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"If I could dream at all, it would be about you. And I'm not ashamed of it."
Edward to Bella, page 294 of Twilight

A series of young adult Paranormal Romance novels by Stephenie Meyer, and the title of the first book.

High school student Bella Swan moves to the small town of Forks, Washington to live with her father. There she meets and almost instantly falls in love with Edward Cullen, a beautiful, mysterious boy in her science class, soon revealed to be a vampire who sparkles.

Bella, meanwhile, turns out to be a very special girl for Edward. For some reason, Edward is:

  1. unable to use his vampire powers to read her mind
  2. unusually thirsty for her blood
  3. madly in love with her

So Edward wants to form a relationship with Bella while resisting the urge to suck her dry, as well as protecting her from other vampires who also begin to hunt her.

The main series consists of four books (Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, Breaking Dawn). Meyer had plans to make a P.O.V. Sequel called Midnight Sun, which is the plot of Twilight from Edward's point of view. After the manuscript was leaked, the project was put on hold for several years, eventually being completed and published in 2020. Meyer has also written a 200 page novella called The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner, which came out on June 5, 2010. In 2015, for the 10th anniversary of the series, Meyer released a gender-swapped version of the first book featuring Beau Swan and Edythe Cullen, titled Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined.

Books in this series

Main series

Others

The books were adapted into a massively successful film series entitled The Twilight Saga, beginning with Twilight in 2008 and ending with the second part of Breaking Dawn in 2012. It helped launch the careers of Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson. In 2015, a collection of seven short films titled The Storytellers: New Voices of the Twilight Saga was released, which explore background events in the Saga. The segments can be watched online.

There are also graphic novel adaptations covering the first book and the first half of New Moon. An adaptation of the second half of New Moon has been announced but delayed indefinitely.

Not to be confused with the numerous other works and characters with the name "Twilight".


These books and films contain examples of:

