Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga is still very popular even years later. Why are vampires so popular with teenagers? But why are so many teenagers (and adults too) all over the world literally addicted to Edward Cullen, Bella Swan and their adventures? We conducted an investigation, on fan forums in particular. To understand a little bit better your daughter or son’s love for Twilight, here are some keys.
A romantic story
Stephenie Meyer does not hide it, she was strongly influenced by Shakespeare. It is true that in Twilight, we sometimes relive the impossible love of “Romeo and Juliet”. A risk in addition: Edward Cullen, vampire of his state, should not let himself go too much … for fear of sucking the blood of his dear and tender Bella Stone … A love a little silly that plays a lot on the “I love you, me neither” that appeals enormously to young girls. What woman never knows would have never wanted to wear the moonstone ring of Bella Swan and seduce a charming vampire like Robert Pattinson?
The vampire as a metaphor for adolescence
And if this story of vampires appeals so much to young people, it is because the heroes of this series are like them, in the sense that they are high school students, who go to school, who have friends, enemies, heart stories, family. The promise of identification is kept.
Except that they are vampires… And this is what makes them even closer to them, paradoxically! Because the vampire, what is it? He is a being who floats, who wanders: he wanders between centuries, he has no age. And he floats between the normal world, where he lives, and the fantastic world from which he comes. Basically, he has trouble finding his place in time and space. This age where one wanders between childhood and adulthood, between a still tenacious attraction for the innocent and imaginary world of childhood and a movement which pushes him more and more towards adult life, with its batch of duties, of responsibilities.
A natural fascination for death
There is still the morbid side of the vampire, a blood drinker. If they like it so much, it is because death is always a source of fascination for the teenager. If a teenager didn’t wonder about death, it would be disturbing! To rub up against it, via films or books, to wonder about it, is, for him, a way of getting to know himself, of testing his limits. To feel existing, quite simply. And the vampire is a good vehicle for his questioning, since we know him to be in the grip of this morbid impulse at every moment.
But it is especially a figure which returns to the murder, to the cannibalism… The fundamental taboos. In other words, he has, by nature, the means to free himself from all the taboos, from all the rules which found the society. It embodies, in this sense, the absolute freedom. What, for a teenager, makes of it an object of fascination without equal. That brings back it to fantasies of omnipotence. Through this hero, he also frees himself from the law; he can do what he wants, without limit.