No context just wanted to tell someone, but Edward and Bella are demisexual x demisexual

Definitely could see something like that!

I know people like to joke about Edward being a virgin for 100 years or whatever and I'd bet SM meant it all in that romantic 'I've never felt this way about anyone before' fantasy way, but it's entirely possible to explain it as him being somewhere on the aro/ace spectrum. He's isolated as a vampire and even more so as a mind-reader, he can't really form normal relationships with people when he knows what they are thinking all the time. So Bella's silent mind allows him to actually get to know someone and opens him up to a demisexual awakening. Totally works.

Bella obviously hasn't been around for 100 years but you can explain her lack of previous romantic/sexual interest in a similar way. Could be that she's young and this is her first crush, could be that she's on the ace spectrum.

I've always lowkey thought Carlisle might be, too. Obviously people come up with their own headcanons about what he was up to for all those centuries before he met Esme, whether he had a thing with Aro or not, etc. But to me it always made a lot of sense that he was someone on the ace spectrum. When he talks about wanting a companion, he only talks about wanting a friend, someone who could really know him. He didn't say he wanted a lover or partner! I always thought that sex/romance wasn't super on his radar because he was focused a lot more on defeating the bloodthirst and becoming a doctor and finding love wasn't a high priority for him. Again, I'm sure SM meant it as meeting Esme was just this fantasy romance epiphany and she didn't think about demisexuality or gray aces or whatever, but you could easily frame it that way!

you're post about what would happen if SM didn't follow up after Eclipse with Breaking/Forever Dawn (what a timeline that could've been... 😔) had this line that made me think:

it made me think about Eclipse where they tried to hide the werewolves' existence from the Volturi...or I guess involvement? (I'll get to that later) and then later in Breaking Dawn where Aro is fascinated by the pack

thing is.....wouldn't the Volturi (or at least Aro) already know? Aro's whole thing is seeing every thought (maybe even memory) that went on in your mind from I guess the first thought you ever had to the present, and just from Edward alone he could've already known about the "werewolves" they had a run in with when they made a treaty in the past.

and even if that was a long time ago, from having touched Alice (who did in fact learn and met the recent resurfacing of the Quileute wolves) it surely would've raced some suspicions? or maybe even have an idea that "huh, are these people they had a treaty with part of the Children of the Moon too?"

now it makes me wonder the full extent of just how much of your thoughts Aro can read, or if Edward's "he hears every thought your mind has ever had" just being dramatic (like he isn't already with his chosen method of offing himself. lol.)

Yeah I've often wondered about this, too. Aro makes it pretty clear in New Moon that he knows all about Alice from being "introduced" to her by Edward via the mind-reading, but is it like an instant download that he immediately just knows or is it more like a book he has to flip through, and maybe he hasn't gotten to the wolf stuff yet because it wasn't as immediately interesting to him as Alice's powers?

I think again it's probably a function of the books being written out of order, because he for sure could pull the "well I'd love to let you go home to my dear friend Carlisle, but alas, you have been fraternizing with werewolves and brother Caius has a problem with that :( " and try to coerce them to stay in Volterra to serve him to spare the other Cullens or whatever. Like he could have so easily just villain'd it up but he couldn't because they HAD to go home and finish high school and get married and have Renesmee.

I guess in my theoretical sequel-to-Eclipse he did find out about them when he touched Edward and Alice in New Moon but he just put it on the back burner and didn't mention it to Marcus or Caius and could have pulled it out later in this not-BD. That is, instead of the Irina thing, Aro could have pretended to be shocked by what Jane was telling him after reporting back after Eclipse (OMG werewolves?! no way! surprisedpikachu.gif) and used the "alliance" with the shifters to go after the Cullens. "To fraternize with the enemy is one thing, but to work with them to kill other vampires is quite another!!" etc.

And I still don't think we talk enough about the danger Edward put the whole family in by choosing Volterra as his would-be suicide method. Edward, my buddy, you gave all the family secrets to Aro. More than he would have gotten from anyone else because you, too, are a mind-reader. I mean at the very least Rosalie and Jasper should be pissed about that. If his plan to die had succeeded, he would have left them not only with the grief over his passing but the fallout from Aro knowing all about Alice (and everyone else, too).

you know, last night out of boredom I was scrolling around tv tropes site and fell into a rabbit hole, and thru that I found entries for the Twilight Saga on the "Unintentionally Unsympathetic" and "Protagonist-Centered Morality" tropes that I found intriguing. Specifically about the Cullens:

In Unintentionally Unsympathetic

In Protagonist-Centered Morality

Yeaaa,, come to think of it, what was up with that?

