@@limitlesscord7319 It's true; deep down every man (regardless of religion, race or creed... or gender) secretly wants to be stalked by a beautiful vampire chick that looks like Ed Pattinson. Look it up . . . .
@@limitlesscord7319Someone you find attractive being kind of terrifying is definitely a turn on for a lot of people. The internet is rife with guys wanting women to step on them and getting turned on when their gf is mean and physically strong af
I think this book would be WAY more interesting if instead of changing the genders, the book changed it so that Bella was the vampire. As in, the basic setup in the same (new girl moves into town, develops a relationship with a mysterious quiet guy in her school, etc) but Edward is just... some random goth guy, and Bella is secretly a vampire and that's the reason she's popular.
Heck, even the straight-up gender swap would've been a lot more interesting if she just acknowledged that different genders would've probably led to a lot of changes in character personalities, backstories, and the overall plot. But nah, that takes effort.
no, not equivalent. on the contrary; his whole point that male characters not being obsessed with sex is supposedly unrealistic actually vindicates "breasted boobily" as more accurate.
And Renee could be Ronnie. Getting glimpses into a female Charlie as the sheriff could have been an angle worth looking at and using gender politics in this gender bent interpretation.
it would not even be needed, she could just say that Beau lived with his Police Chief Mom in Phorx, beeing best freinds with Julie and the Werwolf Girl Gang, until one day the cullens Arrive and Julie becomes weird, revealing in the end that Julie is a Werwolf transforming because vampires came near her. however i would miss Dilf Charlie.
Dom: "Most men don't want to be feel protected by a vastly more strong woman." Also Dom: "A woman is always more attractive if I know she could cut me in half with a sword. It's just like that. I know I'm not alone in this."
He wants a powerful woman, but he doesn’t want to be protected by the powerful woman. He probably wants to fight alongside the powerful woman and prove his worth or something. Idk.
He can know he's not alone in it AND acknkowledge that most basic bro's probably unfortunately reject the charms of Defender Dames... at least that was my experience from locker room talk back in the day. Then again how many of them could've potentially be faking it? That, I cannot say...
@@mirjanbouma Hey, you can trip in a ditch created by the bar dropping into the ground. Edit: apparently I was still half asleep when I wrote my original comment.
While some guys may hyper fixate on certain features, dimples I guess, but I am not convinced they would not also fixate on any other traits of someone they are super into. How often has a guy gone on about his girlfriend's long hair and thiccc butt when I was in high school? A lot.
If you read Luminosity, this is VERY true! Bella comes in MANY forms (female, male, TWINS, straight gay bi Trans...), but Charlie and Renee stay the same
@@chrisgoodness6531 Why not just say "I have no idea what gender or sex are" and be done with it, Chris? Better yet, why are you subscribed to a man who irates you so much? At least my complaint is valid; you're just a Libs of TikTok priest mad that that girl in Chem class won't talk to him.
@@MogamiKyoko13 Oh man; now that I think about it, how amazing would it have been if Meyer did gender-flip Charlie into a woman, but still kept the flavor-saver?
In re the dimple thing: Wow. It's almost as if Ms Meyer was uncomfortable writing Beau objectifying Edyth quite as comprehensively as Bella objectifies Edward. I wonder why that could be.
no homo (Seriously, though, some straight women seem uncomfortable even channeling physical desire through male characters attracted to women or homosocial relationships between women.)
It's because she is a Mormon 😅 She needs her female protagonist to keep sweet, they can't be perceived as sexy or they would be "impure" even if they are virgins
Well, he's a dom, so he'll never understand... ba-dum-tss sorry I'll see myself out, the dad-joke was just way too ready for me to leave it hanging like that
to be fair most guys probably dislike being helpless. it's one thing to have a more 'powerful' or 'sucessful' woman as a partner. it's a little different if you feel like you aren't bringing anything but, your personality to the table.
As soon as he said that my first thought is that the internet widely disagrees. The problem instead lies (I amuse as I have not read the book) in that the story dose a poor job of representing that fantasy.
I can't help but suspect that Meyer made sure to restrict this to a one-off because if she had continued this gender-flip story into the subsequent books, she'd have had to deal with the parts of the story where the breeding pair conceive a child. And there's no way to gender-flip the pregnancy story without substantially changing the plot, so she'd have to put in some actual work.
Nah, just change it so that the vampire men are the infertile ones, easy Edit: you're right, though, Edith pregnancy would not be as gory. The child wouldn't kill her. Thereby not necessitating Beau's turning. But I would like a description of how Edith fucked him so hard he almost died😅
Oh, it's simpler than that: they straight up can't get pregnant because they're both vampires, so she probably doesn't see the point in continuing the story without that. Gotta peddle that LDS doctrine!
@@morinomajou I think what Dom and this comment are suggesting is that she made the decision not to continue the story and then changed the ending so people wouldn't be expecting more.
Hi! Child of the 80s here. My dad got primary custody of me after a divorce when I was a wee babe. It was unusual back then, and due to my Grandparents on my biological mom's side, she was given more liberal visitation rights. However, the more freedom she had to visit, the less she actually came. She definitely did *not* want to be a mother to me, and I thank God Dad got me out of that situation. As for a half sister of mine she also spawned, my dad was not her biological father, but hearing that she was being neglected and bounced from relative to relative, actually took the time to hire a lawyer able to do law in two different states (where the rest of the family had gone) to see that she was settled down and eventually put in the custody of an Aunt - a much more stable home life for her ultimately. Yeah, gender swaps don't = choosing all the same things and wouldn't make sense in some cases.
I think part of it was also bc Renee is an actual mess. Bella had to be the mother figure between the two. So between a scatterbrained dad (male Renee) and a mother who works in law enforcement (female Charlie). F!Charlie had a better chance of getting custody. Although, Charlie giving up Bella/Beau so Renee wouldn't be lonely is a solid point 🤔
We need a film adaptation. Using ALL the original cast, cross dressing and doing the fakest sounding girl\boy voices that they can, and Charlie can break the 4th wall and be self aware. Also, side note, dimples are incredibly cute. I know it was overdone, but also somewhat warranted imo lol. Some people are boob guys, some butt guys, some calf guys.... Beau is a dimple guy.
See I just think they should cast Kristen as Edward/Edythe and Robert as Bella/Beau and Taylor Swift as Julie, complete with her blonde hair surrounded by actual native American actors
I’m baffled that Meyer titled this book ‘Life and Death’. If she for instance had titled it ‘Evetide’, she would have both stayed true to the naming scheme of the series, while also making clear that this was the eve - the beginning - of a tale similar yet different - a changing tide.
Covered the night and moon, this should have covered the day and sun, but then again, it would have clashed with the vampires and werewolves (creatures of the night) theme. Maybe she could have used nightly animals instead? Nightingale, Owl's Cry... -aaand I have already spent more thought on this than Steph.
As someone who was a teenage girl, Bella didn’t think of boinking Edward enough either. Like as someone who was virgin until 24 my lack of experience and desire to have sex didn’t stop me from thinking about it graphically 24/7 until I was like 22 😂
While I definitely didn't think of sex 24/7 I agree Bella didn't think of sex with Edward enough in the books. I mean there are dozens of both teen and adult romances to show that women think of sex as much as men.
Definitely. While as an adult woman I pretty much never think about sex, teenage me had quite some fantasies. Especially when near the boy I had a crush on.
Tbh i had the opposite experience where I thought more about sex during adulthood than when I was a teen. But also I didn't have sex until I was 22, so it kinda counts? And also I was a huge prude and like thinking about just making out with someone was blasphemous enough lol. I had a very weird relationship with sexual thoughts because I was raised in a heavily religious family. So that's probably why.
Weirdly enough I almost never thought about sex as a teen but once I got to my 20s I started fantasizing about all kinds of freaky stuff. Late bloomer, I guess
I'm not saying a group of girls can harass a lone teen boy, but I don't think it would happen they exact way it's depicted in the original Twilight. It would probably be more of a "let's chat up this guy, get him really drunk and steal his shit" type of thing 🤷♀️ Also, an "array of dimples" sounds horrifying
3:11 ah but this is the same woman who romanticized a woman's ability to have a child so badly that she wrote... all of THAT.. in Breaking Dawn. In her mind the idea a mother WOULDN'T want full custody is unfathomable to her.
She could’ve easily written that fem!Charlie had gotten full custody and Beau had lived in the town his whole life. The Cullens move regularly so they could still be meeting for the first time but Edith is moving into town instead and that gives you some interesting dynamics to play with regarding the other people in town. I guess that’d require she work on writing her book rather than just find-and-replacing everything though.
@@SorowFame Expanding a bit- Beau could have been living with his father for several years as they travelled for his new step mother's...sporting career or whatever it was, with the justification being that it was an opportunity for him to see the world for a while. Swapped Charlie (Charlotte) could have been an estranged mother working to repair her relationship with her son now that he was home. This allows Beau to still be the new guy at school and feds into the original set up. However........this would require writing in way more nuance into the characters than was ever originally there.
As you described the plot, I began to realize what a gender swapped remake could've been. Insecure guys that end up in abusive controlling relationships often miss a lot of red flags because they're lonely and horny and the girl is interested in them and hot. There could've been something to say about how hard it can be for a teen boy to leave a toxic relationship, especially if classmates thought they were cool for having a hot girlfriend and their dad liked their girlfriend because if they broke up not only would that all go away but they'd then have to explain to everyone why they broke up which might diminish their manliness in their peers eyes. It could've been an interesting exploration of the differences of what girls and guys want in relationships, how that desire can be exploited, and the different obstacles that make it difficult for both men and women to leave toxic relationships, and that could've made the dark ending kind of work in a really heartbreaking way. The problem is that would've required a writer that understands why Edward's behavior was problematic and how teen guys think, and even then I think it also would've needed a more talented writer
I got to admit being stalked and presured into a relationship by a controlling, possessive, sociopathic vamprie girl is kinda appealing. If it wasnt presenting itself as a genuine love story
While I do agree that a sexually interested male teen would have sex on the mind more than not at all, the phrasing to make that point could have used a little touching up since "Men always think about and want sex" is a tired trope in of itself. Best approach in the book would probably be the protag starting to think about her more intimately after they hook up. So he's not a creep but does obviously show a healthy interest in her. Or just emphasize he's ace.
or just emphasise that he loved her smile and imagined what might come later. don't have to be explicit when you can just hint there were less innocent thoughts as well.
Glad you enjoyed that aspect! Me personally, as an ace, I dislike supposedly allosexual characters acting ace. To me, it makes it seem like the author has something against asexuals, to the point they refuse to label their character as such. The other outcome is that by portraying an absence of sexual feelings as normal in a supposedly allosexual character, people get the message that not having sexual feelings is a normal allosexual thing. So, then they try to delegitimatise the concept of asexuality. That's just my take though. I totally get the satisfaction of seeing an ace or ace-like character, but I wish the authors would commit by calling them asexual, rather than this weird "I'm totally allosexual but just super pure and chaste in heart and mind" thing.
