carolxdanvers:

themorrigansson:

givemeunicorns:

booksnbutterbeer:

so here’s my problem with TWILIGHT critics: they hardly ever talk about meyer’s representation of the quileute tribe. they’ll go on and on about her writing style, or the fact that her vampires sparkle. and tbh edward’s sparkly alabaster chest is a pretty trivial thing to critique, in contrast to meyer’s ruthless appropriation of an indigenous culture.

why aren’t more people having this conversation?? why do we keep neglecting the fact that stephenie meyer took an existing native american tribe, rewrote their entire history, and gave them a new mythology that was extremely “othering?”  

why doesn’t anyone ever talk about this?!?! i mean, i know actual native americans were cast in the films, and that made people happy. but was it enough to absolve stephenie meyer for her gross misrepresentation of an indigenous culture?!?!??

ugh. i just think this is a conversation more people should be engaged in. and it’s happening in some places. but i wish i saw more of it on tumblr.

*FLIES IN TO YOUR POST*

okay so in college I took a class called Science, Witchcraft and Magic and my prof said we could do our final project on anything we wanted, as long as we tied it into the class. So I did mine on Werewolves as a symbol of social climate.

In my research, my prof and I talked a lot about this very thing and I actually used in in my project. I was lucky enough to have a friend with Quileute tribe  and he was the one who broached the idea to me, sighting Meyers disgusting appropriation of a culture she knew nothing about but also turned them into scary monsters who eat people. Because one thing that stood out to me, more than anything about Meyer’s werewolves is that they are born Werewolves, while the all white vampires are made monsters. They come from lower income, often times single parent homes, where as the rich vampires have made themselves into a standard mom-dad-siblings model family unit. The werewolves are violent by default, even scaring their loved ones (which honestly the whole sam-scaring-emily things was a huge slap in the face when you consider the rates of domestic violence against Native women.)

So not only did she bastardize an entire culture, she used werewolves as the worst kind of racist metaphor. They are born monsters, who can’t help themselves, who can’t change what they are, and who are dangerous by default. She slapped a tribe’s name on a metaphor for white fear.

You’re not even covering a lot of it either. Bella is frequently shown flirting with Jacob or acting mildly flirtatious with other male werewolves as a means to get something, like information or other things she could get by just asking. Meyers oversexualizes nearly every wolf. In the second book, Jacob strips down to provide heat because he knows his clothes are soaked and he doesn’t want to get Bella’s kid sick, but wait, all Bella focuses on, and all Meyers focuses on, is the potential sexual storyline, even though Jacob is supposedly a serious love interest at this point.

Not only that, she decides the werewolves are afraid of the ocean and cannot inherently swim well. A tribe of people living near the ocean has its own history where the people who are supposed to protect and provide for them are afraid of one of the biggest providers for them. She creates as many ways to make the werewolves weak and powerless as possible. I don’t know about you, but canines do a pretty good swimming from what I’ve experienced as a dog owner.

As a final stab, she writes into the last book that the tribe aren’t actual werewolves, but some form of shapeshifter. That the true werewolves are from Europe and the vampires have been trying to eradicate them for years. And, even worse, the Volturi wants to make the shapeshifters into their guard dogs. She decides that they can’t even be called werewolves, but that they have to have separation from the European counterpart, because they didn’t inherently come from them.

Literally, their presence in the book is purely mockery and there is no way to justify any of it.

I have never read past the first chapter of the first book, but what strikes me is that this is a Mormon woman writing a book with, apparently, tons of Mormon imagery. You can definitely see why I’m already angry. Mormons have historically singled out indigenous americans & polynesians as this sort of evil society whose sins are shown physically in the darkness of their skin

So I’m not at all surprised that the mythos i nthe books follows that absurdly racist tradition