  • Actionized Adaptation: The films tend to have a lot more action. In Eclipse, we actually see the fight between the protagonists and the newborn vampire army (which was only mentioned in the book itself), and in Breaking Dawn Part 2, the film's climax includes a long battle scene. (In the book, though the characters spend much of the third act preparing in case of a fight, the final stand-off is resolved by talking.) Ultimately, the fight did turn out to be All Just a Dream, but we still see it happen. And that's before getting into the original plan that Paramount had for adapting the book when they had the rights, which would've been closer to a teen version of Underworld (2003) than to the books.
  • The Alleged Car:
    • Bella's classmate Tyler drives a van—a 1980s Chevy Astro to be specific. All we know about it is that it nearly crushes Bella when Tyler is in the driver's seat. It really would have crushed her if Edward hadn't gotten between her and the vehicle.
    • Subverted with Bella's truck. While on the outside it looks like a huge, ugly clunker, its engine has been lovingly rebuilt and maintained and it runs perfectly. The truck holds a fond place in fandom and anti-fandom alike for being one of the few things Bella seems genuinely enthusiastic over.
  • all lowercase letters: The book titles are written this way.
  • All Women Are Lustful: Especially Bella. Other female characters display this trope, like Tanya and her succubus "sisters", and Rosalie, who is known to have spent many nights having loud sex with her husband.
  • Alternative Foreign Theme Song: The Japanese version of New Moon uses Kato Miliyah's "Destiny" as its theme song.
  • Ancestral Name: Quil Ateara. In Eclipse, while discussing the question of who Embry's father is, Quil Ateara Sr. is one of the possibilities mentioned. Quil's grandfather is introduced to the readers as Old Quil. In New Moon, Jake says he's descended from Quil Ateara, and subsequently clarifies that this is the great grandfather of the Quil Ateara from the books. And according to the Twilight Illustrated Guide, even that Quil Ateara is the second. Lampshaded by Jake, who says it's a "hand-me-down name" when introducing Quil.
  • Antiquated Linguistics: According to Bella, Edward, and by extension the rest of the Cullens, sometimes use old fashioned phrases. Don't hold your breath waiting for an example of this in their dialogue. Bella, on the other hand, occasionally uses old-fashioned words and phrases herself. Presumably in an Arizona accent.
  • Artistic License – Biology:
    • Vampires are stated to freak out when they smell human blood. When Bella gets a freaking papercut, it's like throwing a hunk of meat into a shark tank. So, why don't vampires freak out when a girl is menstruating? According to Word of God, it's "dead blood." The Official Illustrated Guide later clarified that the blood from a woman's period isn't freshly oxygenated blood flowing from the heart, like blood from a cut would be, and thus doesn't elicit the same reaction.
    • Newborn Vampires are said to be stronger than aged ones due to their tissues still containing blood from when they were human, and it takes about a year to consume it all. So where exactly does that blood go? How do vampires consume and process blood if their bodies can't change?
  • Artistic License – Geography:
    • The Cullens settled in Forks, Washington because while their vampirism makes their skin sparkle in sunlight, the town's constant rainy and overcast weather means there isn't enough sunshine for that to happen. While Forks does get a lot of rainfall compared to most of western Washington, it's similar to the rest of the region in that summers are highly sunny affairs with minimal cloud cover from July to September. Unless the Cullens lie low or vacate the town during those months, they would've been found out already.
    • Bella and Edward have their honeymoon on an island off "the west coast of Brazil". Unlike the country's other three cardinal directions, the west side of Brazil lacks a coastline entirely. This is corrected in later editions.
    • Seattle's Lake Union is referred to as "Union Lake". Additionally, the shady part of town that Bella visits in the last book is vaguely reminiscent of Aurora Avenue but doesn't come close enough to any real part of the city to be believable.
    • The entire state of Washington appears to be significantly scaled down, as drives from Forks to places like Seattle and Port Angeles are described as taking far shorter than they would in real life. A drive from there to Alaska is also described as taking 16 hours, which is simply not possible on land. Although it is worth noting that vampires seem to like driving at insane speeds.
  • Artistic License – History:
    • A flashback scene which takes place in the 1930s (judging by the Cullens' clothing) has members of the Quileute tribe dressed in buckskin breeches and animal skins. Not only would Quileutes of the 1930s have worn European-style clothing in everyday life and reserved their traditional attire for special occasions, but Quileutes didn't wear buckskin breeches. While numerous sites mention that Quileute men once wore breechclouts and/or deerskin kilts—kilts, not breeches—in hot weather, the Quileute Nation's website says very plainly that "cedar bark is used for baskets and traditional clothing." In fact, cedar was a common material for natives of the Pacific Northwest in general to make clothing out of.
    • Rosalie mentions her family was saved from the worst of the Depression because her father was a banker. The banking system was one of the worst hit industries during the Depression. After the Stock Market crashed in October 1929, people panicked and tried to withdraw their money from their accounts, only to find out the banks did not have enough cash on hand to cover them all. Rosalie was turned into a vampire during the worst year of the Depression, 1933, and approximately 4,000 banks failed that year alone.
  • Artistic License – Medicine: At some point there is mention of a vampire who sucked all the blood out of a human in the space of one second through a cut in the human's finger. The hydraulics of the vascular system really can't support that sort of thing.
  • Attention Deficit... Ooh, Shiny!: The vampires superhuman senses lead to them being "easily distracted" by things they see, hear or smell.
  • Author Appeal:
  • Author Avatar: Bella Swan seems to be this according to some readers (the claim is supported by a strong physical resemblance), although Meyer claims that she is meant to be a kind of placeholder for female readers to project themselves on. Interestingly, Bella is actually the first name she wanted to give to a daughter who was never born.
  • Author Usurpation: Twilight is likely the only successful work of Meyer's that everyone can name.
  • Badass Longcoat: Victoria (in fur form), various Volturi guards, Riley Biers, Eleazar, Garrett…
  • The Bard on Board: According to Stephenie Meyer and the Official Guide, New Moon is inspired by Romeo and Juliet (which also gets referenced a lot in-story) and Breaking Dawn is inspired by A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Merchant of Venice.
    • Like Romeo and Juliet, the plot involves two Starcrossed Lovers torn asunder and the heroine feeling pressured to choose a more suitable love interest (Bella explicitly compares Jacob to Paris at one point). After learning of the heroine's supposed death, the hero attempts to kill himself in his heartbreak, not realizing she's still alive, although New Moon features a happier outcome for the lovers. The climax also takes place in Italy, where Romeo and Juliet is set.
    • The imprinting in Breaking Dawn serves a similar purpose to the love potion in A Midsummer Night's Dream, in that it helps clear up the love triangles and unrequited feelings to ensure everyone gets a happy ending. Like that play, love also drives much of the characters' actions, including the not-so-rational ones. As for The Merchant of Venice, the story involves the heroes being put on trial and facing bloodshed and death, but are unexpectedly bailed out at the last minute and leave unscathed.
  • The Beautiful Elite:
    • The Cullens are portrayed this way, and with the way Bella's friends disappear from the narrative whenever she has Edward and Alice to spend time with, she clearly has every intention of joining.
    • Also: the Denali coven, who are described as "so beautiful that it made [Bella's] stomach hurt."
  • Beauty Equals Goodness:
    • Played straight in the first book. James, the first book's evil vampire, is described as being an average-looking vampire because he was ugly as a human. Naturally, all the Cullens were beautiful in life, making them absolutely gorgeous as vampires.
    • Subverted in The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner, which takes place during Eclipse, where Bree notes that Edward looks like an ordinary vampire to her, and not like anything special, indicating that it's mostly that Bella thinks the Cullens are extra beautiful because she loves them.
    • The later books avert this with the Volturi. When we first meet them in New Moon, Edward points out, the Volturi aren't technically the bad guys. However, at that point all the Cullens thought the Volturi respected the law and controlled their world in a way that was better than what they will have if vampires became an anarchy with poor humans in the way. By the last book they know the Volturi (specially Aro) are ambitious bastards that will go to any length to get their way, including breaking their own laws and murdering innocents to achieve power.
  • Being Human Sucks: Bella constantly feels that being human makes her a liability to the supernatural creatures around her and an inadequate partner for Edward despite the fact that he tells her that her humanity is part of her appeal. Once she becomes a vampire he finds her even prettier despite her losing all of her (literally) warm human traits. Other human characters aren't portrayed much better: Renee is easily distracted and has no sense of direction, and Bella's acquaintances at school are variously weak, shallow, jealous, immature, and ignorant.
  • Big Bad Ensemble: Between the Volturi, Victoria (especially in Eclipse), and Sam (in the first half of Breaking Dawn).
  • The Board Game: A quiz-based board game where you answer questions about the franchise to move forward.
  • Broken Aesop: There are quite a few in the series:
