throbbing light machine

With the accidental release of the Twilight spin-off Midnight Sun, I've found myself pondering vampires.

I haven't actually read Twilight, save in mockworthy excerpts around internetland. My sister bought all four books, though, and then my mother read them. This kind of weirds me out.

But the thing about Midnight Sun that's been freaking me out is how like some sort of dark mirror of Buffy/Angel it is. I'm embarrassingly otp about B/A, and looking at Edward Cullen is a very interesting exercise in self-examination. Because I think that at the end of the day, Angel and Edward - heck, throw in Rochester for a historical precedent - are cut from pretty much the same mode. Handsome, powerful, has knowledge that the heroine does not, secret darknesses, stalkerishness, possessiveness, that whole fantasy of total all-consuming love that verges on creepy and badwrong.



Except that they choose very different sorts of girls to be in love with.

I think that, in fiction at least, who you fall in love with works as a characterization point. I know that it works for me in fic - for example, a Hermione Granger who's in love with Snape is much more interesting to me than one who's in love with Ron. For one thing, Hermione's troubling totalitarian tendencies would have to be quashed before she could find herself open enough to Snape to love him. Another example - I've been watching The Sentinel with my Boy, and it's just so damned cute - I don't think I'd be remotely interested in Jim Ellison if they'd hooked him back p with Carolyn instead of letting him get so very gay with Blair. I'm not into the butch military thing, but if Ellison can be in love with a guy like Blair, there's got to be something to him after all. You get what I'm going for here.

This is actually a big part of why I can still read Jane Eyre as a love story. If Rochester had locked Bertha up in the attic and then gone and found himself some little blonde flirt who would put out, or let him feel powerful, or be the proper wife, I would find him repugnant, and I would certainly be suspicious of his diagnosis of his conveniently crazy wife. I'd assume he was just a jerk who wanted a dark, powerful woman out of his way. But instead Rochester falls in love with Jane, who is nothing special to look at, who exists in an almost constant state of rebellion against power structures in general, who has enough gumption to stand up to him. He cannot have expected to dominate her; he loves her because she is indomitable, which to me suggests that he is not the sort of man who seeks out little girls in order to feel powerful himself.

Similarly, Buffy can kick Angel's ass, and we all know it. Angel knows it. Which makes it sort of okay for the camera to fetishize the contrast of Buffy's small, frail-looking body against Angel's size and strength. We know all along that she could totally take him. She's not a victim, she's the victim empowered. The psychology of stalking isn't really there, because I don't think that Angel ever really sees himself as the more powerful. Yeah, he lurks, but it's not like she couldn't, you know, beat him to an undead pulp.

On the other hand, when Edward thinks about "Bella imagining me with my arms wrapped around her fragile body," it's made of infinite skeeve, because Bella is actually a victim. She isn't a furious rebel against injustice. She can't beat him up. She doesn't even stand up to him. And even if she did, check out wht he thinks of her anger: "We scowled at each other. It was odd how endearing her anger was. Like a furious kitten, soft and harmless, and so unaware of her own vulnerability." (quotes ganked from cleolinda's recaps)

I don't see Angel ever thinking that way about B.

Oh, also, have the most scary passage I've ever read: "And then she started to walk away from me. Without thinking about my action, I reached out and caught her by the back of her rain jacket. She jerked to a stop. "Where do you think you're going?" I was almost angry that she was leaving me. I hadn't had enough time with her. She couldn't go, not yet." I mean, aaaaahhh! Right?

Bella's not Buffy. Which means that Cullen can do the same things that Angel does and end up in infinitely freakier territory. Bella's more like a Radcliffe heroine than like a Bronte girl. Also, honey, when your vampy boytoy breaks up with you "for your own good," the correct answer is not to become passively suicidal. Buffy goes to college, kicks some bad guy butt, and starts dating again - Riley Finn isn't much, but I think he's better than suicide. I think. God, I hate Riley Finn.

Also, in tangent land, rewatching the end of Buffy 3 made me frustrated with it all over again. Because to me, the breakup never actually reads as final. It reads like the Romanceland trope of the obstacle to love, which is SUPPOSED TO BE OVERCOME BY TRUE LOVE. The breakup feels like the first part of something. I don't ever feel like the writers actually say that it's over. If they would, maybe I could get over it. Right now I'm just having Season Six AU fantasies wherein Angel is the one who catches B at the end of Once More With Feeling, instead of stupid Spike.