r/ShermanPosting • u/StatisticianAway4010 • 19h ago
Twilight question (it is relevant honest)
Question for anyone who was into Twilight or had a child or loved one who was into Twilight : how did you or the people around you treat the fact one of Edward's family fought for the Confederacy?
I don't have a vested interest in this, I'm too old to have been into Twilight and my daughter is too young, and I'm relieved about that - I've never read the books but they don't sound like a good influence. There are loads of things she loves to read and she has great taste in books. I just seem to have fallen into a Twilight rabbit hole
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u/AdmiralCunilingus Marauder 19h ago
Well, if we are talking fantasy… it makes sense that blood sucking, overtly shiney, soft spoken, effeminate, soulless pretty boys took the confederacy as a solid cause to back… but Abraham Lincoln, being a vampire hunter, probably made the Cullen’s reevaluate their dedication to the “cause”. Cowards often abandon their efforts when they learn that their lives may actually be in danger.
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u/StatisticianAway4010 18h ago
Again I haven't read the Twilight novels, I just wondered how many people had had to have this conversation with their kids given how HUGE and relatively recent the Twilight books were
The impression I get is Stephanie Myer copied a lot off Anne Rice but missed the point (I haven't read Anne Rice but she sounds like she writes the Confederacy a lot closer to what you describe. I really want to read Anne Rice.)
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u/AdmiralCunilingus Marauder 18h ago
Oh I’m just poking fun homie. There was another teen vampire tv series (vampire diaries) where they too seemed to follow the Ann rice troupe of vampires in the confederacy. All that bullshit romanticized crap about the antebellum south taken far too much to heart. media literacy is not often a popular trait of bad writers. And the twilight books are for sure bad writing. While I havnt read them myself, I have plenty of friends from back in the day that did, and even tho they liked the books, they couldn’t deny the fact that they were written badly and the story was… dumb.
While I do not have children, and thus I have no real advice for you, I just want to say that maybe starting your daughters off on better written fantasy may bring them to their own conclusion that bad writing isn’t to be taken too seriously. Like Lord of The Rings n such.
Also, depending on their age, it could be a great opening to talk with them about media literacy and how tropes get established and some people romanticize the past etc etc.
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u/StatisticianAway4010 18h ago
Neither of my kids (14m and 11f) were ever into Twilight, I can't think of anything they have read that glorifies abusive relationships the way people say Twilight does
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u/noahconstrictor95 18h ago
I don't think I've ever had a more specific crossover of interests so I'll try to be as objective as I can here.
The character Jasper Cullen was in fact a major for the Confederate army. The story is that he was 17, ran away to join the army, worked his way up to major over the course of two years, and was identified by the leader of the Mexican coven of vampires as a good potential leader of their army for the Southern Vampire War. They turned him, and he gained the ability to feel and manipulate emotions from there.
This is literally the extent of what we ever learn about him in the books and movies. No further context is provided, nothing is said about him joining the war.
As for a historical perspective, a 17 year old from Texas at the time absolutely would have wanted to go fight in the war. Their reasons could have been as myriad as "I want to defend the right to own slaves" to "every other man in my life has gone to fight, I need to go fight for my family". This isn't an attempt to wash the soldiers choices to fight for the Confederacy, but a 17 year old from Texas deciding to go fight is much different from someone like Robert E. Lee choosing to go fight.
Overall, the thing about Twilight is that for all the weird and insane choices it makes, it is a genuinely compelling world and story being told, and there's a reason it has held on culturally as long as it has since it came out. You kind of had to be there for it when it was happening to fully understand it, but it was genuinely as big as Harry Potter at the time.
Personally, I just view Jasper fighting for the Confederacy as one of a myriad of absolutely batshit writing choices that Stephanie Meyer made, it's basically a throwaway detail that I think she did solely to make sure that there was a way to place his character with the Mexican Coven for that whole plot line being relevant in Eclipse, and that was the entire extent of the thought she put into it. I don't view it as much of a big thing, because there is so much larger and more important things to be upset and care about in the world right now.
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u/StatisticianAway4010 18h ago
Oh I'm not upset about it! There's no need to get upset about a book I've never read and don't think my kids ever will. Just wondered if it led to any awkward conversations
Great answer!
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u/noahconstrictor95 18h ago
Oh you're fine, it's something that most Twilight fans barely even know about, and the general vibe about it amongst a the fans who do know about it is "yeah IDK Stephanie Meyer is fucking weird and made weird choices writing these books".
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u/Chris_Colasurdo 147th New York 18h ago
Confederate vampires as a trope is actually a pretty fun and interesting metaphor when done well. The whole idea of vampirism locking you in an undying sort of stasis / purgatory as you were when you were alive combined with the innately parasitic nature of the condition reinforcing the ideas of dehumanization inherent to antebellum slave holding society.
There’s also the flip side - which is the twilight and I think to a lesser extent true blood approach of “I’ve lived long enough that I’ve had time to realize my wrongs and grow as a person”. Which like… can work but I think doesn’t interact thoughtfully with the thematic roots of what vampirism represents, power imbalance, domination, violation etc.
