I recently watched Twilight: Eclipse.

Considering my mixed feelings towards the Twilight franchise, telling people that usually feels like a confession, swiftly followed up by the explanation that I got it on Netflix (therefore: no money spent on it) and that it’s really a sort of morbid curiosity, you see.

So why am I talking about it here?  Because I had this revelation about why people like these books.

It’s pure, unadulterated wish-fulfillment.

Yes, yes, I know, that’s not news.  My previous post about Twilight even already touched on it a little.  But I don’t mean the wish-fulfillment about wanting the really attractive guy to fall in love with you.  I mean, that’s every romance ever written.  But something that really struck me about the movie…it’s all about the wish-fulfillment of wanting to be important to people.

Because Bella is enormously, overwhelmingly, impossibly important to EVERYONE.  This is true in the books too, but maybe it’s the more pared-down medium of the movie that suddenly made me sit up and say, “hey wait a minute, doesn’t anyone in this movie have any priority in their lives except Bella?”  And then I realized this story is the perfect fantasy come to life for anyone who has ever felt unimportant, unnoticed, lost in a crowd, felt like they didn’t know how to make themselves matter to other people…oh wait, that’s probably everyone at some point.  Especially pre-teens and teens who are still trying to find their place in the world.  And maybe that’s why this story is just so darn popular…

I mean, let’s break this down a bit.  (And I’m about to get into spoilers, so if you’re worried about that, stop reading!)  I have the movie uppermost in mind because I just watched it, but the book follows the same trajectory.

Edward is obsessively in love with Bella and apparently has nothing else in his life that matters.  This is a man who actually says things out loud like “You are the most important thing in my life” and “You are my reason for existing.”

Jacob comes across as a little more normal in his love for Bella, but he’s still very much in love with her, is willing to “fight for her” until “her heart stops beating” (that is, until she becomes a vampire) even though she’s clearly chosen Edward, and Jacob’s telepathic pack brothers all make a point of telling her that he thinks about her constantly.  Thanks, guys, she needed to be told how important she was.

The villain, Victoria, raises an army of vampires, commits mass-murder in Seattle, takes on the Cullen clan, risks the reprisal of the feared vampire law enforcers the Vulturi…so that she can kill Bella.  Negative attention, true, but still–Bella is incredibly important to her.

When it becomes apparent that someone is stalking Bella, the Cullens drop everything to go on guard duty to protect her.  You can chalk that up to…them being nice.  They care about Edward.  They make it their business to deal with rogue vampires in the area.  Or they want to protect Bella.  And somehow that last one comes off pretty strongly.  Rosalie grumbles about it a little, but she looks whiny as a consequence.

When the Cullens need help fighting the army of vampires, the werewolves jump into the fray…because Bella is in trouble.  Oh, and because fighting vampires is what they do.  But when Jacob points that out, it comes across more as, “don’t worry, we’ll be fine because fighting vampires is what we do,” not, “get over yourself, we’re not fighting them because of you.”  I think they’re fighting them because of her.

At one point Bella visits the Reservation, and is invited to join the council meeting and hear the ancient stories.  Jacob tells her it’s the first time an outsider has ever been invited.  Because Bella is just that special.

One of the vampire army members is a teenager from Forks who went missing.  His parents have been looking for him, and have been talking to Bella’s father, Charlie, the local sheriff.  Fairly unnecessarily, Charlie comments that he’d never stop looking if it was Bella.  (I’m more willing to give that one a pass; he’s her father, he’s supposed to feel that way…)

The only ones who don’t seem to be totally obsessed with Bella are her human friends.  And they’re always shunted off to the side.  This wasn’t in Eclipse, but in New Moon Bella goes totally off the deep end because Edward leaves and one of her friends–Angela?  Jessica?  I can’t even remember–can’t deal with Bella’s resulting weirdness.  As punishment for not making Bella the center of her life–the way Jacob did–AngelaorJessica gets banned from the rest of the series and now I can’t remember her name.

Bella keeps moaning in Eclipse about how everyone’s going to get hurt “because of me.”  And sure, no normal person wants their friends to get hurt, because of them or otherwise.  But to be surrounded by people who are, literally, willing to go to their deaths for you?  Who are willing to make you the center of their world?  Who look at you and say, yes, this is a person who is truly important, who matters, who we want to keep in the world and in our lives and who we recognize as special…  Wow.

Wish-fulfillment gone mad.

Especially since, me sitting over here outside the book, I can say that there’s nothing all that special about Bella.  Yeah, she’s nice enough.  I could probably talk to her about books.  But I don’t think I personally would be willing to take on an army of ravenous vampires for her.  Not without some other awfully good reason for it.

Maybe one reason I’m noticing this is because I just wrote a novel all about who does and doesn’t get noticed in stories.  Bella is clearly a Sleeping Beauty type, with legions of Fairy Godmothers falling over themselves to rescue her, from Edward and Jacob on down the list.  It does make me wonder if AngelaorJessica could use a Tarry to help her with her problems.  Or why the Cullens weren’t equally worried about the anonymous victims being attacked in Seattle–why aren’t they of equal value to Bella?  Oh right–because they’re not the heroine.

So anyway.  There’s my new theory on why Twilight is so popular.  The saying goes, “To the world you may be just one person, but to one person you may be the world.”  I think a lot of the world feels like just one person, and Twilight gives them a story where one person gets to be the world…to everyone.