Fifty Shades of Grey is a direct rip-off of Twilight, but with explicit sex, and now author Stephenie Meyer is repaying the fan-fiction community by writing something they did years ago: Gender swapping Bella and Edward. For the 10th anniversary of the sparkly vampire series, Meyer wrote a “reimagining” of Twilight, except now Bella is a dude named Beau and Edward’s Edythe.
It’s like the Fionna and Cake episode of Adventure Time, but awful.
Meyer explains in her foreword to [novel] that she decided to go with the gender bending to underscore her position that Bella isn’t a “damsel in distress” as certain critics have charged. Rather, the author insists, the character is a “human in distress,” or as Meyer calls her, “a normal human being surrounded on all sides by people who are basically superheroes and supervillians.” (Via Entertainment Weekly)
Meyer also isn’t happy that the haters think Bella is “too consumed with her love interest, as if that’s somehow just a girl thing.” Gender-swapping your protagonists can be an interesting experiment (like, again, Adventure Time), but here, Meyer isn’t doing it for fun; she’s proving a point. Namely, that Bella, and the entire Twilight series, isn’t a “feminist’s nightmare.”
It is. Bella was literally willing to die for her man, who she devotes her life to. That’s insulting to women, and this is insulting to everyone.
According to the foreword, the rewrite allowed her to correct some errors that always bothered her and to re-edit the piece for grammar and word choice issues. (Via Entertainment Weekly)
I ain’t not sees no problems with Twilight is grammar.
(Via EW)