My memory of the book is foggy but I did recall some narration where Bella sees the garage empty of some cars and notes that "the vampires had gone off to hunt" (even though??? they can run faster than any car so why bother? ??) and I can't remember if the movie addresses or acknowledges it but.. I DO remember the part where Aro considers having the La Push packs as "guard dogs" and Edward talks about how the idea won't work because the werewolves, being committed to protecting human life can coexist better with them/The Cullens more than the Volturi and now that I read those entries I'm just sitting here like But you're no different letting all those human-eating vampires chill at your place and causing a werewolf explosion?? And being soooo hospitable as to lend your cars for them lol!! At worse you're enabling it!! (facepalm)

Yeah this has always bothered me.

I think in the book it's specifically Edward who is lending out his keys to the visiting vampires. And, genuinely, why would these hundreds of years old nomadic vampires who don't live among humans like the Cullens do even know how to drive??

And also, they aren't even there THAT long? It's like, what? 2 weeks, max? And they don't have to feed that often. Could they really just . . . not hunt during their stay, or try the vegetarian thing to humor their supposed friends? If your vegan friend invited you to their house and you accepted their invitation, you wouldn't expect to be served bacon cheeseburgers for dinner. Or have Carlisle buy more donated human blood as he's been doing for most of the book and offer it to his guests as a 'nice compromise?'

Again, it's like SM didn't actual want to deal with any of the vampire stuff and just kind of swept it under the rug with Bella being "uncomfortable" with their hunting habits. Either a) deal with it! Show us Carlisle trying to persuade people, Emmett betting Garrett, Benjamin, Peter and Charlotte that they couldn't do it, an angry exchange when someone comes back with freshly bright red eyes, something!! or b) explain it away with an alternative like donated human blood, everyone agreeing to try the vegetarian thing, not being there long enough that hunting is necessary, etc.

If you're going to make it not matter you might as well go all the way and actually remove the moral quandary entirely. Instead we're in this sort of unsatisfying middle option when get one paragraph acknowledging that's happening but neither the 'good' vampires nor the shifters (!!) do anything about it because everything is justified in the protection of Renesmee and the furtherance of Bella's happily ever after.

Even though earlier in the! same! book! Sam says: "And inflict the menace on others? When blood drinkers cross our land, we destroy them, no matter where they plan to hunt. We protect everyone we can."

(I mean I GUESS they aren't technically crossing Quileute land but still like . . . c'mon.)

It could have been a cool source of conflict in a section of the book that really kind of needed some! Instead of Bella's little subplot with Jenks not going anywhere and fight training for a fight that never happened, we could have had something more than just, "well I don't like that they're killing people but we need them to witness so, meh."

I might be projecting because my love language is gift giving and I am the kind of person who needs every detail of my life planned down the second and even my routines have routines but-

I have so much pity for Jasper. Like, don't get me wrong, he's got a great family and his wife is the fucking best thing since sliced bread, but she can see the FUTURE. imagine him trying to plan something special for their anniversary, a trip abroad or something, a wonderful surprise. First of all, he can't even decide until the very last second because he wants to keep it a surprise, which is already impossible, but then, THEN. He books the tickets and before he can even tell Alice what he's planned, she's packed their bags and figured out the itinerary and has already experienced the whole trip in her head and is already telling Jasper how great it will be and how much they will love it and how much nasty back-breaking sex they will have at every opportunity. He would love it, I'm sure, and loves her power and her having total control over him but!!! This poor man can't even plan anything special for his wife because she sees it happening before he does it!! Every gift is left to the last minute, and every experience has to be spontaneous, I don't know why he even tries honestly. That's why Alice is in charge I suppose

(I say this all in jest, I love Alice and her ability and that's probably one of the things Jasper loves most about her but. Imagine the suffering)

Jasper having to go along with any and all schemes he gets roped into is such a goldmine for comedy. It’s so great. I don’t feel the least bit bad for him; it’s like a delicious extra layer of karma. Like, sure sure we can argue that his empathy superpower is karmic justice being served against him, but him being reduced to a standing lamp who sometimes gets plucked out of Alice’s accessory pile to be promoted to Bag-Holding Arm Candy is absolutely incredible.

