Ep 700 - Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined, by Stephenie Meyer

Summary

Overdue Podcast Summary: Episode 700 - "Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined" by Stephenie Meyer

Release Date: April 28, 2025

Introduction

In the milestone 700th episode of Overdue, hosted by Andrew and Craig of Headgum, the duo delves into Stephenie Meyer's "Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined." Celebrating their extensive journey through literature, this episode revisits the beloved yet controversial retelling of the original Twilight saga, focusing on its gender-swapped narrative.

Context: A Journey Through Twilight

Andrew and Craig reflect on their history with the Twilight series, noting that their first Twilight episode was number 300, making this 700th episode a significant revisitation. They humorously acknowledge their longtime listeners—"old hats"—and share anecdotes about their evolving perspectives as time has passed since their initial discussions on the series.

Overview of "Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined"

"Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined" serves as an alternative take on the Twilight series, flipping the genders of the main characters. Andrew mentions, “This, this is not paraphrasing. I did say death first before I would read gender swap Twilight” ([00:58]).

Gender Swapping: Implementation and Choices

The heart of the discussion centers on Meyer's decision to gender-swap characters. Craig explains, “We have to swap them all... swapping everyone except for like two or three very specific characters” ([25:47]). They explore the rationale behind keeping certain characters unchanged—specifically Charlie and Renee Swan—and critique the consistency of these choices.

Notable Quote:

• Andrew: “Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined... what if we went back to Twilight? What if we finally did Twilight and we said...” ([07:22]).

Character Changes and Their Impact

The hosts dissect the transformations of key figures:

• Beaufort Swan (Bella Swan) and Edith Cullen (Edward Cullen): Andrew highlights, “There are people in the chat. Nobody's gay. Nobody's trans. Don't worry about it” ([29:51]), emphasizing the binary gender approach.
• Corinne Cullen (Carlisle Cullen): Craig finds her gender swap particularly intriguing, comparing it to characters from Outlander who assert their power despite societal constraints.
• Jacob Black (Jules Black) and Billy Black (Bonnie Black): The changes are discussed, with Andrew noting confusion over Kyle’s new names and their implications.

Notable Quote:

• Craig: “Stephanie Meyer... claims that it does not matter what gender anybody is... but by changing it, you've proven that it matters if you change it” ([15:33]).

Plot Comparisons: Original vs. Reimagined

Andrew and Craig compare pivotal scenes between the original and reimagined narratives:

• Dance Studio Entrapment: Craig summarizes his comedic yet critical take on Andrew’s recollection of the plot, illustrating the condensed nature of the reimagined book compared to the original.
• Transformation Scene: The hosts critique how the transformation of Beaufort into a vampire is rushed, lacking the emotional depth and consent depicted in the original series.

Notable Quote:

• Andrew: “If you can find the seventh word in each of these episodes, you will unlock my tomb” ([06:32]).

Criticisms and Challenges

The podcast hosts articulate several criticisms:

• Superficial Changes: Both agree that merely swapping genders doesn’t add meaningful depth, leading to a narrative that feels repetitive and stripped of its original charm.
• Character Development: The gender-swapped characters lack the nuanced development that made the originals relatable and engaging.
• Plot Compression: Major plot points and backstories from subsequent Twilight books are haphazardly condensed, resulting in a disjointed and confusing storyline.

Notable Quote:

• Craig: “This book is shorter than Twilight... it is just a rehash of Twilight. Although some of the changes were, you know, strange” ([60:15]).

Listener Feedback and Reviews

Andrew and Craig share audience reactions, highlighting mixed reviews:

• Some listeners appreciate the fresh perspective, while others find the changes forced and the story less impactful.
• A recurring theme in feedback is the difficulty in adapting a deeply personal female-driven narrative into a male protagonist-centric story without losing its essence.

Notable Quote:

• Listener Tessa: “Many people didn't find this book so great, but I absolutely loved it. It felt like I was reading Twilight again for the first time, which I review” ([93:55]).

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

As the episode wraps up, Andrew and Craig express their frustration with the book’s execution but acknowledge the effort behind reimagining a beloved series. They lament the absence of deeper character exploration and meaningful plot evolution, which they believe are crucial for a successful retelling.

Notable Quote:

• Craig: “Stephanie Meyer is talking to the average Twilight reader... Why did she do? Why did she not do Renee, Charlie and Phil?” ([91:51]).

Looking Ahead: Future Projects

The hosts tease upcoming projects, including their exploration of The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien, indicating their continuous commitment to dissecting a wide range of literary works.

Final Remarks

Andrew and Craig conclude the episode with gratitude towards their listeners, reflecting on the longevity and impact of Overdue. They humorously hint at future swappings and literary adventures, maintaining their signature blend of critical analysis and playful banter.

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This summary captures the essence of Episode 700, focusing on Andrew and Craig’s in-depth analysis of Stephenie Meyer’s "Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined," while highlighting their critical perspectives and engaging discussions.

Transcript

[Andrew]

This is a headgun podcast.

[Craig]

Andrew, do you say data or data?

[Andrew]

I think I say data. Sure. You asked me and then I forgot which one that I. Yeah, I got which one it was that I said at my house.

[Craig]

I think we say data. And for the longest time, I thought that paying a fortune on my monthly data plan was just normal. That was until I found out about Mint Mobile and their premium wireless plans that start at just 15 bucks a month. Andrew, you use Mint Mobile, right?

[Andrew]

Yeah. Craig, you think you're telling me about this, like for the first time I know about Mint Mobile. Susanna and I switched like several years ago.

[Craig]

Oh, wow.

[Andrew]

From the plan that we got when we originally bought iPhones and it literally saved us like half. We're paying like half what we were before for a service that's pretty much the same.

[Craig]

That's great.

[Andrew]

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[Craig]

Upfront payment of $45 for 3 month 5GB plan required, equivalent to $15 a month. New customer offer for first 3 months only. Then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. While Andrew and Craig believe the joy of discovery is crucial to enjoying any well told tale, they will not shy away from spoiling specific story beats when necessary. Plus, these are books you should have read by now. Hey everybody. Welcome to Overdue, a podcast about the books you've been meaning to read. My name is Craig.

[Andrew]

My name is Andrew and we are.

[Craig]

Doing it live, episode 700. We've got some old hats in the chat telling us that the audio's great. You'll love to see it.

[Andrew]

That sounds like it is old hands, right? So if you call them old hats, it sounds like you're insulting them in some, oh, they're old.

[Craig]

Some subtle way.

[Andrew]

Yeah, old hand is the like. If you're an experienced person who's done something a lot of times you're an old hand.

[Craig]

Sure.

[Andrew]

I don't know if old Hat is an idiot.

[Craig]

Is old hat a thing?

[Andrew]

I'm not sure.

[Craig]

I think we're blowing some folks minds in the chat who've never seen us before.

[Andrew]

We get the I switched your faces in your voices thing so frequently that I don't. I'm starting to take it a little personal. Like, what did I. What. Why are my voice and my face so mismatched? What did I do?

[Craig]

It's fine. It's fine. Welcome, everyone, to a bonanza on a Friday evening. We are here. This is our book podcast where every week one of us reads a book and tells the other person about it. And sometimes we celebrate milestones with things that are still technically books. Right?

[Andrew]

Yeah. I mean, this went through the process that a book goes through to get published. So I can only. Looks like a book, sounds like a book, it must be a book.

[Craig]

Yes. We are just so happy that even if you're not with us live right now, we're just so happy to be here recording our 700th episode on life and Death, Twilight, reimagined by Stephenie Meyer.

[Andrew]

So there's. And I'm. Pardon me, because I'm the one running the stream and so I've got all these windows looking at me and I'm trying not to get lost in the window so I can actually record the podcast. But one of the things I did for research for this episode was to re listen to all of our old Twilight episodes. And we did. We did have a good time.

[Craig]

Yeah, we did.

[Andrew]

But I did say, and I am not. This, this is not paraphrasing. I did say death first before I would read gender swap Twilight. And I think like, we. And in the first Twilight episode, we were also like, I don't think we're gonna do the rest of these. Like, we, we did not come into it expecting to do the entire Twilight series and then read the first one again two other times for two different episodes. But I don't know, I was trying to think about what's changed. And I don't know what's changed for you, but for me it's just like time passes and when the memory of like the minute to minute experience of reading a Twilight book has faded from my brain, I'm just left with a fuzzy like, oh, we had a good time with that.

[Craig]

So childbirth and the first two years of a child's life, there's a reason that a lot of folks have their second kid after like two years.

[Andrew]

Yeah. It's just enough to not remember all the stuff that you didn't really want and to have a great time with.

[Craig]

The good parts of baby and. And forget all the tough parts of baby. So, yeah, we're back. It has been more podcast since our first Twilight episode than it had been when we did our first Twilight.

[Andrew]

Yes, the first Twilight episode is episode 300. And this is 700. And 700 is more than twice. 300 I've done. I've run the number.

[Craig]

That was elegantly said. I was prepared for you to stick that landing. That was.

[Andrew]

Thank you.

[Craig]

Thank you. Yeah, I just have a quick episode 700 kind of quick retrospective. You know, last time, Andrew, we did a milestone Twilight, you were like, oh, it's episode 300. Let me rattle off some facts about the number 300.

[Andrew]

It was a bit number 300.

[Craig]

So I just looked at our catalog and figured we'd done 700 episodes. Let's just check in on every 70th episode. Let's just what we did.

[Andrew]

Oh, you're telling people about the ARG. Where if you put together sentences from every 70th episode, they figure out the true meaning of the podcast.

[Craig]

If you can find the seventh word in each of these episodes, you will unlock my tomb. Here we go. Episode 70, Girl with the Pearl Earring. Okay, what if a painting was a book? Episode 140, the Amityville Horror. Do you remember that one, Andrew?

[Andrew]

I know that we've read it.

[Craig]

What if.

[Andrew]

What if I read a synopsis of it? I would remember.

[Craig]

What have you made the name of a town synonymous with murder and ghosts? What? No one could ever live there again. Episode 210. The 2016 election. Now, Andrew, speaking of terrible books with terrible sequels.

[Andrew]

Yeah. Yeah. That was the other thing I was thinking about when going back to the Twilight universe is like, it's 2025. It's a year for taking something that you did already and had a bad time doing and doing it again. Exciting for reasons that nobody can divine to do it again. So that is. We are back.

[Craig]

Well, it's good because we can fix it, Andrew, with episode 280, the Secret.

[Andrew]

Oh, man. I think about that book almost every single day.

[Craig]

I know.

[Andrew]

I'm always thinking about the Law of attraction.

