this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2025
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Stephenie Meyer.
Hear me out. Were the books well written? No. Did they describe very toxic and harmful relationship dynamics? Yes. Did they contain weird morals? Also yes.
These are all things that can be justly criticised. And there is probably a lot more to criticise. But did Stephanie Meyer, and to some extent her readers, really deserve the huge wave of hate they got? Were the books really objectively worse than other YA fiction? Or was it just because they were popular among young women?
I was a teenager when the books came out and loved them. (Though even then I did not understand why they needed to marry so young and she lost me with the whole Renesmee thing). Now I cringe hard about almost any aspect of them, but hate is going a bit overboard.
And at least Meyer (to my knowledge) didn't try to push her weird worldviews onto us outside of her book, unlike JKR.
I've heard very little hate for Stephanie but plenty for Twilight the series. Most of the general public that would be unjustly hating on her probably don't know her name, tbh. Maybe I'm just living in a fairy tale land? 🤷
Contra's video about twilight really got me to rethink Meyer. I'm not calling her a master of her craft like Tamsyn Muir, Arkaday Martine, or Ursula K. LeGuinn or anything, but she wrote something that a ton of people loved. Not all art needs to be particularly skillfully made or particularly deep to be cherished. And in retrospect it's clear that the backlash was largely because it was primarily loved by teenage girls and middle aged women. I know that's why I judged it.
Also Meyer has just remained a general class act despite the bullying, which speaks to her character and is refreshing compared to the other major YA author of her era.
Complete side note: I love seeing Ursula K. LeGuinn mentioned when talking about masters of the craft. She's a god damned genius and the entire reason I got into fantasy, which is the reason I read so much to this day.
To at least pretend to be on topic: a lot of folks, myself especially, missed out on a lot of really cool shit because it was enjoyed by teen girls. I was bad about making fun of those things (I hated anything popular for a long time, especially if it was aimed in that particular direction). Twilight was not for me, but good for her for putting out stuff people enjoyed. Very few people have the honor of doing that and I'm happy for her.
Moreover, Meyer matured as an author. Her book The Chemist is a genuinely excellent genre-bending espionage romance thriller, which her fans hated because it wasn’t about vampire porn.
i’ll die on the hill that the twilight series is closer to outsider art than it is to pure schlock. if you consider her background (married young, super mormon), the story starts to read a lot more like escapist fantasy rather than “just teenage romance”.
and don’t even get me STARTED on alice. re-read like ANY alice parts of those books and tell me that smeyer isn’t a little bit gay.
hard agree on the toxic and harmful relationship dynamics tho 😬
I totally see your point with Meyer