These are some of the books I’m reading right now that I’m looking forward to talking about on here but I can’t yet on account of how linear time works.

What I have read recently is the official illustrated guide to Twilight where Stephenie Meyer seems to have been given no limitations at all and presumably put pen to paper and did semi-conscious vampire-related spirit writing for thirty-two straight hours. It’s almost a perfect creative work.

If you have no interest in Twilight you can feel pretty safe to skip this one and I won’t even take it personally. I don’t know why Twilight is such a well of interest for me. I don’t know if it’s just the hyperfocused nuclear Camp ray that blasts me in the face every time I ingest it, or how truly showstopping almost every creative decision Meyer makes through the franchise is. I don’t know if I’m a rubbernecker at a 15-car vampire pileup or the beachcomber who found the Montauk Monster washed up on the shore and can’t stop poking it with a stick.

So without further ado, here are some things I thought you might want to know are all canonical in the Twilight universe.

Alice and canonical vampire manscaping

One of the first things I want to talk about is Alice, who has an insane backstory. She’s the Cullen who is psychic and has short hair and does the pitch you know the one.

One thing this illustrated guide reveals is that when you are a vampire you can no longer grow hair! Alice’s hair was all chopped off right before she became a vampire and that’s why it’s short forever. This has a lot of personal grooming implications I think. Anyway Alice’s hair was chopped off because she had been RECENTLY INSTITUTIONALIZED after uncovering a plot by her father to assassinate her mother and remarry a much younger woman this is all real. She spends a while in an asylum being electroshocked (???) and forming a close bond with a janitor who turns out to be a vampire (this guy doesn’t even get a name). I’m guessing he does this to eat patients but I feel like if I was a vampire I could come up with a way to do this that didn’t also require me to mop some of the time. Anyway the janipire (vamitor?) catches wind that James (the main villain of the first Twilight book/movie) for some reason has decided to eat Alice and changes her into a vampire to protect her.

The Bitchiest Fur Trapper

Speaking of James, here’s a thing about James! He’s from Pennsylvania back in frontier times and he was famous for being the Ugliest Tracker on the Frontier. Ain’t that something. Imagine you’re trying to trade wolf pelts for corn whiskey or whatever and then everyone’s like ooh watch out, Big Ugly coming through. 18th century fur trappers can be so cruel.

Renesmee and a vampire temperature dispute

Renesmee's birthday is 9/11? This is what I’m talking about, in terms of Meyer’s uncanny choice abilities. Like, give her the smallest choice to make and she will still knock it out of the park 10 times out of 10. Also Renesmee’s canonical body heat is like 105 degrees. Why would someone who is half normal human and half cold vampire be hotter than either? If you were looking for answers instead of more questions you’ve come to the wrong place. It turns out there is no canonical information about vampire core temperatures; they might just not produce heat at all, meaning they’re always the temperature of the air around them, or there’s also whatever this explanation is that I found on Reddit.

Barely SAG-eligible vampires

There’s a lot of background vampires that kind of just show up to kick around in the background of Breaking Dawn and are almost universally the vampire equivalents of the stereotypical dolls from every nation on the It’s a Small World ride, with the accents and the traditional garb and the one defining national interest apiece. One of these one-liners is Liam, an Irish vampire who only eats Englishmen as a rule and whose wife is a 6’2” beefy blacksmith girl named Siobhan. These should have been the main characters of the book. A thing about Siobhan is that she became a vampire because a Turkish vampire came through town on his quest to collect a menagerie of unusual vampire women (she later ate him). Do you see what I mean about how a lot of this seems like automatic writing? How would any of this even occur to a conscious mind?

Real werewolves of Forks, Washington

Now I need to talk about werewolves for a while. One thing about the werewolves is that nobody thought a girl could be one??? Leah Clearwater phases into a wolf for the first time one day when she’s having a CRAZY mood swing (because she’s still a GIRL werewolf so she’s probably on her werewolf PERIOD or something) and her father, Harry Clearwater, is so surprised by the concept of a werewolf being a girl that he has a fatal heart attack and then her younger brother is so surprised by this that he also spontaneously becomes a werewolf so what you’ve got in this scene is two giant wolves in the kitchen and a heart attack dad and a mom who presumably has a pretty long day after that. Also I was joking about wolf periods up there but for reasons only knowable by the Meyer estate, Leah stops getting her period when she becomes a werewolf???? Stephenie what? Why would you specify this? I want to live inside her mind.

Here’s some more werewolf drama is that basically all of the werewolves are from one of three families and some of them are from two of the three due to it being a small town I guess. Anyway one of the wolves, Embry, never knew who his dad was but when he turns into a wolf it pretty much narrows it down to the three werewolves old enough to have sired him and all of those guys are his friends’ dads who are all fully married. And he can’t even question his mom about which dad she fucked without revealing the secret werewolf genetics thing. Anyway I bet this is something they try really hard not to talk or think about!

Also Bella’s mom’s maiden name is Higginbotham. I just like, wanted you to know that.