I have extremely mixed feelings about the Twilight Saga. I learned about the books on Tumblr as a child, as one does, and became obsessed with the series for a protracted period of time in my adolescence. I was also a big Harry Potter nerd, which left me in the middle of the great Harry Potter versus Twilight culture wars, because everybody knows only one series of young adult novels can be popular at any one time.As I grew older than the age of 15 and learned critical thinking, Twilight’s flaws became apparent to me and I took a hard turn into rolling my eyes every time someone mentioned it – but I can’t lie and say I wasn’t partly inclined to distance myself from it because of the world’s general disdain towards young people who loved the series. Twilight was firmly in the genre of teen romance fantasy, and teen romance books weren’t real literature. I started reading Sylvia Plath instead.I hadn’t thought about the Twilight franchise in a long time, until last year when I finally got hit with Covid and feverishly binged all five Twilight movies. It turns out that the first movie, in particular, is indelibly inked in my brain, because despite my fever (or perhaps because of it), I remembered almost every line and their deliveries. It was embarrassing to realise how much of my youth had been shaped by this series, but somehow liberating to watch the movies again as an adult, able to appreciate them as standalone films without the filter of outside influences and biases to skew my opinion. 
It turns out, the movies are great if you revel in their camp tone, especially the first one which was directed b🍰y Catherine Hardwicke (Twilight makes a lot more artistic sense if you watch Thirteen first). That leaves me wondering how the new Twilight series is ever going to match up. that a series version of the best-selling book series is in early development with Lionsgate Television, and it seems they’re starting on the right foot as Sinead Daly, best known for writing for Tell Me Lies, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency and The Get Down, is attached to write the script. The series is early in development, so we don’t know much, not even if the show will be an adaptation of the books or some type of offshoot in the same universe. Author of the books, Stephanie Meyer, is expected to be involved in some capacity, and that’s all that seems to be confirmed right now.
I’m inclined to think that an offshoot 𒅌in the same universe is more likely, maybe with one of the minor characters. The original franchise has some ethical issues wrapped up in it, not least the glamorisation of abusive relationships (as an adult, I was shouting “Girl he’s a nightmare, just let him go” at the screen). Right now, many Twilight fans are expressing their lack of desire for a reboot of the Twilight series as long as the Quileute tribe is in it.
Shockingly, unlike most stan movements on Twitter, this is for a good reason. In the original serie🎃s, Stephanie Meyer uses the real-life Quileute tribe in her books, and portrays them in a way that’s pretty racist. It’s so bad, in fact, that the Burke Museum, a natural history museum in Seattle that collaborates heavily with Native people o🐬f the area, .
With the news of an impending TV series, fans are once again calling for the Quileute tribe to be compensated for the portrayal of their tribe in Twilight. It has grossed billions of dollars while misrepresenting and appropriating Quileute culture, and the tribe has not seen a cent of compensation nor had issues they’ve highlighted acknowledged. In 2005, nobody was talking about this, but it’s 2023, and the issues of Native Americans, and more wid♊ely, racial injustice, have risen to🎉 prominence in society’s consciousness. People care, and they’re speaking up.
Ethically, an offshoot would be safer for the series – maybe Lionsgate can make a show with sparkly vampires that doesn’t revolve around weirdly backwards views of feminism, being obsessed with a man who doesn’t care about your agency, and getting married as a teenager so you can finally bang. Maybe it could even be considered objectively good, in a non-cringe way, though I can’t reconcile a serious interpr﷽etation of the Twilight books with the absolute camp-fest the original movies were.
Either way, it’s extremely funny that history is repeating itself and we’re going to have a Harry Potter series and a Twilight series at the same time. Hopefully, history won’t repeat itseꦍlf and millennials won’t start a fresh round of discourse over which series is better, because we’re all old enough to know ☂the answer is that neither are good and both are weirdly racist. Let’s not make the same mistakes again.