[Craig]

Episode 350, Slaughterhous 5. We did Breaking dawn as episode 351.

[Andrew]

For some reason, I do not remember why we did that. And we do not talk about it.

[Craig]

We really don't.

[Andrew]

Because the plan. We said in, like, the previous two Twilight episodes that the plan was to do it for 350. So I don't know what Math did not work out that week, but it's not how we did it.

[Craig]

Like a bonus episode problem or something. Who knows? Episode 420, Candide Blaze it best of all possible weeds. Episode 490 east of Eden. What if Cain and Abel were American? That's what that looks about. Episode 560, Planet of the Dragons. I had forgotten this. Choose your own adventure.

[Andrew]

Oh, choose your own adventure.

[Craig]

And I had forgotten that it wasn't like you went to. You were from space and you landed on the dragon planet.

[Andrew]

Oh, right. Yeah. I think that was one of the ones where we did not get to do most of the exciting stuff. I think we didn't. We just like die in the wilderness.

[Craig]

Yeah, I think we may have gone in a cave. And episode 630, nothing to see here by Kevin Wilson. I read that book. What if a Senators kids could catch fire. What if Halton catch fire? Halt Senators kids catch fire. Other books that we have recorded on April 25, Andrew, the hunchback of Notre Dame. I don't see them making a Disney live action remake of that one. Just putting that out there. Don't think that they're gonna do that one.

[Andrew]

Well, just because of. Because of woke. They're not doing them anymore. Because of woke.

[Craig]

I don't know how you say. How do you say dei in French? De E. Episode 528 the Girl who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. We have to go back. Or do we? Andrew, that book, that spider book is really long.

[Andrew]

We did. Yeah. That was one where I don't know, like my. My absolute hands down favorite part about all three of those books is that he's a rumpled. The author, Stieg Larson is a rumpled financial journalist who wrote a bunch of books where it's like, what if a rumpled financial journalist got laid literally nonstop by every woman who crossed his path?

[Craig]

So yeah, that's my retrospective here. We've done. This is our 700 episode range.

[Andrew]

A tonal and stylistic range of episodes.

[Craig]

If you believe our catalog. We've actually done closer to. Closer to 750 with all of the long reads stuff. So thanks to our Patreon supporters for making those possible.

[Andrew]

I wonder what the secret real 700th episode was that we just recorded without. Without remarking upon it.

[Craig]

Yeah, I don't know. I don't know what that was. But Andrew, as Andrew said, we have done all of the books in the Twilight series. We did skip this one initially because we thought it was bad. Twilight Episode 300, New Moon Episode 320 Eclipse Episode 338 Breaking Dawn 351 Midnight Sun 438 and so it's been a long time since we've been in Forks, Washington.

[Andrew]

Right. And Midnight sun had not come out since, like, when we did the original Twilight run because it was released in 2020, and at that point it was still kind of a mythical book in Stephenie Meyer's vault that she had not published because she was mad that it got leaked. And also she found it really miserable to write for some reason, but then she released it anyway. Thank you, Stephanie.

[Craig]

And I think the thing we talked about in our Midnight episode a little bit, that that book, she didn't release it when she wanted to because some of the chapters had leaked.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Craig]

I read. Sorry, Sorry. So sorry. I read a. An interview I was thinking about the next thing I wanted to say. I read an interview where she said, and I don't think we had mentioned this, that she claims that she started that book when she was writing Twilight to get in the head of Edward.

[Andrew]

Oh, sure. Yes. Right.

[Craig]

I did read this and that it leaked because she shared it in a writing group with people from before Twilight had ever come out. So she thinks that the leak was actually someone who was like, oh, Twilight's big. I was in a. I knew Stephenie Meyer. Oh, I will leak this PDF to the world. So that's why she did this instead. For the 10th anniversary of the first novel.

[Andrew]

Yeah. And it's. Now that it's 2025, I was thinking we're actually doing this on kind of the 20th anniversary year.

[Craig]

You know, we hadn't planned it that way.

[Andrew]

I don't think Twilight, which we didn't. We didn't plan to do, but this is our 10th anniversary celebration of the 10th anniversary celebration of the book Twilight. It turns out something she talked about with respect to the fact that she's rewritten this book two times.

[Craig]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

Is when she was doing the press tour for Life and Death, Twilight reimagined one of the things that she said, and this was, like, short, like a couple of years, I think after the movie franchise had wrapped itself up. She said that going back to this story and, like, doing these characters again kind of made them feel like her own again and, like, made her fall back in love with them in a way, which is the opposite of how she said that she felt about doing New Moon where it was not that she didn't love the characters, but just that it was like a slog to actually write it.

[Craig]

Midnight Sun Midnight sun was Midnight Sun. Yes.

[Andrew]

Yes. Sorry. I did also find it interesting. So this Hollywood Reporter article that I read is from October 2015, and Meyer says that she started planning this in March, presumably also 2015, to give you some idea of what the turnaround time on this book.

[Craig]

Wow. Okay.

[Andrew]

Which is pretty nuts. Yeah.

[Craig]

She also said in what the Guardian. I think that there were a few scenes that she wanted to do between, like, Bella and Alice that are now with the new characters. She got to add in some new playful exchanges we'll go through. She has an opening argument in her foreword to, like, justify this book that we can go through, but she did, in that Hollywood Reporter piece, share a quote that Kristen Stewart gave at a Comic Con. I think I did.

[Andrew]

Yes. I saw this.

[Craig]

Because. Okay. This book comes about. Yes. It's the 10th anniversary of Twilight. Yes. The film series has wrapped and she's bringing the characters home to her desk. And she's now been dealing with 10 years of people complaining about the series and saying that they don't love the Bella Edward relationship. They think that it's sort of toxic. They don't like that she's this, like, passive damsel in distress. She's really hung up on the damsel in distress.

[Andrew]

Yeah. And her line for years, like, outside of this interview was always like, I don't see Bella as a damsel in distress. I see her as a person in distress. And you could change it and it wouldn't make a difference.

[Craig]

Yes.

[Andrew]

So she is.

[Craig]

Kristen Stewart gave this quote about Bella at one point at a Comic Con. This feels like Wikipedia using Comic Con photos, in my opinion, like, just, like, I don't know. It's out there. She could just use it. People wouldn't be asking these questions. If I were a boy who'd done all the same choices, you'd be talking about what a brave thing it was for him to give it all up for love. I don't know that that proves Meyer's point, which will. Our argument that we'll talk about, which is Myers thinks that it doesn't matter, or Meyer, excuse me, thinks that it doesn't.

[Andrew]

Man, you did it again.

[Craig]

I did it again.

[Andrew]

We're bringing back all the old hits from the old Twilight episode.

[Craig]

Stephanie Meyer, singular, likes to say that it doesn't matter what gender they are. And yet she is, like, sharing this quote that's like, no, does matter to people. And that's what's kind of messed up about it. Like, it's this interesting catch 22 of discussing the gender politics of these stories, which is what we're going to do here for the rest of the episode, is like you're changing it in a way to prove that it doesn't matter if you change it. And by changing it, you've proven that it matters if you change it. In my opinion. Me, Craig here sitting here making a podcast.

[Andrew]

Well, and notably. And there's a whole foreword about this, which we could talk about the forward as little or as much as you want to. But she does talk about about like all the stuff that she changed. And a lot of it's like a lot of it's just like mechanical word choice stuff. Like I went back to this manuscript after 10 years and I looked at it and I just like changed some of the word choices. I think in one of the interviews she said she thinks the prose in this is more relaxed. I don't know if that's true or not. It's an interesting way to describe it though. But yeah, she does change quite a bit of stuff to make Beaufort Swan read different from Bella Swan. Mostly. Mostly it manifests in Beau, like deciding just for a quick second to talk about the man code or something like.

[Craig]

He or a lady to be really hair.

[Andrew]

Yeah, right. Craig.

[Craig]

Yep.

[Andrew]

Andrew, Mother's Day is coming up. Do you know that you heard about this? You hear about this?

[Craig]

It's usually around this time every year.

[Andrew]

Well here on Overdue as you as you know, we love and respect and honor moms.

[Craig]

We do.

[Andrew]

And we like to have great gift ideas for them. And a great gift idea, an aura photo frame. Oh, you heard about these?

[Craig]

I have and I do think they would be good for moms if you.

[Andrew]

Have not heard of them. Aura frames are beautiful wi fi connected digital that allow you to share and display unlimited photos. Super easy to upload and share photos via the Aura app. And if you're giving an aura as a gift, you can even personalize the frame with preloaded photos and memories. I've talked about this before on the show, but I did give my in laws an aura frame and they did not need my help to set it up. Like I just gave the sealed box to them and I never heard anything about it again except how much they like looking at the pictures.

[Craig]

Yes.

[Andrew]

So that's how easy setup.

[Craig]

Yes. My mom and my in laws have aura frames and they do love them.

[Andrew]

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[Craig]

So should we dive into the foreword here, Andrew, Is there anything else you want to get out of the way? When do you want to do the list of name changes?

[Andrew]

I mean, we don't need to do the whole list. It's very long. And we also have a very long list of different like the same scene in the two different books that we can compare side by side. So I don't want to take up time with all that I do. Just 18 minutes in 16, however many minutes it's been, the setup for this book is gender swap. Twilight, Bella Swan and Edward Cullen have become Beaufort Swan and Edith, Colin and also and Craig and I did not know this going in because we didn't want to know it. But almost every single other character in the entire book is also gender Swan, which is kind of a wild way to respond to people being like your protagonist is a damsel in distress and Stephanie Meyer just being like, well, we got to swap them all. I'll show you.

[Craig]

I truly don't think I understood what this book was when we said, you and I had a meeting a few months ago and I said it's going to be episode 700 in a few months. What should we read? And I don't think we discussed much else other than what if we went back to Twilight? What if we finally did Twilight and we said, well, we have, we have that gender swap one to do and neither of us knew anything about it. And this happens with a lot of books. I just put it, I put it on my device and I just start reading. And I did not really comprehend what I had signed up for in the, in the many ways in which this is someone using Find and Replace in Microsoft Word, editing a book that they already wrote for just like, what if I just like fixed some stuff?

[Andrew]

What if I just tweaked things? Yeah.

[Craig]

And just the ways in which it is literally the book Twilight Again.

[Andrew]

It is literally the book Twilight Again.

[Craig]

Midnight sun spoiled me for. What if we did it differently?

