Bella Swan : Role Model

I am really not sure what people have against The Twilight Saga.

I think most of their problems with it come from “the sparkly vampire” issue – they think sparkly vampires are stupid, and so the whole film series must be stupid.

But if you actually look at the series as a whole – books and films – I think that you’ll find Bella Swan is a fairly impressive role model for young girls. Hell – for young people in general.

However, there is so much stuff written about Twilight and Bella especially, that it is almost impossible to get down to the truth about the saga. So many people have an opinion, so many people write so much crap that people believe what others write, and not what was originally written.

Bella Swan is a silly little girl who speaks in purple prose and overblown dramatics

Try to remember back to when you were sixteen/seventeen/eighteen. Back to when you were in the first flush of new love.

Try to remember if you were completely self-aware and spoke in adult sentences. Try to remember if you sounded more like Joey Potter or Bella Swan.

Because my bet is you sounded more like Bella than Joey.

Joey, Dawson, Pacey, Jen – as examples of teenagers, they are entirely unrealistic. No one, at the age of sixteen/seventeen is that self-aware and that well spoken.

I certainly wasn’t. When I was in love at that age, I wrote so much crappy poetry, and so much purple prose that it is really quite embarrassing to think about now.

I think everyone who is writing about Bella being a silly little girl is forgetting what their teen years were like.

Bella is slavishly devoted to Edward

I love my girlfriend, and I would live and die for her. If I think about the idea of her leaving me, I am not entirely certain I would be able to carry on as the happy-go-lucky guy I am now.

And while I admit that the three blank chapters in New Moon are not her finest hour, and that throwing herself off a cliff is also not her finest hour, people in love do stupid things – Juliet pretended to be dead, and she is considered to be one of the most romantic figures in English Literature.

Bella submits and becomes entirely submissive in an abusive relationship

Mary mother of god am I SICK of this comment.

Edward refuses to let Bella see Jacob. Even going so far as to stop her from seeing him by messing with her truck.

Now – imagine you have a girlfriend who likes to play Russian Roulette. Who – on a weekend – wants to go down to the local park and point a loaded gun at her head, hoping that that will not be the day the bullet blows her brains out.

Now look at Emily (Sam’s girlfriend). Sam got mad one time – just once – and ripped her face up. The first time Bella meets The Pack, she is almost killed by Paul.

And yet people think it odd that Edward wants to stop her going to meet these people. People think that he is being abusive to her when he wants to stop her going in to a place she might get ripped apart at a moments notice.

“But Jacob loves her, and the rest like her” I hear you say. Well – Sam loved Emily, and yet her face is still all ripped up because he lost his temper.

The wedding night is virtually marital rape

Well – no. Edward does everything he can to prevent her from having sex with him, and yet she forces the issue. (So I suppose from a certain point of view, it is virtually marital rape, but with Bella being the aggressor, rather than the victim – but no one seems to consider that at all. Because Bella is a girl, she apparently must be the victim).

She knows the risks, and she knows what might happen, and yet she wants to experience it before she dies, and with the man she loves.

(She could just go out and bang the first non-vampire she sees, but she wants to lose her virginity to the man she loves. In this day and age, most people would consider that a good thing).

This movie glorifies abortion and those who would force it on women

How? Of everything I have read about Twilight (and I have read a great deal), this is the statement that is the most bollocks.

Everyone tries to talk Bella in to having an abortion, because they think the baby will rip her apart, and she will die having it.

And yet she – the mother, the woman carrying the child – makes the CHOICE to have the child.

This movie should please anyone who thinks abortion is wrong and a crime. Bella is given a choice – a free choice to make up her own mind – and she decides to have the child.

If anything, the anti-choice lobby should embrace this film and celebrate it – Bella is given a choice, and she chooses not to have an abortion. Despite the advice and suggestions she gets, she makes up her own mind and keeps the child.

xoxox

Bella Swan falls in love, stays in love, doesn’t lose her virginity until she marries, doesn’t give in to temptation with anyone else, doesn’t cheat on her husband, decides not to have an abortion but instead to keep her child, and saves the life of her entire coven and family when The Powers That Be come to rip them apart.

How anyone can think she isn’t a perfect role model for young girls is beyond me.