Ten years ago this fall, children’s author Suzanne Collins published The Hunger Games, a creepy, insidious story about a dystopian government that forces children to fight in a gladiatorial death match and broadcasts the whole thing on TV. And that book — and its two follow-up sequels, 2009’s Catching Fire and 2010’s Mockingjay — became a phenomenon.

The Hunger Games books were giant best-sellers, and the movie adaptations were blockbusters. Together, the two series kicked off the YA dystopian boom of the late 2000s. They became a pop culture shorthand for stories of inequality and scarcity. They created slogans that were used in actual protest movements. They helped launch Jennifer Lawrence to megastardom.

Ten years out from the Hunger Games phenomenon, it’s time to look back and reevaluate. To that end, Vox culture writers Constance Grady, Aja Romano, and Alex Abad-Santos joined managing editor Eleanor Barkhorn and critic at large Emily VanDerWerff to talk the whole thing through. Does this franchise live up to the hype? Is it actually good, or was it all talk? And at the end of the day, are we Team Peeta or Team Gale?

Here’s what The Hunger Games does really well

Constance: I still remember the exact moment The Hunger Games got me.

When I started reading the first book, I didn’t like it all that much. I thought the premise of children being forced to murder each other on a reality TV show sounded gross and trashy and exploitative, and I thought Suzanne Collins’s sentences were clunky and inelegant.

And because I didn’t respect the book, I was skimming as I read, so I missed all the telling details that deepened Katniss’s characterization in the first few pages, like the scene where she befriends a wildcat and you think she’s going to pick up an adorable animal companion, and instead she chases it away with stones because it’s scaring away the game. That passage tells us an enormous amount about the brutal pragmatism and unlikability that makes Katniss such a specific and unusual protagonist, and I skipped right over it the first time I read the book because I didn’t care to look for it.

Here’s what got me: Katniss had reached the Capitol and was going through her press interviews, and I was getting bored and thinking about maybe putting the book down. Then Peeta took the stage and gave his interview, and announced that he was in love with Katniss. “Oh,” I thought. “That’s a fun and tropey little love story. I’m a sucker for star-crossed lovers. This book is still trashy, but I’ll keep reading for a bit.”

Then I turned the page and realized that the love story was a tactic, that it was designed to make the audience within the book, watching the Hunger Games on TV, react exactly the same way that I, reading the book, reacted: to make them say, “Oh, how sweet,” and pay attention for a minute longer.

For me, this is the genius of The Hunger Games: It’s able to make me incredibly aware of my own emotional reactions to storytelling tropes, and then it creates enough distance that I can interrogate my reactions. Whom do I consider worthy of my attention? What violence truly hurts me, and what violence do I ignore? What makes a person’s death a tragedy? The Hunger Games creates exactly the state of mind I need to think those issues through.

And it always leaves me hyperaware that I’m not Katniss, not even close. I’m in the Capitol. I have to respect the guts of a book willing to make that fact so clear.

Does The Hunger Games work as a way of thinking through big questions for you, or does it still feel a little trashy or overwrought? And if it got you, how did it get you?

Aja: The moment that got me, or maybe the series of moments, was absolutely the way that Cinna, Katniss’s image consultant, weaponized her dresses throughout the start of the competition. I think for me — as someone who is really not typically into dystopia and high fantasy, because the language and codes of those stories often feel very removed from present-day reality — the localizing ideas in The Hunger Games really started to come through for me in those moments. They conveyed that this is a story about people consciously manipulating their public images and using fashion as a mode of survival in a society that has become entirely image-obsessed. It all felt very concrete, in ways that science fiction usually doesn’t for me.

This series definitely does feel, if not exactly trashy, then like a series whose carefully orchestrated ideas don’t ever quite come together fully or smoothly. I think one reason for that is that The Hunger Games is a YA series, so Collins also has to include a proverbial love triangle. I think another reason is that her action scenes and the plot by which we watch contestants fall to the Games can feel plodding and procedural, and far-fetched in the moments of climax.

