competent than Bella gives him credit for, but Bella's mom is fully as scatterbrained when it comes to day-to-day life skills as Bella thinks. (Though I think she's probably more emotionally competent than Bella gives her credit for.) I vaguely recall one point where Charlie points out that he managed to eat before Bella showed up, and he would be just fine eating when she wasn't around. There was probably just a lot of takeout and frozen stuff (like the way I tend to cook when I'm busy and otherwise low-spoon).

And yeah, I also got the very strong impression that Bella didn't hate Forks because it was Forks, she hated it because it wasn't Phoenix where she would have preferred to be.

COSIGNED!!!

FIST BUMP

<3333333

<333333 I LOVE BELLA AND EVERYBODY ALWAYS MOCKS ME FOR IT! THIS POST IS AWESOMESAUCE.

YESSS BELLA IS THE BEST. I AM SO GLAD MY DAY IS INCLUDING A "BELLA IS AWESOME" PARTY.

HERE, HAVE SOME CHAMPAGNE AND JOIN US.

YAY TO DRINKING TO THE BELLA LOVE!

I agree! Twilight does not hit my buttons, but Bella's pretty awesome.

The narrative hit very few of my buttons, but Bella really, really did. The Caitlin Flanagan piece in the Atlantic hit a lot of the reasons why, and then also missed a ton of them in the way that Flanagan tends to, but I really love those books (even if it is more in the abstract than when I am faced with their prose).

Yessss. I mean, I am eye-rolly anyway about all the "Katniss is great and this is an excellent opportunity to talk about how terrible Bella is!" because OH YES OF COURSE WE CAN ONLY LIKE ONE LITERARY HEROINE AT A TIME ugh ugh ugh. But also YES BELLA. Her books are way problematic! But all these things you say are so, so true and ahhh I think I need your In Defense of Bella Swan essay.

LOOK YOU ONLY GET TO LIKE ONE GIRL SO SHE'D BETTER BE GREAT.

Her books are problematic, but they're problematic in REALLY INTERESTING WAYS. Like, there's the whole way that Edward is terrified of her sexual interests and tries to protect her from them. And the way that Jacob is a Nice Guy and so large fractions of the audience think he deserves her more than the boy she actually loves, and judges her for it. And there's the way that she thinks that she has to get perfect grades and look perfectly pretty and never allows herself to ask for help, and needs to take care of everyone around her and never show any of her inner struggles. And just.

She is just this amazing encapsulation of the demands on teenage girls and I love her for it SO MUCH.

I guess what I love about her comes down to the fact that she's a terrible model for what teenage girls should be but a brilliant reflection of what they actually are.

Oooh yes that is an excellent encapsulation! And I also suspect a pretty good defense of Bella as a character with merit.

There is nothing that irritates me in quite the same way as hating on Twilight, especially from people who are simply shocked! when I ask them why they have such a passionate hate for teen girls.

Ugh, yes, seriously :/

I thought about signing up for the Twilight panel for WisCon but I also signed up for the one about attitudes towards Romance novels and realized that (1) either or both will hopefully be awesome, but could also turn rather heated and I can likely only handle 1 heated panel if that happens and (2) I've still only read the first 2 books and the bit of the Edward book, and I'd probably need to read the other 2 and watch the movies first...

Oh man, you'd be awesome on the Twilight panel. Not going to lie, it is actually the single panel I'm most excited for at WisCon--

likeadeuce and I have been talking about it since last year. But I'm looking forward to seeing you on the romance one, and hopefully you'll at least come and be an active audience member in the Twilight one :D

I hope to go! I thought about signing up anyway but I'm also doing whatever I'm told to do at The Gathering and this will be the first WisCon for BOTH of my roommates, so I decided to limit myself to 2. And then when it was too late, I realized I could have listed all 3 but requested to only be put on 2 (and hoping that all 3 ended up with more volunteers than strictly needed) but oh well.

I really do need to read the other 2 books eventually. And I suspect Snow White and the Huntsman (Bella punched out Thor!) is going to turn me into something of a Kristen Stewart stan. Though, a large part of the interest of the books for me is that they exist entirely within the female gaze (I'm told that changes later...) even though the creator of that particular gaze has some real issues in many ways, and I'm not sure I could sit through it without that element.