Listing out his trauma/problems just gets funnier the longer you go on because his problems range from "horrifying appearance that terrifies other vampires no matter what" to "wife has never once taken his advice". He’s a vampire who is hardwired to kill because murder = survival but he has an honest-to-god eating disorder because he feels the suffering of all his victims. He’s a two-time veteran where he was nothing more than a body tasked with inflicting violence on opposing forces to retain power and control over others but he’s married into a family of pacifists who like to play human in a world where being found out by said humans can and will get you killed by the vampire mafia. He has dogshit willpower but he has to sit through high school English classes with depressed/horny teenagers over and over again for appearance’s sake. He's a bulletproof immortal struggling to get a good grade in Being Good because of his ingrained ruthlessness and he will never once surprise his wife with an anniversary present because she’s a bratty, meddling little psychic.

I agree with your entire assessment here but I also laugh so hard when people try to woobify Jasper or be like “poor baby” because as a Jasper stan I love seeing this bitch suffer. Jasper will never know a moments peace no matter what happens to him and I can't help but point and laugh at his misfortune ♡

I know this is another common complaint (sorry!), but something that has ALWAYS irked me about the series - even when I first read it back in middle school - is how everyone but Edward and Bella have to face rules/consequences in some sort of way, while Edward and Bella not only really don't, but are almost smug about it in certain moments.

(on a side note, I will forever love Carlisle coming to Jasper's defense in Breaking Dawn about how unfair Edward was being towards him)

Yeah that's my biggest beef with the whole thing and with Breaking Dawn in particular. And it's largely about the tone.

If you wanted to write a story about a girl who falls in love with a vampire and becomes a vampire herself and feels joyful in that, that's great! That's fine! But if that's what you plan to do, writing three whole books where every vampire characters goes on at length about what a hard, sad, shadowy existence it is to then in the last half of the last book be like, "Wheeeee this is awesome this is where I fit! This is where I shine!" just feels . . . . strange. What was the point of the rest of it? What was the point of the whole thing about souls in New Moon? What was the point of the hard choices and compromises in Eclipse?

I've said before--and I stand by it--that the tone problem wouldn't have been as bad if it had just been Twilight and Forever/Breaking Dawn. But those middle books changed things. They raised the stakes from "what if she's unhappy like Rosalie?" to "I AM TAKING AWAY HER SOUL AND MAKING HER GIVE UP ALL THINGS GOOD AND HUMAN!" Forever/Breaking Dawn works to resolve things if the problem Edward had was that he was worried she would end up unhappy like Rose; it doesn't address the larger issue about taking away her soul in any meaningful way. I guess the idea is that Renesmee's existence convinces Edward that he must have a soul to have created such a wonderous being but it still feels like, and SM has made comments about, the main thing was "oh! she's happy! I don't have to feel bad!"

I was under no illusion that Bella would become a vampire and that she'd most likely have an easy time with it. But the fact that it was just a complete non-issue for her was boring. It was boring! My favorite part of vampire stories are how they adjust to being a vampire, that 'what have I become?' stuff. How you deal with new instincts, powers, and limitations. Twilight vampires already have woefully few limitations, and then Bella gets to skip all the newborn problems. I wanted to see that! I wanted to see her work through it and Edward angst about her struggles and her reassure him that it's worth it. I wanted her to have to give up Charlie. I wanted the Cullens to have to tackle her to the ground and hold her back when the mailman showed up. I wanted her to see the downside of vampirism and still believe her choice was worth it because she got to be with Edward fully.

what draws you both to jalice/makes you so feral about them as a ship?

you should know we had an entire meeting in order to answer this ask. no this could NOT have been an email (unlike new moon) 🤭

