Transitive Verve

This morning it was announced that the 10th anniversary edition of Twilight  would include a genderbent version called Life and Death , in which Bella is now Beau, and Edward is now Edythe. As you can probably imagine, a lot of the Internet response has been pretty disdainful, as most discourse has been regarding anything having to do with the series, including Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson, who have since moved on with their lives to do other awesome film projects. I'm not going to lie - I can be snarky about Twilight  sometimes too. It's very easy to do so - there are a lot of problematic elements within the book series itself, and then add to it the fandom fervor, the gossip headlines, etc., and it's a perfect storm of mockable elements ripe for the picking. There has been a lot written and said about what is bad about Twilight . So I'm going to talk about what I  like about it instead. At the time that I first read Twilight , which was well after t...

     There’s a big variety of movies, but they do have one thing in common: all of these movies are not about whiteness. They are not about white people. They are not about the experience of being white and they are not historical dramas that are just about white people. They’re not about whiteness. They are about really universal and very human themes. They’re about love and they’re about loss. For example, “The Fault in Our Stars” is an incredible book. I love that book so much. John Green, I think, is a wonderful writer. I’m a huge fan of his. But nowhere in his book was anyone’s race ever mentioned.      So my question with these videos is why are we using white people to tell these universal stories? And what is that saying? I think it’s saying something really dangerous and the message it gives to people of color — and I can say this as a person of color who grew up watching these stories that I related to thematically and didn’t see reflections of m...