This is the Skin of a Killer, Bella: Dating in St Andrews

By Victoria Castro

Is St Andrews Scotland’s Forks? Thanks to our (mostly) incredible weather and the surprising presence of successful twenty-year-olds and young entrepreneurs, the parallels are there. If a St Andrews student speaks as if they have lived several different lives while shining under blue sunlight, it might just be that they are a Scottish Cullen.

Credits: The Sweet Savory Life

Until very recently, I was one of those people who had never seen Twilight. Sure, I knew some of the puns (glitter, I basically only knew about the glitter), and even knew of that Twilight-Ellen DeGeneres theory floating around, but I had neither watched the movies nor read the books. It seems like a whole feat, I’m aware — for the weirdest reasons, but a feat nonetheless. Twilight has a very particular fame, you see?

So, as the excitement of my flatmates grew at the possibility of introducing me to such an amazing  franchise, we decided to watch the first one on a fateful Sunday. I understood disturbingly fast where this particular fame stemmed from. To capture the atmosphere, the evening finished with one of my flatmates cackling evilly (she just really likes Twilight, I fear), another exploiting the vampire-induced psychosis to finish her Russian homework while scaring me with the prospect of watching the second movie, and me with my face in my hands. Now I live with the fear that one of my tutorial classmates might be a Cullen in disguise.

Surprise! We watched the second one two weeks later and I had the terrible realisation that Twilight humour is my kind of humour… “Loca”.

“This is the skin of a killer, Bella,” is, for some reason that truly evades my understanding, among my favourite lines from the movies. It is an infamous quote (I’m sure that much is obvious), perhaps for its ridiculousness, perhaps for the slightly grotesque way a supposedly serious moment is marked by glittery skin and long sighs. Whatever the reason, Bella heard the same quote that makes most of us either grimace or laugh out loud, and still chose to enter a slightly daunting relationship with said killer. This is not a spoiler, I trust — there truly is no suspense in the saga, with how a minimally critical audience member will likely be able to simply guess just about every scene happening next (except the random ones, which there are plenty of).

Credit: Pinterest 

My issue with Twilight — an admittedly insane sentence, because why am I giving it this much thought when I should be working on my deadlines? — is not the script quality, but the way it romanticises red flags (also known as the skins of killers).

The problem with modern romance is not the romance part in and of itself — ultimately, readers are free to read the genre that they want, and this is an agency we must protect — but that modern novels have come to romanticise things that would be creepy, or even downright dangerous, in any other situation. Take Edward and his killer-skin as an example. The bad boy tropes are amusing to read, I admit, but there is a wild difference between behaving questionably in between lectures and blatantly admitting you are a killer without a single ounce of guilt (shining under the studio lights in a flowery set, while at it). I will defend my friend’s rights and wrongs, but this one is a specific kind of wrong that I would potentially call the police over.

The bottom line is: read what you want, enjoy what you read, but do not try to emulate it — and for the lovely fiction writers seeing this, maybe let’s cut down on the psycho killers turned suspicious golden retrievers as love interests in YA.

While it remains to be seen whether I will watch the next movie in the Twilight saga (a blatant lie, I must see this through now), I do close this draft surprisingly content with my decision-making capacities and little romantic life. No matter how badly life can go, at least I’m not Bella. For all the St Andrews Bellas out there: no matter how successful our particular brand of Cullens are, being able to stop a car with one hand is not a good look. It’s actually pretty concerning. Choosing safety and collecting cats well into adulthood is an option.

As a parting message: if my flatmates are reading this… Thank you for the burst of inspiration. Movie night this weekend?