Why I Like Bella

So, I've been considering writing this for awhile, as in months, but I've put it off again and again because I've wanted to do justice to this post.

I have several people who read my stories who are legitimately hater of Bella. I've had people tell me she's shallow, that the only thing she wanted was immortality, that she was too plain, etc, etc. 

I could, and actually have, argued on each point I've been given, but I'm not going to do that here. Instead, I'm just going to come out point-blank. Bella is a one-dimensional character, and I know a lot of people will disagree with me on that, but the thing is that Bella's emotions are almost never shown the Twilight Saga, her logic behind her decisions is completely missing, and anything that could have truly allowed a person to see full depth into Bella isn't there. 

But I'm not saying that's a bad thing. In fact, I'm relatively sure it is why she is so compelling as a character. Because she is so... Well... plain. Almost anyone can find a connection to her. A lot of her logic and drive, etc is missing which allows people to reach their own conclusions about her as a character and it allows readers to read between the lines in such a way that they can imagine their own logic. 

And it's not just Bella, by the way, it is basically that way for every character in the story. 

Because of the way the saga is written, there are huge gaps where you're left having to guess for yourself as to what really happened, as to why such a thing was done in whatever way it was done, and more.

Now, I will say this, if the books were supposed to show every nuance and be completely revealed than the saga was really poorly written, but if this was exactly what Meyer actually wanted - if she wanted people to analyze and think for themselves and ultimately reach their own conclusions - than she is brilliant, possibly one of the greatest authors to ever exist. And I don't know which one it is. I'm also not sure it matters.

But, to get back to the point, it is that plainness of her that makes me want to write about her and it's also why I don't usually label my stories as ooc, because depending on how a person reads between those lines for Bella's motivations, my Bella's truly aren't ooc.

Why Renesmee?

So I'll write from the POV of close to any character in the Twilight Universe, but there are certain characters I like writing more than others. One of which is Bella (post still to come), another is Beau, and my third is Renesmee.

Now I know that not everyone is enamored by the final book in the Twilight Saga. I've heard the arguments against the fourth book and while I won't disagree with those opinions, I personally find a different book in the saga to be the greater evil New Moon.

Here's the thing though, I love Renesmee as a character because she is literally the most blank canvas of all the characters in the book. The whole life span that we get to see her is a span of a few months, and during that brief time she grew to a physical age of maybe four years old.

So she still was an infant and we have no idea how her life will turn out. We have no idea if she'll be a killer, a mother, a lover, or anything else. The world is the playground with her.

For me, this makes her a perfect character.

Why Twilight?

I've had people tell me in the past that I must really love Twilight. I've also had people ask why I write the stories I do and I've had people insinuate that I'm pro Edward or that I'm pro Jake, etc, etc.

So I thought I'd talk about this. And I'd start with the first piece. I do not love or even like Twilight. And I never will. That's not to say I hate Twilight, because I don't.

The Twilight Saga is interesting, intriguing, etc. The books and the movies, in my opinion, are neither good nor bad. They are, however, compelling.

The first thing about Twilight that I recognized is that the series is about somebody average. Somebody normal. Which is extremely different from almost any other book series out there that I've read/am familiar with. In most books, the main character is extraordinary in some way.

Now, it's true, by the end of second book it's pretty obvious she's not as ordinary as it feels in the first, and by the end of the final book it's clear as day. But, big BUT, it's that first book that can compel a reader to continue. So that's what pulled me in, the ordinariness of it. The fact that it's a character who almost anybody can associate with.

And it's because of the compelling nature of the first book that I pull the books out and reread them every few months.

It's also why I write about Twilight. It's compelling.

But it is not one of my favorite books, it's not in my top one hundred or even my top thousand. Then again, I'll never write a fanfic about something I truly love (with one exception from more than nine years ago, and I'll call that the frustrations of a twenty-three year old and leave it at that).

I'm not the type to change something that is already amazing.

I'm also not the type to write fanfics about stuff that I hate (again there's been an exception and there probably will be one more at some point in the future)

If Twilight ever stops compelling me, I'l probably give up writing about it. I don't see that happening any time soon though.

Now, as to what team I am. I'm Team Mike. Get over it.

