From the Introduction In December of 2008, my mother gifted me Stephenie Meyer''s book, Twilight . The book, first published in 2005, was all the rage, you see, because its film adaptation had just been released in movie theaters and one of its stars had played Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter ! I was mired in a PhD program in philosophy at Boston University at the time, but entrenched as I was, I had still been capable of noticing multiple people meandering down Commonwealth Avenue with their faces literally stuck in a book that had pale hands holding an apple on the cover. Although I had already decided that at twenty-seven years old I was certainly not interested in and very much above reading this book, I didn''t want to hurt my mother''s feelings and I also had nothing better to do while I was home for Christmas break. I read the book in one completely delirious evening and came out the other side feral. The Twilight movie posters at the time promoted the promise "nothing will be the same" and I can say that after that night, unfortunately for me, nothing really ever was the same again. I, like millions of people around the globe, immediately fell in love with the characters and world within Twilight , unconditionally and irrevocably, and for a long while I completely lost my personality and in some ways my identity to it. Much like Bella Swan, Meyer''s pale, awkward, clumsy human protagonist who becomes enraptured with godlike, 104-year-old copper-headed vampire, Edward Cullen, my infatuation with Twilight and the three sequels that Meyer produced was, at times, quite unhealthy. Because I was unhappy in my PhD program and in my own romantic relationship, it was easy for me to retreat and escape into the Twilight Saga''s fantastical world of vampires, werewolves, and teenage love in exactly the same way that Bella retreats from her parents, friends, and mortal life.

This retreat largely took place on the dark web (Twitter) where I connected with other fans (unreasonably aggressive soccer moms) as we bemoaned the fact that we had no ancient vampire to watch over us as we slept or, if one was Team Jacob, no beefy, tattooed, teenage werewolf to fight for our hearts. The queen of Twilight Twitter was a woman who went by the username Snowqueens Icedragon and had become famous for her weekly updates of a fanfiction called Master of the Universe wherein Edward Cullen was human and hiding a very sexy secret (whips! chains! Oh my!). Fans, myself included, spent a great deal of time trying to curry favor with her as some sort of Stephenie Meyer proxy, and even though she was indeed spending her time writing NSFW Twilight fanfiction, it was quite obvious that she thought we were collectively insane and kind of scary. Capitalizing on the absolute fervor with which the fandom devoured anything related to the Saga, Snowqueens Icedragon eventually removed her stories from Fanfiction.net, changed the names of the characters, and published them for the masses. She goes by E.L. James now and her Twilight fanfiction is known worldwide as Fifty Shades of Grey .

This anecdote is just one example of how the passion, fervor, and quite honestly, partial insanity of Twilight fans during the time of the books'' publication and the films'' release were both trivialized and exploited. Becoming obsessed with a Young Adult book and/or movie about a human-vampire-werewolf love triangle at twenty-seven years old doesn''t buy you the street cred that you''d think it would. And it truly wasn''t just me; Twilight fans of all ages suffered for their love of the books and movies at the hands of the general public. Twilight, with its female, teenage protagonist and central love story involving hunky supernatural beings, was considered something that was made for little girls. Historically, anything made in the interest of and for little girls isn''t warranted much respect, because the interests of little girls are thought to be frivolous and insipid. This is, of course, entirely untrue, but that really didn''t matter in 2008 and I would say that it unfortunately matters only a little bit more now. What the general public gleaned about Twilight certainly wasn''t a shining endorsement: teenaged girl gives up her entire life (literally) for a man-child (again, literally). Female peers in my PhD program were scathing when it came to the pure joy that Twilight brought me.

One friend told me that I could no longer call myself a feminist, and she suggested that I probably wasn''t a very critical thinker. None of these women had read the books or seen the films. These reactions were confusing, hurtful, and caused me a great deal of shame, because I really wasn''t trying to proselytize the book of Twilight; I just couldn''t contain how happy and alive these characters had made me feel, and for that I was silly and stupid. All Twilight fans were. Odds are that if you were vocal about being a fan at the height of the Twilight phenomenon, you were bullied or shamed in one way or another. It didn''t seem to matter that we were responsible for these books and movies breaking records with their monumental success, that we were the voices guiding media and pop culture. We were one of the very first fandoms to come of age on social media and we have the bruises and scars to show for it. It''s for this reason that the first chapter of this book is about the fans as opposed to the actual content of Twilight and I hope that by the end of this book we''ll have all healed a little.