@@lindenbree9188 I mean, I'm allosexual (and socialized as a boy-though I'm a trans gal), and I wasn't thinking about sex at all as a teen (though I do a lot after accepting that I am trans). some allosexual people just have naturally weaker libidos, etc., and it is worthwhile to depict that. I strongly dislike the idea that people should consider how bigots will twist shit pretty much at all. regardless of what you depict, bigots will try to deny what they want to deny. look at Bridget from Guilty Gear and how transphobic fans for years have attempted to explain away her transness. once you start on the path of, "[this group of people or kind of experience] shouldn't have representation," you can use that same logic (or lack thereof) to justify further minimizing any experiences that exist outside of hegemony, because it is the same argument functionally. this argument also robs serial storytelling of the power of showing a character's path of self-discovery, because you can't depict its conclusion without also depicting the character existing beforehand, when they are not textually confirmed as something they don't even know they are yet. furthermore, your stance ignores that many ace teens are very well behaving and/or thinking similarly to a character who is not confirmed as ace-but, being teens, they obviously have yet to find themselves. it is important to provide them with representation of what that can be like or fictional role models which personify that. besides, if anything, it is more likely to be helpful for ace folks who don't know that they're ace to see a potential role model who shows that not being obsessed with sex is okay. and I will parallel that with how I found solace in characters who weren't obsessed with romance before I determined that I am aromantic. the fact of the matter is that textual ace and/or aro representation is oftentimes identical to characters behaving in a way that is minimally sexual and/or romantic-with the only distinction being that the character vocalizes their asexuality and/or aromanticism. based on Dom's description, Beau here could absolutely be a sex-positive ace, and I find it asinine to toss out the baby with the bathwater simply because a piece of representation does not toss up the relevant pride flag (especially when the bathwater in this case is merely, "I don't personally find value in _this_ representation"). sometimes, implied or incidental representation such as this is the difference between someone feeling represented or not at all in that respect.
@@MelMelodyWerner I think I consider author intent a lot more than you. I discount the possibility of Beau being ace not because he's not throwing a pride flag around, but because Stephenie Meyer wrote him. And I personally don't see head canons to be as affirming for representation as actual canon. In the actual canon, considering there's zero confirmation and considering who the author is, Beau probably isn't ace. He's probably not a late bloomer still figuring himself out either. He's another one of those weird "I'm totally allosexual but just super pure and chaste in heart and mind" tropes. Yeah, allosexuals can have low libidos. Though I'd still consider them gray asexuals personally. But often, allosexual characters with low libidos like this are written with a weird purity agenda, stemming from the idea that all sex thoughts are inherently predatory or something. I'm not seeing Beau, as written by Mormon Meyer herself, as an honest attempt to portray low-libido allosexual people, and definitely not an attempt at an ace person. As I said in my first comment, one of my issues with this is how "To me, it makes it seem like the author has something against asexuals, to the point they refuse to label their character as such." Besides Mormon Meyer, another example is the writers for Big Bang Theory. Sheldon, is absolutely, on every level, portrayed as asexual. Likely aromantic too. But the authors just hate asexuals or something and denied this fact when asked. And while I get the sentiment behind not caring how bigots twist things, a lot of young LGBT people are growing up in bigoted households. They think like bigots because it's all they know, and often they rely on good media to break their brainwashing. I don't think swearing up and down that a character who behaves asexual at all times in every circumstance is actually allosexual, and ALSO we're never going to acknowledge that any possibility except straight allosexual exists, is particularly helpful for anyone discovering themselves. In fact, it might help asexuals be in the dark about their identity longer, so that's cool. A character who's just not interested in sex often is whatever... I don't care if it's addressed in SOME contexts. Not everyone HAS to have their sexual identity confirmed. And projecting whatever you feel is the rep you want onto them, if it doesn't contradict narrative or authorial intent, have at it. As an example, personally, I like how Batman in the Animated Series, though a playboy allosexual, rarely gets sexually distracted at all. That's some cool allosexual with a low/super controlled libido rep. His sexuality or lack thereof doesn't need to be explored though since that's not what the series is about, but I like that it's there. A character in a literal romance novel where sexuality should REALLY be discussed, however, is just the author having a weird bias against the topic. If Beau is low-libido allosexual (which again I would see that as gray asexual anyway), cool, but I doubt Meyer ever considered him as anything but simply "straight" or cared about any rep.
@@lindenbree9188why did no one take into the consideration that meyer just didn’t want to write out a teenager’s (be it beau or bella - girls think about sex a lot, too) explicit thoughts and desires of being boinked by a hot vampire graphically? Not all romance books delve into that. Edit: what do you mean by "sexually distracted" and do you think that all allosexuals with a non-low libido get sexually distracted regularly? What’s an uncontrolled libido outside of the sex addicted/obsessed behaviours? As a teenager, I had a lot of sexual feelings, but rarely directly towards my crushes. I wanted to maybe hug or kiss them, and i’d get butterflies an all that, but didn’t think explicitely about them. So if i was on the place of beau i’d definetely be close to him in my thought process around my crush. I don’t think I’m asexual...i don’t think i was pure and sexless either, or an abnormal allosexual
@@beafraid5467 Because Bella had more explicit thoughts than Beau, so clearly Meyer isn't above writing that when it comes to teenagers. This is what I recall at least, but if you want actual quotes, it's been too long since I've read the books. Sexually distracted means horny to the point where it's difficult to concentrate on anything else. Tends to happen to people when in the presence of what they find to be a very sexually desirable person, especially if said person is acting flirtatious or initiating a lot of physical contact. This situation would come up a lot in, you know, ROMANCE novels. Sounds like you were/are a gray asexual, but classify yourself however you want. Doesn't make it the typical allosexual experience - to be completely apathetic to all sexual expressions your crush has is, indeed, an abnormal allosexual experience. If you want to take that as an insult, I can't stop you, but it's not meant to be one.
"It's sometimes really hard to remember he's not Bella, which actually improved the experience for me, because while I forgot and pictured her and turned it into an LGBTQ-romance" 😂 I had the same experience!
The second I heard "Reimagining Twilight" and "Genderswapped", my mind was rushing to this idea of Bella being a vampire who takes refuge/scouts out in the small town in Washington to find a place for her coterie of vampires (what she would call her family). The perspective would be on Edward, the prodigal son of the famous doctor who has retired to this town with his family, who witnesses an old family friend, the sheriff, suddenly introduce his daughter, who came from Arizona to get away from the busy city life. The issue Edward finds? The Man never married, nor did he ever talk about having any children let alone a daughter who already look more like a young adult than a teenager she claims to be. The story is then Edward stalking Bella, learning that vampires are real and that her coterie is being hunted by a pack of werewolves. Buuuut that would involve thought, planning, and creating a story that is beyond "fangirling/fanboying(?) over hot vampire of opposite sex".
@@denelian116 I mean both parts can work together yours give me the setup for the for the personality Dynamics and the reason everything everybody is the way they are in the story well this one gives a bit of intrigue and a reason for them to interact other than him getting saved if I mix both of them together it's a pretty complete story since they work well together as they have similar beats already
Ngl, as a former teenage boy, I wasn't thinking very much about sex when I was that age. Mostly when I liked a girl I was thinking about how how amazingly out of my league she was and how hopeless any chance of ever asking out was because I was and still am completely inept at social relations.
As a straight male, I feel weirdly called out. I don't think I've ever imagined a girl I knew being naked or fantasized about sex with them, even as a teen. The hyper-sexual teen boy stereotype has always been weirdly alien to me. So a male boy being depicted thinking about things other than sex is refreshing.
Yeah, people tend to gloss over just how much variation there is between people, especially in terms of gender and sex. Sure there can be trends but we end up acting like variation is way more non-existent than it is
See, I'm a pansexual man who figured that out in high school because that's what was constantly happening to almost everyone in my head. Don't get me wrong, I'm definitely not sad that we didn't have to read some weird horny thought in every other paragraph, but im with dom on this one lol
@@regrettablemuffin9186lol before I figured out I was Ace I had a few guesses what crushes were -something I would figure out when I was older (I was 17) -a thing movies made up -an inside joke I didn't get the context for
Same. I'm a cishet, very much not asexual man, and I never really experienced what Dom was describing, at least not to the degree he claims. Even as a teen, when I had a crush on a girl, I thought about romance much more than sex. I don't think it's fair to act like that stereotype is true 100% of the time.
I don't think it's fair to act like those stereotypes of teenage boys are true 100% of the time. I'm a cishet man who definitely isn't asexual, and I wasn't that sex-obsessed as a teenager. I definitely fantasized about romance with my crushes first and foremost.
Fun fact: we might comment on the dimples, but we're still thinking about your chest. Sorry, on behalf of all teenage boys. We're pretty crass when you get down to it.
@@shinyagumon7015 real talk, during that part I did a thought experiment where I replaced "dimples" with "boobies" and it all began to make sense It sounded very close to the self-censorship prudish teen me used to practice in case someone could read my mind
I'm a cis woman and I was also ALWAYS thinking about sex as a teen (honestly not a ton has changed at 30 but that's besides the point) In my experience, how sexual someone is doesn't neatly tie to gender or sex.
I do agree, but theres a point in remarking more the "teen" part than the "male" part. While gender has probably little to do with it, my own experience is that sexual thoughts have a diferent intensity (to put it one way) when youre going though puberty. That is, if you have a sexual awakening during your teenage years, its likely that the novelty of it all would made such thoughts more prevalent that they would later on in life. Or at least i think considerably less about sex now that im my twenties in comparation to when i was a teen. Though that could also be tied to individual experience, i dunno.
@@pedrovallefin8406 yeah, this isn't something that maps onto everyone's experiences either. I NEVER thought about sex as a teen, it actually repulsed me. stayed that way until I came out as trans earlier this year, and ever since, I have been nonstop obsessed with the thought of getting [none of y'all's business, lmao] by my girlfriend. like, jeez, repression exists, lol. especially for those raised in evangelical households (though I personally was not).
Aw man, Bella's undisguised (if weirdly non-explicit) sexual desire for Edward was one of the things about Twilight I enjoyed. Sad to see it was toned down in the genderswap. Adorable but weird for Meyer to go so hard on "only girls get horny". Also...Hey Stephenie Meyer, my dad got sole custody of my brother in the 80s. It's actually pretty easy for men to get sole custody of children if they indicate they are interested, and that was true even in the 80s. (...actually, thinking about when my brother was born, it might even have been the 70s!)
I just realised… considering the plots of the later book simply can’t happen in this universe… Leah’s counterpart is stuck in their abusive “werewolf” tribe because Jacob’s counterpart doesn’t go through any of the developments that lead them to make their own pack! Myers continues her campaign to make Leah’s life suck more every time you look at it!
On the other hand, if literally everyone is gender-swapped (except Charlie) how would the dynamics of the pack change? Or would like, it just be different wolves? Like, would then the male counterpart of Leah shift first rather than Sam? Would Jacob's (counterpart) brothers have stayed on the rez, rather than let their little sister take full time care of their mother? Would one or both of them be the first shifter?... hm, beginning to see why this was only one installment.
@@Tbm998 can't be. Vampal Mormon fertility thing doesn't seem like it would work the same way in reverse. Liam Clearwater or whatever she decides to name him if not going to be worrying about never being a mother. And well you could say the fertility issues would work in reverse I really don't think that stephenie Meyer cares about male fertility issues at all.
@@Acide950 given that Samantha is still the leader and it was mentioned that Julia was going to join the pack soon I'm going to guess nothing changes all that much and that it's the same thing except now it's a matriarchal pattern.
I’m still puzzled by why Charlie stayed the same, because it could’ve given us a nice look at a friendship between Charlie and Bonnie and how it changed/stayed the same when they were both women. Do they still go fishing together? Do they have different things they bond over? Anything!
The custody argument about moms getting the kids is just another extension of Meyer being weird because of twisting Mormon values. "Children have to be raised by mothers!"
Feeling like those dimples replaced his 'crooked smile' right there. I remember being so tired of that crooked smile when I read it, even as I read it as a young teenager over ten years ago.
Your script during the "What she didn't change" sounds identical to your synopsis on the original, which I gotta say is a pretty ingenious way to prove your point about Meyer's 'changes'. Love it.
I admit, being stalked by a vampire girl is a bit of a fantasy. As a lesbian, it's everyone's lesbian fantasy. It's not however a fantasy for possessiveness to be presented as a loving relationship.
@@ManOutofTime913 I mean, classic piece of horror literture. I say and stress horror given she's not exactly someone you'd really want as a girlfriend if you think about it.
In fairness to the dimple thing, I'll just be honest and say sometimes there is one tiny thing about a woman that just gets into you and doesn't let go. The Little Mermaid (the original) has made it so that women who bite their lips live rent-free in my head forever.