But I also think there’s enough naturalism within the Battle Royale scenario that it balances out the robot birds and terrifying remote-controlled robot wolves. I think Collins took great care to make the Capitol especially feel like it could be any current city, rather than something very stylized and futuristic. And that impression of the city as this vapid but very real place, where the people who succeed have learned to manipulate its superficiality, has stuck with me ever since.

I also think Katniss is Collins’s greatest weapon: You really believe this girl is a determined strategist who can manipulate and bluff her way to victory in the final moments of the first book, and I think the faith she earns from readers in book one helps us navigate the many weaker moments in the rest of the series. Katniss keeps the whole thing grounded.

Alex: I think the clever genius of the trilogy is that it’s Battle Royale, but you actually care about the kids in it. Battle Royale did well to establish a dystopian future where adults control the youth through the annual Battle Royale. And while it’s a bloody concept and I was horrified when they died, I don’t think I really cared about or connected with the kids in Battle Royale the way I did with the kids in The Hunger Games.

That’s the genius of Collins: You get really invested in the characters to the point where you root for certain ones to live and root for certain ones to die. Like, Clove was a nasty piece of work, and I felt a dark relief and satisfaction when Thresh not only concussed her to death but did so to save Katniss and avenge Rue. Collins can also turn that feeling inside out and make you root for the charismatic Finnick or the damaged but loyal Johanna.

Collins taps into a kind of wish fulfillment — that you could imagine yourself winning the Games and be the exception. In reality, I would probably be most like Glimmer and die when Katniss drops a bunch of bees on my bitchy head. But that doesn’t stop me from thinking I could win it all, and somehow avoid the life of prostitution or drug abuse that awaits winners.

She makes the horrific concept of the Games alluring, which is the fantastic, insidious conceit when you realize that’s the entire point.

Is the Hunger Games discourse overhyped?

Eleanor: I am on record as being a bit of a Hunger Games hater. But as I was reading what Constance, Aja, and Alex wrote above, I started to question why. Katniss is a really compelling character! Collins does do a really nice job of not letting the reader off the hook! The series is a canny subversion of the love triangle trope!

And then I realized — what bugs me about The Hunger Games is not really the series itself; it’s the entire ponderous, reductive discourse it launched. For a while there, everyone had a theory on how The Hunger Games applied to post-recession America. Panem’s indulgent, out-of-touch Capitol was exactly like indulgent, out-of-touch Washington, DC! Also London. The nadir came when Dan from Gossip Girl called The Hunger Games a metaphor for Occupy Wall Street.

Even now, a decade later, the phrase “Hunger Games” is regularly used as a shorthand for any situation where there’s competition for resources. (Just this year: The Washington Post called DC’s school lottery “an academic Hunger Games,” CNN referred to Amazon’s HQ2 quest as “the Hunger Games,” and Stephen Colbert brought back his Julius Flickerman character to compare the revolving door of President Trump’s Cabinet to the Hunger Games.)

I know it’s not completely fair to judge a franchise for the way people talk about it. It’s like hating a band because its fans are annoying (and I love Dave Matthews Band — or at least “Crash Into Me”). But all the lazy takes have made me wonder if, in fact, The Hunger Games was also lazy — a simplistic critique of economic equality masquerading as something deep.

What do you think? Is The Hunger Games’ critique of contemporary media and capitalism useful? And what do we do when the conversation around a franchise becomes bigger than the franchise itself?

Emily: I think it’s interesting to note that The Hunger Games sort of accidentally gave us a way to talk about something people could feel intuitively but struggled to put into words — namely, a growing income gap between the haves and have-nots, and an ever-sharpening divide between cities and rural areas.

I don’t know how much of this Collins intended. After all, any good dystopia needs a significant gap between those who have power and money and those who do not. But these sorts of pop culture works go supernova, as The Hunger Games did for a brief time, because they find a way to express the things we’re worried about in our own world via the safe confines of storytelling. Or, put another way, it became easier to understand real life as an extension of The Hunger Games than it was to understand The Hunger Games as an extension of real life. (Famously, Collins conceived of the book when channel-flipping between Iraq War footage and reality shows.)

