Fifty Shades of Twilight Legacy: The 9/11 Twilight Domino Effect
It’s hard to imagine an America today without reflecting on the impact and legacy of the terrorist attacks on Sept 11th, 2001. 9/11, a date that will soon infiltrate every aspect of American society, had the heaviest impact on those who still remember it as if it were yesterday. If any moment in American History changed the trajectory of journalism, international affairs, politics, and media it was September 11th.
Among the millions of Americans who were impacted that day was a person working in New York City. The aftermath of that day left citizens collectively emotional, anxious, and frightened. One New Yorker, Gerard Way, was motivated to create something that would “positively change the world, “ a world that at the time was filled with confusion and fear.
Gerad Way, who at the time was for Cartoon Network, sought to at the time form a band to create music that would resonate with adolescents and adults who shared similar emotions after this event. A feeling of hopelessness, angst, and sadness as the world we once knew became ominous and unfamiliar. There was something post-apocalyptic about that event and it went on to inspire the writing and musical sound of the band My Chemical Romance.
My Chemical Romance released their debut album I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love in 2002. It featured songs like “Skylines and Turnstiles,” inspired by the events of 9/11 and its catastrophic impact.
The group found success with the generation of emo-angsty teens and young adults who related to the complex emotions their music expressed. The group went on to also release tracks like “Helena” “Welcome to the Black Parade” and “Vampires Will Never Hurt You.”
Our post-9/11 social and political climate, as well as the pending Great Rescission that was only a few shy years away, created the perfect stage for this type of music to gain popularity and reach a broad audience. There’s this level of raw emotion and pain that their music encompassed unapologetically. It was therapeutic to the world, then and even now. It makes sense why their music has had so much impact. My Chemical Romances and musical contributions are still alive today. Since their debut they have had a multi-genre impact, inspiring emo rappers, pop stars, and a long list of alternative bands and artists. MCR’s impact is not only limited to music, but also to fashion, philosophy, and literature.
Among their millions of fans was a girl named Stephanie. It’s easy to imagine a young Stephanie listening to “Vampires Will Never Hurt You,” as she went to bed one night and hearing the lyrics “Can you Stake My Heart,’ in her dreams she saw in a misty green meadow Edward and Bella staring into each other’s eyes. From that moment, an MCR-induced dream led to the birth of Twilight. Or did it?
THE TWILIGHT SAGA
The first Twilight book was published in 2005, with the film adaptation released in 2008. Upon its growing popularity, we learned more about Stephanie Meyer and her inspiration for the book. Among many inspirations was My Chemical Romance, especially in the creation of Jacob’s character arch.
Meyer told Entertainment Weekly, “This really raw, uncontrolled emotion — where it’s not about some person who’s grown up and callused over and learned how to control things. It’s someone who’s feeling it for the first time and just wants to go out and blow things up. The song ‘Famous Last Words’ is a really romantic version of Jacob saying, ‘Okay, I’m putting myself out there, and you’re probably going to break me, but that doesn’t change the fact that I’m still going to make the offer.”
My Chemical Romance is also featured on Meyer’s Twilight playlist, besides other songs that inspired her book. Fans even wanted Gerard Way, the lead singer of MCR, to play Edward in the live-action adaptation.
The band caught wind of this and was even approached to write a song for the Twilight Saga: New Moon soundtrack. An offer they declined and instead wrote their loving tribute to Twilight, titled “Vampire Money.”
Gerard Way told NME, “Twilight? A lot of people around us were like, ‘Please, for the love of God, do this movie.’ But we’ve moved on.”
Regarding the impact My Chemical Romance had in the creation of Twilight, the band said, “Originally, what we did was take goth and put it with punk and turn it into something dangerous and sexy. Back then nobody in the normal punk world was wearing black clothes and eyeliner,” Way said. “We did it because we had one mission, to polarize, to irritate, to contaminate. But then that image gets romanticized and then it gets commoditized.”
The romanticization and commoditization of their dangerous, sexy, yet alluring punk-goth fusion aesthetic happened throughout the late 2000s and early 2010s.
One can argue that Bella is a representation of helplessness but hunger for hope and escape from an ever-impending bleak death sentiment held by many at the time. Like Bella, the reader and many people trying to understand our post-9/11 world, crave a supernatural escape and explanation. It is easy to imagine how alluring eternal life was to people who felt like death was occurring at any moment. From there, escapism becomes their coping mechanism.
Because of this, Twilight’s popularity wasn’t an isolated case, it was a catalyst to a lot of supernatural, twilight-like, vampire-wolf, Young Adult media becoming even more mainstream.