I was about to say the same thing. (And not just because I also have several fetishes I can trace back to the The Little Mermaid) The dimple thing could work if she’s aware of it. Like, everyone has *some* atypical beauty preference. If the understanding is man-Bella in particular is into that then that’s just a character trait. Which Meyer could signal by just having Boylla mention it aloud and then some other character could react with a small “oh, ok. I can see the appeal.” Which would serve as a passive way to show that it’s not universal. If it’s mentioned as often as it seems and goes completely uncommented on, that makes it seem more like it’s just her best guess for “what teen boys are into.”
The weirdest change is Meyer actually cited a real medical condition to explain Beau's aversion to blood. I forget the name of it, but its symptoms match what Beau/Bella goes through. Which only makes her unwillingness to do research for anything else more infuriating.
@@michaeliv284 I don't own the book anymore so I can't look it up, but it was a medical condition, not a phobia. I remember Beau explaining that he has the condition when he's taken to the nurse's office.
The dimples section was sublime. At times, it almost sounded like Meyer had originally written breasts, and then latterly switched it to dimples (can you "flash dimples" at somebody? Dimples are like a side effect of a smile, right, so asserting your dimples doesn't make any logical sense to me).
Well, there's technically two kinds of dimples. The ones on either side of your lip parting, and the ones on your lower back colloquially called the "dimples of Venus" by doctors. Maybe Beau's an ass man?
I remember my brother finding this in that little book section in the greeting card aisle at Safeway, and laughing about how the biggest change seemed to be that the calligraphy font used for the one-word note Edythe leaves for Bo is arbitrarily fancier than the one used for Edward's note to Bella. Even after seeing it as a real book being sold in a real store, part of me still refused to believe it existed.
I liked this book better than actual Twilight. The romance felt much more earned. In the original, Edward and Bella were exaggerated versions of their respective gender stereotypes. Why does Edward love Bella? Because she’s the best girl. Why does Bella love Edward? Because he’s the best boy. But in Life and Death, they love each other for their personalities. Beau is passive, sweet, and accepts help easily. Edith is strong, protective, and doesn’t see Beau as weak. We also get Carine Cullen: hot lady doctor, Earnest Cullen: sterile daddy vampire who longs for fatherhood, Bonnie Black: stern Native American Cheiftess, and Archie Cullen, Beau’s boy bestie. The gender swap honestly reveals just how strongly Meyer’s writing clings to stereotypical gender roles, and it’s a much better book when the roles are scrambled.
13:28 I fully agree with Dom, you can be a hopeless romantic, who is giggling and kissing your girlfriend as you bake a pie toguether and then goes on a picnic... and also imagine doing it on the ping-pong table in the middle of the schoolyard
@@MusicoftheDamned Yeah, but to be fair I haven't seen a studio make an exact duplicate of a movie in a cheap C/P job. Not since Gus Van Sant's Psycho remake anyhow.
@@ManOutofTime913 Hmmm...I imagine the closest one could get to that in films are probably remakes of a foreign film by another country, and even those require more thought and effort than Ms. Meyer put into this, if only by the nature of being film in the first place. Otherwise the closest you would get in movies is something like remakes that miss the point of the original while heavily pandering/retreading ground like _The Thing_ (2011)--yes I know it's a prequel--or the all-female _Ghostbusters_ debacle from 2016. That or a sequel that heavily cribs its predecessor like _The Force Awakens_ since J. J. Abrams is a hack like that. Oh. I suppose there is the relatively rare movie that literally does remake its predecessor because it's effectively replacing it, like _Evil Dead 2_ did. Ironically is a far better movie than either of the two previous ones despite being "lazier", so, uh....
When you mentioned a character didn’t change gender, I knew it was Charlie before you said it. Caring if absentish father is probably a fantasy of hers. And imagining a mother having the same reactions for someone with more conservative gender views would think belong just to a father is a step and an epic journey so far.
@@ManOutofTime913 There is such deeper psychological stuff that could feed into an actual horror story around Bella and her flighty mother and detached father feeding into her insecurities, making her vulnerable to the manipulations of a teen-looking, 100+-year-old vampire. But Meyer is not aware enough of how unhealthy Bella/Edward is to write this.
@@jediping Well, I think she just doesn't care about exploring the psychology of her own characters so much as pushing her very strange worldview of genders and sexuality on us. That and/or writing something trashy enough to sell. Even her own characters don't really stay consistent in behavior, changing as the plot demands.
This video single-handedly makes me wish I didn’t have aphantasia coz I’m really missing out on the mental image of Kristen Stewart in a fake moustache staring dreamily at a girl with just. a horrifying number of dimples
Funny thing is, when I was younger, I'd tried doing some writing and was a Twilight fan (I didn't know any better), and actually considered writing a genderbent version of Twilight. I never actually got around to it, but I distinctly remember imagining a scene that parodied the "You know what I am. Say it". bit. Edit: Okay, I actually love the idea of meeting someone with precognition and them being like "Dude, there you are! I've been waiting forever!"
Babe wake up, new Dominic Noble video Oh my god I am obsessed with the way that the summary is just the Twilight summary gender-flipped, that’s genius.
Dom: *Talks about alternate ending* Me: So depsite them literally being the same person, they respected Beau's bodily atonomy to choose become a vampire more than Bella's......That tracks. ALSO, WHY CAN THE GIRL WEREWOLVES SHAPESHIFT NOW?!
Leah (Leon, or whatever the hell their gender-swapped name is- I never read the damn book) wouldn't be the catalyst for her dad's death, in this version- so... would Seth...? (Senna/ Sienna- I don't know) Or, in this re-imagining, can they *all* be capable- if they have the right bloodline? The more you think about it, the worse it gets...
@@OcarinaSapphr- Can everyone in the Werewolf tribe shape-shift now or is it just the girls and if so, does that mean that Boy-Leah is still an outcast?!
16:08 Honestly as a very 'beta' male who felt very inadequate compared to my peers and was picked on a lot at school, I wouldn't have minded being protected by a 'radically more powerful woman' [Hence why I quite like Cameron protecting John Connor in the Terminator TV show]. There was an interesting book called 'Crazy Love You' [by Lisa Unger] which had the male narrator have a female guardian angel figure [who's about his age] who protected him but often in twisted ways [his art work is mocked at school so she burns the art block down]. The twist is that when the narrator is an adult, the guardian angel ages with him and they have a very love/hate relationship. The book plays with meta elements and ambiguity so is better than I'm describing it.
I particularly know this book because it popularized the Danny DeVito "My god, I get it" meme. A 4chan user read Life and Death as a joke, but came away with a deeper understanding about the appeal of the original series.
I've always wondered when characters instantly read everyone else's mind, they don't immediately run screaming away from all the things that are in peoples' heads. The hentai tags I've seen descriptions of are enough to make me *NOT* know what is going on inside other people.
@@timothymclean I would think it would randomly pop up a lot, though. Especially with the Cullen's being so attractive. The mind reader would often end up hearing little snippets of peoples fantasies involving them, or one of their family members.
Someday I’m going to get the bisexual Twilight inspired book I wrote published, and one of my hopes is that Dom will read it and think to himself “Huh. Well that was something.”
I believe in you! And while I'm not a fan of Twilight, I would absolutely read a bisexual Twilight inspired book, because that premise alone sounds awesome. And when I read that book someday, I hope it's yours!
Hold on… so I never read the Twilight books and I only ever saw the movies. So my knowledge was already limited but when I heard Stephanie Meyers wrote a gender bent Twilight and Bella was now Beau that’s all I knew. So all these years I assumed with the gender bending she only changed Bella… So for the past 10+ years I assumed she was being weirdly progressive and just rewrote Twilight as a gay story but now you’re telling me the whole book was gender swapped?!?!?!?! I’ve been living a lie and I don’t know how to recover 😂
I think it's worth mentioning that Beau becoming a vampire immediately probably also happened because Edith is already a vampire and therefore can't get pregnant, so there's no compelling reason (from Stephanie's perspective) for them to not be vampires together by the end of the book.
I've dealt with my share of stalkers and hyper obsessed controlling exes. I've been able to consume reviews of twilight because, as a man, I've had the barrier of Bella's different pronouns to separate myself from it and revel in the red flag chaos. Now...now I am not so fortunate. And I am queasy. And I ain't even past the summary yet.
Well, "dimple" doesn't sound like a real word anymore 😂😂😂😂😂 Also, on the sex point: I think she just dont know how. See, Bella was kinda obsessed with sex too - but in a very repressed way, which suits Stephanie's background. She could do something about that with Beau, try to portray his lust in a more "classful" way - Talk about her fugure against the light, or how he was fixated on her lips, or something like that -, but I don't think she was able to think in desire for a woman in anything but the most crass terms, so... She took something that someone said it was cute and run JUST with that. However, she IS right about Twilight working the same with a swaped gender. It does just as terrible as the original 😂
I clicked on this expeditiously I TOTALLY forgot about this 😂. It’s so funny that this book could’ve been an interesting exploration of the original book, with Meyer acknowledging the problematic ideas of the original and deconstructing it, maybe even making a new better version of the story. But apparently that was too much work so she just changed some names around and called it a day lol. It is hilarious how good Pattison looks as a girl tho
I worked at Barnes and Noble when this came out. I had to stand at the register in front of a shelf of dozens of these books for a month before the display was changed. Everytime I looked at the book, I seethed with rage that this was allowed to happen. I was a starving student who was eating my savings just to pay rent, and this unimaginative abomination comes along and sells like wildfire. Fun times.
I'm just waiting for the day when EL James decides to take her stab at the gender-swapped retelling schtick and do one for Fifty Shades, It's only a matter of time, people.
Dear God, what would that even look like?! I can only assume that some of the dullest parts of the first book would be short-cut, & stuff from book 2 would be brought forward... Gender-Swapped-Mr Robinson & Subby McSub-Sub would be plain horrifying, though...
Two things: 1. Re: fantasizing about girls you like. For some reason, it's when I like a girl that I find myself not doing that. Celebs and fictional characters, sure. But for someone I know I just find myself...not doing it. 2. Re: dimples. Just me, but if I find an attractive girl with freckles that has interest in me, you can bet your ass that I will notice every solitary spot wherever they are exposed.
I love how the gender swap filter turned Beau into a normal teenage guy, Julie is somehow just as hot as Jacob except as a lady instead of a gentlewolf, and Edythe turned into... Lestat. Also, Edythe? I don't think Meyer was committing to the bit even when it was ridiculous, I think she was committing to the ridiculous. Or, to paraphrase a game title, what remains of Edith Cullen? And... does... does Stephanie know what dimples are? Because that's a very odd way to write about dimples, and I'm not even talking about the frequency. Heck "dimples popped out" is an outright oxymoron.
I remember when this book came out, a forum I was on had a small meltdown realizing why girls were into these books after reading a story about a moody teenage boy being hit on by a goth vampire woman and a tomboy werewolf who are both madly in love with him. Also your point @12:40 , I actually have to personally disagree. Like, I'm not saying I never did, but it wasn't the first thing to pop up. Maybe it was because I grew up with fairly intense depression but my personal hierarchy of needs was just "make friends" well before anything romantic. But that's just me, I'm not going to speak for others personal experiences.
I cannot imagine being a famous published author so privileged that you can not only revisit but rewrite your most famous work, knowing it won't kill your career, and choosing to change nothing but the characters names and genders. There is not a thing I've ever written in the past that I wouldn't make huge changes to because I've improved as a writer or grown as a person since making it if I were given the chance.
Agreed, but then again it would have defied the "purpose" of the book in showing that the original wasn't sexist and stuff, which if she had to double down on to make the gender swap on it as it was. Maybe in a parallel world, Stephanie would have remastered the original to make it less questionable and troubling with her gained experience...
Omg, I can’t believe that you’re really continuing the series 😂 Thank you for the effort. Is there any chance that you might make a video about Midnight Sun (Twilight from Edwards perspective) too some day? Edward is such a drama queen in it and I kind of love it.