Secretary G took notes. they are as follows (read the bolded parts for a tl;dr)

we kind of see it as though jalice got the traits that edbella weren’t allowed to have, either due to their status as protagonists or because smeyer's mormon background causes her to view these qualities as too sinful/negative for her wholesome Waiting Until Marriage main couple. (examples: alice's materialistic, "shallow," hyperfeminine qualities, her character flaws (especially her manipulativeness), and jasper's aura and history of fucked up violence closer to what you'd find in traditional vampire stories/horror/adult gothics/books not written by a mormon author)

in terms of how much screentime the non-main-love-triangle canon couples get, their relationship is kiiiinda given the next-most weight to edbella’s (examples: jasper's extreme overprotectiveness, the New Moon chapter 19 moment where alice prioritizes jasper and bella is like “yeah I get it, I would do the same.”) basically smeyer gives jalice's relationship a lot of the qualities she finds romantic/ideal, (and which are either similarly romantic to us or entertainingly toxic/a good source of drama), presumably because alice is like her 4th-favorite character after the main love triangle and she wants nice things for her

we both really love how, superficially, as presented in the books, jasper and alice seem to have this almost “courtly love” that smeyer has described as "spiritual." yet when you look closer, their relationship has so many darker undertones—the deep codependency bordering on obsessiveness (mutual, but especially the way it manifests on jasper's end—"I will kill this random teen girl who witnessed edward's jean valjean moment™ because any means are justifiable when the ends are Protecting Alice"), the dark sides of both of their powers, the idea that jasper is only a cullen and/or only a vegetarian for alice's sake, etc. hell, even the fact that they're the only Cullen couple who we know had (gasp) premarital sex 😏 (I mean we assume rosemmett did too, but alas, they don't have that hilarious "carlisle convinced jasper and alice to get married" quote from smeyer)

partially summarized: "jasper’s general desperate willingness to sell everyone to satan for one corn chip if it keeps alice safe (carlisle: I know this and I love you)"

we're forever smug that the movies gave us even more jalice screentime (especially remarkable in such a protagonist-centric universe), including jasper being in the same grade as alice/bella/edward, and the extra jalice kisses in Eclipse and BD 🥺

what we wrote down as the “who’s protecting whom" phenomenon, as coined by G in this old ask. (shannon: "jasper is the toddler you've given the PS2 controller that's not plugged in")

we also like the characters individually. jasper is for the girlies with competency kinks—a stoic caretaker who speaks little and mostly expresses himself via acts of service. we also both love the way in which he needs protection from his own uncontrolled violence (slipping up and killing humans, suffering the pain and fear he inflicts, etc.) he is, in the words of our beloved @liceparade, the "line cook trauma boyfriend"

“It’s hot when there’s a fictional violent man who wet babygirl 😌” —shannon

and alice, unlike bella, genuinely loves being spoiled and bossing people around. she's brat-coded, she's confident and secure in who she is, her god complex ("I'm close enough [to omniscient]") causes fascinating conflict, bella eats drywall from sheer horniness at her merest movement, she dresses like a slut in the Mormon YA Novels and yet somehow escapes authorial condemnation, she has a sickass gothic heroine backstory, she's "annoying," aro started a whole war over her (eat shit helen of troy 🖕), she spaces out in public and has to be led around by jasper, she's one of the most powerful vampires in the world, she's in high school getting a C+ on her precalc test 💅🏻

it's appealing that smeyer frequently puts alice in the center of the series' various conflicts (james' singer and "one that got away," the accidental cause of all the drama at the end of new moon, one of aro's secret True motives for starting the conflict in BD.) this is mostly as a consequence of smeyer using alice as a plot device and/or deus ex machina, but it is in fact interesting

is alice jasper's morality chain? we love pondering this question via fic, meta, etc (especially because...alice ain't exactly a model of ethical behavior herself)

together, the two of them exhibit lots of classic tropes. they're grumpy x sunshine, chatty x silent, opposites attract, etc. to say nothing of that height difference 🥵

we love the yin/yang symbolism of a character with a horrific past paired with a character with NO memory of her past, who is focused on the future and all about potential. not to invoke an ancient phrase but POETIC CINEMA

the next note just says “POTENTIAL in general.” I assume we meant how all of the above stuff creates potential for interesting stories, conflicts, metas, art, fic, etc

G has brought this up in the past, but we love the irony of jasper, a character whose chief desire is to be left in peace, being soul-alteringly in love with the one character who will always be a giant glaring target through no fault of her own. hilarious

Do you think that Charlie also undergoes retconning/revision as the series goes on? In Twilight he seems somewhat distant but still buys Bella a truck, worries about her, etc. By Eclipse he can't work a microwave and is (at least through Bella's PoV) an unreasonable brute of a man. Do you think that Meyer needed to make Charlie more distasteful to the readers so that Bella essentially abandoning him (and Renee) wouldn't come off so cruel/harsh? Or did she just evolve the character as she went to mesh better with New Moon and Eclipse, even when those new character traits DON'T mesh well with FD/BD? Charlie was still in Bella's life in FD and presumingly Nessie was also still named Carlie as well.

