This is going to be a long one...
I lurked this thread for 5 pages before I decided that I couldn't wait until page 140 before replying.
I'd like to start by saying that I agree with most if not all of the points against Edward Cullen. Also, remember that abuse doesn't have to be physical. It can be mental and emotional, too.
I'd also like to say that although I've as of yet only read the first book and seen the first movie, I have read arguments both for and against the whole Twilight "Saga", written by people who have read all the books, even several times over, and include quotes from the books to make sure they get the facts straight and can back up their claims.
Second, I'd like to note that even in just the first 5 pages of this thread, I see many arguments being repeated. One should at least *try* to read some of the arguments before replying so one doesn't just end up saying the same things over and over.
(I'll probably repeat a few arguments myself, but I hope at least to clear a few up so they don't need to be said again)
For people who need more evidence of these points but can't be bothered to read the entire thread or go looking for the facts written in the books, this is a very good video essay that includes not just "it is like this" but "why it is like this" "how it is like this" and several quotes from the books to demonstrate
You Are Bella Introduction
Now for some of my personal opinions:
It's ok to watch someone sleep
if they say it is. But Edward Cullen started watching her sleep
before she said so and not only is that an invasion of her privacy and not only is that creepy, but she can sense that he's there and catches a glimpse of him as she wakes up and she so much as says in the book that she thinks she's losing her mind over him. This clearly indicates that she does not like it and that it is even harmful to her mental state.
The truth of their relationship is
not, as so many fans claim, "True Love". It comes down to physical attraction and obsession.
Bella sees Edward and swoons. "He's so beautiful." She can't stop looking at him and suddenly, everything else is all the more boring. The physical attraction on Edward's side is, other than her pretty looks, her intoxicating blood. (Blood is very physical, if you didn't know.)
Edward sees Bella and is befuddled. "I can't read her mind." She is a mystery to him. He's gotten so used to reading people's minds that he does a surface scan and decides what kind of person they are and swiftly sorts them into categories in his mind. But Bella's mind denies him this.
If he had actually been paying attention, he would realize that she is no different from any other self-absored, ingrate of a shallow chav who's first reason for liking him is his looks. But since he's become too dependent on his mind-reading ability, he is lost and becomes irrationally obsessed with understanding what's happening inside Bella's head. (Kinda creepy, if you ask me.)
This is why he gives her the "psychiatric test", as Bella herself describes it, where he throws all manner of questions at her in a rather compressed space of time to try to compensate for his lack of knowledge about her, or sits quietly and lets her rabble up her entire life story to him. This is why he reads the minds of everyone close to her to try to find out more. This is why he goes through her things without her knowledge. This is the
real reason for watching her sleep. All of this displays obsession and stalking, which (in my opinion) is not romantic.
Knowing all these things about a person also gives one a margine of control over that person. You know better how to talk to them, how to manipulate them, that if you buy them a topaz necklace, they might forgive certain indiscretions...
This brings us to manipulation.
Since I haven't read or seen New Moon, I can't say very much about the particular circumstances of Edward's suicide threats/attempt/etc, but it is true that threats and attempts can be used to control and manipulate people.
For a potentially real-life situation: If you care for your boyfriend and he says he's had such a crappy week that if you don't come for the weekend, (something which has been in debate due to a family reunion or some such) he just won't get out of bed all weekend, neglecting to eat or drink until he just withers away into nothingness and death, what would you do?
Receiving such news would be emotionally jarring and would most likely make you feel/think "He needs me!", "I can't abandon him!" and you would most likely blow off the family reunion to go be with him because "He needs me more than my relatives do. If I don't go to the reunion, there will always be next time, but if I don't go to him, he might die!"
And just like that, the suicide threat has made you change your mind, change your plans and do exactly what the other person wanted you to do.
Although if what I have read from fans is true, it points more to that he is too in love OR obsessed with her to live without her. There is a fine line between love and obsession, so make sure that all your facts are double and tripple checked before you go saying one thing or the other. And by checking facts, I don't mean "read that Meyer says it's true love" I mean check the blatant facts in the books. Even the first time I read the book, I recognized their relationship as obsession rather than any substantial love.