    • According to Word of God, the Bella/Edward/Jacob love triangle was intended to show Bella's choice in the matter of love, namely that she had the option of Jacob but chose Edward. The "love through choice" moral is shot to hell through most of the other couples though, particularly in the case of imprinted couples (the guy can't help but feel attracted to the girl and while the girl technically is able to refuse him, there is a ton of pressure not to. To give an idea of just how much pressure, in the very first imprinted couple the books show the girl did try to refuse the guy which caused him to fly into a rage and more or less literally rip her face off.). Especially egregious is the case of Jacob, who made a number of speeches about how imprinting is essentially the loss of free will and he hopes to never have it and then finds himself happily imprinted on Renesmee, even though he absolutely hated her not five minutes prior. Which kind of contradicts everything the author said about Jacob being an option since it's implied if not outright stated that Jacob's interest in Bella was apparently only due to him being subconsciously drawn to her because he was meant to imprint on Renesmee in the first place.
    • One of the themes is abstinence before marriage, yet all their waiting is all made irrelevant during the final instalment. The first time they actually sleep together after their wedding, it's a violent event that leaves Bella injured and the bed destroyed. To make matters worse, the pregnancy turns out bloody, gruesome, and nearly fatal. Marriage does not protect from sexually transmitted diseases, nor does it physically or emotionally prepare one for pregnancy.
    • One aesop seems to be that a girl as plain and unassuming as Bella can find true love, but Bella's flaws fall mostly into the category of Informed Flaw, and are almost entirely removed at the end of the series. Not to mention, though Bella is intended to be plain and unassuming, nearly every man she runs into falls for her and Edward himself states that most of the boys in the school find her attractive. Clearly, not so plain. However, maybe the intended Aesop here was that if you hold off on sex until you get married and then die in childbirth, you will become a saint and absolutely perfect in every way.
    • The Cullens are portrayed as saintly vampires who value human life and therefore maintain a "vegetarian" diet of animal blood. But they never once object to other vampires killing humans — the closest they ever come is politely asking some non-veggie vamps who are staying with them to go out of town to feed, which has little to do with protecting human life and more to do with not blowing their cover. When there's a huge murder spree going on in Seattle caused by a vampire army, the Cullens never lift a finger to help until they realize the vampires are coming for them.
      • And worse still, some of the deaths the Cullens cause are glorified, the most obvious example being Rosalie murdering her fiance and his friends. This would otherwise be a pretty badass moment, if it weren't for the fact that Carlisle is supposed to be an absolute pillar of morality; if he's so moral, why did he stand by and allow his new adoptive daughter to murder humans, something he's so strongly against?
      • In the first novel Edward briefly mentions that before he went full "vegetarian" he was sort of a vigilante vampire superhero; he would make meals out of muggers and rapists when they were in the middle of attacking someone. This is presented as wrong because he's inevitably still killing, despite the fact he would also often be saving people who would have otherwise been murdered, assaulted, or raped. The option of remaining a vigilante and just not feeding on the criminals he captures is never even considered.
      • Also building on Carlisle's supposed status as a pillar of morality, the reason he saved Rosalie's life was he saw her lying raped and dying in the street and thought it would be a shame to let beauty such as hers go to waste. And then he tried to give her to Edward as a girlfriend.
  • Brooding Boy, Gentle Girl: Edward spends all his time thinking about how extremely likely it is that the love of his life will die because of him, and Bella tries to ease his worries by making light of it. Though Bella can be fairly broody herself at times, Edward is it much more, and so maintains the dynamic.
  • Brother–Sister Incest: The Cullens have worked out a system where they pretend that Carlisle and Esme adopted the rest of the family when their parents died when they were children, and that the blonds Jasper and Rosalie are from blond Carlisle's side of the family while dark-haired Edward, Alice, and Emmett are from dark-haired Esme's side of the family.
    • Discussed by Jessica in the book, when she explains to Bella that Alice is with Jasper and Rosalie with Emmett.
    • Angela and Jessica talk about how gross it is in the movie, with Angela insisting that it's probably fine since the couples in question aren't blood relatives.
  • Call-Back: When Edward has Alice dress Bella up in a blue chiffon dress, Bella thinks he has decided to turn her into a vampire after all. When he actually does turn her into a vampire in Breaking Dawn, Alice dresses her up in a blue silk dress while she is turning.
  • Comic-Book Adaptation: The first book was adapted into a graphic novel in two parts by Young Kim, released in 2010 and 2011 respectively. An adaptation of the first half of New Moon was released in 2013.
  • Cast Full of Pretty Boys: Most of the vampires are male and hot.
  • The Clan: The Cullens subvert this by all being physically within nine years of each other. Birth-wise the oldest was born in the 1630s (he's not sure which year exactly), and 1915 before Bella joins, and 1987 after. Carlisle is their patriarch.
  • Clark Kenting: The Cullens pass for human by blinking at least three times a minute and lifting their shoulders to feign breathing if they have to hold their breath for any length of time, and also by avoiding going out in public when the sun is shining. The main reason people assume they're human is that they don't know vampires exist.
  • Compelling Voice: Alpha werewolves (to other werewolves, at least). The dazzling from vampires to a certain extent.
  • Compulsory School Age: Since all the "kid" Cullens were transformed in their late teens, they maintain their cover by going to high school over again regularly.
  • Cool Car: All the Cullens have at least one. Even klutzy Bella gets a motorcycle and a sports car (a Mercedes S600 Guard, which is somewhat fitting as it is bulletproof and armored against explosives). Meyer's brothers are massive gearheads, so she let them pick cool cars for each of the characters:
    • Edward: Volvo S60R, Aston Martin V12 Vanquish.
    • Bella:
      • A S600 Guard and a Ferrari F430 after her piece of junk truck broke down.
      • Though a '64 Chevy pick-up truck is pretty cool too; at least Bella thinks so.
    • Rosalie: BMW M3 (books) and Mercedes-Benz CLK 350 (movies)
    • Alice: more Porsches than you can probably name.
  • Cool People Rebel Against Authority: Happens often enough to become a theme, or at least suggest that Smeyer has problems with authority. All of her protagonists go crazy when someone tells them what to do and the audience is supposed to side with them on the issue. The Volturi are obviously the main bad guys; any time they issue orders we're supposed to boo and hiss. Riley was an authority figure in Bree Tanner, and Bree hated him. Any time Charlie tried to parent Bella and tell her no, we were supposed to disagree and think him unreasonable. Sam asserted his authority and told Jacob what to do, and he was vilified for it in Breaking Dawn.
  • Creepy Child: Jane, Alec, and Renesmee. The last gets further up in the department since she wasn't intended to be so.
  • Curse That Cures: This is how Edward views vampirism. On the bright side, he was saved from a horrible, wasting death from Spanish flu and is now impossibly beautiful. On the negative side, he is hard as rock, is not truly "alive", can't go out in direct sunlight, constantly thirsts to kill people and is currently living a lifestyle that has him going to high school for the rest of his life (which is forever). This is why he is unwilling to make Bella a vampire, despite the fact that she wants to be one.
  • Deus ex machina: There are two main reasons in the first three books for why Bella shouldn't be a vampire: first, the overwhelming desire for human blood, which is incredibly painful to resist, and second, a vampire's inability to reproduce. In Breaking Dawn, however all these concerns are swept away when it turns out that actually, only female vampires can't have babies — male vampires have working sperm — and therefore Bella is able to have Edward's child by having sex with him before being turned. And after the half-vampire baby starts eating Bella up from the inside and Edward turns Bella in order to save her life, it turns out Bella possesses the willpower to resist fresh human blood. Actually, Breaking Dawn is crammed FULL of this. A group of powerful vampires, the Volturi are built up for three books as being the most powerful group of vampires around, but Bella's newborn vampire ability is able to depower many of the Volturi's heavy hitters.
  • Doorstopper: The first three books float around 600 pages. The fourth book is over 700 pages.
  • Double Standard:
    • Bella once criticizes another girl in her school as shallow for only liking Edward because he is good looking and comes from a wealthy family, yet the things about him that she most often expresses appreciation for are (in order of prevalence) his physical appearance, his equally attractive well-to-do family, his nice house, and his expensive car.
    • During the original Twilight craze, when our male heroes were still around twenty, the portion of the fandom that consisted of middle-aged women openly lusting after them had people saying: "If these were 40-year old men screaming for 17-year old girls, they'd be on "To Catch A Predator" so fast it would make your head spin."
    • The series also repeatedly implies that men should not be held accountable for things that they do when they are very angry or otherwise emotionally overwhelmed.
      • Both Edward and Jacob "accidentally" hurt Bella (or come really close to doing so) on at least a few occasions and this is usually excused by the fact that they are male and therefore unable to control certain impulses.
      • Most of the other men in the series also do things that could be interpreted in a negative light but usually aren't because they did them in "the heat of" rage/passion/jealousy/lust/etc. But any time a woman steps even the slightest bit out of line she is swiftly and harshly reprimanded for it, usually by the men around her some of whom exhibit the exact same behavior at some point.