Charlie is interesting because if you think about the idea that it was originally just Twilight and Forever/Breaking Dawn, Charlie seems to exist mostly so Bella can move to Forks and be largely unsupervised. I mean there's a story there about a girl reconnecting with the father she barely knows, but that's not the story SM is interested in and for the most part is not the story she is telling. I'd argue the movies made a bit more of an effort there, or at least Billy Burke made people care about Charlie. I don't remember people being all that invested in him when it was just the books, but movie!Charlie is largely beloved.

But yeah I think a lot about Bella's homelife is the way it is so that choosing to become a vampire doesn't seem so terrible. If she were close to her parents, if she had siblings, hell if she had any actual human friends she cared about, that decision would be a lot harder to make and there would be consequences, things she had to give up. But she doesn't really have anyone. She likes Angela well enough, but doesn't spare her a second thought after the wedding. Her grandparents are dead, no cousins or aunts or uncles. No friends back in Phoenix. Just Charlie, Renee, and Phil. And she gets to keep Charlie and doesn't seem to care about Phil at all.

I think some of the problem with Charlie is that SM was going for humor. Similar with Renee, I never really believed he didn't actually know how to cook. I assumed it was Bella exaggerating for effect. I didn't actually think Bella was paying the bills and doing the grocery shopping at 10, either. But then we get Charlie not even knowing how to boil pasta or not to but metal in the microwave. Like he hadn't lived on his own for nearly two decades, like he hadn't cared for his parents? It's just "haha look how clueless he is!"

I do think his disdain for Edward is largely justified, though, given what he actually knows. The "break-up" after the baseball game where Bella ran back to Phoenix and ended up in the hospital, and then her depression when he breaks up with her again, then her disappearing for three days because he needed help. Yeah, I'd think this guy wasn't good for my kid, too. But because it's a romance and Bella's the narrator, she paints him as unreasonable and Edward being a saint for putting up with it.

I don't think he was retconned as much as Renee; I think they both started off as well-meaning but comically helpless/clueless and that Renee took a darker turn whereas Charlie may have benefited in later works from how beloved movie!Charlie is.

what are your headcanons in regards to when alice and jasper first met the cullens? what was the cullen’s reactions? were they intimidated by jasper, confused by alice? how long did it take for jasper to get comfortable?

I mean, alice timing her and jasper's arrival so that emmett and edward weren't around has always been suuuper telling. because like, yeah. I fucking BET that if alice and jasper showed up out of nowhere with everyone home, between emmett's 'think now act later' tendencies and edward being able to see into jasper's head (which I'm sure was full of tense, uncomfortable "if it comes down to it I can just kill them and we can dip" thoughts), in combination with the entire family just taking one LOOK at jasper, it would not have gone smoothly in any way 💀

I mean, in breaking dawn even BELLA perceives jasper as a scary/dangerous threat on an instinctual level that she hardly understands!! and he's her best friend's husband! who she's known for over a year!!! no matter how much he's chilling out the atmosphere there's no way esme, rosalie, and carlisle aren't at least a liiiittle nervous about him. alice could have shown up nude and covered head-to-toe in human blood and i'm confident they would have still been more uneasy about jasper. (don't mind me linking more of g's posts. she's the only person I know who would have all this evidence documented lmfaooo ♡)

but thankfully, because of alice's and jasper's gifts, those two should be able to nail introductions 10 out of 10 times with a 100% success rate! if alice can pick the best possible route to take and jasper can keep the atmosphere light and relaxing, then they could probably charm their way through any 1950s entryway! I highly doubt jasper did the same midnight sun baseball scene camouflage, but I'm sure he did plenty of tension-smoothing.