In Meyer's defense. If someone told me I could make "My whole family can retire in comfort" levels of money from a minimal effort job that only took a few days... I absolutely would too. Granted, I probably would have put more creativity into it, but since she really didn't have to, I can almost respect the shameless cashgrab for once.
I actually enjoyed the experience of reading this one, exactly BECAUSE hardly anything was changed. I read Twilight pretty young. Reading it gender-swapped was a whole exercise in noticing the gender-based norms and assumptions that I didn't pick up on in the original because they're so normalized. I can see doing this as a writing exercise, like when you look at your drawings in a mirror to catch problems you hadn't spotted.
Imma be honest when i first heard this book existed i was kinda intrigued. I mean there arent a lot of romance focus teen novels around were the protagonist is a normal dude and his love intrest is a supernatural whatever but then i heard what you basically said in the intro with the ctrl+h bit and didn't bother looking into it
I wish there are more of that, but then I realized that it may not be worth it, because the story would still be bad (Because for some reason, young adult novels are bad). Japan did the whole normal dude protagonist and his love interest being a supernatural whatever right.
I am delighted that Dom followed Meyer's lead in giving a word for word plot synopsis from his synopsis of the original, with names and pronouns swapped. Even with remarkably similar intonation - nicely done!
By the time you were half-way through the dimple examples, I was mentally wondering if a draft actually said nipples, before being swapped over. It makes the dimples monolog EVEN funnier.
I kind of bristle at the idea of it being impossible Beau wasn’t thinking about sex 24/7 because ace boys do exist BUT Bella was never established as such sooo yeah it makes no sense. The thing that is really strange and frankly insulting is that it seems like along with their sexes she swapped their sex drives, which proves the point that she really does have that old old school biblical idea about women being lusty temptresses who will corrupt the godly men.
Okay hear me out Bella was never established as ace, but I wholeheartedly believe that Edward was. Therefore the fact that Edith is way hornier than Bella means that she took that from Bella well bow took the asexuality from Edward. It's one of the few things that I actually stayed the same in their gender dinamic.
@@chellyfishing I don't know because Stephanie Meyer is Mormon? And having an ineffectual female would go against everything and Mormon beliefs probably.
Going to be honest, I read this when it first came out (I was 17 in 2015) because my mom is a Twilight fan and I wanted to see if I liked it any better in this form. I did. I actually really like this book, and I am very much in the minority of men who finds the prospect of a more-powerful woman protecing me *extremely* appealing.
Having not read this... Rosalie was jelly that Eddie never wanted her, so is boy!Rose mad that Edith never wanted him? That seems... I gotta say too, there are some experiences that are simply gender based, they just are. Rosalie being raped by her own fiancee, Esme and the whole thing with her marriage and baby, Jasper being an army man, and honestly, even Carlisle being a doctor (after all, even in living history we have more than enough examples of female doctors being looked down on if not worse - "she" would have a harder time keeping a low profile being a female doctor in all of "her" vampire life (and being single and alone too, before "Edith"). But sure. 80s single mom not being able to get full custody is the one thing that breaks reality.
'Rosalie being raped by her own fiance' bullSHIT. Plenty of guys (cis or trans or anything else) get raped by their fiances. You just never hear about it cause men get shamed for being 'emasculated' when a woman rapes them
You know, the actors' faces actually work incredibly well on the gender-swapped Photoshops, I don't think I noticed until now how androgynous the main cast was until now!
I gotta say, when you were going thru the genderswapped synopsis, all I could think was, "wow, this makes the plot of twilight so much more believable, its not even funny"
From what I remember, at the time, she had no intention of writing the book, but her publisher asked for something "special" they could put out for the anniversary.
@@Rabbitlord108 From all I've heard, Meyer is pretty copacetic about fanworks, even ones which deserve a bit of vitriol. I get why that's frustrating, but it's way better than being generally opposed to fanworks, like EL James is.
@@dddaaa6965 It's called Nacido para morir (Born to die) and it was picked up by a small publisher here in Spain, but it's not in English because I am poor and can't afford to get it translated.
Teenage guy deciding that "hot chick is a terrifying immortal vampire, and that's np" is the most realistic part of the adaptation.
“I could kill you at any minute”
“… hot”
@@eugenideddis When your angry gf tells you "I could kill you right now!" and you realize that she really means RIGHT NOW . . . .
I never got this stuff lol, is it something people would actually think?
@@limitlesscord7319 It's true; deep down every man (regardless of religion, race or creed... or gender) secretly wants to be stalked by a beautiful vampire chick that looks like Ed Pattinson. Look it up . . . .
@@limitlesscord7319Someone you find attractive being kind of terrifying is definitely a turn on for a lot of people. The internet is rife with guys wanting women to step on them and getting turned on when their gf is mean and physically strong af
I think this book would be WAY more interesting if instead of changing the genders, the book changed it so that Bella was the vampire. As in, the basic setup in the same (new girl moves into town, develops a relationship with a mysterious quiet guy in her school, etc) but Edward is just... some random goth guy, and Bella is secretly a vampire and that's the reason she's popular.
Well let me add this to my list of future story ideas
"I know what you are, Edward"
"What?"
"You're pale, you never go outside, and you're not attracted to me. You're a vampire, like me"
"What??"
That would be a lot more interesting [and would have required more effort!].
See, _that_ would have been interesting!
Heck, even the straight-up gender swap would've been a lot more interesting if she just acknowledged that different genders would've probably led to a lot of changes in character personalities, backstories, and the overall plot. But nah, that takes effort.
So what I'm hearing is Stephanie Meyer's version of "breasted boobily" is "smiled dimpley"
I’m glad I wasn’t the only one making that connection good lord.
YES. I am now adding "I dimpled" to my dictionary of shitty references to use when I want to say LOL
no, not equivalent. on the contrary; his whole point that male characters not being obsessed with sex is supposedly unrealistic actually vindicates "breasted boobily" as more accurate.
The irony of Charlie being the only character that wasn’t swapped when he’s also the only one whose name wouldn’t have had to be changed
And Renee could be Ronnie. Getting glimpses into a female Charlie as the sheriff could have been an angle worth looking at and using gender politics in this gender bent interpretation.
I kept thinking Chalize.
Maybe that is do to an affinity for the actress.
Charlie is the god. No one changes Charlie
it would not even be needed, she could just say that Beau lived with his Police Chief Mom in Phorx, beeing best freinds with Julie and the Werwolf Girl Gang, until one day the cullens Arrive and Julie becomes weird, revealing in the end that Julie is a Werwolf transforming because vampires came near her.
however i would miss Dilf Charlie.
Apparently the idea of a mom who is a cop in a tight knit community losing custody of her child to her flighty jobless ex-husband was too riduculous
Dom: "Most men don't want to be feel protected by a vastly more strong woman."
Also Dom: "A woman is always more attractive if I know she could cut me in half with a sword. It's just like that. I know I'm not alone in this."
He wants a powerful woman, but he doesn’t want to be protected by the powerful woman. He probably wants to fight alongside the powerful woman and prove his worth or something. Idk.
The difference between being able to be of valuable aid to the vastly stronger woman, and not? Like if you can help out and not be dead weight.
He can know he's not alone in it AND acknkowledge that most basic bro's probably unfortunately reject the charms of Defender Dames... at least that was my experience from locker room talk back in the day. Then again how many of them could've potentially be faking it? That, I cannot say...
That one meme where Spike Cowboy Bebop says he wants a woman that will just kill him but it's narrated by Dom.
Should prolly change his name to Sub
Don't tempt fate by thanking people for not voting for an E. L. James book, it could backfire 😂
It probably will
That's not tempting fate, it's worse: it's tempting people to vote differently
Standard heel promo tactic in pro rasslin' . . . .
After all, 'underestimating how much people enjoy seeing you suffer is a terrible mistake to make'. His words.
Yep,iftht happens, he has nothing toblme it himself.
Or worse after ,....
I guarantee there are more well thought out gender swaped twilight stories on any fanfic site
Well duh. That bar is so low it's not even a tripping hazard.
Still a better ... gender swap story... than Twilight?
I'm just waitin' for that gender-swapped Barbenheimer sequel . . . .
@@mirjanbouma
Hey, you can trip in a ditch created by the bar dropping into the ground.
Edit: apparently I was still half asleep when I wrote my original comment.
While some guys may hyper fixate on certain features, dimples I guess, but I am not convinced they would not also fixate on any other traits of someone they are super into. How often has a guy gone on about his girlfriend's long hair and thiccc butt when I was in high school? A lot.
2:20 The real answer is that Charlie is a constant. There is only one Charlie across the multiverse.
Ain't no replicating that mustache
Like JK Simmons as J Johan Jameson in literally every Spider-Man adaptation, Moustache Dad is a multiversal constant.
Charlie, Into the Charlie-verse
If you read Luminosity, this is VERY true! Bella comes in MANY forms (female, male, TWINS, straight gay bi Trans...), but Charlie and Renee stay the same
Do you think Charlie, as a multiversal singularity, is more of a Primus or a Unicron?
Gender is a complex and fragile construct utterly crushed by the weight of Charlie's untamable moustache.
Except... Dom said chromosomes.
@@chrisgoodness6531 Why not just say "I have no idea what gender or sex are" and be done with it, Chris? Better yet, why are you subscribed to a man who irates you so much? At least my complaint is valid; you're just a Libs of TikTok priest mad that that girl in Chem class won't talk to him.
@@Yukinoomonihe also said gender.
@@mirjanbouma which is not chromosomes.
@@Yukinoomoni yes, your point?
Charlie’s mustache was just too strong. It shielded him from the gender-flip ray (AKA the find-and-replace tool in MS Word).
Nah, Mom!Charlie has PCOS and is rockin' the fabulous 'stache.
@@MogamiKyoko13 Oh man; now that I think about it, how amazing would it have been if Meyer did gender-flip Charlie into a woman, but still kept the flavor-saver?
Reality itslef would tear apart and that stache would remain
Untouched ... Unbroken
@@MogamiKyoko13 this.
@@SynchronizorVideosWhat’s a "flavor-saver"?
In re the dimple thing: Wow. It's almost as if Ms Meyer was uncomfortable writing Beau objectifying Edyth quite as comprehensively as Bella objectifies Edward. I wonder why that could be.
Trying to prove she isn't sexist and then having to change that is so ironic
no homo (Seriously, though, some straight women seem uncomfortable even channeling physical desire through male characters attracted to women or homosocial relationships between women.)
I think she just can't bring herself to do it. She's just that straight.
It's because she is a Mormon 😅
She needs her female protagonist to keep sweet, they can't be perceived as sexy or they would be "impure" even if they are virgins
It could just be - as Dom suggested - that she has no idea *HOW* men ovjectify women. She wouldn't know from personal experience, after all.
Dom: "it is not a fantasy of a young man to be protected by a far more powerful girl"
Me (who grew up on Xena and Buffy): SPEAK FOR YOURSELF, DOM!
As J Michael Straczynski once said, "I love a woman who can kick my ass."
Exactly. Sailor Moon and Buffy are the loves of my life.
Well, he's a dom, so he'll never understand... ba-dum-tss sorry I'll see myself out, the dad-joke was just way too ready for me to leave it hanging like that
to be fair most guys probably dislike being helpless. it's one thing to have a more 'powerful' or 'sucessful' woman as a partner. it's a little different if you feel like you aren't bringing anything but, your personality to the table.
As soon as he said that my first thought is that the internet widely disagrees. The problem instead lies (I amuse as I have not read the book) in that the story dose a poor job of representing that fantasy.
I can't help but suspect that Meyer made sure to restrict this to a one-off because if she had continued this gender-flip story into the subsequent books, she'd have had to deal with the parts of the story where the breeding pair conceive a child. And there's no way to gender-flip the pregnancy story without substantially changing the plot, so she'd have to put in some actual work.