      • The series implies that men, and only men, should not be held accountable for things they do while angry, or any other time for that matter. Bella's narrative is willing to forgive any man for almost anything he does, and the few times she doesn't, she still describes him in surprisingly positive terms. By comparison, Bella seems to hate women by default, especially non-vampires, and expects them to remain in control of their emotions at all time (except herself) and views women as stupid, shallow, or selfish for being even a little bit emotional about anything. About the only non-vampire woman she doesn't hold in contempt at least a little bit is Angela, and that's mostly because she's too much of a doormat to bother her the way almost all other humans do.
    • A lot of things the Cullens (The Beautiful Elite) do are considered horrible when anyone else does them.
      • Bella also judges all the non-vampires around her very harshly (even when their only crime is having the sort of flaws that any normal human being would) but is endlessly forgiving of the vampires in the Cullen family pretty much no matter what they do.
      • The series is greatly biased in favor of the vampires over the werewolves. The vampires are almost always described as insanely beautiful every time one of them is mentioned, and narrative even kisses the asses of the villainous vampires, however the werewolves usually don't get off so well. Bella's narration constantly expresses doubt that the werewolves can handle vampires, even after she finds out that they already have and she personally witnessed one fleeing from the pack in terror. Also, if a werewolf says something negative about vampires, Bella will express in narration feeling outright offended by it, and if it's Jacob saying it, she'll often yell at him and force him to apologize. Whenever a vampire, usually Edward or Alice, says something negative about the werewolves, Bella never says anything to them about it and at most wishes silently that the two sides would get along.
    • When Leah is heartbroken over Sam and is moody about it, everyone considers her a bitch who should get over it. When Jacob is heartbroken over Bella, everyone holds his hand and doesn't say a cross word to him.
    • Bella rolls her eyes at the few human girls she occasionally hangs out with for being shallow and silly and frivolous, but adores Alice who is, arguably, the embodiment of those qualities, implying that it's bad to be that way, unless you're a beautiful, wealthy vampire.
    • Bella often manipulates the feelings of those around her to get what she wants with no regard to whether or not she is hurting them, but any other woman in the series who acts in this way is framed as a heartless bitch.
  • Downer Ending: For Renee at least, post-Breaking Dawn. After Bella's marriage to Edward, the public story was that she got really sick and was flown to another country for treatment. Bella muses that her parents would soon be told that she died, although her father (due to Jacob's actions) is brought into her world, although he doesn't know she and the Cullens are vampires. However for Renee, the parent whom Bella was the most closest to, she went to her daughter's wedding, saw her daughter be really happy before flying off to her honeymoon, and then will be told that Bella died of some illness.
  • Dramatic Ellipsis: The books abuse both these... and dashes — though mostly the dashes — in places they don't belong. Like... here — and back there.
  • Dreaming the Truth:
    • Used in Twilight, where Bella has a dream about Jacob turning into a wolf and Edward being a vampire.
    • In New Moon she has the same dream with emphasis on Jacob being a werewolf.
    • Subverted in Breaking Dawn, where Bella dreams that she has a son and assumes this is the case when she discovers she is pregnant, but has a daughter instead. In the dream, the Volturi come to kill her son, and in reality they come to kill her daughter.
  • Drives Like Crazy: The only thing about Edward that frightens Bella is that he speeds and doesn't wear a seatbelt.
  • The Dulcinea Effect: Edward. Bella also is a female version of this, ready as she is to die for a family she just got to know that week.
  • Eating the Eye Candy: Bella spends a lot of time describing Edward's beauty in excruciating detail.
  • Electric Love:
    • Bella describes this sensation upon touching Edward in their Bio class. She feels his exceptionally cold hand and feels a shock. Both Bella and Edward pull away their hands.
    • Later on when the romance is in full bloom, Bella describes the feeling of electricity between the two of them during a movie in class when all the lights are off. They are "hyper-aware" of each other then.
  • Emergency Transformation: Several times. Actually, most of the Cullens.
    • Esme: Attempted suicide after the death of her son (he was only a few days old).
    • Rosalie: Gang-raped, beaten, and left for dead by her fiance and his friends.
    • Edward: Just another victim of the 1918 Spanish influenza epidemic.
    • Emmett: Mauled by a bear.
    • Alice: Was transformed in order to prevent James from hunting and killing her.
    • Bella: Childbirth complications. Pulverized pelvis, shattered spine, the hole her husband bit in her uterus... y'know, the usual.)
    • The Quileute werewolves: The gene that causes them to phase (which all members of their tribe apparently possess) is only triggered when there is a significant vampire presence (i.e., the Cullens) in the area. Otherwise, they would have remained human.
  • Emo Teen: Bella becomes one for a while after Edward leaves her in New Moon. Also, despite his actual age, Edward. It could be argued that Bella is this through the whole series (until she becomes a vampire) she's constantly miserable (in Edward's absence) despite the fact that she gets straight A's with little effort, her father makes little or no effort to control her and everyone loves her. Any other teenager would be thrilled to have her life.
  • Epigraph: Each book opens with a quote from a different source.
    • Twilight: The Bible.
      But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,
      thou shalt not eat of it:
      for in the day that thou latest thereof
      thou shalt surely die.
      Genesis 2:17
    • New Moon: Romeo and Juliet.
      These violent delights have violent ends
      And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,
      Which, as they kiss, consume.
      Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene VI
    • Eclipse: Robert Frost's "Fire and Ice" in its entirety.
    • Breaking Dawn: Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Childhood is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies".
      ''Childhood is not from birth to a certain age and at a certain age
      The child is grown, and puts away childish things.
      Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies.
      Edna St. Vincent Millay
    • Part two of Breaking Dawn: A Midsummer Night's Dream.
      And yet, to say the truth,
      reason and love keep little company together nowadays.
      William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act III, Scene i
    • Part three of Breaking Dawn: Orson Scott Card's Empire.
      Personal affection is a luxury you can have only after all your enemies are eliminated. Until then, everyone you love is a hostage, sapping your courage and corrupting your judgement.
  • Erotic Dream: Thanks to one of these, Bella gets Edward to have sex with her again while she's still human!
  • Eternal Love: Seems to be treated as the best part of being a vampire: you can be with your true love for all eternity. Or at least until the sun goes supernova.
  • Everyone Must Be Paired: Due to its primary theme being about the importance of romance, almost every single character (except Leah) gets a love interest in the end. Even the newborn baby. To her mom's ex, no less.
  • Everything's Better with Sparkles: The (in)famous sparkling vampires. Most dramatically shown with Edward, when he introduces Bella to it.
  • Fan Art: Much of this is pretty snarky. However, there is some serious work out there that's worth taking a look at, as with most fandoms.
  • Fanservice: Considering that by the time the fourth movie came out it was extremely common in both popular media, fandom, and anti-fandom to point out the number of times the movies went out of their way to feature Taylor Lautner's bare chest, it's very hard to read Jacob dramatically ripping off his shirt in the first thirty seconds of Breaking Dawn, Part One as anything other than the screenwriters' snarky acknowledgement of how silly things had gotten.
  • Fantastic Racism:
    • Vampires and werewolves.
    • The vampires, including the Cullens, are strongly prejudiced against humans. Bella accepts fairly easily that vampires are superior to human beings, never wondering why, if this is true, that the Volturi are so dedicated to keeping a supposedly inferior species from finding out about the handful of vampires in the world.
  • Female Gaze: In a book, no less. Cut out any sentence paying tribute to Edward's godly, wondrous, Adonis-esque physique, and you'll lose maybe more than a third of each book. Even New Moon, which he was only in half of.
  • Fiction 500: After 300 years of strategic art collecting and 100 years of playing the stock market (with a clairvoyant providing financial advice), the Cullens took second place the 2011 Forbes Fictional 15 list with an estimated wealth of $36.2 billion. Apparently, Carlisle has a controlling interest in the blood product company Immuncor. According to the list, Carlisle has more money than both Tony Stark and Bruce Wayne combined.
  • Fire-Forged Friends: To the surprise of everybody in general, Edward and Seth Clearwater become this after their team-up against Riley and Victoria in Eclipse. It continues through to Breaking Dawn where Seth is perfectly comfortable giving Edward a hug at his wedding and Edward in turn considers him one of the kindest souls he knows.
  • Foregone Conclusion: The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner. Even if one hasn't read Eclipse the title pretty much gives it away.
  • Four-Girl Ensemble: The four Cullen women are the snarky Bella, pixie-like Alice, elegant Rosalie, and the motherly Esme.
  • Freakiness Shame: Bella's positive reaction to Edward's sparkly skin and odd eyes.
  • Friendless Background: Bella had no friends to speak of in Phoenix. Though she mentions people she went to school with (three Jessicas), she never misses anyone from there.