I personally enjoy that they planned to show up when it was only carlisle, esme, and rosalie home. in midnight sun, alice fucking glomps edward (no, I won't apologize for using this word because I swear to god it's literally what she does) which he only responds positively towards because of their weird, instant psychic connection that lets her bombard him with LOOK-I-SWEAR-WE'RE-GONNA-BE-BEST-FRIENDS-I-LOVE-YOU-ALREADY visions. tbh, I think it's edward's absence specifically that alice probably needed. sure, emmett would've automatically perceived jasper as a threat alongside the rest of the family, but I bet that alice knew that if she could just get jasper through the door, and get carlisle to hear them out, then dealing with edward (and his ability to see what goes on in that nightmare's jasper's brain) would be muuuuch easier.

to answer your more specific questions: rosalie was definitely the very last person to be "okay" with their presence, but I'm sure she was fine with alice first, and that it took emmett to get her to be okay with jasper, too. it probably took jasper ages to adjust to living peacefully alongside 5 strangers—I'm sure these difficulties were probably exacerbated by alice being comfortable and happy right off the bat. and i'm sure the reason that jasper finally calmed down and relaxed into his new life with the cullens had to do with a combination of his trust in alice, his respect for carlisle, and the improvements that vegetarianism had on his mental health (we, as a fandom, forget too quickly that this war criminal has a canonical eating disorder and that's so INTERESTING AND FUNNN)

Hello. I'm not new to the Twilight fandom, but I only know one joke about a vampire having sex with his food. It was said by someone from the series What We Do in the Shadows. I've read a lot of fanfiction, but no one has ever pointed out that it's weird for a vampire to sleep with his dinner. Do you have any thoughts about this?

It comes up from time to time. It's somewhat standard for the vampire genre, though, so the jokes are in every fandom I'd imagine. "Don't play with your food" etc. The one from WWDITS, if I recall, was in a discussion of why they prefer virgin blood and one of the vampires crudely described it as you're enjoy a sandwich more if you knew no one had had sex with it.

With Twilight they are never so straightforward about it, but in the movies Bella does joke about how she might 'become the meal' so it's sort of acknowledged. I think part of it with Twilight is that it is SO sexually repressed (until marriage! whereupon she immediately gets pregnant!) that it doesn't come up in the context of sex so much as just, why are you hanging out with your food, why are you in love with your food, why do you want to marry your food? But even so, the Cullens do try to see humans as people and not just prey so it's more the other vampires seeing it this way (the "you brought a snack?" at the baseball game, for example).

What seems MORE strange to me, personally, is that it's CANON LORE that male vampires CANNOT reproduce with female vampires, but CAN with THEIR FOOD. It's even canon that the MORE DELICIOUS A WOMAN SMELLS TO A SPECIFIC (MALE) VAMPIRE, the higher the chance of conceiving. So not only can they have babies with their food, the chances of Baby are higher the MORE DELICIOUS the food is. Like why . . . why would biology work that way. Why would one half of the species retain fertility while the other didn't? Why can they reproduce with their intended prey? Why does the deliciousness of the specific prey make it easier to conceive?? That makes it a million times more likely the human dies and the pregnancy doesn't proceed. It feels so specifically designed just so Edward and Bella can have a kid; like the entire universe, in-world science and lore bent to their needs.

Edward had sex with the most delicious sandwich ever and had a half-sandwich child with it. What.

Of all the Cullens, for some reason it tickles me to imagine Jasper sitting down to write essays and do diorsmas for school. He's just seen too much, did too much compared to all of them to have an even somewhat reasonable masquerade as a teenager. You mean the man with the thousand yard stare is 16 years old? Okay. Out of all of them, his time playing pretend is the hardest to imagine. From breaking heads off to making a Styrofoam model of a animal nucleus. Hahah

Oh I agree. He's the one where I think about it for two seconds it's just so utterly absurd he's in school. And it's not even about his shaky self-control, it's that this guy is the oldest after Carlisle, is 19/20 years old physically, and spent 90 years in endless vampire war and now he's subjected to writing another essay on The Great Gatsby? How is that not hugely humiliating and completely pointless?

His dates vary between the books and the guide, but he is 19-20ish and Emmett is 20 and both are too old for high school. There's also 6'3" and 6'5". I mean on her very first day Bella sees them and says they look more like teachers than students, so the whole "blending in" excuse completely falls apart.

Is this supposed to be some kind of punishment or atonement for him? Edward calls high school purgatory, which is a place where you work off your sins and are purified before being allowed into heaven. But how does physically 20-years-old ex-vampire-warlord Jasper atone for anything by graphing parabolas?