[Andrew]

What if we did it different? And even in the Midnight sun episode we complained quite a few times about. And this was something actually that Meyer talked about not liking. Part of why she struggled with it is because she did feel that she was locked into a lot of the sequence of events, the exact dialogue choices, all the stuff that had been decided in the original Twilight she needed to stick to for that one. And I guess it felt too restrictive. But even compared to that, this feels very beat for beat. Like the book again and, and Twilight has, has many fans. It's a, it's a, it's a beloved and best selling series of books. But in my opinion, this story does not have that many facets to it.

[Craig]

No, it's pretty upfront about what it is and what it's doing. It has a plot for approximately one third of the novel.

[Andrew]

You're talking about the last third.

[Craig]

Yep.

[Andrew]

When the, when it decides it wants to have antagonists suddenly and the rest.

[Craig]

Of it is just, hey, what if a cipher for the reader got to experience a supernatural relationship like that and like that is a plot, but it's not really a propulsive one. And yeah, I just feel like I, I feel we thought we punked ourselves with Midnight Sun.

[Andrew]

We really, we well and truly punked ourselves. We were both having kind of busy, like weird weeks for other reasons and both of us were just commiserating a couple hours ago about how like also having this book to read in the background of that kind of just pulled it all down a little bit more.

[Craig]

SJ says in the chat, reheating her own vampire nachos. And Diana says, I'm not sure which of this is referring to seeing the face that goes with tactful voice is truly incredible.

[Andrew]

I did not know that I, I did not know that I had a voice that went. A face that went with tactful voice. But yes, that is when I was saying that Twilight is a beloved popular book series before I could bag on it.

[Craig]

Shelby in the chat says, just going to say that I read Life and Death for a college English course where half of us read Twilight and the other half read the gender swap version. What Stanford prison experiment is this? What is your professor doing? I hope they got tenure. That's amazing.

[Andrew]

I hope they got 10 years in jail. That's what I hope.

[Craig]

That's really stupid.

[Andrew]

Forget golden handcuffs. Here's some regular handcuffs.

[Craig]

Oh, my goodness.

[Andrew]

Come on.

[Craig]

Okay. Where do you want to start, Andrew? I think we can just get into the book now. We can. I don't know where to start. I really.

[Andrew]

I think we should start with the forward.

[Craig]

Okay, we start with the four. Let me open up the forward over here.

[Andrew]

Yeah, do it.

[Craig]

Okay, Forward. Hello, lovely reader. I'm not going to read everything.

[Andrew]

Yeah, don't do it.

[Craig]

But to go back. Let's. Let's read the full quote here on damsel in distress, people.

[Andrew]

Yeah, you read that. And then I want to talk about the Charlie stuff.

[Craig]

People have complained about her being a typical damsel in distress. My answer to that is, has always been that Bella is a human in distress, a normal human being surrounded on all sides by people who are basically superheroes and supervillains. She's also been criticized for being too consumed with her love interest, as if that's somehow just a girl thing. But I've always maintained that it would have made no difference if the human were male and the vampire female. It's still the same story. That's her note. And then she explains herself with a. With like, a couple of notes on the conversion. The first is that she says a pretty straightforward across the board gender swap with all of the characters, with some exceptions. Andrew, what are the exceptions?

[Andrew]

With two exceptions. So she. The two people in this book who are not swapped are Charlie and Renee Swan.

[Craig]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

What's Rene's last name? Does she have Phil's last name? I don't know. I don't know. Bella's parents are still. They're still as they were when they crossed over into the different universe that this book exists in. From the prime universe, Charlie and Renee stayed the same. And she says, here's the reason for that. Bo was born in 1987. It was a rare thing for a father to get primary custody of a child in those days. Even more so when the child was just a baby. Most likely the mother would have had to be proven unfit in some way. I have a really hard time believing that any judge at the time, or even now, would give a child to a transient, unemployment, unemployed father over a mother with a steady job and strong ties to her community. Of course, these days, if Charlie had fought for Bella, he probably could have taken her from Renee. Thus, the more unlikely scenario is the one that plays out in Twilight Only the fact that a few decades ago, a mother's rights were considered more important than a father's rights, as well as the fact that Charlie's not the vindictive type, made it possible for Rene to raise Bella and in this case, now Bo. It is really the thing about this that really kills me is that she has this justification, like locked and loaded for Charlie. But then we're talking about Carlisle Colin, the patriarch of the Colin family, who in this book is Corinne Colin. And she was born in like 1640 something. And Stephenie Meyer just kind of blithely says, well, she was just really. She was really smart and driven and so she knew a lot more than she should have known for a woman who existed in that society. It's like the societal context sometimes matters and sometimes you just allied over it.

[Craig]

I think the Corrine Cullen swap is the most interesting swap in the book.

[Andrew]

I think if she. Yeah, I think you are right, but I think if she had swapped Charlie that would have been interesting.

[Craig]

Also. Where is my Carly and Remy swap? Please give me Carly and Remy Swan. I would like to learn. And Phyllis, who plays, you know, in the national softball league or something. But no, Carlin. Carlin. Colin is an interesting character.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Craig]

Corinne.

[Andrew]

Excuse me, Corinne.

[Craig]

Yes, Corinne Cullen. Because yes, it acknowledges that this person born in the 1600s would have had a different experience as a woman. I think the whole backstory we get on Cullen as, as a vampire hunter in the first book is now changed that it was her father and then the vampire turned her as a way to punish her father. Yeah, all interesting stuff.

[Andrew]

And there were, and there are little like nods to the, the gendered roles in there too where she's like, yeah, and then, and then Corinne became a nurse because they wouldn't let her be a doctor because it was 200 years.

[Craig]

It feel it. That part of it. Yeah, it like rhymes for me with like the, the outlander stuff where like, because she was a war nurse, like she goes back in time and she can like, like kind of fit into her social like strata that way and assert her power. All that stuff was very interesting and there's not a lot of room for it in the book, but it also is the, it's the double edged sword of this novel where she's doing the swap to quote unquote, prove that it doesn't matter what gender is. But also there's no non binary people and it matters for like every character.

[Andrew]

Well, and I, you know, she's got this rationalization for the Charlie Renee thing and like, you know, I'm gonna assume that she's, she's doing that in good faith, I think speaking in good faith about that. But like also like not coincidentally, I think it probably feels like changing the book in a more fundamental way to have that be the swat.

[Craig]

Yeah, sure. Yep.

[Andrew]

Because I feel like Charlie fits into a specific like sort of deadbeat, sort of trying like relaxed dad archetype.

[Craig]

Yep. Yep.

[Andrew]

That I don't think would map as neatly onto a woman. And so I think you. I think she would feel more of a. Like more cause to change it. I was trying and that would have. I don't know. That would have been a little bit like. That's a. As little as Bella and Beau consider Charlie or Renee's feelings about anything ever at any point.

[Craig]

Yep.

[Andrew]

They are more load bearing than any of the other background characters.

[Craig]

It's true. It's true. So.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Craig]

Yeah. They. Huh. The. The relationship.

[Andrew]

Yeah. It goes. It goes without saying. There are people in the chat. Yeah. Nobody's gay. Nobody's trans. Don't worry about it.

[Craig]

Just don't think about it. Just don't think about it. It was.

[Andrew]

It was. It was 2005. We hadn't invented. We barely invented any of that.

[Craig]

We'd bear. We barely have cell phones and such that. It struck me funny in the. In the new ending where someone pulled a phone buzzing out of their pocket and I had to like double check whether or not they have cell phones in Twilight. They do. But it's fine. Yeah. The. If you swapped. If you did. If you did Remy and Carly, it would. It would change the relationships. I think the book like kind of is predicated on I'm going to take care of my mother by leaving her. Both books are. And she's just in. I was struggling to find the interview where she said it, but I know that there was one where she was like, this was really fun. It was kind of easy and I had a good time making the book. Yeah. And to what you just said, I think swapping Renee and Charlie would like fundamentally require a little more work than was done here. It's fine to do an easiest like assignment for class. I'm not begrudging her that. But.

[Andrew]

Well. And Bella, Bo. Leave Renee in the first place so that Renee can go bum around in minor league baseball with Phil and like follow him around. And I do think that reads as like fundamentally less sympathetic when it would be a man.

[Craig]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

A man being like, hey, could you go stay with your mom while I go like schmooze around with minor league softball.

[Craig]

No. You're totally right.

[Andrew]

It feels more sleazy somehow.

[Craig]

The other exception she said is two characters mentioned in the background only twice. I believe she is referring to the Volturi. I found a Reddit thread from user queasy attitude 7822 asking about the Volturi instead of gender swapping some Volturi. She has some like either dead or discarded Volturi women be in charge instead. They don't appear in the book, but they are like mentioned as having been like either killed or gotten rid of in the main books. And so she justice for these people.

[Andrew]

There's a. We got a whole bunch to talk about when we get to the. There are no other gender swapped Twilight books. She has no plans for other gender swapped Twilight books. And the way that she ends this precludes the possibility of further gender swapped Twilight books. So the amount of stuff from the other three Twilight books that gets dumped on us in like two chapters right at the end of this is as dense and honestly as like fun to read and exciting as I think this book got for me.

[Craig]

I do just want to quickly go over her 100% breakdown of what the changes were. 5% of the changes I made were because bo is a boy. 5% were because bo's personality is slightly different from Bella's. The biggest variations are that he's more OCD and not flowery with his words. He's not ocd. He just cleans up after Charlie a little bit. Why did you even say this? Stop it. 70% of the changes I made were because I was allowed to do a new editing run 10 years later. Okay, okay, good for you. 10% were things I wished I had done the first time but hadn't occurred to me at the time. Okay, sure. And 5% were mythology issues. I didn't really understand what she meant here, Andrew, that she like tweaked how Alice's visions work. I don't really know what that means.

[Andrew]

She went into that a little more in one of the interviews. I think it might have been the Guardian one. But basically. Basically there are just some logistical loopholes in the way that the future telling worked that made some of the end parts of the book, especially when Bella, Bo is with Alice, Archie. Archie, and they're hiding out and then Bo gives them the slip. I think there are some loopholes in that that are there for plot contrivance purposes that maybe she's. I thought that that section still read really clunky and weird and I didn't know all of a sudden why the vampires like powers were not working anymore on Bo. But whatever, man.

[Craig]

Which leaves a 5% catch. All she says for the miscellaneous changes I made, each for a different and no doubt selfish reason. I've ever written a grant proposal budget where I say here's we need 5% extra money to do the work and it's called overhead. Just give us the money and. Yeah, so she, she claims she had a good time writing this book. She likes it. Instead of, I presume, a. What is it? Wuthering Heights epigraph. She has a 20,000 leagues under the Sea epigraph. This Destiny be Strange. It is also sublime. And then we are in the book. Big sigh from my boy Andrew here.