Nah, just change it so that the vampire men are the infertile ones, easy
Edit: you're right, though, Edith pregnancy would not be as gory. The child wouldn't kill her. Thereby not necessitating Beau's turning. But I would like a description of how Edith fucked him so hard he almost died😅
Oh, it's simpler than that: they straight up can't get pregnant because they're both vampires, so she probably doesn't see the point in continuing the story without that. Gotta peddle that LDS doctrine!
The cynic in me can't help but agree.
@@morinomajou I think what Dom and this comment are suggesting is that she made the decision not to continue the story and then changed the ending so people wouldn't be expecting more.
Not to mention societal gender roles play a large part in a lot of the characters backstories, so she'd have to substantially rewrite a lot of them.
Hi! Child of the 80s here. My dad got primary custody of me after a divorce when I was a wee babe. It was unusual back then, and due to my Grandparents on my biological mom's side, she was given more liberal visitation rights. However, the more freedom she had to visit, the less she actually came. She definitely did *not* want to be a mother to me, and I thank God Dad got me out of that situation. As for a half sister of mine she also spawned, my dad was not her biological father, but hearing that she was being neglected and bounced from relative to relative, actually took the time to hire a lawyer able to do law in two different states (where the rest of the family had gone) to see that she was settled down and eventually put in the custody of an Aunt - a much more stable home life for her ultimately.
Yeah, gender swaps don't = choosing all the same things and wouldn't make sense in some cases.
your dad sounds like a badass
I think part of it was also bc Renee is an actual mess. Bella had to be the mother figure between the two. So between a scatterbrained dad (male Renee) and a mother who works in law enforcement (female Charlie). F!Charlie had a better chance of getting custody. Although, Charlie giving up Bella/Beau so Renee wouldn't be lonely is a solid point 🤔
We need a film adaptation. Using ALL the original cast, cross dressing and doing the fakest sounding girl\boy voices that they can, and Charlie can break the 4th wall and be self aware.
Also, side note, dimples are incredibly cute. I know it was overdone, but also somewhat warranted imo lol. Some people are boob guys, some butt guys, some calf guys.... Beau is a dimple guy.
Robert Pattinson would be down
See I just think they should cast Kristen as Edward/Edythe and Robert as Bella/Beau and Taylor Swift as Julie, complete with her blonde hair surrounded by actual native American actors
@@katharineeavan9705 but they make NO mention or reason as to why a white girl is full blooded quileute.
@@Badenhawk exactly. Also, she gets buff like Lautner did
@@katharineeavan9705 Taylor Swolft. Lol, even has wolf in there I didn't realize until typing the combo of swole and swift.
The photoshopped images of Edward with long hair and Bella with short really does work to show just how little has changed in this “retelling”
I'm just saying, Bella makes a cute guy.
Love that the picture at 5:43 depicts them as a tall Amazonian and her short King
Absolutely loved all the gender-swapped Snapchat filters😂
Same! I can't stop laughing 😂😂😂
LOL!!! 😂😅
Every single one of them made be burst out laughing cause of how silly they looked
Bo is kind of cute!
Emmett is incredible on the baseball image
I’m baffled that Meyer titled this book ‘Life and Death’. If she for instance had titled it ‘Evetide’, she would have both stayed true to the naming scheme of the series, while also making clear that this was the eve - the beginning - of a tale similar yet different - a changing tide.
That or Equinox.
Covered the night and moon, this should have covered the day and sun, but then again, it would have clashed with the vampires and werewolves (creatures of the night) theme.
Maybe she could have used nightly animals instead? Nightingale, Owl's Cry... -aaand I have already spent more thought on this than Steph.
@@thekueken definitely more time than her that's for sure !
Eventide would be way too clever for Meyer, considering it would also reference that the "night"-themed character is an "Eve," this time around.
The best part of Twilight Reimagined was when she said ''IT'S DIMPLIN' TIME'' and dimpled all over those girls.
Truly one of the books of all time.
Yes, dimples are beautiful
As someone who was a teenage girl, Bella didn’t think of boinking Edward enough either. Like as someone who was virgin until 24 my lack of experience and desire to have sex didn’t stop me from thinking about it graphically 24/7 until I was like 22 😂
While I definitely didn't think of sex 24/7 I agree Bella didn't think of sex with Edward enough in the books. I mean there are dozens of both teen and adult romances to show that women think of sex as much as men.
Definitely. While as an adult woman I pretty much never think about sex, teenage me had quite some fantasies. Especially when near the boy I had a crush on.
Tbh i had the opposite experience where I thought more about sex during adulthood than when I was a teen. But also I didn't have sex until I was 22, so it kinda counts?
And also I was a huge prude and like thinking about just making out with someone was blasphemous enough lol. I had a very weird relationship with sexual thoughts because I was raised in a heavily religious family. So that's probably why.
Weirdly enough I almost never thought about sex as a teen but once I got to my 20s I started fantasizing about all kinds of freaky stuff. Late bloomer, I guess
hell i read these books when i was like 13 and when i discovered fanfiction the books felt way to tame!
I'm not saying a group of girls can harass a lone teen boy, but I don't think it would happen they exact way it's depicted in the original Twilight. It would probably be more of a "let's chat up this guy, get him really drunk and steal his shit" type of thing 🤷♀️
Also, an "array of dimples" sounds horrifying
setting phasers to "dimple"
Which to be fair would not carry the same amount of urgency if that's a crime that's one not as dangerous and to takes more time
an "array of dimples" = Lovecraftian nightmare . . . .
@@chadsknnr lol
@@Gauldame lol . . . .
Genuinely surprised Stephanie called Edward’s female counterpart -Edith- Edythe (ffs Stephanie…) instead of the painfully obvious name of Edwina
Well, if she did, I would have thought of Edwina like the BG2 character (which is literally a gender-swapped guy, but called Edwin)
Oh, no. She doesn't call her "Edith." She calls her "Edythe." For some. Insane. Reason.
@@cooperross9495 i should have known 😅
It would have been fun if she had gender swapped the man Charlie...for a woman called Charlie to be ultra lazy.
If it was Edwina she could have gone by Ed or Eddie
3:11 ah but this is the same woman who romanticized a woman's ability to have a child so badly that she wrote... all of THAT.. in Breaking Dawn. In her mind the idea a mother WOULDN'T want full custody is unfathomable to her.
She could’ve easily written that fem!Charlie had gotten full custody and Beau had lived in the town his whole life. The Cullens move regularly so they could still be meeting for the first time but Edith is moving into town instead and that gives you some interesting dynamics to play with regarding the other people in town. I guess that’d require she work on writing her book rather than just find-and-replacing everything though.
@@SorowFame Expanding a bit- Beau could have been living with his father for several years as they travelled for his new step mother's...sporting career or whatever it was, with the justification being that it was an opportunity for him to see the world for a while. Swapped Charlie (Charlotte) could have been an estranged mother working to repair her relationship with her son now that he was home. This allows Beau to still be the new guy at school and feds into the original set up.
However........this would require writing in way more nuance into the characters than was ever originally there.
“Brandishing her dimples” I literally choked on my tea
It was "unleashed the dimples" for me.
No, please, not the dimples!!
“A full array of dimples”
As you described the plot, I began to realize what a gender swapped remake could've been. Insecure guys that end up in abusive controlling relationships often miss a lot of red flags because they're lonely and horny and the girl is interested in them and hot. There could've been something to say about how hard it can be for a teen boy to leave a toxic relationship, especially if classmates thought they were cool for having a hot girlfriend and their dad liked their girlfriend because if they broke up not only would that all go away but they'd then have to explain to everyone why they broke up which might diminish their manliness in their peers eyes. It could've been an interesting exploration of the differences of what girls and guys want in relationships, how that desire can be exploited, and the different obstacles that make it difficult for both men and women to leave toxic relationships, and that could've made the dark ending kind of work in a really heartbreaking way. The problem is that would've required a writer that understands why Edward's behavior was problematic and how teen guys think, and even then I think it also would've needed a more talented writer
All of what you said is true. Especially the talented writer part
Can confirm. Got in one when I was barely twenty, in it for almost 5 years, and I just look back and feel sympathy for past me
“There’s no sexism in my book!”
Beau gets to immediately be a vampire, Bella had to wait 4 books to get that.
The old Class Coffin Ceiling
Then you could stretch out him pointlessly angsting about it for 4 books instead.
But Beau ends up missing out on a tomboy werewolf GF. So that's way worse.
Beau even gets the choice. Edward made the selfish decision to safe her for her.
@@nemi-ru5318 see ? not sexist at all. 😅
I got to admit being stalked and presured into a relationship by a controlling, possessive, sociopathic vamprie girl is kinda appealing. If it wasnt presenting itself as a genuine love story
The covid lockdowns changed me
If Twilight were just written as horror novels I think it would make things a lot easier to digest.
Having had a crush on a vampire lady with relatively limited empathy, vampires are overrated.
I feel like Buffy had a few of those storylines (Darla and Angel, Dru and, um.... yes).
@@PlatinumAltaria😂
While I do agree that a sexually interested male teen would have sex on the mind more than not at all, the phrasing to make that point could have used a little touching up since "Men always think about and want sex" is a tired trope in of itself.
Best approach in the book would probably be the protag starting to think about her more intimately after they hook up. So he's not a creep but does obviously show a healthy interest in her.
Or just emphasize he's ace.
or just emphasise that he loved her smile and imagined what might come later. don't have to be explicit when you can just hint there were less innocent thoughts as well.
she's mormon I doubt she believes in aces (as an ex mormon and ace, myself)
As a asexual man I felt really happy to have a male character not be sexual even if bo was not asexual
Glad you enjoyed that aspect!
Me personally, as an ace, I dislike supposedly allosexual characters acting ace. To me, it makes it seem like the author has something against asexuals, to the point they refuse to label their character as such. The other outcome is that by portraying an absence of sexual feelings as normal in a supposedly allosexual character, people get the message that not having sexual feelings is a normal allosexual thing. So, then they try to delegitimatise the concept of asexuality.
That's just my take though. I totally get the satisfaction of seeing an ace or ace-like character, but I wish the authors would commit by calling them asexual, rather than this weird "I'm totally allosexual but just super pure and chaste in heart and mind" thing.
@@lindenbree9188 I mean, I'm allosexual (and socialized as a boy-though I'm a trans gal), and I wasn't thinking about sex at all as a teen (though I do a lot after accepting that I am trans). some allosexual people just have naturally weaker libidos, etc., and it is worthwhile to depict that.
I strongly dislike the idea that people should consider how bigots will twist shit pretty much at all. regardless of what you depict, bigots will try to deny what they want to deny. look at Bridget from Guilty Gear and how transphobic fans for years have attempted to explain away her transness. once you start on the path of, "[this group of people or kind of experience] shouldn't have representation," you can use that same logic (or lack thereof) to justify further minimizing any experiences that exist outside of hegemony, because it is the same argument functionally. this argument also robs serial storytelling of the power of showing a character's path of self-discovery, because you can't depict its conclusion without also depicting the character existing beforehand, when they are not textually confirmed as something they don't even know they are yet.
furthermore, your stance ignores that many ace teens are very well behaving and/or thinking similarly to a character who is not confirmed as ace-but, being teens, they obviously have yet to find themselves. it is important to provide them with representation of what that can be like or fictional role models which personify that.
besides, if anything, it is more likely to be helpful for ace folks who don't know that they're ace to see a potential role model who shows that not being obsessed with sex is okay. and I will parallel that with how I found solace in characters who weren't obsessed with romance before I determined that I am aromantic. the fact of the matter is that textual ace and/or aro representation is oftentimes identical to characters behaving in a way that is minimally sexual and/or romantic-with the only distinction being that the character vocalizes their asexuality and/or aromanticism. based on Dom's description, Beau here could absolutely be a sex-positive ace, and I find it asinine to toss out the baby with the bathwater simply because a piece of representation does not toss up the relevant pride flag (especially when the bathwater in this case is merely, "I don't personally find value in _this_ representation").
sometimes, implied or incidental representation such as this is the difference between someone feeling represented or not at all in that respect.