Are you on the Twilight panel? (Or rather, did you volunteer/submit it?)

i love you & i love bella & you are ridiculous

I could cope with her co-dependency on her vile boyfriend but she was mean to the girls who tried to be her friends in a new fucking school and from every moment where that happened I hated her fucking guts.

I agree, she was a massively flawed character, most fundamentally in her deep mistrust of everyone around her and tendency to push away anyone who tried to form attachments with her. But that actually turned out to be one of the things that intrigued me about her. I loved seeing her grow and become more trusting, and I love the way she was ultimately able to use her barriers as a strength, and learn to let people in by pushing them outwards.

In short, I think we'll have to agree to disagree on this one.

Oh! That was the bit I liked! I have NEVER EVER EVER seen a teenage girl slope into a school all alienated and fucked-up and cool like James Dean and not have to fall over herself being anxious and grateful and 'like me! like me! what do I have to do to keep you liking me??? let me do it more!!' as soon as some other girl was nice to her! THANK YOU BELLA.

(Someone randomly linked me to this post, btw, epershand, and I can't even believe how right you are. I had heard such awful things about Twilight and then I saw the first movie and it was about this excellent girl whose boyfriend is all like 'No! I must not kiss you because I might LOSE CONTROL AND HURT YOU!' and she is like, 'No you won't, don't be ridiculous, the solution is perfectly simple, kiss me but don't hurt me' and he is like 'Oh! Okay! That is perfectly simple! Now let's go climb a tree with my MAGIC POWERS!'. Which is not at all what I had been told.)

I have NEVER EVER EVER seen a teenage girl slope into a school all alienated and fucked-up and cool like James Dean and not have to fall over herself being anxious and grateful

I mean I have never seen it in a movie. I have seen it in real life a bajillion times.

Seriously? She spends the whole book calling these people her friends and being nasty to them while they are legitimately nice to her with no apparent ulterior motives or condescension. I'm not saying she should fall over herself. I'm saying she's a jerk. A sort of boring jerk, which is probably the main reason it doesn't work.

Yeah, seriously: it looks to me exactly like the kind of behaviour that gets male characters 'romantic hero' or 'interestingly damaged' or 'deep' status, and gets female characters punished or dead. (I mean, she treats them all better than Harry Potter treats any of his 'friends', let alone Snape). Am basing this all on the films, though, so we might well be at cross purposes, of course.

As I said, her behavior in the movie didn't bother me at all; I liked her in the movie. I hated her in the book. So yeah, that is pretty definitely a cross-purpose.

But, I mean--I also dislike Harry more than basically any other Harry Potter character, and that is one of the reasons. So maybe I just don't like catty entitled fictional high schoolers.

I think our comments crossed there! And Harry is a dreadful person, but I like it when girls get to be dreadful in the way that boys do and not get punished for it. (Also, I do like catty entitled fictional high schoolers, for some reason, though usually not real ones. Hmmm.)

I like a lot of catty entitled fictional adults, so I'm not sure what my criteria for likeability is... (although I don't think either JKR or Stephenie Meyer is quite aware enough of their protagonists' nastiness for me to really enjoy it--authorial awareness, in general, is really really important to me as a reader.)

I believe you about the consequences for m/f characters being different (or, you know, only existing for female characters), but I'm drawing blanks on examples. What should I be thinking of that's escaping me?

Ha! I am going to have to go away and think about this one also! It's a thing I've been talking about in the abstract for so long that all my examples have fled... ::blushes::

I know exactly how that is. HAVE NO FEAR.

Also Bella is much more pleasant in the first movie than she is in the first book. Which is one of several reasons that I like the first movie, and hate the book.

I love Katniss a lot and I'm not into Twilight but fuck yeah, THERE IS MORE THAN ONE WAY FOR GIRLS TO BE AWESOME OKAY. This is a great post.

The exciting thing is, now that I've written it, I no longer need to feel bitter about Katniss and actually get to read The Hunger Games \o/

THANK YOU! I love Katniss, but goddamn, people, stop bashing Bella in her honor! KATNISS WOULD NOT APPROVE.

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