[Andrew]

I just. This book is so. There's just so much of it that is just two people sitting in a car and talking to each other and. Yeah, in high school, did I do that on dates sometimes? Because you could make out and it was cheap and nobody would really look at you that hard. And so you hang out in your car and you talk to the person you're interested in. Sure, sure. I didn't write a book about that. Like, I didn't. I didn't decide to like fictionalize that.

[Craig]

Because I thought it was super exciting.

[Andrew]

For everybody else to be like, read in on. Yeah, let me, oh, let me flash. I got something. I got some visual aids. Just want to flash up real quick for everybody. Here are the book covers.

[Craig]

Oh, yeah, of course.

[Andrew]

For both of both of these books. Twilight. Pale hands holding a red apple. Twilight. Twilight Reimagined Life and death holding a green apple.

[Craig]

Excuse me, what if you went from two hands to one hand?

[Andrew]

One hand, probably. I also, I really like that on Twilight it says that it's by Stephenie Meyer, author of the number one best selling Twilight Saga. Like, yeah, okay, sure.

[Craig]

Why? Why only one hand?

[Andrew]

I don't know. Makes you think.

[Craig]

Whose hands do you think?

[Andrew]

Who knows? I don't know. Probably a vampire.

[Craig]

Probably a vampire.

[Andrew]

An apple. There's not an apple scene in Twilight. There is a mushroom ravioli scene. There is the iconic mushroom ravioli scene. It was just so much of this book was like running into individual scenes again because a lot of the stuff where they go out of town and something bad happens had all kind of run together in my mind. And so I did get to reconstruct the book in order by reading it again. I don't know where to start with the actual narrative of it because it is just Twilight again. Go Fort Swan Leaves, Arizona. Phoenix. I think to come up to the wet, wet town of Forks to be with his dad because he wants his mom to be able to run around.

[Craig]

Pull up high, Charlie. Real quick.

[Andrew]

I'll pull up high, Charlie.

[Craig]

So we do have some visual aids to compare the versions of the story here. And some of these I have selected as like, oh, here's like how she slightly reworked sections, and some of these are like, wow. You like added stuff, right? So. It's good to see you, Bells. You haven't changed much. How's Renee? Mom's fine. It's good to see you too, Dad. I wasn't allowed to call him Charlie to his face. I only had a few bags, etc. In the next one. What does it say? I'm looking on my own computer, so I apologize.

[Andrew]

I got it loaded up on the feed too, if that's. If that's helpful.

[Craig]

You really feel okay about leaving her? We both understood that this question wasn't about my own personal happiness, was about whether I was shirking my responsibility to look after her. This was the reason Charlie never fought mom about custody. He knew she needed me. Yeah. I wouldn't be here if I wasn't sure. Fair enough. A couple of bros just talking about Renee. Like, I bring this one up early because the book. And you can fade this down when you're ready.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Craig]

The book is some. It is shorter than Twilight.

[Andrew]

That's. That doesn't seem right.

[Craig]

It does.

[Andrew]

That doesn't feel. That doesn't feel right.

[Craig]

No, because there are like, there are spots in the book where she has added little things like this. Little Beaufort touches.

[Andrew]

Little Beaufort.

[Craig]

A touch of Beaufort, A touch of Beaufort here. A. Like, Edith is a little different from Edward there, but she has also truncated a lot of the interactions with other kids in Forks. That just kind of. And I think the net effect of that is a lot of like the social aspect of teenage girls. Bella, Jessica, whatever the rest of their names are, is really shortened here. It's a lot. It's. It's Beaufort, it's Jeremy, it's some other idiots.

[Andrew]

It's. Yeah, because it's. It's interesting because I think the number of contact points has stayed roughly the same, but like, the volume of it has all been cut down. So you'll. You still have to, like, know that the regular boy Mike from Mike Newton from the original books has become Michaela Newton in this book. You still need to know all that stuff. You still need to remember all these people. The thing, something I struggled with continuously, especially with the Collins, was these new names are so weird.

[Craig]

Yeah. Can we go through some names?

[Andrew]

They're so kind of similar, but not to the original Twilight names, that I just could not hold them in my head. And I think even as we talk about this, like, I'm going to call some of the new gender swap characters by their old names because I can't remember who they are. Otherwise I did. Let's just do Cullen's too. So we've got. We got Alice Cullen, who, if you'll.

[Craig]

Recall, it's kind of the future seeing everyone loves Alice. We all understand Alice.

[Andrew]

Everyone loves Alice.

[Craig]

Archie.

[Andrew]

Archie. Colin.

[Craig]

He's fine.

[Andrew]

Carlisle. Colin, of course, is Corinne. Colin. Edward. Colin has become Edith. Colin Emmett. Colin has become Eleanor. Don't really. They're a bunch of like the second order Collins, who you don't really spend enough time.

[Craig]

She's committed. She said it in a. I found a WordPress art. What is it? Literaturemasochist.WordPress.com did a recap of a Tumblr Q A, which is the most Twilight thing I've ever heard of.

[Andrew]

Everybody in the chat making very complex spellings of Archie. And even though Edith is spelled the wildest way I've ever seen it spelled, Archie is spelled Archie like Archie comics. Like it's not more exotic than.

[Craig]

And she said she was committed to keeping the first letters. She liked Beaufort because her younger brother had a friend named Beau and she needed Beau to have a name that he didn't want. Like Bella didn't like Isabella. She liked Edith but wanted it to be prettier and found a book that had her Y and T spelling in it. E spelling in it. She also thought that she could just keep Carlisle as Carlisle, but somebody said that was dumb, so she changed it. Keep going with the Cullens, Andrew.

[Andrew]

And then you've got Esme. Cullen is the other big one. Becomes Ernest Colin. Okay, Craig, did you stop the thing that this book does not end in the place where the Twilight series ends.

[Craig]

This is my question about Ernest Cullen.

[Andrew]

But if it happened like it happened in the regular Twilight books and there was a baby born to these people.

[Craig]

I do think remind us what the name of the baby is in the.

[Andrew]

Original Renesmee is the name of the baby in the original Twilight. And it. Because it's a combination of Renee and Esme. And I do think you would have to name the baby either Ren Ernest or Charlernest. And I think I like Ren Ernest better.

[Craig]

Renernest was sending me the entire book. The fact I made it to the end of the book and she does not get pregnant in this book. Nobody gets pregnant in this book. And so I got to the end of the book and there was no Renernist. And I was both sad and relieved that there is no Renernest.

[Andrew]

No Renernest.

[Craig]

But yeah, there's just a lot of these freaking Names. Oh, Jacob. Jacob Black is called Jules or Julie.

[Andrew]

Julie. Yeah.

[Craig]

Jacob's dad, Billy is named Bonnie, and the evil vampire named James is called Joss, which is.

[Andrew]

Sure.

[Craig]

And do we think that's a.

[Andrew]

Do we think that's a female name? I only know the one. Joss. The one we don't talk about.

[Craig]

There's a pop singer named Joss.

[Andrew]

Okay. All right, cool. I just wasn't aware.

[Craig]

Joss Stone. Joss Stone. You might remember her work. She's out there.

[Andrew]

Okay.

[Craig]

But, yeah, so the. The color names are kind of a mess. And you're right. I. I said this to you before we started recording a while ago. I had real, like, severance reintegration problems reading this book because I decided about a chapter in that while I was reading it on my Kindle, I was going to occasionally open Twilight on my phone and just, like, check what was happening. And this did give me a brain sickness where, like, I had a trouble. I had trouble discerning which book I was in. I left notes about this book in the other book on my phone.

[Andrew]

Like, I just.

[Craig]

I was really. The wires were crossed because these. These texts are so similar.

[Andrew]

They're so similar. Jasper. To answer chat questions about the rest of the columns, Jasper becomes Jessamine, and Rosalie becomes Royal.

[Craig]

Jessamine is the worst name.

[Andrew]

Jessamine's not great. Royal is very, like, succession to me.

[Craig]

Yeah. Jessamine is a plant. Okay. It's a plant. It's a color.

[Andrew]

Just don't. I don't want to talk about. I don't want to talk about it. We read this book, and I don't want to talk about it. Was there any. Okay, we've got all these quotes. Let me do. Let's do some more gender stuff. Here's. Here's my favorite thing is that Stephanie Meyer famously insisted it does not matter what gender anybody is.

[Craig]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

But whenever she has to show two men interacting, it's like she's never been on a planet where that has happened.

[Craig]

She did dedicate the book to her teenage sons, which is funny to me because she thanked them for the, like, getting to be in the teenage boy experience. But lay on the bro.

[Andrew]

Here's a. Here's a quote comparing the scene where Bella Bo goes over to the car. The Collins house, man. These names and meets. Meets the whole family, including Alice in the original book and Archie in the new book. Hi, Bella. Alice said, and she bounced forward to kiss my cheek. If Carlisle and Esme looked cautious before, they now looked staggered, there was shock in my eyes, too. But I was also very pleased that she seemed to approve of me so entirely. I was startled to feel Edward stiffen at my side. I glanced at his face, but his expression was unreadable. Bo. He greeted me enthusiastic, like we were old friends. He held out his hand, and when I went to shake it, he pulled me into one of those one arm bro hugs, thumping me lightly on the back. Hey, Archie, I said. My voice sounded winded. I was shocked, but also a little pleased that he really did seem supportive. More than that, like he already liked me. Just. Just bros. Having a bro hug. Two men sharing a bro hug.

[Craig]

Having a bro hug. Okay, here's.

[Andrew]

And then. But. And the only thing that she got wrong about it is that Archie didn't say no homo to Bo after.

[Craig]

Especially for 2005. Yeah, everyone's saying no homo. I'm sorry. God, we were all idiots. So, to my. Like, to my earlier point that she is trying to prove that it's not different, which means she has to make everything different. Everything, including, like, basic administrative assistance at this school have been swapped. Okay, fine, sure. Whatever. Equal opportunity.

[Andrew]

Yeah, sure.

[Craig]

Beau Beaufort Swan has. Here are the qualities that he shares with Bella. He falls down. He.

[Andrew]

To the point where, again, I've got to ask, like, has anybody seen a specialist about, like, really? Seems. It seems like it's a lot that.

[Craig]

He does not exhibit the selfless qualities that we learned about Bella from Midnight sun, other than generally caring about his mother and cooking for his father.

[Andrew]

Caring about his mother in a way where he'll, like, state that he cares about his mother, but not in a way where he'll, like, answer any of her emails. No, he really forgets about all he's doing.

[Craig]

He reads them and then marks them as unread so that he can come back to them later.