More on manipulation: There is the subtle form of suggestion. Edward tells Bella that her mortal friends are shallow. He clearly indicates that they have no worth in his eyes. And because Bella sees him as perfect, how could his opinion be wrong? Because he can read their minds, this is fact, yes? Well, there is a difference between picking up stray thoughts and actually paying attention to what they're really thinking.
Now, Bella does tend to use and neglect her "friends" quite a bit and does not regard them in any kind of flattering light, calling Mike a dog and Erik a nerd and several girlfriends shallow and uninteresting or "rainy day friends", and she is rather hypocritical about it, so maybe it isn't that big a leap for her to abandon them completely in favor of spending time with Edward, but Edward still did wrong.
And what does Edward do to change her mind or when does he force a decission upon her? Just a quick list:
stare Dragging her to prom.
stare Telling Tyler over the phone that Bella isn't available "any night as far as anyone other than himself is concerned." *
stare Pushing Jacob, Mike, Erik and all other males aside. *
stare Making her dance with him, even though it's the last thing on Earth that she wants to do.
stare Refusing to turn her and then sucking James's venom out of her when she was getting her wish of being turned *not* because it's what was best for her, because becoming a Meyerpire and being instantly healed would be better than months of hospitals and rehab, but because *he* wanted her to stay human.
stare Giving her a surprise birthday party when she didn't want one.
stare Holding immortality over her age-concerned little head to make her marry him.
* Clearly acts of jealousy and possessiveness and a disregard for what Bella thinks of the situation demonstrated by him not asking her opinion before acting.
Many fans hold up the fact that he tried to leave her for her own safety as proof of that he is not stalking her, not obsessed, not trying to manipulate her... Let's review:
In Twilight, after their first few meetings, he disappears to Alaska in an attempt to keep himself from killing her. For her own safety, yes? But why didn't he stay there? Why didn't he let the memory of him fade from her mind and let her continue her mortal life as if they had never met?
Simple answer:
He couldn't stay away. He was obsessed. Obsessed over why she smelled so good, why he couldn't read her mind and, by association only, who she was behind that veil of silence.
He also returned to try to prove something to himself. To see if he could resist her. He honestly didn't know if he could and therefor put her life at risk needlessly just to see if he could control himself. Note the complete lack of concern for her wellbeing in all of this, both physically and mentally. Mentally because surely he must know the effect he has on her. You don't have to be a mind-reader to see her swoon over him.
As for the whole "lying to Charlie" bit... Bella was stupid for not telling him. Yes, teenagers lie to their parents, but this is no normal teen situation, this is life and death. She should have told him.
Edward did tell her to tell Charlie, but whether intentional or not, he used reverse pschology and told someone who is overly concerned for his wellbeing "so if I kill you,
I'll get in trouble." Three guesses as to which half of that sensence she's going to listen to.
Also, Edward could have taken more precautions and safety measures, more than just one mortal knowing where they were. I mean, honestly. He's worried that he might kill her, so he takes her to a meadow, devoid of any human/humanoid life, all alone with her. Romantic? Or just incredibly dangerous? The very least he could have done was have another Cullen chaperon them. That would still be dangerous as Bella is tasty to them as well, but not as much as she is to Edward.
And scaring her repeatedly with his vampirism is not considered a "safety measure". If showing her once isn't enough for her to realize that maybe she shouldn't be with him, then scaring her five more times won't change her mind. The effect of that will either be to whittle down her trust for him, remove her fear of what he is as the unpleasant moment never leads to anything actually harmful, or make her see him as a tortured soul that she needs to nurture, no matter how unpleasant he may be.
Should something have gone wrong that day on the meadow, the worst that would have happened would be that the Cullens would have to move from Forks.
"He should know better. He is, after all a hundfred years old, if we are to believe Meyer."