Inspiration Behind Necromancy in the Fifth

So occasionally I get inspired by the most random of things. The whole idea around this was based off of a single line of a single episode of Supernatural.

I've watched Supernatural since it started and though I find most of the more recent seasons to be meh... there's been a few here and there that have truly been intriguing. One of the most intriguing is an episode in season seven when the brothers visited a town called Lily Dale. 

For the record, Lily Dale, NY is a real place and supposedly is truly one of the most psychic places in the world. Now, the reality is that the vast majority of people in Lily Dale - both in the show and in real life - are frauds. They use cheap tactics like lights attached to strobe technology, holograms from projection devices, and more. 

But in the show they go to a museum in Lily Dale and at the museum they meet a curator who tells them the story of Kate and Margaret Fox, or at least an adulterated version, because the Fox Sisters were real people - as like the town. In the show, after he tells them about the sisters, the curator then goes onto grab his arm and proceeds to tell a message to Dean from an old friend beyond the grave.

The assumption viewers are left with is that he's a real psychic, but that's wrong. A psychic might be able to read your future, tell you your thoughts, tell you someone else's opinion of you, or even cause some sort dream weave experience - all forms of psychics each have their own titles, but I'm not going there in this post. But they do not conjure or talk to the dead. 

Necromancers talk to the dead. 

So when I recently rewatched that episode, the assumption they left viewers with bugged me. It made me want to write a story about necromancy.

As for the decision to leave it in the family, I guess we could say that the Fox sisters inspired it.

The story itself is one part science, two mysticism, three parts tragedy, four parts romance, five parts supernatural, and all dark.

So... welcome to the dark side. 

Inspiration Behind The Hunter

As I'm prepping the fifth chapter of The Hunter, I wanted to discuss what inspired this story originally. When I first started getting heavily into Twilight fanfiction back in 2009, I quickly delved into dozens of YA series. Among them was the Evernight Series by Claudia Gray.

If you've never read the books, the premise around them was about a girl, Bianca Oliver, who was a born vampire going to school at a place strictly for special or supernatural species, specifically vampires, though there are humans that go there as well. Among the humans at the school was a boy named Lucas who is secretly a vampire hunter. Bianca and Lucas fall in love making this huge forbidden love saga. The story series was very dramatic and while I loved the first two books, the second half of the series was nowhere near as intriguing to me.

But it gave me a crazy idea of how I could take some of the core theory from that series and apply it to the world of Twilight.

Evernight Series inspired The Hunter but there is almost nothing that is obvious and fully apparent.

In Evernight, it was the boy that was the hunter and he was part of a group called Black Cross.

In The Hunter, it's Bella who's the hunter and the Cullens are vampires. There are multiple hunting factions, not just one, and the one Bella belongs to is called Rose.

As the story proceeds there will be little nods to some of the ideas that were inspired from Evernight, but this is not a crossover and there's nothing directly from that series.

A Quick Note on The Emotional Roller Coaster Of Life

So this is a little about why I made it a drabble fic. I'll be the first to admit I haven't read a lot of drabble fics. In fact, in my ten years of reading fanfics, I think I've read four or maybe five of them. Of those, I don't think any of them did chapters as long or as detailed as I'm doing.

I know I read one where every chapter was approximately seventy-five words, and to me there's just no way to capture every thing that needs to be captured in such a short amount of words.

Originally, The Emotional Roller Coaster Of Life was actually supposed to have much bigger chapters, fitting everything that would happen in a day into the same chapter. Of course, in that original version, everything was in first person (and if you look through the first thirty chapters you may catch a couple errors where it's still in first).

For me though, I'm all about challenging myself, putting myself outside of my comfort zone, trying new things, etc. So not only is this story the first AH fanfic I've ever written, but I wanted to push my limits in other ways too. That's why this story deals with a lot of things that go on in the real world every day; ptsd, depression, drug abuse, infidelity, phobias, racism, adoption, etc.

When I finally figured out where I wanted this story to start, in the prolegomenon set five years before the first chapter, it was what inspired me to break this down into a drabble-esque fic. I decided to set limits and try to stay in them as best as possible. My limits, of course, was no less than 300 words and no higher than 1000. (I'll be the first to admit I've failed several times)

I wanted to set about a story where every chapter, while short, had both a clear start and clear end, as well as every chapter having meaning and depth. There is no unimportant chapter.