@@MelMelodyWerner I think I consider author intent a lot more than you. I discount the possibility of Beau being ace not because he's not throwing a pride flag around, but because Stephenie Meyer wrote him. And I personally don't see head canons to be as affirming for representation as actual canon.
In the actual canon, considering there's zero confirmation and considering who the author is, Beau probably isn't ace. He's probably not a late bloomer still figuring himself out either. He's another one of those weird "I'm totally allosexual but just super pure and chaste in heart and mind" tropes. Yeah, allosexuals can have low libidos. Though I'd still consider them gray asexuals personally.
But often, allosexual characters with low libidos like this are written with a weird purity agenda, stemming from the idea that all sex thoughts are inherently predatory or something. I'm not seeing Beau, as written by Mormon Meyer herself, as an honest attempt to portray low-libido allosexual people, and definitely not an attempt at an ace person.
As I said in my first comment, one of my issues with this is how "To me, it makes it seem like the author has something against asexuals, to the point they refuse to label their character as such." Besides Mormon Meyer, another example is the writers for Big Bang Theory. Sheldon, is absolutely, on every level, portrayed as asexual. Likely aromantic too. But the authors just hate asexuals or something and denied this fact when asked.
And while I get the sentiment behind not caring how bigots twist things, a lot of young LGBT people are growing up in bigoted households. They think like bigots because it's all they know, and often they rely on good media to break their brainwashing. I don't think swearing up and down that a character who behaves asexual at all times in every circumstance is actually allosexual, and ALSO we're never going to acknowledge that any possibility except straight allosexual exists, is particularly helpful for anyone discovering themselves. In fact, it might help asexuals be in the dark about their identity longer, so that's cool.
A character who's just not interested in sex often is whatever... I don't care if it's addressed in SOME contexts. Not everyone HAS to have their sexual identity confirmed. And projecting whatever you feel is the rep you want onto them, if it doesn't contradict narrative or authorial intent, have at it.
As an example, personally, I like how Batman in the Animated Series, though a playboy allosexual, rarely gets sexually distracted at all. That's some cool allosexual with a low/super controlled libido rep. His sexuality or lack thereof doesn't need to be explored though since that's not what the series is about, but I like that it's there.
A character in a literal romance novel where sexuality should REALLY be discussed, however, is just the author having a weird bias against the topic. If Beau is low-libido allosexual (which again I would see that as gray asexual anyway), cool, but I doubt Meyer ever considered him as anything but simply "straight" or cared about any rep.
@@lindenbree9188why did no one take into the consideration that meyer just didn’t want to write out a teenager’s (be it beau or bella - girls think about sex a lot, too) explicit thoughts and desires of being boinked by a hot vampire graphically? Not all romance books delve into that.
Edit: what do you mean by "sexually distracted" and do you think that all allosexuals with a non-low libido get sexually distracted regularly? What’s an uncontrolled libido outside of the sex addicted/obsessed behaviours?
As a teenager, I had a lot of sexual feelings, but rarely directly towards my crushes. I wanted to maybe hug or kiss them, and i’d get butterflies an all that, but didn’t think explicitely about them. So if i was on the place of beau i’d definetely be close to him in my thought process around my crush. I don’t think I’m asexual...i don’t think i was pure and sexless either, or an abnormal allosexual
@@beafraid5467 Because Bella had more explicit thoughts than Beau, so clearly Meyer isn't above writing that when it comes to teenagers. This is what I recall at least, but if you want actual quotes, it's been too long since I've read the books.
Sexually distracted means horny to the point where it's difficult to concentrate on anything else. Tends to happen to people when in the presence of what they find to be a very sexually desirable person, especially if said person is acting flirtatious or initiating a lot of physical contact. This situation would come up a lot in, you know, ROMANCE novels.
Sounds like you were/are a gray asexual, but classify yourself however you want. Doesn't make it the typical allosexual experience - to be completely apathetic to all sexual expressions your crush has is, indeed, an abnormal allosexual experience. If you want to take that as an insult, I can't stop you, but it's not meant to be one.
"It's sometimes really hard to remember he's not Bella, which actually improved the experience for me, because while I forgot and pictured her and turned it into an LGBTQ-romance" 😂 I had the same experience!
I'm glad Meyer is not pro rainbow mafia.
@@missxmarvel Sure, we all love a good old-fashioned homophobe.
No, I just respect Meyer for not going there, One of the few writers who won't bow down to the Alphabet thugs. @@Jovrjo
@@missxmarvelalphabet thugs lmaooo ok bro
Camilla???
The second I heard "Reimagining Twilight" and "Genderswapped", my mind was rushing to this idea of Bella being a vampire who takes refuge/scouts out in the small town in Washington to find a place for her coterie of vampires (what she would call her family). The perspective would be on Edward, the prodigal son of the famous doctor who has retired to this town with his family, who witnesses an old family friend, the sheriff, suddenly introduce his daughter, who came from Arizona to get away from the busy city life. The issue Edward finds? The Man never married, nor did he ever talk about having any children let alone a daughter who already look more like a young adult than a teenager she claims to be.
The story is then Edward stalking Bella, learning that vampires are real and that her coterie is being hunted by a pack of werewolves.
Buuuut that would involve thought, planning, and creating a story that is beyond "fangirling/fanboying(?) over hot vampire of opposite sex".
Do you want me to do it
You know, I actually imagined something VERY similar? Bella the vampire and Edward the human...
Sigh. This is why God made fanfic
@@lahlybird895YES PLEASE!
Oh?
As someone who is basically neutral on the Twilight series, I find your ideas intriguing.
@@denelian116 I mean both parts can work together yours give me the setup for the for the personality Dynamics and the reason everything everybody is the way they are in the story well this one gives a bit of intrigue and a reason for them to interact other than him getting saved if I mix both of them together it's a pretty complete story since they work well together as they have similar beats already
"It's not common for men to fantasize stronger women protecting them" Have you learned nothing from when people obsessed over Lady Dimitrescu?
Nobody who is into Lady Dimitrescu fantasizes about Lady Dimitrescu _protecting_ them. _Dominating_ them, yes. Protecting, no.
She is the most not "protect you women" out there.
You misspelled 'still obsess'
i think it is more about the fact that you get the hots from a Woman who could effortlessly snap you in half!
Step on me tall Woman,
Ehem, markiplier *_dying, aggressive cough_*
"Showing as much agency as a paper towel in a hurricane." 🤣 I love your way of words!
Meyer accidently writing asexuals is hilarious and a Lil frustrating because she didn't commit to it.
Ngl, as a former teenage boy, I wasn't thinking very much about sex when I was that age. Mostly when I liked a girl I was thinking about how how amazingly out of my league she was and how hopeless any chance of ever asking out was because I was and still am completely inept at social relations.
That was very much my experience too [and like you, I'm still struggle socially]. I'm still very much 'It'll never happen' now.
As a straight male, I feel weirdly called out. I don't think I've ever imagined a girl I knew being naked or fantasized about sex with them, even as a teen.
The hyper-sexual teen boy stereotype has always been weirdly alien to me. So a male boy being depicted thinking about things other than sex is refreshing.
Yeah, people tend to gloss over just how much variation there is between people, especially in terms of gender and sex. Sure there can be trends but we end up acting like variation is way more non-existent than it is
See, I'm a pansexual man who figured that out in high school because that's what was constantly happening to almost everyone in my head.
Don't get me wrong, I'm definitely not sad that we didn't have to read some weird horny thought in every other paragraph, but im with dom on this one lol
So… is it possible that you’re ace? I know I thought everyone else was joking or exaggerating about this before I realised I was ace.
@@regrettablemuffin9186lol before I figured out I was Ace I had a few guesses what crushes were
-something I would figure out when I was older (I was 17)
-a thing movies made up
-an inside joke I didn't get the context for
Same. I'm a cishet, very much not asexual man, and I never really experienced what Dom was describing, at least not to the degree he claims. Even as a teen, when I had a crush on a girl, I thought about romance much more than sex. I don't think it's fair to act like that stereotype is true 100% of the time.
I don't think it's fair to act like those stereotypes of teenage boys are true 100% of the time. I'm a cishet man who definitely isn't asexual, and I wasn't that sex-obsessed as a teenager. I definitely fantasized about romance with my crushes first and foremost.
I'd like to imagine you didn't fantasize about dimples at least.
depends on how horny you are at the time. most of the time it was romantic but, there are definitely other far less pure times.
@@Appletank8 I mean, it does depend- a teenager probably wouldn't realize it, but dimples can exist on places other than the face.🤣🤣
Yeah, I'm in the same boat. Like, I fantasized about sex, but it wasn't on my mind anywhere close to 24/7.
@@Appletank8freckles
Speaking as a woman who was once a dimpled teenager, men comment on dimples when your chest is flat.
Fun fact: we might comment on the dimples, but we're still thinking about your chest.
Sorry, on behalf of all teenage boys. We're pretty crass when you get down to it.
😳 oh - maybe that’s why no one ever mentioned my dimples lol
Explains all the "She flashed her dimples" comments
@@shinyagumon7015 real talk, during that part I did a thought experiment where I replaced "dimples" with "boobies" and it all began to make sense
It sounded very close to the self-censorship prudish teen me used to practice in case someone could read my mind
Oh fuck. Yes, I did stop getting dimple comments once I got C-cups.
I'm a cis woman and I was also ALWAYS thinking about sex as a teen (honestly not a ton has changed at 30 but that's besides the point)
In my experience, how sexual someone is doesn't neatly tie to gender or sex.
I do agree, but theres a point in remarking more the "teen" part than the "male" part. While gender has probably little to do with it, my own experience is that sexual thoughts have a diferent intensity (to put it one way) when youre going though puberty. That is, if you have a sexual awakening during your teenage years, its likely that the novelty of it all would made such thoughts more prevalent that they would later on in life. Or at least i think considerably less about sex now that im my twenties in comparation to when i was a teen. Though that could also be tied to individual experience, i dunno.
@@pedrovallefin8406 yeah, this isn't something that maps onto everyone's experiences either. I NEVER thought about sex as a teen, it actually repulsed me. stayed that way until I came out as trans earlier this year, and ever since, I have been nonstop obsessed with the thought of getting [none of y'all's business, lmao] by my girlfriend.
like, jeez, repression exists, lol. especially for those raised in evangelical households (though I personally was not).
Same. So… yeah. 😂
Maybe Meyer’s goal wasn’t to write out explicit thoughts of a teenager of any gender tbh.
Aw man, Bella's undisguised (if weirdly non-explicit) sexual desire for Edward was one of the things about Twilight I enjoyed. Sad to see it was toned down in the genderswap. Adorable but weird for Meyer to go so hard on "only girls get horny".
Also...Hey Stephenie Meyer, my dad got sole custody of my brother in the 80s. It's actually pretty easy for men to get sole custody of children if they indicate they are interested, and that was true even in the 80s. (...actually, thinking about when my brother was born, it might even have been the 70s!)
"Flashing dimples" eventually felt like a terrible euphesmism for "flashing a gun". I feel threatened by the omnipresent dimples.
All the "dimples" lines which don't mention smiling read better as the obvious euphemism, smuggled or otherwise 😂
And now I cannot ever think of, or write about dimplies again 😂😂
I just realised… considering the plots of the later book simply can’t happen in this universe… Leah’s counterpart is stuck in their abusive “werewolf” tribe because Jacob’s counterpart doesn’t go through any of the developments that lead them to make their own pack!
Myers continues her campaign to make Leah’s life suck more every time you look at it!