"But he is still only seventeen and he's never been in a romantic relationship before. It's only natural that he make mistakes."
Okay, make up your minds. Stephie, you too. Is he a hundred or is he seventeen? You can't be both. You can act seventeen, but you have still lived for a hundred years with all the experiences that entails. When not playing the part of the teen, he might sound like a nostalgic old man.
"But he still has the brain chemistry of a teenager!"
Isn't he technically dead? What brain chemistry? And if that really was the case, what seventeen year old with all the hormones that entails can you think of that would stave off sex and relationships for a hundred years? So either Edward is lying or he is a Gary Stu, created for the sole purpose of being Bella's one and only "true love", in which case Meyer did a terrible job, considering that he abuses her emotionally.
That says more about Meyer than anything else. If she had realized this, she probably would not have wanted anybody to read it.
Now for the Meyerpires themselves, I do not consider them to be vampires. They may be "vampiric", but not vampires. Simply drinking blood and being immortal isn't enough. Sunlight should at the very least be unpleasant and shunned, or weaken them, if not full out burn them to a charcole crisp. They should not sparkle and they should not be made of a substance similar to but harder than diamonds.
shmeiliarockie on YouTube, creator of "You Are Bella", puts it very nicely when she says that Meyerpires are "venomous stone-people that drink blood".
There are two main categories of vampires with some overlapping and gray areas. Folklorish vampires and romantized vampires.
Folklorish vampires come in a variety of flavors, most being mindless blood/life-draining ghouls. With these we have all the classics of burning in sunlight and holy water, being repelled by garlic and holy symbols, unable to cross running water, weaknesses to salt, silver, iron, wooden stakes through the heart, etc. They often look like corpses, fangs are not a must, and they are not something you would want to date. Anyone killed by a vampire will become one, or someone who lived a sinful life, or someone who died a violent death, or someone who was improperly buried... (the list goes on, but it is not important to this discussion)
Romantized vampires have existed for some centuries, but didn't really get their start until Bram Stoker wrote "Dracula" in the late 1800's. "Dracula" became very popular due to all the subliminal smut that got past the censors. (Fangs that
get bigger/longer and
penetrate skin and an exchange of fluids... all that stuff.) Development on this lead to "The Vampire Chronicles", "Buffy", "Let the right one in", "World of Darkness", "Blood Ties" etc. where vampires are these beautiful, but dangerous, supernatural creatures of the night. They seduce their victims into the bite, rather than taking it by force, (although force is still an option open to them).
Depending on what story you read, they either infect with one or several bites, or there must be an exchange of blood to turn someone (the latter being my favorite). Crosses, holy water, invitations to enter private homes, wooden stakes... Some of these weaknesses have survived the change, some have not, all depending on what story you read. But sunlight has remained strong, if burning or simply weakening. Coffins have become disposable, but most still need to sleep during the day, and appear as if dead when they do so.
The ugly "Nosferatu" fall between the cracks here, with a more folklorish appearance, but the modern intelligence.
For people who still think that the Cullens are vampires, try reading some other vampires books or watching vampire movies, something with Meyer did
not do.
Meyer refused to expose herself to anyone else's idea of what vampires are so as not to mess up her own ideas. This makes her venomous stone-people who drink blood so far removed from the conventional concepts of vampires that it is nigh on impossible for Bella to have drawn the conclusion of the Cullens being vampires. And "I never see you in the sun" is a big fat lie. She's never seen him in
direct sunlight, but she has
only seen him during the day. She has never seen him drink blood. He is pale, but so is she. And she doesn't know that he is supposedly a hundred years old. So how the heck did a Google search tell her that he was a vampire?
I hope I've managed to cover at least most points without repeating too many mangled words.
Oh, and for the record, I am not jealous of this emotionally abusive relationship. I don't find Robert Pattinson to be handsome at all. I am very happy with my boyfriend, and even if I wasn't, I would not in a million years pick Edward Cullen. If I had to choose a supernatural, I'd much rather have Lestat de Lioncourt.
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