[Andrew]

Okay. All right. Geez. You don't have to get personal about it.

[Craig]

He. A big thing about this book is. Andrew, you mentioned this to me. I don't know that this is gonna get blue a little bit. There's no mention of his physiological response.

[Andrew]

All right, are we gonna talk? Okay, we're gonna talk about it. Huh? We're gonna talk about the boner problem. There is, as I. As I began calling it in my.

[Craig]

Head, there is not a single mention of this boy's physiological response to the hottest woman that has ever existed on the planet.

[Andrew]

And he talks all the time about the blood rushing around to other parts.

[Craig]

His body, mostly to his face.

[Andrew]

In his face and his chest. And it. At one point, it had happened enough Times by the middle of the book that I was just highlighting every incidence of that and writing a note. And the note was one word and the note was boner. Yeah, it is. You're a 17 year old boy and there are just. I remember that time of my life. And you just get them. You don't need a reason. If you do have a reason, it's unavoidable.

[Craig]

Yeah. Could you pull up? Could you pull up?

[Andrew]

There is no context that is unsexy enough to make a 17 year old boy not do this.

[Craig]

And it's funny to me because, like, she is committed to making him awkward, to making him feel kind of silly next to Edith. Like all sorts of. And again, she doesn't deal with this in Twilight at all. Like, kind of like Bella's responses to Edward.

[Andrew]

No, no, no. And she doesn't. She doesn't. Yes. To be fair, she does not talk about like specific biological. Like how Bella's genitals are responding to.

[Craig]

No. And I'm not advocating for that necessarily, which is fine.

[Andrew]

It's just like with it being a sort of a protruding external thing, there are. There are logistical. There are logistical concerns that are hard to. That are hard not to address is all. That's all I'm saying.

[Craig]

Especially because she's willing to be kind of irreverent about a lot of their interactions. So. And I honestly think that she could have gotten away with one or two jokes and that would have been it. You know, like, she doesn't need to devote chapters to it, pages to it. It is just kind of funny to me what she will spend her time on and what she won't pull up. The sex comparison.

[Andrew]

Sex talk. Okay, these are the big. The big blocks of quotes I'm gonna do.

[Craig]

Yeah, this is. We're gonna skip some plot stuff here.

[Andrew]

Because everybody remembers the plot from the.

[Craig]

Original Twilight, the overall plot from Twilight.

[Andrew]

Craig, in 30 seconds, I'm gonna. I'm gonna set a timer for two minutes and you're gonna tell me the entire plot of both of these books at the same time.

[Craig]

Okay.

[Andrew]

Because that's how amazing you are. Okay. Ready?

[Craig]

Yep.

[Andrew]

Go.

[Craig]

Beaufort Swan leaves his mom and moves to Forks, Washington, live with his dad, Charlie. He goes to class and a very hot lady looks like she wants to puke next to him. She disappears for some periods of time and comes back and they sort of fall in love. He learned he almost gets hit by a car and she saves him from the car. And then he starts to think that she is supernatural and then he learns that she is supernatural. And then they spend some time together and she glows in a forest and she sparkles in a forest. Excuse me. And then they meet each other's families and then they go play baseball and they attract evil vampires. Also. Beaufort sort of wants to be a vampire because then he could stay with the love of his life. And they, they have to leave because the evil vampires want to eat human. Beaufort, he's a hot boy who wants to. Who deserves to be eaten by a vampire. And they go to Phoenix, Arizona and there is a dance studio where the vampire is watching home movies of Beaufort and his mom. And we'll talk about the ending afterwards.

[Andrew]

Okay.

[Craig]

Because that's ending is different.

[Andrew]

But the funny thing is that you spent the same amount of time on the first 75% of the book and the last 25% of the book, which tells you most of what you need to know about the sort of like the packing peanuts that look when you buy the book. It's like when you buy. You try to buy like a roll of tape from Target or something and it comes in this like giant box rattling around. Like the giant box is the physical book of Twilight. And then the roll of tape rattling around in the huge box is like the amount of plot content that is available in here. Like, it's just not okay.

[Craig]

I did forget the raviolis. I did forget the part where they go to Port Angeles and they eat raviolis. It is worth comparing the sections of that book that are different. But we got to do the sex part first. But I will. Allegra asked in the chat, what about the werewolves? The werewolves don't really factor into this part of the book. That is like the novel Twilight because.

[Andrew]

They do come in at the end.

[Craig]

We meet Jacob slash Jules and she's. She's just like a cool 15 year old. I don't like that it's. Older Bo and younger Jules don't like it. And then they factor in at the end of the book. You may forget from the, from reading the first Twilight novel that there are really no werewolves in it at all. It's just kind of a legend. Because Jacob doesn't really know about the real werewolf stuff yet.

[Andrew]

Yeah. And Meyer talked about her. She wrote the book not knowing that Jacob was going to be a werewolf and then that whole, that whole thing was going to happen. But then during like the edit process for Twilight, they were like, let's do, let's. This Jacob character is really interesting. Let's do it more with him. And that's where all the werewolf stuff kind of sprung from. But the. The byproduct of that is that every time you go back to this first book, the werewolves are, like, not really in it.

[Craig]

No, they're not. Okay, so pull up the sex. The sex thing, Andrew.

[Andrew]

Sex thing.

[Craig]

We were talking about the boner, which is funny to talk about. We both had a lot of fun with that.

[Andrew]

Hilarious.

[Craig]

But I think it is also worth noting that this section is very different between the two books. So this is a little bit later on in the original book. Bella now knows that Edward is a vampire. I think the scene is when they're in Bella Beaufort's bedroom.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Craig]

Hiding from Charlie under or on the covers because Edward slash Edith is so cold.

[Andrew]

And this is the thing I was talking about when I was talking about the, like, people sitting in their car talking to each other stuff is, like, among Twilight fandom, like the mushroom ravioli scene where they go to this restaurant and they sit down and Bella Bo eats one piece of mushroom ravioli and Edward eats nothing. This is considered so iconic that people go to that restaurant and recreate the scene.

[Craig]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

To the point that there was a. There was a story going around the Internet years ago that somebody went into that restaurant not knowing what it was, and thought that everybody in it was unhinged because they all kept doing this ravioli thing.

[Craig]

Andrew, you go there.

[Andrew]

Iconic mushroom ravioli scene. You've got the iconic, like, they're laying in bed and talking scene. Like it's. These are. These are held to be distinct, memorable things in the brains of many Twilight fans. And that's an issue that I have with discussing the plot is none of this stuff. I do not have object permanence when it comes to stuff that happens in Twilight book books. It's just in and out. It's gone.

[Craig]

We have to go.

[Andrew]

Okay, go to Forks. We have to go to Forks. Episode 1000 recorded live in Forks, Washington.

[Craig]

In the original novel, Bella is asking about Rosalie and Emmett getting married soon. Is that marriage the same as it is for humans? Is that what you're getting at? Edward says, and later on, he says, I don't think that that would be possible for us. Oh, sorry. Bella says that, and I actually don't know who's talking. Edward says, I don't think that would be possible.

[Andrew]

You took these screenshots.

[Craig]

She says, because it would be hard for you if I were that close. Okay, we go to the new novel, Life and Life After Death.

[Andrew]

Life and Death.

[Craig]

Whatever.

[Andrew]

Beaufort says, Life after death.

[Craig]

Twilight resurrected Both Beaufort has questions about Royal and Eleanor and says, you know, I'm just an ordinary human guy. You're the most beautiful girl I've ever seen. I'm overwhelmed by you. Part of that is I'm insanely attracted to you. But what I don't know is if it's like that for you or is it like sleeping and eating, which you don't need. I don't want them nearly as much as I want you. You said that Eleanor and Royal go off and live like a married couple, but does that even mean the same thing for vampires? And this question is totally offside. Completely not first date appropriate. And I'm sorry. And you don't have to answer. Okay. And Edith is like, are you asking me about sex? So in the general sense, sex and vampires 101, we all started out human and most of us have these human desires just obscured beyond more powerful desires. And she goes on to like, really dive into. I don't think that it would be easy for us to bone because I would destroy you. It just struck me that in this novel where Stephanie Meyer wants to trim it down because she's doing an editing Bass 10 years later, she is also like, let me devote two pages to having sex with. Between a human and a vampire, which is a whole thing in one of the later books. And I think speaks to something that you, I think, Andrew, you're feeling about the ending of the book, which is. She is compressing the next. She's compressing parts of the next three books into this book as well. Like. Yeah, I don't think that this is an edit that she would just do on the original novel Twilight. I think this is an edit she's doing on this book because she doesn't want to write three more gender swapped Twilight books.

[Andrew]

Well, and so somewhat. The other thing, somewhat infamously, Twilight is. Can be interpreted and I think pretty justifiably as kind of an abstinence parable.

[Craig]

Oh, yeah, yeah.

[Andrew]

And Edward and I don't remember the extent to which this stuff is present in the very first Twilight book, but over the course of the series, it is clear that Edward believes.

[Craig]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

That if you have sex before you get married, you will go to hell forever.

[Craig]

Yeah, basically.

[Andrew]

And it is just. It's interesting that they have kind of a frank discussion of mechanics in this book this time where it's easily book four before I think we start even talking about what the physics of an immortal being and a human being trying to have sex and the beds that.

[Craig]

Would get broken and why they have to go to, like, an island in the Caribbean or whatever. Yeah.

[Andrew]

So I don't. I don't know if that, like, reflects any change in. In, like, I don't believe it feels like too strong a word, but, like, any change in focus on Meyer's part. Like, I think she's always kind of dismissed the. The idea of it as an abstinence parable. But, yeah, I just. It was. It was interesting to have it, you know, kind of discussed pretty frankly in that one middle section of the book.

[Craig]

Yeah, well. And Holybird says, happy birthday. Holy bird, by the way. Prove. Which proves the whole point. It does matter. Like, I do think that there is a lot of gender stuff in this book that is, like, it's not uninteresting because I've read the other story and I can kind of see how some of this is playing out. Like, there's a lot of the stereotypically heterosexual high school stuff that hits just a little different from a boy's perspective. Like, yeah, the. The whole day. Okay, for those of you who haven't read the first book in a long, long time, there's this whole, like, very sub, sub subplot where all the human characters are worried about the girls choice dance and also prom. And, like, it's not the boys choice dance. It's still the girls choice dance. And so all of, like, Beaufort is getting, like, asked by multiple girls, including Michaela Newton, who I like way more than Mike Newton, by the way. But then again, I haven't been inside of her head, which is what made me hate Mike Newton.