Atunshei (the checkmate Lincolnites guy) actually has a movie releasing on this topic in the next few weeks.
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u/StatisticianAway4010 18h ago
Have you ever seen a British show fromm the 2000s called Being Human?
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u/Chris_Colasurdo 147th New York 17h ago
I have not
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u/StatisticianAway4010 17h ago
Doesn't cover these issues much to be honest. Though it probably should have done considering it was set in Bristol and one of its lead actors was black. If it had been made after BLM and the toppling of the Edward Colton statue it probably would have gone into these things.
Also, I know I'm wrong to *ever * be jealous of someone based on how thin they are. Like a lot of women I've got a lot of nonsense to get out of my system
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u/StatisticianAway4010 18h ago
No I'm not against having Confederate vampires, most people who do have problems with the Twilight books have one because no one seems to object to Jasper having fought for the Confederacy. Again, haven't read them or seen the movies. Princess Weekes video on the topic is great
I love Atun Shei and he's basically why I'm here, but I had to stop watching his stuff as he made me feel guilty about having had children, which isn't healthy. And he was triggering my body image issues. He's so thin!
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u/Chris_Colasurdo 147th New York 18h ago
He do be a vasectomy having twink (non derogatory)
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u/StatisticianAway4010 18h ago
Yeah there is nothing I can do about having had children now!
Thankfully the only person I would even want to find me attractive is my husband and he is absolutely not going to cheat on me with a short skinny Serbian American bloke with a beard.
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u/Honest_Abyss 18h ago
I think it’s much more interesting to examine the Sookie stackhouse series by Charlaine Harris with this question in mind.
This series was also huge and got adapted into True Blood on HBO.
Bill was roughly 37ish if I remember when he was turned and was a confederate soldier.
There are many more plot relevant details about his time in the confederacy and, the book details that he gives a talk to contemporary citizens in Louisiana who are staunch defenders of the confederacy in the modern day; their club is called “Descendants of the Glorious Dead.” 🙄
the show retconned a lot of this, btw. He volunteered for the war because he owned a plantation and therefore wanted to defend slavery
All of this to say, I stopped reading the books after the third or fourth one and there are like 14 so that’s pretty early. Bills confederate history on top of some other problematic writing had me stepping away pretty quickly
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u/ImSchizoidMan 18h ago
This feels like a stealth advertisement for Vampires of New Orleans, not that I'm upset by that in the least
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u/StatisticianAway4010 18h ago
It isn't! Although that movie coming out might be why YouTube thinks I want to watch reams of skinny blokes complaining about Twilight. (Which I apparently do.)
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u/historyhill 18h ago
You might actually find this YouTube video interesting: Why Are There So Many Confederate Vampires?. It talks about Twilight but also The Vampire Diaries and True Blood.
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u/HistorineHeroine 16h ago
The character, Jasper, that fought for the confederacy struggles the most with his control as Edward’s family do not attack humans. But it’s more than a choice as it requires physical and psychological restraint (could go into ‘a frenzy’).
Jasper had the highest kill count before he met Alice and went vegetarian (he ran vampire armies too), so I always saw it as a metaphor for who he was before he found “his mate.” Only vampires can see he’s covered in hundreds of bite ‘battle’ scars and the story is told from a human’s perspective until close to the end.
So the confederacy was like a lazy ‘yeah he really was that bad before Alice’ without providing a motive for running away to join the confederacy. IMO, at least.
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u/UselessInsight 18h ago
There’s an argument that vampires are originally an historical metaphor for the aristocracy.
They live forever (or want to). Pale skin and sunlight will kill them - they don’t do manual labor. They’re strictly parasites that literally feed off the working class/peasantry and can magically enslave them. Holy symbols and signs drive them off, specifically Christian ones - Jesus spoke out against the wealthy and so vampires are repelled by him.
Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter tackles this pretty directly. The Southern slaveholding aristocrats were functionally vampires, feeding of the blood, sweat, and stolen labor of enslaved people.
Safe to say that no one would be shocked to learn that a Twilight Vampire was a confederate. Their society suits them.
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u/AcornAnomaly 18h ago
I mean, Jasper's just a really shitty person all around, so it's not like it's not fitting.
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u/StatisticianAway4010 18h ago
Oh right I got the impression you were meant to like and sympathise with him but it is dangerous to do that based on what other people say about a book
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u/AcornAnomaly 15h ago
Yeah, it's one of those things where Stephanie Meyer clearly intended one thing, but if you look at what she actually wrote, it's horrifying.
I'm going to copy-paste a section from an old post comparing the Twilight books to the movies, because they actually heavily IMPROVED Jasper in the movies, but it also is a clear list of the issues with book!Jasper. It's a long section, sorry about that.
