I don’t have literary character heroes.  There are characters whose morals I want to imitate, adventures I want to pursue and ideas that I want to think about, but I would never say that I was Team Atticus or Team Holden.  For me, characters in books were static and their actions would never change no matter what I did.  Unlike television that changed based on viewer preferences, books were printed and characters were finished by the time I got my hands on it pages.

But now we have Twilight.  Characters are adored.  Readers model their own lives and their own dreams off of these characters.  What will be the repercussions of young girls thinking they need to be saved by men? 

And perhaps most important for the future of reading, readers of the Twilight series think that they have some agency in predicting the future of their favorite characters.  They root for characters—Team Jacob or Team Edward!—behaving as if enough people prefer a certain team, Jacob or Edward will get the girl. 

For those of you who missed the last few years, Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series is four books of a vampire-themed romance.  They center on Bella, a mortal teenager, who falls in love with a 104-year-old vampire named Edward.

The series’ plot raises anyone’s even remotely feminist hackles. James, another vampire, tries to kill Bella in the first book, but Edward rescues her. Bella marries Edward in the third book when Bella is only eighteen! Bella the role model tells young girls that it is more important to find a man (or preferably, a vampire) than to go to college. Bella gets pregnant in the fourth book, and in her pregnancy-weakened state, Edward injects her with his venom to make her immortal. Hm, venom. Still, disgustingly, the series has sold over 100 million copies of the books worldwide and includes 38 translations.  

I  don’t know if Stephenie Meyer has an agenda—love! marriage! kids!—but she does seem to model the plot after her own life.  Graduating from Brigham Young University, Meyer is a Mormon and, at the time of the characters “springing” into her mind in 2003, she was a stay-at-home mom with three young kids.

Bella’s life seems to follow Stephenie’s own. While there is nothing wrong with staying home with young children, Bella, unlike Stephenie, is never given a chance to experience a life without love and family in it.  Girls these days are not given enough opportunities to see what life could be without love and family; rather, love and marriage is primary and career and personal goals are secondary.  For sixteen-year-olds, I don’t see how this could be anything but dangerous.

As for the Teams, it’s certainly strange to think that one’s personal preference for a specific character can influence a book’s outcome, but I suppose it can’t be a bad thing that kids are rooting this hard for one literary character over another. 

But wait—to root for one character or another, you also have to read these books. Some people say it is more important that kids read than what they read. I would disagree. If Stephenie Meyer’s perspective on life and happiness is the only thing young girls are reading, I’d rather they didn’t read anything at all.