So it may not be a traditional drabble because the chapters are significantly longer than normal ones, but it is  still a drabble.

The Inspiration Behind It's A Twin Thing

So, as I already mentioned in the last chapter part of the inspiration, specifically the part that has to do with their very unique mental connection, is one of the oldest and most common folktales in the world. Throughout mythology, fables, myths, etc... there are myths of a parent or a village elder giving up their life, their very soul even, so that a young child with no will of it's own could survive. Working from that idea, what if the life that was give was another child instead? If Bella's soul was used to revive Beau, than is she the spirit-self (or shadow-self) or is he? So there's some open ended interpretation here, but you can decide whichever way you wish. I will say this, that though they share a spirit, they are both in fact human in one way at least – wherein they both bleed, age, and can potentially die.

But more than that, is the fact that because I've written Twilight stories for ten years now, I've written a lot from Bella's perspective, and far more recently (as in about a year and a half ago) I started writing a continuation of Life and Death, which of course means the perspective is from Beau. Even though the two characters are supposed to be gender-swaps of each other, I so far have found them to not be quite the same. That, in large part, inspired me to mesh them.

But I didn't just want to make another Twilight remakes, I wanted to push forward and past the normal world of Twilight, introduce types of supernaturals - and even  other-natural. As I continue the story, I hope I inspire people to think outside the box and take stories, be they fanfiction or original fictions in routes other than what has become essentially tradition.

On the other end of that though, for the purposes of my story, I want you to question what is? and what isn't?

The Position Behind My Continuation of Life and Death

So, as I opened up Death and Rebirth: New Moon Reimagined, I tried to imagine what would have happened after Life and Death now that Beau was a vampire. Especially if I followed the general plotline of the rest of the Twilight Saga. This brought forth a number of challenges. 

In the original Twilight Saga, it is this really sappy teenage love story with small hints at deeper meanings and thought processes. The first time I read the complete saga, I read it in much that way - as a sappy teenage love story.

But I needed to find more meaning, more depth, than just that. So I read it again, and again, and again (you get the picture). A little background on me is that I'm a lawyer with a major in psychology. So to put that into perspective, I need to suss things out, need to analyze, over analyze, and ultimately understand every little detail of something I become obsessed with. This would be why I've read the Twilight Saga well over twenty times. I could go in depth into my thoughts on Bella, Edward, Jacob and the other characters in the Twilight Saga (in fact I probably will, in some other post(s)), but that's not the purpose of this post.

The Twilight Saga has a lot of different changes that happen to the characters, but it never goes into detail on the changes. The focus wasn't on the character growth, the emotional development, or the maturing of the characters in general. It was all there, in the background, but it wasn't a focus. Instead, the focus was on a sappy teenage romance that had no morality or anything else behind it.

So going into my stories, I wanted the characters to still have that ultimate sappy romance, but I wanted there to be reason behind it, I wanted people to actually see the growth of the characters. The problem is that the main characters, Beau and Edythe, are both vampires, both turned at seventeen. So barring major influence they can't change. A "real life" romance would never survive if all it was was an early stage first love with no depth behind it.

Because of the way vampires are in the Twilight universe, Beau isn't just going to wake up one day and be a mature adult (he can't sleep), Edythe would never instantly move away from that overprotective vampire faze. There are a lot of psyche flaws - for a lack of a better word - in both of the main characters. And since vampires are stuck in their ways and almost never change without major things happening, it makes it difficult to have these characters grow.

For Edythe, walking away from Beau because she believed it would save him and then believing he was killed has helped her to grow into a more mature woman, watching him walk away and actually be with Jules - at least for a short while - made her come even farther into her own. Obviously, Beau didn't get to see most of that growth as he wasn't there for it, but it's hinted at through the first half of Rebirth and Affliction. The thing with Edythe though is that she was no longer a child when she was turned. In the early 1900s a seventeen year old would most likely already be at that point where they're starting to be courted, where they're learning to be a homemaker, learning how to raise children, and more. Edythe wouldn't have quite been an adult when she was turned, but she definitely wasn't what we consider to be as a typical teen in today's terms

