Doin’ the Creep is Not Heroic

Here’s the question for this week, gang, and it makes me tear out my hair that I should even have to ask it, but: why do we keep romanticising creepiness and abuse?

There is nothing fun about being stalked. Anyone who has had even a breath of the experience can tell you that. We are taught to fear this, taught to be wary of our surroundings, taught to travel in groups at night and be altogether afraid of the wholly negative species that is creepy men. And yet we are also taught, through the media and fiction, that said creepers are a thing we should idolise.

I try not to mention Twilight every time I find a gripe about young adults and the media, but it just seems to be the base example for so many things that are wrong, wrong and wrong with a garnish of wrong. We all know the story to death by now, surely, but if you don’t, let me fill you in on one of the key beginning points of our hero and heroine’s glorious relationship: Edward breaks into Bella’s house and watches her sleep.

His major source of angst throughout the series is also the fact that Bella smells oh so tasty, and he must control his bloodlust when he’s around her. Aww, isn’t that sweet? He’s a biological-fluid-drinking immortal monster, but he’ll restrain his primal urges because he loves her. Admirable on one level, a metaphor for how all men just want to bang every woman they see and those that resist the urge are gentlemen on another, and overall, the basic and rather overlooked principle that he wants to kill and eat his girlfriend.

But WHY

Fanfic: A Shady Area

Credit to Kate Beaton

You know fanfiction. You’ve heard it in whispers from the grimier corners of the internet and you’ve heard that it’s poorly written, explicit sludge hatched together by greasy nerds and manic fangirls frothing at the mouth.

I humbly beg to differ.

Fanfiction is often shot down as being the uninspired work of slimy fangirls, but can we talk about the amazing fact that it even exists? No one is paid or asked to write it, it’s just created for the love of it as a tribute to the impact the original work had on its audience. Someone somewhere watches or reads something and it sticks in their brain and stirs into their imagination, switching on a light that was not there before and setting the creative process in motion.

It’s the ultimate compliment to the creator—one day, hopefully, I shall be published, and I’ll lie awake at night wondering of somewhere in the world my characters and story are rolling around in a reader’s mind, soon to come out again in a piece of creative expression.