At least he won't be having quite as many gender issues
On the other hand, if literally everyone is gender-swapped (except Charlie) how would the dynamics of the pack change? Or would like, it just be different wolves? Like, would then the male counterpart of Leah shift first rather than Sam? Would Jacob's (counterpart) brothers have stayed on the rez, rather than let their little sister take full time care of their mother? Would one or both of them be the first shifter?... hm, beginning to see why this was only one installment.
@@lahlybird895no, just the other way around.
@@Tbm998 can't be. Vampal Mormon fertility thing doesn't seem like it would work the same way in reverse. Liam Clearwater or whatever she decides to name him if not going to be worrying about never being a mother. And well you could say the fertility issues would work in reverse I really don't think that stephenie Meyer cares about male fertility issues at all.
@@Acide950 given that Samantha is still the leader and it was mentioned that Julia was going to join the pack soon I'm going to guess nothing changes all that much and that it's the same thing except now it's a matriarchal pattern.
I’m still puzzled by why Charlie stayed the same, because it could’ve given us a nice look at a friendship between Charlie and Bonnie and how it changed/stayed the same when they were both women. Do they still go fishing together? Do they have different things they bond over? Anything!
The custody argument about moms getting the kids is just another extension of Meyer being weird because of twisting Mormon values.
"Children have to be raised by mothers!"
Yeah but that takes more work than just a search and replace
I have no idea why but the whole “men love dimples” sparked a memory of a much cooler vampire then anything Mayer can do saying “bi*ches love cannons”
We stan Alucard!
@@naomilanders9381 yes we do
Feeling like those dimples replaced his 'crooked smile' right there. I remember being so tired of that crooked smile when I read it, even as I read it as a young teenager over ten years ago.
Your script during the "What she didn't change" sounds identical to your synopsis on the original, which I gotta say is a pretty ingenious way to prove your point about Meyer's 'changes'. Love it.
I admit, being stalked by a vampire girl is a bit of a fantasy. As a lesbian, it's everyone's lesbian fantasy. It's not however a fantasy for possessiveness to be presented as a loving relationship.
Not a fan of Carmilla?
@@ManOutofTime913 I mean, classic piece of horror literture. I say and stress horror given she's not exactly someone you'd really want as a girlfriend if you think about it.
@@atiredfloridian777 No more than you'd want the Phantom of the Opera as a boyfriend, yeah. Doesn't stop people from thinking about it, of course.
Well not only lesbians, some boys here want bat milk.
Just read Carmilla and call it a day.
In fairness to the dimple thing, I'll just be honest and say sometimes there is one tiny thing about a woman that just gets into you and doesn't let go. The Little Mermaid (the original) has made it so that women who bite their lips live rent-free in my head forever.
So what im hearing is Stephanie Meyer has a dimple kink
That is very true, and dimples can be quite cute.
You must *love* the book Divergent. She spends the whole fricken thing biting her lip like it was some unconscious tick.
Is that you Mr Grey?
I was about to say the same thing. (And not just because I also have several fetishes I can trace back to the The Little Mermaid) The dimple thing could work if she’s aware of it. Like, everyone has *some* atypical beauty preference. If the understanding is man-Bella in particular is into that then that’s just a character trait. Which Meyer could signal by just having Boylla mention it aloud and then some other character could react with a small “oh, ok. I can see the appeal.” Which would serve as a passive way to show that it’s not universal. If it’s mentioned as often as it seems and goes completely uncommented on, that makes it seem more like it’s just her best guess for “what teen boys are into.”
The weirdest change is Meyer actually cited a real medical condition to explain Beau's aversion to blood. I forget the name of it, but its symptoms match what Beau/Bella goes through. Which only makes her unwillingness to do research for anything else more infuriating.
Hemophobia?
@@michaeliv284 I don't own the book anymore so I can't look it up, but it was a medical condition, not a phobia. I remember Beau explaining that he has the condition when he's taken to the nurse's office.
I lost it SO HARD at you reading all the dimple quotes, that's hysterical.
The gender swapped photos throughout are so funny. Great video Dominic!
Too bad he didn't gender swap himself and introduce himself as Dominique 😢
@@KuLaydMahn Yeah, a bit of a waste.
the genderswapped Jacob (Julie) is pretty cute though
@@KuLaydMahn Good call . . . .
Gender swapped Volturi would be a sight . . . .
The dimples section was sublime. At times, it almost sounded like Meyer had originally written breasts, and then latterly switched it to dimples (can you "flash dimples" at somebody? Dimples are like a side effect of a smile, right, so asserting your dimples doesn't make any logical sense to me).
Just in case, the comment above me is a scammer impersonating Dominic - apparently Telegram is a very good platform for thieves.
@@mirjanboumawhat? The comment you responded to was by a person named Christopher...
@@denelian116 no, that's the parent comment. The first reply to Christopher was a scammer impersonating Dominic.
I mean there's flashing a smile?
Well, there's technically two kinds of dimples. The ones on either side of your lip parting, and the ones on your lower back colloquially called the "dimples of Venus" by doctors. Maybe Beau's an ass man?
I remember my brother finding this in that little book section in the greeting card aisle at Safeway, and laughing about how the biggest change seemed to be that the calligraphy font used for the one-word note Edythe leaves for Bo is arbitrarily fancier than the one used for Edward's note to Bella. Even after seeing it as a real book being sold in a real store, part of me still refused to believe it existed.
I liked this book better than actual Twilight. The romance felt much more earned. In the original, Edward and Bella were exaggerated versions of their respective gender stereotypes. Why does Edward love Bella? Because she’s the best girl. Why does Bella love Edward? Because he’s the best boy. But in Life and Death, they love each other for their personalities. Beau is passive, sweet, and accepts help easily. Edith is strong, protective, and doesn’t see Beau as weak.
We also get Carine Cullen: hot lady doctor, Earnest Cullen: sterile daddy vampire who longs for fatherhood, Bonnie Black: stern Native American Cheiftess, and Archie Cullen, Beau’s boy bestie. The gender swap honestly reveals just how strongly Meyer’s writing clings to stereotypical gender roles, and it’s a much better book when the roles are scrambled.
I doubt you descriptions of the characters of life and death
13:28 I fully agree with Dom, you can be a hopeless romantic, who is giggling and kissing your girlfriend as you bake a pie toguether and then goes on a picnic... and also imagine doing it on the ping-pong table in the middle of the schoolyard
This is one of those books nobody asked for, but is like rolling a natural 20 in kapitalism.
Wait, I can sell the same book twice if I attach some bizarre gimmick to it the second time? 🤑
@@ManOutofTime913Looking at all the lazy remakes going around, I'm going to have go with a "yes".
@@MusicoftheDamned Yeah, but to be fair I haven't seen a studio make an exact duplicate of a movie in a cheap C/P job. Not since Gus Van Sant's Psycho remake anyhow.
@@ManOutofTime913 Hmmm...I imagine the closest one could get to that in films are probably remakes of a foreign film by another country, and even those require more thought and effort than Ms. Meyer put into this, if only by the nature of being film in the first place. Otherwise the closest you would get in movies is something like remakes that miss the point of the original while heavily pandering/retreading ground like _The Thing_ (2011)--yes I know it's a prequel--or the all-female _Ghostbusters_ debacle from 2016. That or a sequel that heavily cribs its predecessor like _The Force Awakens_ since J. J. Abrams is a hack like that.
Oh. I suppose there is the relatively rare movie that literally does remake its predecessor because it's effectively replacing it, like _Evil Dead 2_ did. Ironically is a far better movie than either of the two previous ones despite being "lazier", so, uh....
When you mentioned a character didn’t change gender, I knew it was Charlie before you said it. Caring if absentish father is probably a fantasy of hers. And imagining a mother having the same reactions for someone with more conservative gender views would think belong just to a father is a step and an epic journey so far.
A woman cop who made a baby with a dad who had a stable job and willingness to change nappies? In my good conservative cul-de-sac?
Edit - I just got to the bit where Dom addresses this, so please ignore me
I mean, it's still pretty cliche to have a slightly overbearing mother with a soft spot for her son.
@@ManOutofTime913 There is such deeper psychological stuff that could feed into an actual horror story around Bella and her flighty mother and detached father feeding into her insecurities, making her vulnerable to the manipulations of a teen-looking, 100+-year-old vampire. But Meyer is not aware enough of how unhealthy Bella/Edward is to write this.
@@jediping Well, I think she just doesn't care about exploring the psychology of her own characters so much as pushing her very strange worldview of genders and sexuality on us. That and/or writing something trashy enough to sell. Even her own characters don't really stay consistent in behavior, changing as the plot demands.
This video single-handedly makes me wish I didn’t have aphantasia coz I’m really missing out on the mental image of Kristen Stewart in a fake moustache staring dreamily at a girl with just. a horrifying number of dimples
"Turns out Dom's kind of nasty."
(Glances at his name)
"Well... yeah."
Funny thing is, when I was younger, I'd tried doing some writing and was a Twilight fan (I didn't know any better), and actually considered writing a genderbent version of Twilight. I never actually got around to it, but I distinctly remember imagining a scene that parodied the "You know what I am. Say it". bit.
Edit: Okay, I actually love the idea of meeting someone with precognition and them being like "Dude, there you are! I've been waiting forever!"
Some of the name changes are extremely awkward and there were easier alternatives to them: make “Alice” “Alex” for example
Even Alec could work..! Rosalie, Richard (same feel to me, sounds posh) or Roland..! Emmet could have become Emma, Jasper to Jasmine.
I would have thought that changing Rosalie to Ross would make a lot more sense than Royal.
@@CalliopePony it would.
Bold of you to assume her names would be anything but unhinged 😂
@@emilyrln I know it’s asking to much but it’s just baffling to think about.
Babe wake up, new Dominic Noble video
Oh my god I am obsessed with the way that the summary is just the Twilight summary gender-flipped, that’s genius.
Dom: *Talks about alternate ending*
Me: So depsite them literally being the same person, they respected Beau's bodily atonomy to choose become a vampire more than Bella's......That tracks. ALSO, WHY CAN THE GIRL WEREWOLVES SHAPESHIFT NOW?!
Leah (Leon, or whatever the hell their gender-swapped name is- I never read the damn book) wouldn't be the catalyst for her dad's death, in this version- so... would Seth...? (Senna/ Sienna- I don't know)
Or, in this re-imagining, can they *all* be capable- if they have the right bloodline?
The more you think about it, the worse it gets...
@@OcarinaSapphr- Can everyone in the Werewolf tribe shape-shift now or is it just the girls and if so, does that mean that Boy-Leah is still an outcast?!
@@shebjess
Like I said- the more you think about it...
This is reminding me of Blood and Chocolate.
16:08 Honestly as a very 'beta' male who felt very inadequate compared to my peers and was picked on a lot at school, I wouldn't have minded being protected by a 'radically more powerful woman' [Hence why I quite like Cameron protecting John Connor in the Terminator TV show].
There was an interesting book called 'Crazy Love You' [by Lisa Unger] which had the male narrator have a female guardian angel figure [who's about his age] who protected him but often in twisted ways [his art work is mocked at school so she burns the art block down]. The twist is that when the narrator is an adult, the guardian angel ages with him and they have a very love/hate relationship. The book plays with meta elements and ambiguity so is better than I'm describing it.
I particularly know this book because it popularized the Danny DeVito "My god, I get it" meme. A 4chan user read Life and Death as a joke, but came away with a deeper understanding about the appeal of the original series.
I've always wondered when characters instantly read everyone else's mind, they don't immediately run screaming away from all the things that are in peoples' heads.
The hentai tags I've seen descriptions of are enough to make me *NOT* know what is going on inside other people.
Presumably, their mind-reading doesn't instantly dump their target's every fantasy and fetish into their head.
@@timothymcleanMakes sense to me.
@@timothymclean I would think it would randomly pop up a lot, though. Especially with the Cullen's being so attractive. The mind reader would often end up hearing little snippets of peoples fantasies involving them, or one of their family members.