The Vampire Diaries aired on The CW in 2009. Like many CW shows, The Vampire Diaries was based on a book of the same title, but the two media were only related by name. You could argue that Gossip Girl existed for the same reason, The OC was a hit, The CW also wants a hit, The CW finds a Young Adult novel with a similar plot to the hit show, and The CW makes a Young Adult novel a show, but the show is nothing like the Young Adult novel.
Prior to Twilight and The Vampire Diaries, popular supernatural media consisted of different elements. Yes, we had Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Charmed, but the Vampire and supernatural love interest were framed as the bad guy and the apple you should never be tempted to bite. Also, the female leads were the strong superheroes trying to rid evil from the world with the help of the supernatural power they also have.
This is what separates Twilight and its offspring apart from its predecessors. Suddenly we wanted to bite the apple because it must be better than our bleak human reality and the horrific world we live in. Suddenly vampires weren’t evil, but alluring, easy to romanticize and commodify.
Apart from The Vampire Diaries, the extent of supernatural teen media didn’t stop there. True Blood was released in 2008, the same year as the Twilight films, followed by The Vampire Diaries in 2009, and Teen Wolf was released in 2011, afterwards, we get spin-offs like The Originals, then later movies like A Werewolf Boy (2012) and Fallen (2016).
Twilight’s dystopian, ominous allure, which embodied the brooding angst that the underbelly of our post-9/11 world was fostering, can also be credited for the popularity of The Hunger Games and other Dystopian teen media. That mixed with the Great Recession made the perfect storm. Twilight can be credited for its popularity, but not its creation.
There is something to be said about “Team Edward” or “Team Jacob” infiltrating every sector of our society to the point that by 2010, Twilight was able to escape fans and nonfans alike. The popularity of this type of media was not only limited to US boards, like our economy, US media is subjected to globalization.
EXO WOLF
In 2012, the Korean film A Werewolf Boy hit the theaters just in time to rival Twilight Breaking Dawn Part 2. Because even though the Twilight Saga was coming to an end, South Korea was only getting started.
The Hollywood Reporter said, “SEOUL — Despite the arrival of Twilight: Breaking Dawn — Part 2, South Koreans are hot for a teenage werewolf romp of their own. A Werewolf Boy has become the most-watched homegrown romance of all time with over 6.5 million admissions as of Monday, and the craze has prompted the release of a new version with an alternate ending.
Jo Sung-hee’s fantasy film, which revolves around a romance between a young girl (Park Bo-young) and a feral yet devoted “wolf boy” (Song Joong-ki), topped the Korean box office for four consecutive weeks from Oct. 31 to Nov. 28, keeping the Hollywood vampire saga — which has been seen by 2.39 million by now — at number two for two straight weeks after its release in the country on Nov. 15.”
It’s fair to say that the Twilight genre was popular in South Korea too.
In 2012 SM Entertainment debuted their new boy group EXO with the single “MAMA.” The group’s lure was that they were alien boys from the EXO Planet that not only had superpowers but could sing and dance too.
But by 2013, this would all change. With their new single “Wolf” they abandoned their alien superpower roots and became werewolf school boys because it’s clear what the people really want.
This concept continued with their next single “Growl,” in which the group saw immense national and international success. They also released two drama versions, and episodic music videos further expanded their lure.
By 2014, the group would abandon this concept, as we all moved on from the Twilight craze to other interests.
Just as Gerad Way predicted, the world “romanized and commodified their sexy yet dangerous vampire-ish image.”
FIFTY SHADES OF GREY
Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L. James is an erotic romance novel published in 2011. It follows the sexual relationship between a recent college graduate Anastasia Steele, and a young business magnate, Christian Grey. It is often categorized in the dark romance genre because of its questionable depiction of BDSM and other problematic themes that I will not touch on in the video.
But how is this even related to the 9/11 Twilight domino effect? E. L. James wrote a Twilight fan fiction titled “The Master of the Universe,” which was the plot of Fifty Shades of Grey but featuring the Twilight cast. It was published under the fan fic pen name “Snowqueen Icedragon.” And well “Snowqueen Icedragon” received hate because of her use of the Twilight characters in a sexually explicit fashion. Because of the hate, James rewrote the book as an original work and thus created the Fifty Shades of Grey Trilogy.
The 9/11 Twilight Domio Effect demonstrates how small our world is. Nothing exists in a bubble, despite how much people like to believe. We are forever communicating with our world and historical events. Even looking at a media artifact like Twilight can tell us so much about our society.