As usual, I loved the podcast – I always especially like the themes you choose. Glad that you mentioned at the end how you don’t project onto Bella. It’s something I take issue with book reviewers about. They often try to explain the appeal of the books by saying that Bella is nothing but a blob that teenage girls can project themselves onto disregarding the themes of life and death, the tranformative power of love, finding your tribe, etc.

Anyway, I just want to to defend Edward a little bit here… First of all, as you probably already know, this began as an exercise in developing Edward’s character for Twilight. The extended “Biology class” scene was on the website for years and included much of the “monster within” stuff that Shannon hates so much. It’s cheesy as heck, but it doesn’t offend me in the way it could because it’s kind of an initial reaction of Edward’s. If you think about his POV, he has been struggling with his nature as a vampire vs. what he feels is morally right, but he in no way feels equal to humans. He has sympathy for them, even kindness and generosity, but he has largely forgotten his humanity. So I would argue that it is accurate to initially see Bella as some kind of personal demon. See this is what I like about the Edward character, he is really flawed – particularly when it comes to personal relationships – but he learns. And here is the real appeal of Edward – he struggles with all this, makes mistakes, apologizes, changes his ways, keeps working at it for BELLA. It’s what we all do with our significant others, with our children, with our friends because those people are important to us. We keep at it and don’t give up when it gets difficult because that’s what life and love is all about. The opposite is all around us; you don’t have to look far to see people avoiding commitment (and I’m not talking about marriage here) so it’s somewhat refreshing to see characters struggling to find common ground and creating their own “family” even at great odds.