Beau, on the other hand is more of a typical teenager. He's just a seventeen year old boy who was turned at that cusp of adulthood.  He didn't grow up in a time of war, disease and/or depression, he never had that kind of experience. He never truly had a chance to grow up at all. (Born middle age and all that be damned, he's still a kid). To top all of that off, he was stubborn as hell when he was human so that comes through in spades now that he's a vampire. As a result, Beau's journey is more difficult. It takes multiple metaphorical 4x4's whacking him over the head to get him to grow.  Having him deal in depression, anger, bloodlust, and more have helped to develop the backbone behind that growth. As we go into the second half of Rebirth and Affliction, the final major metaphorical 4x4 will hit him. It's that one, the major one actually, that will finally break through that stubborn wall in his mind.

There's more to these stories than just that emotional growth, but that particular part of the stories is about to hit it's climax, at least where Beau and Edythe are concerned (Jules growth is still to come).  

Hopefully I have done justice to the struggles, setbacks, and general state of continuity that will allow these characters to truly find love, respect and happiness in the long run.

The Emotional Roller Coaster Of Life Inspiration

So where'd I come up with the idea of The Emotional Roller Coaster Of Life, or TERCL (as I sometimes abbreviate it to myself)? There are many parts to this story that have extremely rough basings on my history and history of my family. But they are also inspired by the Twilight Saga.

The nine primary characters, while all very OOC when compared to the Twilight Saga on the outside when looking at an in depth look aren't.

In Twilight, Bella was in love with both Edward and Jacob and was more of an optimist than a pessimist. This Bella is very similar. She is in love with both and is ultimately undecided about who she belongs with. But, unlike Twilight Bella, her life has been a little harder, because her mom ran off when she was pregnant with her and Bella spent the first nine years of her life only with her crack addict mother.

Jacob was always in love with Bella until late in Breaking Dawn when he imprinted on her daughter, but there was a moment in the chapter's from Jacob's POV where it almost felt like the story could go in a Jacob/Leah direction. If that had happened, it would have been very slow to occur. Eventually, Seth, Quil and Embry were all members of his pack. Also, Jacob had a temper. So in TERCL, he still has that temper, and he loves both Bella and Leah, while Seth, Quil and Embry are all his little brothers.

The biggest things for actually both Edward and Alice are this love for their family and their supernatural gifts. So to bring that forward in my story, I wanted them to be part of a family unit, to be close, which is why their twins. There's no supernatural in this story, but how could bring forward things like hearing voices, being in a realm outside yourself, etc... that is part of what brought me to the decision to make it so they both have a history of abuse and their choice of coping mechanisms.

As for Rosalie, in the Twilight Saga, one of her biggest regrets was not being human, because she wanted the ideal life that women in the early 1900s, she wanted the perfect husband, the kids, the white picket fence. At the time periods she was human, those were driving desires for a lot woman. In my story, she is still driven, but it's by the things that a lot of this time period want. She wants a successful fortune five-hundred business, wants the solid future, wants to never need for anything.

Emmett has often been considered as being bear-like and being protective. He's also a bit of a joker and very sexual. So here you have Emmett as a cop, the chief of police actually, and he takes his job seriously, but he's often seen as a joker. He's a typical lady's man. He likes sex and he's not all that particular about who he gets it from. That will change as the story develops.

Then there's Jasper. He was always one of the most serious characters in the books, had a history with war and always seemed a little on the fringe. But he was madly in love with Alice. In this book, she is still his whole world, he's still too serious, still has a history with war.

Leah and Seth round out my major character, but they were relatively minor in the Twilight Saga. In the saga they were siblings and Leah had a history of being in love with a man she'd never be able to truly have, while Seth was younger, a little too innocent with an issue of hero worship for not only Edward, but Jacob as well. In this book, some of that is apparent, Leah is in love with a man who's married to another woman, and she thinks of Seth as a crutch more than anything else. While Seth still looks up to Jake, his brother, in matter of fact, he looks up to his so much that he aspires to be him.

So that rounds the main characters out. This story, as a whole, is going to be very angsty and not everyone will get a Happily Ever After, though most will. This is a story that brings a lot supernatural characters and humanizes them, gives them human issues, with ultimately human resolutions. For those that are reading this... be prepared for difficult journey.