  • Friendly Neighborhood Vampires: The Cullens, not very social but not intentionally harmful.
  • Fur Against Fang: Vampires and werewolves really, really hate each other, although Edward and Jacob make friends pretty quickly as soon as Jacob finds out he imprinted on Edward's infant child, despite the decades of hate. Which doesn't upset anyone except Bella, and only enough for her to try and kill him. Seth seems to get along with the Cullens.
    • There really is no reason why there's so much animosity between them. The werewolves have an excuse to be wary of vampires because one of them attacked and slaughtered their tribe. The vampires, on the other hand, just seem to innately hate werewolves.
  • Googling the New Acquaintance: Bella searches about vampires after hearing Jacob Black describe the local legends about them. She tries to put two and two together to figure out what Edward really was.
  • Gosh Dang It to Heck!: "HOLY CROW!"
  • Happily Adopted: The Cullen kids.
  • Happily Married:
    • The entire merry Cullen bunch, sans Edward (at least, until Breaking Dawn).
    • Also Renee and Phil, and it's implied that Charlie and Sue will end up this way too.
  • Heel–Face Turn: Many of the Vegetarian Vampires - Edward, Jasper, and the Denali coven - fed on human blood for a portion of their lives and later chose to abstain.
  • Heroic Willpower: Edward's resistance of Bella's blood makes him poster boy for this trope. Of course, both Edward and Bella have to resist their regular sexual lust too, for reasons of safety and morality.
    • An even better example is Carlisle, who is explicitly stated to have trained himself over the roughly three centuries that he has lived as a vampire to the point where he is virtually immune to the smell of human blood.
    • A lack of this on the part of most vampires is also stated to be the reason why not all humans who are fed on become vampires themselves. Enough of the victim's own blood must be left in their veins to allow the vampire's venom to spread through the victim's body and trigger the change. It requires a level of willpower (though not necessarily of the heroic variety) that very few vampires possess to pull themselves back before completely draining the victim.
  • Hormone-Addled Teenager:
    • Most of them, but Bella and Edward especially, since they mostly think of absolutely nothing but one another, in New Moon especially to the exclusion of common sense. Bella's Heroic BSoD in New Moon has particularly unfortunate connotations in this trope, since how it's handled implies that her life is literally nothing without her boyfriend.
  • Horror Hunger
  • Hunk: Jacob and all the male werewolves. Also, Emmett is consistently described as being this. Also, Felix is mostly likely this, given he's described as being just as huge and strong as Emmett, and given that he's a vampire, it's probably safe to say that he's this.
    • Laurent describes James as such.
  • Idiosyncratic Episode Naming:
    • Meyer usually uses one- or two-word titles for chapters from Bella's POV. Midnight Sun (2020), from Edward's POV, also uses this style.
    • Jacob's chapters in Breaking Dawn have chapter titles like "You Know You've Got Problems When You Feel Bad For Being Rude To Vampires", "Good Thing I've Got A Strong Stomach", "Waiting For The Damn Fight To Start Already", "What Do I Look Like? The Wizard Of Oz? You Need A Brain? You Need A Heart? Go Ahead. Take Mine. Take Everything I Have." The title of the birth chapter: "There Are No Words For This".
  • I Hate You, Vampire Dad:
    • Inverted. Not one of the main characters is ever angry at the vampire who turned them. They get plenty angry at their current state but never think to blame Carlisle. Hell, Bella is ecstatic to be turned by Edward. Then again, she'd been wanting it since she found out vampires were real, and jumped on every possible chance to get it.
    • In the case of the Volturi Jane and Alec adore Aro (he saved them from burning at the stake after all). Riley loved Victoria until, sadly, too late for him, he realized that she didn't love him.
    • In the novella, Bree seems quite loyal to Riley, despite the fact that she remembers him turning her into a vampire by kidnapping her and breaking her arm.
  • I Love You, Vampire Son: This sums up Bella and Edward's relationship in Breaking Dawn. See I Hate You, Vampire Dad above.
  • Informed Attribute: Bella is supposedly very intelligent: other characters talk about how smart she is a lot and the story frequently mentions her getting straight A's, but she never actually does anything that demonstrates above average intelligence. In fact in dangerous or stressful situations, when a high intellect might prove beneficial, she usually just grabs her first emotional impulse and goes with it without stopping for an instant to think about the potential consequences; things only turn out o.k. through sheer luck/coincidence or through the interference of Edward, Jacob or one of the Cullens.
    • Bella is also described by the author to be well-read and having already read all the classics, though we only ever read about her dealing with the most famous classics (Pride & Prejudice, Romeo and Juliet, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, etc) and only when they are currently reading said book for school. She also seems to repeatedly misinterpret the meaning the authors were going for or flat out misunderstanding what the book is actually about, like saying that Wuthering Heights was about Catherine and Heathcliff's romance,note  or stating Romeo and Juliet to be a wonderful love story.note  (Though this might be a failure on Meyer's side.)
    • The author also seemed to be trying to convince the reader that Bella is a headstrong, independent, modern woman despite the fact that throughout the entire story she almost never actively tries to take control of her own life; she makes a few vain attempts to seem self-possessed (she occasionally argues with Edward or puts up a little resistance before giving in), but Edward usually winds up making her decisions for her in the end.
    • Edward also talks a lot about how good and kind and pure and virtuous Bella is (Incorruptible Pure Pureness), but most of her actions are either completely selfish or impulsive reactions to external stimuli; the majority of the things she does that would conventionally be considered indicators of virtue or selflessness are things that Edward forces her to do or things that she's doing out of her selfish desire to be with Edward (usually only with regard to how they affect Edward and herself, with no consideration for anyone else.) Left to her own devices, Bella is childishly selfish and reckless.
      • The fact is, everything about Bella's personality is defined in terms of what she hates and/or holds in contempt. Even the things she ostensibly does like or care about (e.g. Edward's looks, Alice's company, sparkly vampires, having her "true love") are distinguished solely by how they lack the flaws she carps about in everything else — which is, after all, what "perfect" really means — or by how miserable the prospect of not having them there will make her. Small wonder that she wants to be a vampire: it's not that she likes vampires, it's that she loathes imperfect humans and her own mortality.
    • Vampires are supposed to be highly intelligent and once Bella has been turned into one she often informs us of how fast her brain works now and how much smarter she is than any human. However she is extremely slow on the uptake in most situations and the reader can easily figure out what's going on in any given situation before Bella connects the dots.
      • This goes for all vampires. They seem to utterly lack the capacity for critical thinking and the reader always catches on to what is going on and understands who or what is behind something before the allegedly super intelligent Meyerpires do. Furthermore when faced with a threat (as for instance finding out that the Volturi are coming in Breaking Dawn) they react by freezing up and showing no signs of doing any thinking for several hours, as if their brains cannot process stressful information very easily.
    • Carlisle is repeatedly said to be incredibly compassionate but (apart from being a doctor) never seems to show any concern for anyone outside his own "family"; in many instances, he is even shown passively allowing innocent people to suffer and die, deciding that Edward and Bella's relationship is more deserving of his attention, right down to stealing O-negative blood for Bella's use that (presumably) other people really need as well.
  • Inhumanly Beautiful Race: All the vampires (except James), but especially the Cullens.
  • Inter-Class Romance: Bella's strictly working class. The Cullens are wealthy (it's easy to make money if you're immortal and have a clairvoyant handling your investments).
  • Invincible Hero: Pretty much every protagonist in the series, but especially Edward Cullen.
  • I Just Want to Be Loved: The whole point of the series.
  • In Medias Res: Each book (and the three sections of Breaking Dawn) opens with a preface that describes a scene that happens at the climax of that story.
  • Interplay of Sex and Violence: Vampires having sex with humans typically ends with the humans at least bruised, since vampires are ridiculously strong. Vampires doing it with vampires is even more violent, but they are so resilient that the only thing that suffers damage is the bed.
  • Interspecies Romance: Humans and vampires! Humans and werewolves! Half-humans/half-vampires and werewolves!
  • I Want My Beloved to Be Happy: The reason why a lot of vampires (mainly males, strangely enough) make major sacrifices. For example, Jasper's willingness to forgo human blood for Alice, Garrett's presumed willingness to forgo human blood for Kate, Eleazar's willingness to ditch the Volturi for Carmen, et cetera.
  • Jail Bait Wait: A rather extreme form, with werewolves falling in love with toddlers, then having to wait for them to hit their mid-late teens before they can do anything physical.
  • Jealous Romantic Witness: The series runs off of these moments between Bella, The Rival Jacob, and One True Love Edward, with the latter two baiting Bella into such moments by the third book in order to make their romantic claims on her that much more apparent to one another. This peaks in Eclipse when the three have to camp in the woods in the middle of winter and Bella begins to freeze. Edward cannot help since as a vampire, his skin is ice cold. Jacob however runs very warm due to his shapeshifter nature and thus Bella has to share his sleeping bag with him in order to keep warm. The entire chapter that follows is a conversation between Edward and Jacob discussing Jacob's smugness over the situation, their feelings for Bella, and her feelings towards both of them.