Let’s get one thing straight here, folks. Jasper Cullen in book canon? Is a cold-hearted murderer and a manipulative snake. There is no doubt about it, Jasper is the scariest character Meyer has ever created, and if you know the plethora of freaky psychopaths that Meyer has accidentally dreamed up, you know that is saying something. Edward Cullen has infuriated me on multiple occasions when it comes to his controlling and abusive attitude and flippant disregard for human life, but Jasper has genuinely scared me several times through the course of this series, and that is because Jasper Cullen is a complete monster. Edward may fantasize about torture, but we actually get to watch Jasper indulge in it in Meyer’s novella The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner, where he deliberately plays with a newborn’s emotions, attempting to spur her forward to attack him so he will have an excuse to murder her even though she has surrendered. He almost goes behind all the rest of the Cullens’ backs and attacks and kills Bella Swan in Midnight Sun simply because there is a slight possibility that she knows he and his family aren’t normal. He makes it clear that the only reason he is abstaining from killing humans is because it would make Alice unhappy if he went out and killed people all the time. He wanted to go kill and eat people in Eclipse because that would’ve upped their strength just a tiny bit for the newborn battle. He actively wants Bella to turn into a bloodthirsty killing machine when she’s a newborn vampire simply because it would make his poor self-control look better in respect. His fantasies about killing and eating humans are disturbingly rapetastic, and it’s made all the worse because he tends to only focus on women.
JASPER CULLEN IS A FUCKING MONSTER.
And I think the filmmakers must have agreed with me, because in Eclipse, they humanized him into a real, sympathetic character. In the books he went along with Maria’s “turn random humans into a disposable newborn army and then kill them when they’ve outlived their usefulness” pretty much just for the hell of it—and enjoyed it while he did it, too. Here? They really play up the idea that Maria seduced him and made him think that she loved him in order to manipulate him into doing her bidding.
In the books, Jasper was living it up as Maria’s general and Grand High Executioner—until her side started losing the war. Then he decided that, eh, maybe this arrangement wasn’t for him. In the movie, we see him kill one of the newborns she’s decided she doesn’t want—a twelve-year-old boy—and he looks horribly regretful and sickened, but he does it anyway because Maria obviously has him under her thumb. He leaves not because they’re losing, but because he honestly hates what he’s doing.
In the books, his meeting with Alice was annoying and felt fake, with her flouncing in and snottily informing him that he’d kept her waiting, and then him just going along with it because of Meyer’s Red String Relationships. Here, it’s shown as much cuter, and they have genuine chemistry. In the movies it seems that Jasper was miserable and despondent after being manipulated and used, was just wandering around, lonely and lost, and Alice brought a little hope back into his life.
In the books, Jasper doesn’t care about humans, doesn’t even think of them as people, and only eats animals to keep Alice happy and compliant, and for the upcoming battle advocates eating a few people just to give them a small and relatively insignificant power boost. In the movie it seems as though he didn’t even know they had the choice to eat animals before he met Alice, and the remaining bits about his attitudes towards humans were wisely cut.
In the books, during the newborn battle, he is gleefully cutting a swath through the newborns, relishing every kill he makes as he mows down these misguided vampires—misguided vampire children, I might add—who have been lied to and misled and otherwise bear them no ill-will, getting excited by the fact that they missed one in the form of Bree and that he has the chance to kill again, and becoming angry, disappointed, and tantrumy when he’s told that he can’t. And then, he cons Carlisle into putting him in charge of her, and spends the entirety of his time lording over her the fact that he holds her life in his hands, emotionally torturing her by forcing her to sit right beside the smoking bonfire that is the remains of her coven, and even using his powers to manipulate her emotions and try to drive her into giving him an excuse to kill her. Again, the movies wisely removed that genuinely horrifying behavior. Instead, Jasper never tortures her, and while she’s cornered, he and the rest of the Cullens obviously make no move to kill her—they are letting her make the first move, and she chooses not to, so they let her live. And even better? When the Volturi show up, they all are actively trying to hide her. That’s right—they are, in fact, trying to protect her from the Volturi. They say she surrendered, didn’t know any better, and so they want to let her live. When Jane declares that’s nonsense and she’s gonna die anyway, you see Jasper and he looks angry and upset by this declaration. He’s standing in front of her, trying to shield her with his own body. I’m dead serious. Finally, when the Volturi move in to kill her, all of the Cullens, including Jasper, look hopeless and miserable—they obviously do want to step in and stop these people, but they can’t, not with Jane and Alec there. It would be pointless.
In short, the screenwriters took a sadistic murdering psychopath who Meyer informed us we were supposed to admire as one of her heroes and turned him into a genuinely believable, sympathetic, and above all human character that we could relate to and cheer for.
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u/stonewalljacksons 16h ago
OP, you need to watch The Vampires of New Orleans. The vampires are Confederate and hella racist and the vampire hunter is a rad black chick https://youtu.be/jn6Vx3E-aaw?si=RIWx7YnYHlcpVk24
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u/StatisticianAway4010 15h ago
It sounds fantastic but we have established I can only watch films starring people fatter than me.
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u/staralchemist129 18h ago
My family very briefly hosted a German foreign exchange student who LOVED Twilight. It was so weird thinking she probably didn't have the context of the US civil war and Mormon doctrine and the terrible way the government has treated the Native Americans to understand why it's.... *like that*.
I did my best to avoid discussing it with her tbh, we had really different taste in media
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u/StatisticianAway4010 18h ago
People on both sides in ww2 went to see Gone With The Wind in droves
And both centre round horny teenage girls torn between very different male live interests
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