[Andrew]

I. Well, I regret to inform you that until the. The book from Edward's perspective, where he. We actually got inside Mike's head and heard what he was thinking. We actually were big. We were.

[Craig]

We were big Mike fans.

[Andrew]

We were riding the mic train for the entire first problem, I think.

[Craig]

Yeah, the. Jeremy, the Jessica swap is not a real character in this book. I think even less so than Jessica is because she has trimmed out a lot of these interactions between Bella and Jessica. Andrew, can you just pull up the home enchiladas scene real quick?

[Andrew]

Enchiladas. Where is my mouse cursor? Here it is. Enchiladas. There you go.

[Craig]

So the first one is when I got home, I decided to make chicken enchiladas for dinner. Yada, yada, yada. She's trying to keep herself busy. This is after an interaction with Edward. It was Jessica. She was jubilant. Mike had caught after a school to accept her invitation. She has this Huge phone call with Jessica. If you slip on over to the next slide. By the time I'd run out of home, I'd run out of questions. I started making chicken enchiladas. And then she just immediately. Or Beaufort just, excuse me. He moves on to thinking about Edith. There's no phone call with Jeremy. Like, some of this, I think, is, like, representative of tropes about teens. And, like, are teen girls more likely to call each other and talk about their feelings and social interactions versus boys? But it means that we get a little less access to Bella Beaufort as a social creature outside the vampires. And maybe some of it is Meyer being like, yeah, we don't need that. But as I'm reading it, I'm going like, well, now I don't have access to, like, how she is not interested in these people.

[Andrew]

I think we're just letting that be subtext this time. Yeah, if Beau was interested in these people, he would want to hang out with them more. And he super doesn't. Like, he has, like, one cool bro outing with a couple of them, and he, like, ditches them and never thinks about them again for the entire rest of the book.

[Craig]

I really, in my, like, attempts to find all of these parallels, I really struggled. I was trying to find. There's a scene in Life and Death where Beaufort goes up to Taylor, the girl who almost hit him with her van.

[Andrew]

Yep. And you also asked him to homecoming and this dance, and when he said no, she was like, well, you're going to me with prom. You're going with me to prom. And then, like, tells everybody in the school they're going to prom.

[Craig]

Yes.

[Andrew]

It's a weird. It's weird behavior.

[Craig]

There's this very dramatic scene where Beaufort is like, hey, Edith, ask me about my most embarrassing moment. I'm going to do it right now. And he gets up and pretends this, like, makes up, improvs this whole scene at Taylor to be like, you're just using me to pretend and you really want to go to prom with this person. I don't think that exists in the original novel. I was struggling to find it if it does, because Meyer does move things around a little bit. There's a couple scenes where she juggles stuff, which made it even harder for me to find comparison points. I'm very mad about it, of course, because I have to prep a podcast. Meyer, what are you doing?

[Andrew]

Yeah, I was frustrated when I was trying to use the Kindle search feature to find individual phrases and finding that, yeah, a lot of them are not like totally recreated in the second book. And it was like, yes, that's that. That is a thing that she said she did. And it's totally fine. It just made it harder for me to do side by side.

[Craig]

And yeah, overall my notes on like all of the high school stuff is like. It might just be me bringing my own social baggage to the table, but I do think like what she's written is holding a certain mirror up to nature. And she is embarked on this project claiming that that is not how it works. And unfortunately that's how it works.

[Andrew]

CM in the. In the chat says is there still the clumsiness aspect, bella bow tripping, etc. That felt very early 2000s relatable. Not like other girls female protagonists. That would feel weird if it was a dude. We did. We mentioned this in super quick passing earlier. But yeah, he does. He is still clumsy. He is. He does still trip all the time. It's kind of concerning that he does this.

[Craig]

The big difference between them, like physically I suppose is he is tall and she is short. Like Beaufort is tall and Edith is short.

[Andrew]

Occasionally there is a thing where it's like I put my hand on top of her smaller hand.

[Craig]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

There's like prose that's kind of. That's pretty much that she.

[Craig]

She cuddles into me or when there's that scene. So I was. There's the scene in the. In the sparkly forest bit, Andrew, where Edward slash Edith is like, no, I'm a monster. Check out how I can break this tree. And in my. You can tell that the eagles had just won the super bowl. Because in my notes for the novel Twilight, I made a note that Edward had just like Nick folzed a tree or something. Okay, sure. But Edith has to like jump up into the tree to break a branch off to then do something because she's so small.

[Andrew]

She also like lifts a boulder, right?

[Craig]

She does pick up a boulder.

[Andrew]

She lifts up a boulder.

[Craig]

I don't think Edward does like wet.

[Andrew]

Dirt and stuff all over the bottom of it.

[Craig]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

How strong she is.

[Craig]

What do you think of Edith Cullen? Maybe let's just zoom out on Edith Cullen a little bit, Andrew.

[Andrew]

Even more than with Beau because at least with Beau were in his head all the time. And we occasionally get little drops, little drips and drabs of bro hug man code stuff. Anytime I was not actually reading her name or one of the few physical descriptions of her body that we are given in this. I could not. I kept forgetting that it was not Edward. And this Happened to me in this book a lot. If I was not looking at a name, I would just start thinking about them as Edward and Bella.

[Craig]

I had an easier time holding onto a mental image of Edith than I did as a. Than I did of a mental image of Beaufort. Particularly in the latter part of the book, I really forgot that Beaufort was not Bella Swan. I, like, really struggled.

[Andrew]

No, I mean, it was hard with both of them, but I'd found Edith to be more that way than I found Beau.

[Craig]

Phoenix is asking, did she lift the boulder for the spider monkey scene? Is the spider monkey scene scene when Bella gets on Edward's back? Right. Is that what it is?

[Andrew]

And they run back. This is all. Yeah, this is all one, like, because. Stretch of them.

[Craig]

Because in. In. In the Beaufort Edith version, it's something like a greyhound on a monkey or so I don't remember.

[Andrew]

What are we talking about? Spider monkey was.

[Craig]

So it's. It's when she rides on his back, right?

[Andrew]

Yes.

[Craig]

And then in the other version, it's like a gorilla on a greyhound. Excuse me. Because she. Because Beaufort's so big on top of tiny Edith running. I don't think it's Stephenie Meyer's best work, is what I'm saying here.

[Andrew]

Says spider monkey is only movie dialogue is suggesting. Oh, I do not remember this from the book, and I have not seen the movie.

[Craig]

Yeah, there's a lot of people saying boulder in the chat and go, birds.

[Andrew]

So, yeah, we got a lot of. We got a bow. We got a lot of bow. And I feel like I invited this with my boner thing earlier, but we got a lot of bow. Wordplay. Do we just want to talk about the end? Because we're, like, an hour and five minutes into this. Anyway, the end. The end is the only part that's different or interesting to me.

[Craig]

Okay. There are two other quotes I just want to talk about.

[Andrew]

Okay, let's do it very, very, very quickly.

[Craig]

That's fine.

[Andrew]

We can talk about the.

[Craig]

Because we don't need to talk about the. We don't need to read the quote for the. The ravioli scene where instead of Edward giving Bella a jacket, Edith offers Beau a scarf. And he has a full, like, home improvement 90s man freak out about wearing a scarf.

[Andrew]

He doesn't know how to wear a scarf.

[Craig]

He doesn't know how to wear a woman's scarf. And it is like, no, I stole it from my brother. It's my brother's scarf.

[Andrew]

It's a boy.

[Craig]

It's a boy scarf, you idiot. So Stupid. Can you pull up three things, Andrew?

[Andrew]

Three things.

[Craig]

There you go. I pulled this up because it's. It's a pretty straightforward example of Meyer just kind of lightly editing herself. About three things. I was absolutely positive. First, Edward was a vampire. Second, there was part of him, and I didn't know how potent that part might be, that thirsted for my blood. And third, I was unconditionally and irrevocably in love with him. Versus. There were a few things I knew for sure. For one, Edith was an actual vampire. For another, there was a part of her that saw me as food. But in the end, none of that mattered. All that mattered was that I loved her more than I'd ever imagined it was possible to love anything. She was everything I wanted. The only thing I would ever want. I mean, I. They're sort of the same, but, like, real. The second one is a little overwritten.

[Andrew]

It's just. It's wordier and like. Again, you. You've told me that this book is shorter than Twilight.

[Craig]

It is.

[Andrew]

Somehow doesn't make sense to me because.

[Craig]

She cut out all the, like. Like, tertiary characters.

[Andrew]

Every. Everybody. Everybody in the chat says the second version is worse. I do. I absolutely agree that it is. She has added a bunch of, like, purple prose to it that it actually did not need to be so.

[Craig]

And then this. This last one, this is Alice and Archie same. Alice and Archie are not very dissimilar between the two books. And this passage is almost exactly the same. She doesn't know who created her. She awoke alone. Whoever made her walked away. And none of us understand why or how he could. If she hadn't had that other sense, if she hadn't seen Jasper and Carlisle and known what, she would someday become one of us, she would probably have turned into a total savage. Archie doesn't remember his human life at all. And he doesn't know who created him. He awoke alone. Whoever made him walked away. None of us understand why or how he could. If Archie hadn't had that other sense, if he hadn't seen Jessamine and Karen and known that he would someday become one of us, he probably would have turned into a total savage. That one I share as the like truly find and replace update. Yes, of this book, where she's not interested in changing character at all. She doesn't think it's necessary. She can just, like, swap the names, swap the pronouns. It's the same. I think that is her ideal of what the book is. And she did a bunch of other stuff instead. Let's talk about the ending of the book.

[Andrew]

Andrew, let's talk about the ending of the book. So everybody remembers. This is something everybody remembers about the original Twilight is the iconic dance studio entrapment scene.

[Craig]

Yep.

[Andrew]

In the original book, it's like a ballet studio that Bella actually went to. Right.

[Craig]

Because her mom. Her mom worked at it and then, I guess, changed.

[Andrew]

Her mom working, her mom working. There was still a constant in the old book.

[Craig]

Do you remember that? I don't remember.

[Andrew]

Okay, well, in. In this book, it's. It's this dance studio Beau remembers because his mom worked there for, like a week 10 years ago.

[Craig]

Yeah. But he never went there. Because he's a man.

[Andrew]

Because he's a man. He wouldn't. He wouldn't do this. The scary tracker vampire who was attracted Joss, who was attracted to the Collins by the sound. The dulcet sounds of vampire baseball, has lured Bo to the Stance studio with a VHS tape of his mother talking, which Bo thought was his mother talking on the phone. And now Joss is going to kill Beau just as what's his name tried to kill Bella.

