Be Careful What You Wish For

Afterword

First and foremost, I would like to thank everyone who gave my little tale of woe the time of day. I write a lot, but I only just started publishing on the internet, so I'm not really used to having an audience outside of people I already know or the odd creative writing class colleagues. You invested your hours, you stuck with the story, and I am grateful for that. Thank you, also, for leaving comments, for telling me what you think and for leaving suggestions. I appreciate your thoughtful critiques a lot and I take them to heart.

This is why I wanted to explain what exactly motivated me to write this story, and what I intended it to be. I'm not sure I accomplished every goal I set for myself, but still, I'd like to explain where all of this came from. Basically, it came from me being an anti, but also from the outrage at least half the fan-base of these books felt when Breaking Dawn was released. They had a lot of complaints, and all of those complaints were not only justified, but got completely blown off by the author and her brother – you know, the one who screens her mail for her. Yeah. Anyway, I don't intend to soapbox. What I do intend is to (again, wordily) elaborate on my reasons for writing this story.

Here's the tl; dr version, first: people didn't like Breaking Dawn. I myself thought it was abysmally bad. I had fun trying to address all the issues the fans had with it. Thank you for giving me the time of day!

Here's the wordy version:

So...let's get to it, then. As I wordily explained in the note at the start of chapter one, I set out to do the opposite of what Stephenie Meyer had done: I wanted to write an actual story with a plot and with character development – you know, something the actual Twilight fans were expecting and what they, frankly, deserved. I'm not a fan, as you can obviously tell, and when I read the novels, I was well aware of the fact that they were a blatant Mary Sue wish-fulfilment fantasy. I knew that going in. I started reading them after the Sparkledämmerung, after Seth Morgan's infamous response to that very polite fan petition, after the Breaking Dawn fallout. I'd never even heard of Twilight before the first movie trailer came out, and it only caught my eye due to internet mockery, in the first place.

Mockery, however, has never been my intention with this fic.

I got to say, when I first read those books, I wilfully ignored the damaging messages, the abuse, the racism, the misogyny, the bad writing etc. I simply didn't care. It was a Mary Sue fantasy and it was fun – for me, at least. That being said, I understand the actual fans' rage at not only the dud that was Breaking Dawn, but also at Meyer's rather infantile reaction to criticism. That wasn't so great, to put it mildly. Insulting and dismissing your detractors is bad enough; doing it to your fans is infinitely worse. As for you people who didn't like Breaking Dawn? You just didn't get it, apparently. Says so in the Illustrated Guide.

Most people who loved the books honestly believed that Meyer was writing a coherent tale wherein all elements had a narrative purpose. Turns out they were mistaken, and that made them angry – rightfully so. The fans deserved better. The fans deserved resolutions to the many plotlets that Meyer had introduced; they deserved to have at least some of their questions answered, instead of just having to swallow a half-arsed hand-wave for nearly every conflict established throughout the novels. Because that's what happened.

In short, the fans wanted Bella to have her happy end, but they wanted her to fight for it, to face adversity, to grow as a person. They did not want to watch her prance about arrogantly à la Rose Potter, lord her superiority over everyone else, and then stand around doing jack shit and feeling awesome. They did not want everyone to just talk for five minutes and then go home. Of course they didn't want that. Nobody wants to slog through such a massive waste of time.