Or is it really just like "well Alice looks the part and wants (?) to go to high school and I want to be where Alice is?"

Or did SM not think about this for two seconds? The story would not change AT ALL if Edward and Alice, as the two youngest-looking (I think Alice is technically older than Rosalie but her small stature makes her pass for younger) were the only ones in high school. Jasper's presence at school doesn't matter, neither do Emmett's or Rosalie's.

It's just such a bizarre thing to think about. What a strange use of his eternal life. What would Maria think to see him sitting in school?

not sure if you’ve touched on this before hint i’ve been curious lately: does edward actually like alice and bella or does he just appreciate their gifts? i’m not quite sure how to explain it but the more i think about it, the less alice seems like the kind of person edward would like. she seems to be more self-interested and cunning than the saint-like characters edward typically reveres. i’ve been wondering if their bond is less about a genuine like for each other and more about an understanding of each other's gifts.

i know edward's attraction to bella as a person vs her silent mind has been discussed before. do you think edward would've fallen for bella if she were more like characters like rosalie and jessica? for instance, assuming her mind were still closed off to him, would edward still have found bella fascinating if he perceived her to be vain and materialistic?

This is part of why I'm less interested in the gifts stuff that a lot of other people. I think it does muddy the waters with things like this. Like, are Edward and Alice actually compatible as siblings/friends or is it just like "you're the only one who understands because our author gave us these specific gifts?" And at the end of the day maybe it doesn't super matter; they DO have those gifts and it DOES help them understand one another so what it would be like without them only really matters if you're writing some All Human AU that removes the supernatural. In their world, compatibility with gifts is a thing, and probably just as valid as other kinds of compatibility and sympathy.

It is interesting that Edward thinks Rose is selfish and vain but loves Alice, when you know if it were Rosalie spending all this money on clothes they only wear once and throwing parties he would see it as another sign of her poor moral character. But part of it may be that Alice and Edward are different enough that they don't annoy each other in the same way Rose and Edward do. Both of them are more melancholy, more negative, more judgmental. Alice is more fun and happy and extroverted so Edward probably doesn't see his own flaws in her the same way he does in Rose (although they can be similar, too, in their sort of manipulative "I know best" dealings).

With Bella I think the gifts thing is even more of a factor. I mean if he could hear Bella's thoughts he'd be getting a lot of "Edward is SO hot" because that's what her narration is in the book, and I don't know that he's find that any different than how Jessica or whoever thinks about him. But because he can't read her mind, he's able to project on her, and also interpret her choices and actions in flattering ways rather than negative ways as he does with most people. And like I get it. I certainly think things I wouldn't say or do. I'm very patient and helpful at my job at the library, for example, but in my head when I see certain people coming and asking for help I'm like "ugggggh not THIS person" and "why can't you do this yourself?!?!" so if Edward were reading my mind he might be like "oh she's not as nice as she seems, she's two-faced, what a scoundrel!" when it's really just . . . being human?

If Bella's behavior was more like Rose and Jessica but Edward couldn't read her mind, that would be interesting. I guess if she also still smelled delicious he might fall for her, and then make up flattering explanations or excuses for the behaviors he doesn't like in others. "She just moved here/she's lonely/she misses her mother/she will grow out of it/whatever" when he's not willing/able to extend that same grace to Jessica because he can read her mind and judges her on her thoughts.

And this isn't me badmouthing Edward; I'm sure it WOULD be genuinely hard NOT to judge people when you're hearing what they are thinking all the time. That's going to flavor your perceptions of people in a major way. But I do think it's not really a fair or accurate view of a person, because what we DO and SAY matters more than what we think. We can have bad thoughts and re-direct them. We can think something mean and choose not to say it. We can internally grumble but do the Right Thing anyway.

I also think having the first two people he spent any time with being the uncommonly "good" Carlisle (super compassion!) and Esme (unconditional love) probably didn't help Edward get a realistic picture of what most people's thoughts are like. Judging a teenager's developing brain against a centuries-old compassion-motivated vampire doctor isn't gonna be a fair comparison. "Carlisle would never think like that" sure but he's also been actively choosing to fight baser instincts for hundreds of years, and Jessica's a 17-year-old navigating social cliques and history exams. They are not the same.