[Craig]

Yeah. Yep, yep, yep, yep.

[Andrew]

In the original book, the Collins come in in the nick of time. And Edward manages. And even though Bella has been bitten, Edward manages to suck the vampire venom out of her without sucking all of her blood out of her. Which is both a way to keep her human for the next three books and also a way for us to see how dedicated and, like, strong of will that Edward is. Because this is a thing that's very hard for vampires to do. And in the original episode, I did make a Pringles joke. It's still a good joke. If you pop a human, you cannot stop until you're done.

[Craig]

And there is stuff in this book, like in the forest sparkle scene where Edith is revealing herself to Beaufort, she talks about Alice, like, running the odds. And like, in one of four times this happens, Edith just kills Beaufort and eats him. So, like, the restraint is a huge part of the Edward Edith character. Yeah, yeah.

[Andrew]

Cynthia says, but this is definitely not an abstinence.

[Craig]

Not at all. Not at all. Not at all. Don't worry about it.

[Andrew]

Practicing the vampire pullout method. So in this book, in life and death, Twilight reimagined. The reimagining has Archie, who is Alice, who can see the future, says, well, I just checked in with the future again, and there's only two of them. Either we turn Beau into a vampire now and he lives or he dies.

[Craig]

Yep.

[Andrew]

And that's it. Those are the Choices. And so one of the Collins. I don't think it actually. Is it Edith who actually does the biting in the end? I think it is, because Corinne is like, I took a Hippocratic oath. I can't bite people. And Edith is like, well, I didn't take an oath.

[Craig]

Yeah, I think it was Edith.

[Andrew]

But the. You know, the venom from the vampire bite is, like, started in Beaufort's hand and spreading up his body. And someone was like, well, I'm just gonna give him a bite close to the heart and put him out of his misery a little bit faster because it's very. It's a very painful process to be turned into a.

[Craig]

It is.

[Andrew]

But Beau is turned into a vampire at the end of this book instead of. As Bella is, like, midway through book four.

[Craig]

Yep. And so there's, like, two chapters at the end. Ish. That are. We don't have from the original novel. Like, Rene shows up and visits Bella in the hospital, and then they're gonna go back to Forks and, like, dance at prom. None of that happens. What happens instead, Andrew?

[Andrew]

So we get. We get an extended scene where Beaufort. Beaufort is transforming into a vampire, and it is just, like, burning all over his body. It's miserable. He can hear stuff that people are saying to him, which is convenient. But while he is turning, the Collins are like, well, shoot. We have a lot of context and backstory and stuff from three other Twilight books that we need to dump on Beaufort so he can be prepared to be a vampire.

[Craig]

Yep.

[Andrew]

It's the thing. The only thing that bothered me about this ending is that I think by. Especially by the time you get to the hospital scene, like, Bella is very much like, hey, I want to be a vampire for sure. Like, I want to be a vampire. 100,000.

[Craig]

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Andrew]

And what are you laughing at? What are you laughing?

[Craig]

Well, there's some stuff happening in the show.

[Andrew]

Okay. Yeah. Okay.

[Craig]

Finish your thought. We'll come back.

[Andrew]

But, boy, I think he, like, toys with the idea. He definitely says he wants to be with Edith, like, forever and ever.

[Craig]

Yeah, he does.

[Andrew]

That element of their relationship is intact, but there are not, like, two and a half books of Beaufort explicitly over and over again, consenting to being made a vampire.

[Craig]

Yep. Yep.

[Andrew]

Before he's actually made a vampire. It just kind of happens right here. And I already like reading it again. I already think it super stinks that Corinne Carlisle is like, well, I just. I was really lonely, and so I made people who didn't seem like they had anybody else into my family. By making sick people I was treating into vampires. Like, that blows.

[Craig]

Yep, it's bad.

[Andrew]

And so that this. That this felt even less sort of consensual. Also. Also blue. But anyway, he turns into a vampire and. Yeah, tell us. Tell us some of the. So we get a lot of, like, Volturi stuff. What other plot from the next three Twilight books gets dumped on Bow for He is transforming.

[Craig]

There's a lot of. I honestly don't. I don't remember how much else we learned about the Volturi. There's some stuff about the wolves, I think. There's a whole stuff. There's a whole section after Beaufort turns.

[Andrew]

Right, we're gonna talk about that. The Volturi stuff. Like, it's all. It's all the stuff from the other books about how the Volturi live in Italy and they run the vampire world with an iron fist. Nobody can know about vampires. And any vampires who get out of hand and start drawing human attention are gonna get put down by the Volturi. Like, that's. That's the whole. To the extent that the books have, like, a big, bad antagonist, like, that's kind of the sword that's hanging over everybody the entire time.

[Craig]

Yep.

[Andrew]

And that gets. Yeah, that just gets, like, condensed into, like, three paragraphs.

[Craig]

Well, some of our listeners are. Are pointing out, you know, tangled and word says, but the gender makes no difference. And then Emma B. Says she gets turned into a vampire out of wedlock. So, like, the whole abstinence metaphor, the whole save yourself until marriage and then you can do what you want. Like, that is tossed out the window in this ending in a way that is, like, I guess, kind of interesting that Meyer went for it.

[Andrew]

Yeah. But a lot of people in the chat saying correctly, though, that, like, Bella's. Bella's desires in this are continually, like, ignored, slash deferred by Edward. And like, Beau, it turns out he's fine with having been made a vampire. He does pay some lip service to being sad about never seeing his dad and mom again. But it's not like that big a team.

[Craig]

No. And I was also struck by. Can you just bring up the transformation fire sections? Because I was wondering about this and I. We will talk about some of the werewolf stuff in just a second. And I struggled to find anything from earlier books, but there is a passage here in this Beaufort turning into a vampire section that is basically lifted from Breaking Dawn. The fire constricted, concentrating inside that one remaining human organ with a final, unbearable surgeon. The surge was answered by a deep hollow Hollow sounding thud. My heart stuttered twice and then thudded quietly again. Just once more. The fire constricted tighter, concentrating in one fist sized ball of pain with a final unbearable surge. The surge was answered by a deep hollow sounding thud. My heart stuttered twice, then thudded quietly again one more time. Etc, etc. So she.

[Andrew]

Does you ever notice how boys think about fists? You know, just like punching people.

[Craig]

Boys are mostly just fists wearing T shirts. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I was struck by the fact that she went and just like pulled Breaking dawn text in here. I don't know. She's doing a weird exercise for her 10th anniversary. She's allowed. It is just sort of silly to me that that's. That's what she went with. Talk to me about the werewolf stuff and how do you feel about this werewolf stuff at the end?

[Andrew]

Whatever. Like it's. It's trying to like nod to the whole Jacob thing by implying that friendship between Jacob and the werewolves and the Collins is possible without actually having to depict any of it.

[Craig]

It's a show. Oh, we did skip the funeral. Do you want to talk about.

[Andrew]

No, I wasn't skipping the funeral. I was just getting back to it. So this comes up because sometime after the transformation has taken place, they are all from far away looking really weirdly and unpleasantly. I think look like Beaufort is Tom Sawyering his own funeral.

[Craig]

Don't love it.

[Andrew]

By being there to look at his poor completely dismolished mom and dad at this funeral. And the rest of the Collins go.

[Craig]

It all seemed to take a really long time. Lowering the casket. The reverend giving some kind of speech, a sermon. My mom and dad each throwing a flower into the hole after the casket. Everyone awkwardly forming the obligatory line to speak to my parents. I wished they would let my mom leave. She was sagging into Phil and I knew she needed to lie down. Charlie was holding up better, but he looked brittle. Jules wheeled Bonnie over so that she was behind him, a little to the side. Bonnie reached forward and took Charlie's hand. It looked like that helped some. This put Jules in a position where I could see her face really well. And I kind of wished I couldn't.

[Andrew]

To just fill in the gap here real quick. They exhumed a corpse and put it in Beaufort's truck and then pushed the truck off a cliff and lit it on fire.

[Craig]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

To sort of fake Beaufort's death. And I just want to remind everybody, these are the morally upstanding good vampires that we are told about over and over again.

[Craig]

Allegra Asks was this in the OG Bella going to her funeral? No, there was no funeral scene for Bella in Breaking Dawn. She had already liked.

[Andrew]

I know Charlie at least was like, read into the whole thing at some point. I don't think Renee ever was, but yes.

[Craig]

And so, like, it's just. I don't know, she's just gonna kind of look like she's 18 for long enough until her parents die, I guess. But there is. There's none of. There's nothing like this in the original series. It's bananas. And it does even worse justice to Charlie than Midnight Sun. It's even worse. I want more Charlie, and this book sells him short.

[Andrew]

I wanted the things I wanted in order. Is like, the thing I want in an ideal world is gender swapped Charlie.

[Craig]

Yep.

[Andrew]

If I can't get gender swap Charlie, I will take just more of regular Charlie. And this book delivers on neither of those promises. The thing I was most excited about going in thinking, did she gender swap everybody else? Is like, what's gender swap Charlie? Like?

[Craig]

Yeah. Nope. Not allowed.

[Andrew]

No. A dream deferred. I guess I'll have to write about fan fiction. Stephanie Meyer says of fan fiction real quick. I've always told people, if you're going to do it, realize that you're practicing and then find your own story and move on. Because I think that's a clearer way to have your own characters. So if I wanted to write Gender swap Charlie, it would just be. It would just be practice and I would need to move on after that.

[Craig]

There is a whole scene with Bonnie, AKA Billy. Jacob is Jacob. Jules is not part of it. Where Bella is revealed or Beaufort is revealed to be a vampire.

[Andrew]

Diana says her entire career is fanfic of her own books.

[Craig]

Yeah, it's true. And she basically has to be like, hey, I. They. They sort of saved me and it saved the vampires and it got rid of an evil vampire. This is all good. Please, Bonnie, go make sure my dad is okay. I'm gonna live my best life with my vampire husband. And that's how the book ends. And it kind of stinks. Like, I didn't like this book and it gave me headaches.

[Andrew]

I think I really like the. I liked the last two chapters. And you haven't seen Better Call Saul. There's a scene where Saul and Mike Ehrmantraut are walking through the desert.

[Craig]

Okay.

[Andrew]

For reasons that I don't 100% remember. And Saul is really, really thirsty and he has a thermos full of zone pee that he keeps looking at. And he's like, I'm not thirsty enough to do that yet. I'm not thirsty enough to do that yet.

[Craig]

Oh, man.

[Andrew]

At the end, he finally does give in and just swig a big old drink of his own pee. And like, a man wandering, parched in a desert, getting a couple of chapters that, like, moved, you know, so they had some, like, energy to them.

