Why there's so much hate against TWILIGHT

‘Before you, Bella, my life was like a moonless night. Very dark, but there were stars - points of light and reason... And then you shot across my sky like a meteor. Suddenly everything was on fire; there was brilliancy, there was beauty. When you were gone, when the meteor had fallen over the horizon, everything went black. Nothing had changed, but my eyes were blinded by the light. I couldn't see the stars anymore. And there was no more reason for anything.’ - pretty deep quote from Eclipse 

I’m going to start by clarifying that I do not think that Twilight is a great work of literature or even, to be honest, well-written at all (emphasised by the trainwreck which, sadly, is Breaking Dawn) and I am not a ‘Twilighter' who thinks that vampires are real/that I am going to marry Edward Cullen/ that I am Bella/ that I would even want to be Bella, or that the story isn’t full of plot-holes. I didn’t even realise that people like this existed, until I read on some forum that a fangirl cut herself whilst shaving her legs, and instead of clearing the blood up, wiped it on her mouth so she could pretend to be a vampire that had just been ‘feeding’. This scares me.

HOWEVER, I would describe myself as a (moderate) fan of the franchise and, as a moderate fan, I resent the hate that is channeled into it. Because I am a history student (and a n00b) I will now provide you with a few main reasons as to why I think the hatred for Twilight is both unjustified and ridiculous:

1. Most of the ‘haters’ used to think it was cool: I started out as a cynic of Twilight  and when it first came out it was the COOL thing to read (tbf this is in year 9 in an all-girls West-London private school) and then suddenly, everyone started hating it, and it was an embarrassment to say that you were a bit of a fan. I remember I shyly admitted that I quite liked the books to this girl she said, ‘Oh! You’ve gone down in my estimations!’ Aside from being absolutely devastating, I thought it was unfair because she probably liked the books too before it became socially unacceptable.
2. People who hate it often haven’t read it: If you’ve just read extracts of Twilight and think that it is bad, then all I would say is that, of course you think it’s bad - the writing is fan-fiction-y! The redeeming factor is that you get swept along with the story so well that you hardly even notice the anomalies and cringey extracts that make you squirm ("Don't be afraid,' I murmured. 'We belong together.' I was abruptly overwhelmed with the truth of my own words. This moment was so perfect, so right, there was no way to doubt it. His arms wrapped around me, holding me against him, summer and winter. It felt like every nerve ending in my body was a live wire. 'Forever,' he agreed, and then pulled us gently into the water.' - taken from the joke that is Breaking Dawn - I'd also like to point out that I didn't even have to go looking for a cringey bit, this was on the page that I opened at.
3. People compare it to Harry Potter: This is ridiculous - why are the two ever compared? It’d be like comparing Inception to Cinderella merely because they’re both films.
4. People don’t know what it’s about: People get all their information about Twilight off crap newspapers or badly written, one-sided blogs where the writer hasn’t done sufficient research and is merely ranting at you (self-deprecating jokes FTW). Sure on the surface Twilight looks like a pro-Christian, pro-abstinence, poorly written story about (as a great facebook group put it) a girl’s choice between necrophilia and beastiality, but it isn’t (really). Edward Cullen is also not a 108-year-old virgin who wants to control Bella, marry her when she is basically still a child and then impregnate her with his vampire spawn... Well he sort of is but it has all been taken out of context!

Personally I think that the allegations made against Twilight are, although quite hilarious, kind of unfair. Stephanie Meyer didn’t write it in order to get all the teenagers in the world to get married before having sex, she didn’t write it knowing that it would become a bestseller meaning that every single word used would be analyzed etc.

 I think that Twilight has been hyped up too much so that people no longer understand that, at the end of the day, it is just a teen romance novel that cheers you up a bit.