  • Kissing Cousins: Sam and Leah are 2nd cousins. This means that it is also possible that he is related to Emily.
    • This could apply to Edward and Tanya—though, not literally—but we're not quite sure how diligent Tanya was in her romantic pursuit.
  • Kiss of the Vampire: Edward and Bella's make-out sessions in early books are decidedly tame for this reason.
  • Law of Inverse Fertility: Bella wasn't trying to get pregnant, and did not even believe it was possible for Edward to father children. Rosalie and Esme, on the other hand, both wanted children and will never be able to have biological children (although Esme seems perfectly happy with her big family of big immortal adopted children).
  • Let's Meet the Meat: Bella is unfazed by Edward telling her he literally wants to drink her blood. It's implied that it's because she guessed he was a vampire and has had time to process it, but it's amazing how little she seems to care.
  • Lewd Lust, Chaste Sex: Bella enjoys spending time with Edward in great detail. When they finally have sex, it's all off-screen.
  • Like Brother and Sister: Edward and Rosalie, although some fans would disagree.
  • Living Forever Is Awesome: Even though the Cullens are not totally convinced they seem to have achieved happiness with their condition (except for Edward and Rosalie, at least at the beginning). Bella has no doubt it is.
  • Lost in Imitation: It's a major complaint for many that Edward and the other vampires are unaffected by sunlight (other than going sparkly), but if you read Dracula, vampires aren't supposed to be vaporized by sunlight, just lose their superhuman abilities.
  • Love at First Sight:
    • Imprinting for werewolves, sometimes to a squicky level.
    Jacob: It's not like love at first sight, really. It's more like ... gravity moves. When you see her, suddenly it's not the earth holding you here anymore. She does. And nothing matters more than her. (Eclipse)
    • Variant: Edward falls in Love At First Smell, effectively.
    • Some would say Bella. Considering the first chapter of the first book is entitled "First Sight"...
  • Love Makes You Crazy: Bella is so madly in love with Edward that her concerns about his feelings outweigh any worries about him being a vampire that could kill her. When Edward takes Bella to meet his family for the first time, she's much more concerned by the possibility that they won't like her than by the fact that she could very well end up as their next meal.
  • Love Martyr: Bella is determined to stay with Edward even though he lies to her, manipulates her, and waxes poetic about killing her. She subverts it, however, by apparently not considering any of it emotionally relevant.
  • Luring in Prey: When revealing that he sparkles in sunlight, Edward explains to Bella that the sparkling is meant to invite humans to come closer so that vampires can eat them.
  • Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex: Along with morality concerns, this is why Edward is reluctant to have sex with Bella.
  • Mandatory Motherhood: Though not every woman in the story is capable of reproduction, the ones that aren't are universally regarded as having something wrong with them, especially if they don't want to have children. Meyer even contradicts herself to uphold this (she originally said all vampires couldn't have children and later changed it to female vampires can't have children.) In a particularly disturbing passage, an infertile young woman is described as a horror who is less than female.
  • Manly Men Can Hunt: The male Cullens. Actually, all male vampires.
    • Also Jacob, but he's only shown hunting in his wolf form.
  • Mars Needs Women: The imprinting business with the werewolves looks suspiciously like this, especially if all female werewolves are as infertile as Leah. According to Meyer, there were no female werewolves before Leah and it is never said if a female werewolf could imprint.
  • May Fly December Romance: Edward is immortal and Bella is a normal human, with a normal human lifespan.
  • Meaningful Name:
    • Bella moves to Forks, where she's at a crossroads, having to choose between remaining human and living out her life and becoming an immortal who thirsts for human blood.
    • "Jacob" and "James" both mean "usurper", both of them trying to take Edward's place in Bella's life: one as the one who drinks her blood, the other as a romantic partner.
    • "Esme" means "loved" or "esteemed", and her vampire power is to love and support her family more than anyone has ever loved and supported their family.
  • Men Act, Women Are: Bella stands around while two supermen fawn over her and their families promise to lay down their lives to protect her. Everybody either loves her or wants to kill her to spite the Cullens, but about the only thing about her that stands out is that she's immune to mind reading. This, of course, is a trait she can't control and didn't even know about until Edward told her. On the rare occasion when she is called to action, it's usually just to find a man so he can take care of the problem.
  • Mind Rape:
    • Specifically Jane and Alec, although most of the Volturi can fall under this category.
    • Jasper. His power is to control the emotions of anyone he chooses. It is irrelevant what you want to feel.
    Jacob: Bloody annoying, that's what it is, only you can't be annoyed until after."
  • Mirror Character:
    • Lauren is like a modern human Rosalie: vain, blonde, arrogant, beautiful, with little going on in their heads as far as Edward is concerned.
    • Werewolves and vampires: They both get obsessive about their "fated soulmate", they both can potentially live forever without aging, and most importantly, they both see how special and protection-worthy Bella is. On the other hand, the wolves are still human with biologically functioning bodies, while vampires are effectively made of stone. Also, while the wolf pack answer to their agreed-upon, practically democratically elected alpha, and he to the tribe's Council of Elders which consists of humans who may or may not have had the shapechanging potential in their youth, vampires form covens with loose leadership that disband at the drop of a hat, and can only be brought to trial by the extreme violence of a coven of dictatorial "elders".
  • Mockbuster: Called Blood Red Moon. Reviewed by Obscurus Lupa.
  • The Musical: A fan-made one. Twilight the Musical.
  • Narrating the Obvious: The series is notorious for this. Bella is quite an unobservant narrator of her own story, so half the time she doesn't notice what should be completely obvious to the other characters and/or all the readers.
  • No-Sell:
    • Bella's power is to do this to mental vampire powers. From the first book, Edward is fascinated by his inability to read her mind. In later books, she blocks the powers of other vampires, including Aro, Jane, and Chelsea.
    • Midnight Sun (2020) reveals that Charlie is also resistant to Edward's mind-reading, though to a lesser extent than Bella.
    • James' reaction to getting maced.
  • Non-Action Protagonist: Bella becomes the focus of Edward's existence, but when he fights other vampires to protect her, they're too fast for her to even watch, let alone contribute. Not to mention that even if a vampire stayed still, a Gatling gun would do nothing but annoy them. Her vulnerability in the middle of a coven of strong protectors is what makes her such a fascinating target for James, who lives for the thrill of the hunt.
  • Not Blood Siblings: ...Bad puns about their dietary habits aside.
  • Oddly Common Rarity:
    • Werewolves imprinting on their soulmate is supposed to be a rare occurrence, yet everyone in the pack that the story follows (save for Seth and Leah) imprints in the span of two years.
    • The first three books repeatedly say that it's rare for vampires to have psychic powers, but by Breaking Dawn it seems like vampires without powers are the minority.
  • One Head Taller: In the books, the vast majority of the males are tall and the vast majority of the women are average or short. The Quileutes take this up to eleven.
  • One-Steve Limit:
    • Meyer appears to have gone to pains to avoid name overlap, considering her huge cast of characters, and only reuses the name Charles. We have the main character's overbearing father, Esme's abusive first husband, and the vampire who's singled out at the end of Breaking Dawn because of his power to verify that the Cullens are telling the truth about Renesmee.
    • Invoked in the first book, where Bella gives up on reading Austen because there are characters named Edward.
    • And again when Bella remembers that there were several Jessicas in her class back in Phoenix.
  • One True Love:
    • Bella and Edward, of course. One, as the fact that they neither have nor can have any other romantic love interest shows. And true, because, even though Mike Newton, Tyler Crowley, Eric Yorkie, Jacob Black, and Tanya all try to persuade Bella or Edward to date them instead of each other, the only perfect pairing (indeed, the only possible one) is Bella and Edward.
    • All vampires apparently have this, or the potential for it.
    • Deconstructed with imprinting, where it doesn't matter at what age you meet your soulmate, which has some creepy implications.
  • Ordinary High-School Student: Bella, the main character. Well at least she was supposed to be...
    • Bella's human friends
  • Pants-Free: The scene where Bella sees Edward in her room, and discovers he's been watching her, it's framed in a way at first where Bella is shown from the waist up, and we see she has a t-shirt on. As Bella and Edward begin kissing, the camera shot widens revealing Bella has no pants on and is in her underwear.
  • Paranormal Romance: The central plot is the romance between a human girl and a vampire (as well as a Vampire-Werewolf Love Triangle). Twilight is probably the most prominent example of the genre from the late 2000's/2010's and helped revamp it, especially for teens.
  • Pretty Boy: Every single one of the male vampires, except for Emmett and Felix, and James.
  • Protagonist-Centered Morality:
    • You can eat humans, and we'll even lend you our cars to broaden your range, as long as you don't try to eat Bella Swan.
    • Also: the wolves won't do a thing to stop said human nomming if it was ever committed by Jake's imprintee, Renesmee.
  • Psychic Dreams for Everyone: Bella has prophetic dreams for no apparent reason.