[Craig]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Andrew]

I was glad to drink that pee is what I'm saying.

[Craig]

Okay, sure. I also will never forget that Stephenie Meyer thought, I need to come up with a way for people in an alley to attack a boy. Because in the original novel, a bunch of sex predators attack Bella in an alley in Port Angeles. And in this novel, she thought, well, that would never happen to a boy. So I need. I need to have.

[Andrew]

No man has ever been mugged in an alley.

[Craig]

I need to have him bump into some people at an airport and make them mad. And then he will walk into their alley and they will call him a pig because he has a cop dad. And then he will be saved by his vampire girlfriend, Struck. It really doesn't make any sense. There are plenty of other ways she could have handled it, but she did get to call her Beaufort Swan a pig. So, whatever. That's fine by me, I guess.

[Andrew]

What do we think that C in ACAB stands for in the Twilight universe? Unfortunately, it is Charlie.

[Craig]

In the afterword, she says, we meet again. Gentle reader, I know it's a lot to expect you to read, both a forward and an afterward, but there are a few things.

[Andrew]

Okay, I'm not going to say the really mean thing that I just thought. Just continue.

[Craig]

There are a few things I wanted to say that I couldn't include in the beginning without spoiling the fun of your read. So obviously I have cheated. I did not stay true to the original story in the conclusion of my swap, and I am not sorry. It was exciting and I very much enjoyed writing the alternate ending. I hope you've enjoyed a different look at Twilight that really isn't very different at all. Except for the end, which I don't apologize for.

[Andrew]

Tangled in Words does say assigned Charlie at birth, which I thought was good. Everybody in the chat telling me to say it. It is. Stephenie Meyer is talking to the average Twilight reader when she says, I know it's a lot of work to have to read two things, but.

[Craig]

She also says, I didn't make a playlist for this one as I usually do, because the music I'm listening to now didn't exist in 2005. When the story begins and that felt off. But if you are interested, the quote unquote soundtrack inside my head for this one is three albums. Royal Blood by Royal Blood, Seeds by TV on the Radio and 2.0 by Big Data. Or Big Data. I'm not sure how you pronounce it at home, but figured I would let you know. She did not mention Linkin park in this novel at all.

[Andrew]

She didn't? No, no. Linkin park is canonized in the Edward one.

[Craig]

In the end, gender did really matter.

[Andrew]

Yeah. Gender did really matter.

[Craig]

Yeah. That's life.

[Andrew]

That's life and death. Twilight reimagined.

[Craig]

I'm just so grateful that folks have, have, like enjoyed our show over the 700 episodes that we get to do this.

[Andrew]

We do get to do this. I'm. I am only sad that this is a real Alexander Wept moment for us because there are no other Twilight books we can swear that we are never going to read at the end of this episode.

[Craig]

True.

[Andrew]

I mean, there are no more frontiers.

[Craig]

Do you want.

[Andrew]

Until she puts out another one, a.

[Craig]

Novella called the Short Second Life of Bree Tanner. Do you want to read Twilight Saga, the official illustrated guide? Like we can.

[Andrew]

Let's. Let's talk about it off mic.

[Craig]

Okay.

[Andrew]

Listen, I don't want to commit to any of this in public. Thanks very much.

[Craig]

Before we do our outro, Andrew, as a thank you to everybody for tuning in and for listening to our 700th episode, do you want to tell folks a little bit about our next Long Read project?

[Andrew]

Sure. So we are currently cruising into the end of Sit Me Baby One More Time, our Babysitters Club Long Read project, where we've read a smattering of Babysitters Club books, mostly focused in the early, the early years before the girls enter eighth grade. Forever.

[Craig]

Forever.

[Andrew]

There is. For people who are not privy to these Patreon episodes yet, there is kind of an eternal 8th grade where they go through 8th grade like 12 or 13 distinct times. I think people have mapped it.

[Craig]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

But when we are done with that, we are going to start our next project and that's going to be called the silly. A like five or six part look at J.R.R. tolkien's the Silmarillion, which is like what if the Bible but with elves. Yeah.

[Craig]

So, yeah, you get somewhere back in our back catalog, you can experience me reading the Lord of the Rings series a little too quickly and too quickly and maybe and enjoying myself, but also feeling like I was moving too fast. So if we, if we were, if.

[Andrew]

We were doing this now we would have spaced those bad boys out more. We would not have done them all in in three weeks.

[Craig]

No, we would not have.

[Andrew]

I would not.

[Craig]

Was having trouble.

[Andrew]

We got children now. We can't. We can't mainline Lord of the Rings books anymore.

[Craig]

But I am excited to go back to the age of men or whatever it is. I don't really know what Tolkien's about.

[Andrew]

We're not going back to the age of men. That's the third. That's the fourth age, actually.

[Craig]

Oh, okay.

[Andrew]

Well, yeah, I look forward back to the. Going back to the first age, baby. Do you know there was a guy before Sauron who's like basically like Sauron, but he's like worse. So he's like big. He's like even worse.

[Craig]

What would.

[Andrew]

But he's like shares. He shares most of the same kind of characteristics, but he's worse.

[Craig]

Would a gender gender swapped Sauron be Sharon Chow?

[Andrew]

Ron patreon.com overdue pod when the SillyMarillion begins airing, the Simi Baby episodes will start going out on the main feed for people who. Who have been patiently waiting for those. So salvation is coming, I suppose. To those of you who that describes.

[Craig]

You can send us an email overdue podmail.com let us know what you think about gender swapped Twilight or what other series do you think would have an interesting experience if you adhered to a strict gender binary and swapped everyone except for like two or three very specific characters? Why did she do. Why did she not do Renae, Charlie and Phil. Could we not have had Phyllis?

[Andrew]

What if just Phil. What if you. Even if you're not gonna swap Renee and Charlie.

[Craig]

Yeah, just.

[Andrew]

What if you only just swap Phil? Come on, just swap Phil.

[Craig]

Be brave, Stephanie. Anyway.

[Andrew]

Craig, we forgot to. We forgot to tell everybody that you and I swapped tops genders for this episode.

[Craig]

Oh, we did forget. I'm your gender now.

[Andrew]

Yep.

[Craig]

Oh man. Wow.

[Andrew]

Well, we did that. Everybody. That's. Go back and listen from the beginning. It'll make something a lot different.

[Craig]

Everybody watching on video can tell it's fine. Hit us up on social media at Overdue Pod. We're mostly on Blue sky and Instagram at this point thanks to Nick Lauren just who composed our theme music. Andrew. If folks want to know more about the show, where do they go?

[Andrew]

Overdue Podcast.com is our Internet website. If you go there, you will see the books that we have read. The ones we are going to read, including our schedule for whatever month is after May. I guess sources are producers telling me it's May. That's after April.

[Craig]

It is. It is.

[Andrew]

Have we said. Have we talked about. Have we.

[Craig]

We have.

[Andrew]

Not yet. You want to talk about that?

[Craig]

Yeah, I'm ready to talk about that. On May 5, we are going to be celebrating Children's Book Week with the Madeline, Madeline, Madeline book series.

[Andrew]

I think. I think to make it rhyme, it has to be Madeline to My As.

[Craig]

I Recall by Ludwig Bevelmans. Then Andrew is going to be reading Alice Adams by our old friend Booth Tarkington.

[Andrew]

Booth Talkington. And he's coming back. We're gonna make him a thing.

[Craig]

Then I'm gonna be following that with Play It As It Lays by the great Joan Didion. Excited to cover Didion on the pod. And then Andrew is going to be reading Cursed bread by Sophie McIntosh. That book sounded cool. I'm excited about Sophie McIntosh has had some good accolades lately. That book sounds cool. Yes. There were reviews of this. They had stars. There were.

[Andrew]

Jeez, we're doing. Doing this in the. Like, the post credits.

[Craig]

Well, people are asking Andrew. I feel bad. It's episode 700. I can't hear them.

[Andrew]

Three star Goodreads review.

[Craig]

Okay, Aylin says three stars. Props to Stephanie Meyer for allowing me to live my bisexual fantasy. Brittany says, I didn't like Beau and Edith very much. I'm sorry. And believe me, I did separate them from Edward and Bella to give them the best chance of my mind. They just didn't sit the same with me. I can't put my finger on it. Luke said, when I arrived, I couldn't help myself. I had to have a peek. It was very similar to Twilight. So I read it and it was simply a rehash of Twilight. Although some of the changes were, you know, strange. I have to say the highlight was the ending. Since Bo was, you know, a boy and Edith a girl, the events in Breaking dawn couldn't have happened, so why not drastically change the ending so different events couldn't happen? It's a good ending, though. Though, I have to say, Bella got the better hand and Tessa said, many people didn't find this book so great, but I absolutely loved it. It felt like I was reading Twilight again for the first time, which I review. I would respond, tessa, do you know how many stars you gave it?

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Craig]

I'm not sure if you know how the stars work, but that's our show. Andrew, again, we're so just grateful that folks have been supporting the show for long enough and listening that we would make it to episode 700.

[Andrew]

700 is a wild number of episodes. And I have not, like, let myself kind of contemplate it because I'm like, I don't know, I'm 30 or 40 years old and just like contemplating my own mortality a lot. And the fact that we've been doing this for so long is something that doesn't feel real to me. But I am glad to have you, Craig, and this podcast and all the people who listen to it in my life. It has made my life better. And I'm excited to do another 700 of them. Baby, let's do it.

[Craig]

That's right. Thanks for.

[Andrew]

At this point, the cool thing about this is that even more that like 600, like a thousand. Feels. Thousand. Feels like we can get there now.

[Craig]

Real.

[Andrew]

Yeah. Feels like we can get there.

[Craig]

Yes.

[Andrew]

And like, what are we gonna do for it? Because we do probably need five years.

[Craig]

To Stephanie Meyer, please email us and tell us what you're working on.

[Andrew]

Stephanie, we didn't mean any of the things that we said.

[Craig]

You keep writing. Let us know what you got, please.

[Andrew]

Keep going.

[Craig]

All right, Andrew, get us out of here, please.

[Andrew]

All right, everybody, thank you so much for listening to our show and for hanging with us on the stream. If you want to stream with more again, patreon.com overdue pod but yeah, for. For the rest of you, until we see you next time, please try to be happy. That was a Headgum podcast with a.

[Craig]

Five dollar meal deal with new McValue. You pick a McDouble or a McChicken, then get a small fry, a small drink and a four piece McNugget. That's a lot of McDonald's for not a lot of money.

[Andrew]

Prices and Participation may vary. McDouble meal, $6 in some markets for a limited time only.