In the books he describes it as being in a crowded hallway and just tunes it out
The people who watch that kind of stuff don't go outside and you know it
I almost didn't believe the extent to which it is just Twilight but the names and pronouns are different.
Someday I’m going to get the bisexual Twilight inspired book I wrote published, and one of my hopes is that Dom will read it and think to himself “Huh. Well that was something.”
I hope it warrants a more positive response. Aim high!
I was actually just thinking in a gender swapped Twilight the ONLY thing that makes sense is a bisexual Beaufort and Jacob being a total bear
Well, colour me interested!
I believe in you! And while I'm not a fan of Twilight, I would absolutely read a bisexual Twilight inspired book, because that premise alone sounds awesome. And when I read that book someday, I hope it's yours!
Best of luck :).
Hold on… so I never read the Twilight books and I only ever saw the movies. So my knowledge was already limited but when I heard Stephanie Meyers wrote a gender bent Twilight and Bella was now Beau that’s all I knew. So all these years I assumed with the gender bending she only changed Bella… So for the past 10+ years I assumed she was being weirdly progressive and just rewrote Twilight as a gay story but now you’re telling me the whole book was gender swapped?!?!?!?! I’ve been living a lie and I don’t know how to recover 😂
I think it's worth mentioning that Beau becoming a vampire immediately probably also happened because Edith is already a vampire and therefore can't get pregnant, so there's no compelling reason (from Stephanie's perspective) for them to not be vampires together by the end of the book.
I've dealt with my share of stalkers and hyper obsessed controlling exes. I've been able to consume reviews of twilight because, as a man, I've had the barrier of Bella's different pronouns to separate myself from it and revel in the red flag chaos.
Now...now I am not so fortunate. And I am queasy. And I ain't even past the summary yet.
Well, "dimple" doesn't sound like a real word anymore 😂😂😂😂😂
Also, on the sex point: I think she just dont know how. See, Bella was kinda obsessed with sex too - but in a very repressed way, which suits Stephanie's background. She could do something about that with Beau, try to portray his lust in a more "classful" way - Talk about her fugure against the light, or how he was fixated on her lips, or something like that -, but I don't think she was able to think in desire for a woman in anything but the most crass terms, so... She took something that someone said it was cute and run JUST with that.
However, she IS right about Twilight working the same with a swaped gender. It does just as terrible as the original 😂
I clicked on this expeditiously I TOTALLY forgot about this 😂. It’s so funny that this book could’ve been an interesting exploration of the original book, with Meyer acknowledging the problematic ideas of the original and deconstructing it, maybe even making a new better version of the story. But apparently that was too much work so she just changed some names around and called it a day lol. It is hilarious how good Pattison looks as a girl tho
All the males looked good as females! Kristen... not so much.
I worked at Barnes and Noble when this came out. I had to stand at the register in front of a shelf of dozens of these books for a month before the display was changed. Everytime I looked at the book, I seethed with rage that this was allowed to happen. I was a starving student who was eating my savings just to pay rent, and this unimaginative abomination comes along and sells like wildfire. Fun times.
"She dimpled cheekily down the stairs"
If I wanted to read a genderswaped version of twilight (why would I ever want that) I’d go to one of the MANY fanfic sites
I'm just waiting for the day when EL James decides to take her stab at the gender-swapped retelling schtick and do one for Fifty Shades, It's only a matter of time, people.
Dear God, what would that even look like?! I can only assume that some of the dullest parts of the first book would be short-cut, & stuff from book 2 would be brought forward... Gender-Swapped-Mr Robinson & Subby McSub-Sub would be plain horrifying, though...
Well that one you really could just C/P everything and it wouldn't change a thing.
Simple: Fatal Attraction, but with child grooming
@@viddergrapho8488 child grooming?
@@ManOutofTime913 It's like we know these kinds of authors too well
Two things:
1. Re: fantasizing about girls you like. For some reason, it's when I like a girl that I find myself not doing that. Celebs and fictional characters, sure. But for someone I know I just find myself...not doing it.
2. Re: dimples. Just me, but if I find an attractive girl with freckles that has interest in me, you can bet your ass that I will notice every solitary spot wherever they are exposed.
I love how the gender swap filter turned Beau into a normal teenage guy, Julie is somehow just as hot as Jacob except as a lady instead of a gentlewolf, and Edythe turned into... Lestat.
Also, Edythe? I don't think Meyer was committing to the bit even when it was ridiculous, I think she was committing to the ridiculous. Or, to paraphrase a game title, what remains of Edith Cullen?
And... does... does Stephanie know what dimples are? Because that's a very odd way to write about dimples, and I'm not even talking about the frequency. Heck "dimples popped out" is an outright oxymoron.
I remember when this book came out, a forum I was on had a small meltdown realizing why girls were into these books after reading a story about a moody teenage boy being hit on by a goth vampire woman and a tomboy werewolf who are both madly in love with him.
Also your point @12:40 , I actually have to personally disagree. Like, I'm not saying I never did, but it wasn't the first thing to pop up. Maybe it was because I grew up with fairly intense depression but my personal hierarchy of needs was just "make friends" well before anything romantic. But that's just me, I'm not going to speak for others personal experiences.
OKAY, BUT WHY IS THE GENDERFLIPPED EDWARD SO BEAUTIFUL???
Because Robert Pattinson is a beautiful man no matter how you slice it. No, I’m not Gay, why do you ask?
Gender-Swapped Jacob is pretty cute... what would a gender-swapped Seth look like...?
Pattinson is pretty androgynous tbh.
I cannot imagine being a famous published author so privileged that you can not only revisit but rewrite your most famous work, knowing it won't kill your career, and choosing to change nothing but the characters names and genders. There is not a thing I've ever written in the past that I wouldn't make huge changes to because I've improved as a writer or grown as a person since making it if I were given the chance.
Agreed, but then again it would have defied the "purpose" of the book in showing that the original wasn't sexist and stuff, which if she had to double down on to make the gender swap on it as it was.
Maybe in a parallel world, Stephanie would have remastered the original to make it less questionable and troubling with her gained experience...
I think it's sad, really, to become a mediocre fanfiction writer of her own work. Even the atrocious fifty shades tried harder.
Omg, I can’t believe that you’re really continuing the series 😂 Thank you for the effort. Is there any chance that you might make a video about Midnight Sun (Twilight from Edwards perspective) too some day? Edward is such a drama queen in it and I kind of love it.
He said he wasn't going to but I'm sure we can force him into it someday
Yeah, the book where his character lives up to his namesake, Ed Gein.
Unrealistic for a father to get sole custody of a kid...in a world full of vampires and werewolves 🙄
In Meyer's defense. If someone told me I could make "My whole family can retire in comfort" levels of money from a minimal effort job that only took a few days... I absolutely would too.
Granted, I probably would have put more creativity into it, but since she really didn't have to, I can almost respect the shameless cashgrab for once.
I actually enjoyed the experience of reading this one, exactly BECAUSE hardly anything was changed. I read Twilight pretty young. Reading it gender-swapped was a whole exercise in noticing the gender-based norms and assumptions that I didn't pick up on in the original because they're so normalized. I can see doing this as a writing exercise, like when you look at your drawings in a mirror to catch problems you hadn't spotted.
Imma be honest when i first heard this book existed i was kinda intrigued. I mean there arent a lot of romance focus teen novels around were the protagonist is a normal dude and his love intrest is a supernatural whatever but then i heard what you basically said in the intro with the ctrl+h bit and didn't bother looking into it
I wish there are more of that, but then I realized that it may not be worth it, because the story would still be bad (Because for some reason, young adult novels are bad).
Japan did the whole normal dude protagonist and his love interest being a supernatural whatever right.
As the other replier says, Japan has some. The first to come to mind is Karin/Chibi Vampire. She's kind of more the protagonist than him though.
I am delighted that Dom followed Meyer's lead in giving a word for word plot synopsis from his synopsis of the original, with names and pronouns swapped. Even with remarkably similar intonation - nicely done!
“Dimples” = sweet, coy, innocent. I think it’s to show us that Ethel is ✨feminine✨
Female soyjack = ✨feminine✨
By the time you were half-way through the dimple examples, I was mentally wondering if a draft actually said nipples, before being swapped over. It makes the dimples monolog EVEN funnier.
I kind of bristle at the idea of it being impossible Beau wasn’t thinking about sex 24/7 because ace boys do exist BUT Bella was never established as such sooo yeah it makes no sense. The thing that is really strange and frankly insulting is that it seems like along with their sexes she swapped their sex drives, which proves the point that she really does have that old old school biblical idea about women being lusty temptresses who will corrupt the godly men.
Okay hear me out Bella was never established as ace, but I wholeheartedly believe that Edward was.
Therefore the fact that Edith is way hornier than Bella means that she took that from Bella well bow took the asexuality from Edward.
It's one of the few things that I actually stayed the same in their gender dinamic.
Except the book is written about an explicitly allosexual character. Dom also acknowledges it comes from his experience as an allosexual as well.
@@quinn0517 no it's not. Bow and eateth swap sexuality from Bella and Edward.
@@lahlybird895 but why? Why not have sexualities be a part of their character and not just whichever sex they happen to be at the time?
@@chellyfishing I don't know because Stephanie Meyer is Mormon?
And having an ineffectual female would go against everything and Mormon beliefs probably.
Going to be honest, I read this when it first came out (I was 17 in 2015) because my mom is a Twilight fan and I wanted to see if I liked it any better in this form. I did. I actually really like this book, and I am very much in the minority of men who finds the prospect of a more-powerful woman protecing me *extremely* appealing.
Not sure it's a minority. At least not a tiny one.
Same here, lol. I liked this version way more than the original. Too bad we only got the one book out of it.
@@TheRealGSmith Oh, I agree, I was more responding to Dominic's remark in the video about how being rescued by a woman isn't a fantasy most men have.
@@Accidental.Creation Yes, I'd have liked to read more.
Having not read this... Rosalie was jelly that Eddie never wanted her, so is boy!Rose mad that Edith never wanted him? That seems...
I gotta say too, there are some experiences that are simply gender based, they just are. Rosalie being raped by her own fiancee, Esme and the whole thing with her marriage and baby, Jasper being an army man, and honestly, even Carlisle being a doctor (after all, even in living history we have more than enough examples of female doctors being looked down on if not worse - "she" would have a harder time keeping a low profile being a female doctor in all of "her" vampire life (and being single and alone too, before "Edith").
But sure. 80s single mom not being able to get full custody is the one thing that breaks reality.
'Rosalie being raped by her own fiance' bullSHIT. Plenty of guys (cis or trans or anything else) get raped by their fiances. You just never hear about it cause men get shamed for being 'emasculated' when a woman rapes them
You know, the actors' faces actually work incredibly well on the gender-swapped Photoshops, I don't think I noticed until now how androgynous the main cast was until now!
She wanted a lover who was a good listener, but got one who was a good glistener.
Lol 😂
I gotta say, when you were going thru the genderswapped synopsis, all I could think was, "wow, this makes the plot of twilight so much more believable, its not even funny"
From what I remember, at the time, she had no intention of writing the book, but her publisher asked for something "special" they could put out for the anniversary.
I'm shocked they didn't make a spin-off book that indirectly takes a potshot at 50 Shades.
@@Rabbitlord108 From all I've heard, Meyer is pretty copacetic about fanworks, even ones which deserve a bit of vitriol. I get why that's frustrating, but it's way better than being generally opposed to fanworks, like EL James is.
@@timothymclean Okay.
I'm legit snort laughing at all the gender flip pics
This book was what fueled me to finally write my own book. I literally wrote my own story with a human boy/vampire girl couple out of spite.
What is it where is it
@@dddaaa6965 It's called Nacido para morir (Born to die) and it was picked up by a small publisher here in Spain, but it's not in English because I am poor and can't afford to get it translated.
I recently read "Mistborn Well of Ascension" which was largely about a dude being protected by his vastly more powerful girlfriend. Spetty good