  • Puny Earthlings: Humans can't possibly compete with or stand up to vampires or werewolves, and it's implied that before the Cullens only werewolves could protect normal people from vampires.
  • Purple Prose: Buckets. Especially when it comes to Edward's appearance.
  • Recycled In Space: Described by the author as Romeo and Juliet WITH VAMPIRES AND WEREWOLVES!
  • Rejected Marriage Proposal: At the end of New Moon, Edward asks Bella to marry him, saying it's his condition for him turning her into a vampire. She rejects him because she thinks eighteen is too young to get married, especially as her mother drilled into her that getting married too young like she did is a terrible mistake. Edward continues to suggest it throughout Eclipse, but Bella remains reluctant, though she does try negotiating that Edward have sex with her while she's still human in exchange for marriage. However, Edward is iffy about this because he's old-fashioned and doesn't believe in sex before marriage. Bella finally accepts when Edward agrees they can consummate the marriage before she becomes a vampire (and he formally proposes with a ring).
  • Remember the New Guy?: We hear briefly about the Volturi, mainly that they and Carlisle are on friendly terms, but that he left because he did not agree with their diet of humans. Edward speaks pretty well of them when he tells Bella about them. In the next book and all books after, it's revealed that the Volturi are a highly corrupt organization, and the Cullens are all highly suspicious of them. This also leads to a case of Remember Those New Rules, since it's not until then that it's mentioned that there are any sort of laws or governing of vampires.
  • The Rich Have White Stuff: Specifically invoked in the case of the Cullens.
    • The Cullens are shocking white vampires, in contrast to everyone but most startlingly to the Quileutes, who are dark tan with black hair. The Quileutes are obviously natives, and at one point Edward Cullen is referred to as "the freaky pale skinned boy". This may also play on the expectations of immortal vampires being wealthy and native peoples not.
  • Roaring Rampage of Romance: Bella and Edward start a war and cause all sorts of chaos and mayhem, including hurting each other, in their quest to be together.
  • Romance Novel: An archetypical Paranormal Romance for young adults, featuring the story of a human girl and an eccentric vampire as Star-Crossed Lovers.
  • Sadly Mythtaken:
    • Vampires hating (or even rotting in) the sun is actually Newer Than They Think, the idea having been invented and popularized by Nosferatu. (Granted, there's still nothing about vampires sparkling in the sun.)
    • On the negative side, the myths used to have ugly, short, smelly peasant vampires with reddish not pale skin. They almost always had some sort of shapeshifting and definitely did sleep (during the day at least). Fangs were also common because of the lips of posthumously exhumed corpses being peeled back after death. Telekinetic and other creepy poltergeist abilities were common because if something bad happened in your home it's easier to just blame a dead guy.
    • There's a positive side to this trope for werewolves. While several myths of werewolves had them be a little more anthropomorphic, most of the original myths of werewolves actually were just men changing into wolves without anthropomorphic features. Twilight also explicitly mentions the more modern werewolves, with their changing under the full moon and bites transferring the infection.
  • Satellite Love Interest:
    • One of the most bizarre examples of this trope can be found in the concept of "imprinting", in which males "recognize" the females that they are destined to fall in love with — which can occur as early as child-birth. Many of these female imprintees are "basic" by default considering they're infants or toddlers and thus have no fixed personalities at all. Their lives revolve entirely around their future husbands considering the teenage boys appear to become their caregivers until they're of marriageable age, and whether the girls want to be in these relationships is treated as somewhat irrelevant in the text. They are future wives, nothing more. In-universe, it's explained that the boys become anything and everything that the girls want, literally living and breathing to make their imprints happy, so they're satellites as well.
      • One example of this was when Jacob came across his friend Quil (a teenage boy) on a "date" with Claire (a two-year-old) at the beach, which involved Quil just watching as Claire played in the sand.
    • Also, Bella Swan, our romantic heroine and POV character herself. We never learn much about her life in Phoenix, and although she easily makes friends in the beginning of the first novel, she immediately dumps them to be with Edward. Her whole life revolves around Edward, to the point where she actually goes catatonic when he leaves her, and in the last book she turns into a vampire, and completely leaves her human life behind her for a life with her Edward. She also has no character development at all throughout the books. At one point her mother literally compares Bella to a satellite around Edward—always orientating herself to always be near him—and Bella agrees with her mother with no second thoughts.
  • Screw the Rules, I Have Supernatural Powers!: Especially Bree Tanner, but even Bella and most of the Cullens think like that sometimes.
  • Shout-Out:
    • Bella compares her love affair with Edward to Wuthering Heights and Romeo and Juliet. New Moon parallels the latter when Bella and Edward almost commit Tag Team Suicide due to a communication error. Even funnier when considered that Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet to be a cautionary tale about the dangers of falling in love too fast, which is exactly what Bella and Edward did!
    • How about Rosalie as the Bride in Kill Bill?
    • The fact that the Cullen family likes to drive fast could be a Shout-Out to the line "the dead travel fast" from Bram Stoker's Dracula. (Which was itself a quote from a famous German poem.)
    • Leah's cousin Emily is introduced in New Moon.
  • Show, Don't Tell: Inverted. Stephenie Meyer's Modus Operandi. She strongly dislikes the word "said" and almost always provides at the very least an adverb for the verb she decides to use, rather than letting the dialogue speak for itself. She is also a big fan of saying how people feel, which can be jarring, since the books are told from a first-person perspective and (with the exception of Midnight Sun (2020)) do not have a narrator who can read minds. At the very least, Bella's supposed to have been socially withdrawn before the story begins, and as a result doesn't sound like somebody who'd be skilled at reading other people.
  • Sickeningly Sweethearts:
    • Bella's opinion of Sam and Emily.
    • Edward and Bella as he is fascinated by even the most mundane things about her and she gushes about how gorgeous he is every time he enters her field of vision and once even swoons over how good his breath smells.
  • Stag Party: Subverted; the Cullens' idea of a bachelor party is hunting grizzly bears and mountain lions. When Bella asks Edward if there will be strippers, Emmett can be heard yelling "Bo-ring!"
  • Straw Vulcan: Any character who tries to convince Bella to think rationally and make practical decisions as opposed to blindly following her heart is usually treated as an enemy. In the end Bella's flat out refusal to be logical or rational, using the fact that she's in love as a justification for making decisions that even she openly admits are unwise, winds up making all of her dreams come true.
  • Supernatural Gold Eyes: When the vampires have fed off of non-human blood. When thirsty, they go black, and if they've had human recently, they turn red.
  • Technicolor Fire: At several points a fire is lit using driftwood, and it's noted that the salt in the wood effects the color of the flame.
  • Team Mom: Esme, to the vampires; Emily, to the wolves.
  • Their First Time: Played straight, except when Edward and Bella kept switching positions on who was the "ready" one.
  • Theme Naming: Many of the Quileutes have Old Testament Biblical names. (Jacob, Leah, Seth, Samuel, Paul...) Four of them (Jacob, Seth, Emily, and Paul) were named after Meyer's siblings. It can also be attributed to the Mormon belief that many if not all Native Americans are descendants of a Hebrew tribe known as the Lamanites.
  • This Loser Is You: Most of the fans still say they like the books because of how much they identify with Bella/ wish they were Bella.
  • Those Two Guys: Bella's human friends, as well as the members of the pack (who aren't Jacob, Sam, Leah, or Seth) fill this role. Quil and Embry fill it especially well.
  • The Three Faces of Eve: Bella's Naïve Everygirl is contrasted with Esme (wife), who warmly welcomes Bella into her home and later restores a cottage on the Cullen estate for Bella and Edward, Rosalie (seductress), who is jealous of Edward's affection for Bella because she the one who has always been desired by men, and Alice (child), who values Bella's safety above all and cares for her like a sister.
  • Token Good Cops: Most of the Volturi who enforce the laws governing vampire society enjoy using their authority to kill with impunity or build up their power base under the guise of meting out justice. However, Marcus would prefer to enforce the rules fairly and without needless executions. Former member Eleazar also genuinely believed in stability while being unhappy with the ruthless parts of their job, which led to him leaving the Volturi for a Vegetarian Vampire lifestyle.
  • Too Dumb to Live: Bree and Diego from The Short, Second Life of Bree Tanner would surely count as well. They both know that they're being kept in a basement by a Riley, who (A) has been kidnapping other teenagers to make into vampires and (B) clearly doesn't care if they kill each other. Later on, they discover that the story they had been fed about how sunlight burns them up was a lie. They also learn that they were all being used as cannon fodder and Bree remembers that the night she had been turned into a vampire, she had been kidnapped and tricked into it. They also find out that Riley is discussing plans with Victoria. So of course they come to the conclusion that Riley is completely innocent and will surely help them if they tell him everything they know, so Diego decides to meet him alone, to tell Riley that he knows all of these secrets, without telling anyone except for Bree where he is going. Needless to say, Diego does not return. Bree qualifies as this trope because after all of that, she doesn't realize that Diego is dead until Riley has run off and left her and the other vampires to be killed by the Cullens. What a brilliant pair!
  • Town with a Dark Secret: Forks is a subversion. Aside from Bella, none of the humans know there are vampires living in their town. La Push is a bit closer, since the tribe is actively hiding the presence of werwolves. But since the werewolves aren't evil, it doesn't quite apply.
  • Trend Covers: The years following the success of the books saw a lot of YA novel covers (and new covers for existing ones) with "one symbolic object on dark background" designs.
  • Undeathly Pallor: Every character who is considered beautiful.
  • Unfortunate Names:
    • Jacob is not a fan of the name "Renesmee". Bella, in turn, is not a fan of the nickname "Nessie". They both grow to accept them.
    • Jacob wasn't a fan of Bella's name choice for a boy either, since she planned to name a son after her husband and himself: Edward Jacob, or EJ for short.
  • Unreliable Narrator:
    • Bella is supposed to have low self-esteem about her looks, but the events of the series suggest that she's gorgeous. There are also plenty of probably unintentional examples - for example, Bella becomes convinced that her friend Jessica is using her for popularity and doesn't actually like her, on the basis of absolutely no evidence. One of the plainer examples comes from the beginning of the third book where she describes the Cullens as "dedicated to protecting human life," then shortly afterward we see Edward reacting to a killing spree in a nearby city that's obviously perpetrated by a vampire, which he brushes off as Someone Else's Problem.
    • In Bree's novella, the protagonist sees Edward as a good-looking red-headed guy, rather than the marble-perfect tousled, bronze-haired Adonis of Bella's descriptions, suggesting that Bella's viewpoint might be skewed.
  • Unusually Uninteresting Sight:
    • The Cullens attempt to be this to throw off suspicion, though its debatable how effective they are at this. Despite being Genre Blind to their true nature, the rest of the school have noticed that both pairs of adopted siblings are romantically involved, that they always buy lunch but never eat any of it, and that they are absent on sunny days.
    • In Midnight Sun we find out that Jasper invokes and exploits this deliberately with his powers: when Laurent, James and Victoria meet the Cullens and may be hostile, he makes himself, Alice, Esme and Bella feel as boring and unremarkable as they can be. For a long while, none of the three notice the battle-scarred war veteran, the petite seer that James personally knows, or the human girl casually hanging out with a coven of vampires. Even Edward has a hard time keeping his focus on them.
  • Unwanted Harem: Bella unwittingly gains a number of male suitors over the course of the trilogy. In Twilight, she falls for Edward while gaining the attention of Justin, Eric, Mike, and Jacob. Same for Edward, who attracts the attention of Jessica and Angela but still wants Bella.
  • Urban Fantasy: The series combines elements of magic and horror with sci-fi set in modern-day smalltown America.
  • Vampires Are Rich: The Cullens own their own island. James, Laurent, and Victoria were not rich, however. The nomadic vampires in general are not wealthy, just vampires who establish big covens, reside near human society and actually bother to accumulate money.
  • Vegetarian Vampire: The Cullen clan of vampires, who hunt, kill and drink the blood of animals for sustenance, call themselves "vegetarians". They make a point to say they are careful not to impact the environment. Considering how fast they move on foot and the excess of money they have, they can travel pretty much wherever is needed in order to be responsible vampires. An easier way of not impacting the environment would have been to just go to any butcher shop and outright buy a few litres of pig's blood.
  • Viewers Are Goldfish: Stephenie Meyer has the irresistible urge to describe how unbelievably gorgeous Edward is over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over AND OVER!!!!! We heard you the first time, Meyer.
  • Voodoo Shark: Every time Meyer tries to cover up a plot-hole she just makes it bigger.
    • The books explain that vampires can't get pregnant because they are essentially dead, and their bodily fluids are all converted into venom, even the ones they drink. When it turned out human women could get pregnant by male vampires, Meyer pointed out that she only said they couldn't get pregnant, because the frozen body of a female vampire couldn't accomodate a growing fetus. None of which explains how vampiric venom-sperm gets produced or doesn't melt the human's ovaries or simply turn her as though he bit her.
    • When asked how it is that male vampire's produce sperm when all their other body fluids are venom, Meyer explained that he still had the sperm that was there when he turned, failing to explain how it survives there for hundreds of years, how Nahuel's father could have four dhampyr children with decades between them, or why the baby isn't human if the sperm used was in fact made by a human body.
    • Confronted with the fact that vampires have twenty-five pairs of chromosomes, which implies that the transformation somehow adds two matched pairs, and werewolves having twenty-four pairs, implying that both their parents were at least half werewolf, and dhampyr's also having twenty-four pairs, implying that the extra two chromosomes from the vampire parent somehow folded and joined up with the top one attaching to the human half of the DNA helix like it belonged there, Meyer gave this iconic Shrug of God:
      Meyer: I majored in English, not biology.
    • Vampire powers are somewhat inconsistent. Bella's Shield, so powerful it protected her even as a human, blocks out Edward's read-only Telepathy, but not Jasper's read-and-change Empathy, nor Alice's prophetic powers. Meyer explained this as Bella's Shield only blocking telepathic powers, whereas Jasper's Empathy is basically him telekinetically altering brain chemistry. While consistent with Edward's explanation that Jane's Crucio powers are just the illusion of pain, it does not explain how Alec's anaesthetic powers, which manifest as slow-moving fog, nor Kate's electroshock powers, which are implied to be made of real electricity, don't affect Bella.
    • Even done In-Universe. When Bella asks about how vampires came to exist in the first place, Edward suggests that they evolved, arguing that if Bella can believe humans evolved, she can believe vampires evolved. This is blatantly false, though Bella doesn't know it yet, because vampires don't reproduce in such a way that this can happen. Vampires are made out of humans, they don't pass on their genes through breeding with other vampires or even asexually through cloning themselves; every new vampire is just a transformed human.
    • Regarding Life And Death, Meyer has said that she kept Charlie and Renée's genders because "family court tends to favor women", implying that the only reason whimsical womanchild Renée got custody over calm and rational law enforcer Charlie is that she is a woman, and not that, say, the police chief felt the child would be better off with its mother.
  • Wanton Cruelty to the Common Comma: It happens a lot.
  • Warm Bloodbags Are Everywhere: This series runs on this trope.
  • What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway?: Certain abilities or traits that humans possess are enhanced into actual superpowers if they become vampires: Edward, who was perceptive enough to guess what people were thinking when he was human, has that ability enhanced to full-on telepathy when he becomes a vampire; Jasper, who was charimastic enough to change people's moods gained the ability to alter people's emotions as a vampire; Alice, who was a psychic human who could see brief glipmses into the future, has her power magnified upon her transformation into a vampire. However, Carlisle's enhanced power is said to be "compassion", Esme's is love, and Rosalie's, according to Meyer, is her beauty. An alternative for Rosalie's enhacement suggested by Edward, tenacity, isn't much better.
  • What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Inverted. Bella doesn't seem to care about the fact that Edward and some other Cullens killed some humans in their past. She finds it "only natural" for Edward to go through this phase. She also doesn't care as long as her guests in Breaking Dawn go out of town to find and kill their food.
    • The Cullens seem to have it the same way: despite their own moral reasons for abstaining from a human diet, they don't really care if humans die by being eaten by vampires, as long as they're not the ones doing it.
      • On the other hand Bella's freaking out about the tragedy of all the lives being lost at the beginning of Eclipse, so figure that.
  • Wish-Fulfillment: Reading the book, and Meyer's statements in interviews, shows that the Twilight books are nothing but this. Ranging from the popularity in high school, to Edward's personality, including the admittance that Bella is 'the daughter she wanted, but never had' and that Renesmee is how she wanted child-raising to be like.
  • Woman Were-Woes: Certain families among the Quileute tribe have werewolves, a trait which has always passed from father to son. The Clearwaters knew that this might one day be an issue for their son, but when their older daughter Leah transformed, it was enough to give her father a heart attack. She's the only female werewolf, though, and why she inherited it remains unexplained.note 
  • You Are What You Hate: Dangerous to hang out with, have a hard time keeping their instincts under control, and are physically powerful. Vampire, or werewolf?
  • You Must Be Cold: Because Edward is convinced Bella's going to go into shock and let's face it, it's not like the cold bothers him.
  • You Need to Get Laid: Edward's broodiness and fatalism has been linked to the fact that he has never had sex in almost a century. Once he gets married and does the deed he certainly becomes less stressed. Also, Bella had a history of night terrors and talking in her sleep which ceased after her honeymoon.
  • Your Vampires Suck: This series has been on both the giving and receiving end of this trope (receiving more often than not, though).
  • You Sexy Beast: The entire basis of the series is that Bella is only interested in vampires, werewolves and shapeshifters. And the author loves to remind us.

Alternative Title(s): Twilight

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