I suspect that the way the stories became conversational shorthand is due to how canny Collins is about the exact thing those conversations rarely touched on: television production. The Hunger Games is shot through with the knowledge of somebody who used to work in the TV industry, and Collins is always careful to ground the story Katniss is trying to sell within the larger stories and strategies that everybody around her is plugging away at. And it understands how pop culture is used to prop up all aspects of the social order, even the horrible, unjust ones. This is why, for me, the second book is the most frustrating: In its desire to plunge the characters back into the Hunger Games arena, it loses sight of these larger satirical devices.

But it’s also why I love Mockingjay best of the three books. (Yes. I know.) It’s a slog, but an intentional one, and as it rolls toward its preordained conclusion, Collins gets at something about how even the least predictable narrative twists and turns have a sort of glum inevitability to them. I don’t think it’s a particularly great book in the way the first one is, but it’s a book that tries so much more than you would ever expect. Collins is really, really good at having horror slide right by you in the middle of a sentence or two, a style that took a while to gel for me but that I eventually really got into. She’s probably not a strong enough prose stylist to make the final turns hit as hard as they could have, but that weakness weirdly ends up being an advantage.

However, it’s also impossible to talk about why The Hunger Games blew up without talking about a different woman who was important in its rise to fame: Jennifer Lawrence, the first genuine movie star minted in the 2010s and someone whose career has extended past this particular franchise. It might be my least favorite of the three books, but Catching Fire was a terrifically entertaining film, precisely for the reasons that it sort of dragged on the page. (In movie form, it almost seemed a snide critique of franchise filmmaking!) How do the movies compare to the books for all of you?

The Hunger Games is the rare franchise where both books and movies have their partisans

Aja: Before we jump to J-Law, I want to add one more thing about the real-life economics that surrounded The Hunger Games. I think it’s particularly fascinating that a book series whose resistance movement was so frequently compared to Occupy Wall Street spawned a movie franchise that yielded absolutely straight-faced marketing tie-ins that aligned so unironically with the brazen capitalism of the Capitol that they caused fan protests in response.

These included an entire “Capitol Couture” line of ready-to-wear fashion; a line of Cover Girl makeup that created a different “look” to accompany each of the starving and marginalized districts of Panem, including a special Capitol line; a pink archer’s bow Hasbro toy aimed at young girls, for those moments when you want to express your girlish charm while hunting wildlife to feed your starving family; and two food-related products: a partnership with Subway and upscale Hunger Games chocolate.

The level of bafflement these marketing campaigns produced, inviting queries about whether they were somehow being intentionally ironic (they weren’t), was exactly the portrait of bleak nihilism that made Mockingjay so devastatingly fitting as a series ending. (I know! But I agree with Emily!) They blithely, consciously missed the entire point of the series in a way the series itself anticipated — not to mention a way that also seems like the perfect presaging of the post-ironic, post-dystopian reality we have entered since.

And that constant sense of ironic self-awareness is also why the movie franchise works so well — better than the books, for me. Again, that starts with Katniss.

Before she was cast, I had seen and loved Lawrence for her devastating performance in Winter’s Bone, where she basically plays a proto-Katniss. So I was constantly marveling at the way the media completely ignored how perfectly this previous breakout role had positioned her to play Katniss, and instead dissected her ability to play the part solely based on her weight, her blondness, her attitude, her public persona. (Meanwhile, critiques that fans made about how Katniss in the books is somewhat coded as a person of color were essentially overlooked.) Once again, the series had already anticipated this: The media’s dismissal of Lawrence’s abilities based on superficial reasons directly played into how effective she was in the role, exactly like Katniss herself.

Honestly, despite how frequently The Hunger Games fumbled its plot points in execution, Collins’s deep meta-awareness of society as a high-concept production, and the way she built those reminders into the books — literally from the ground up; remember the hidden cameras buried in the ground all around the arena? — meant that once the machine of filmmaking got underway, all those elements just kept paying dividends.

How about that J-Law!

Constance: Jennifer Lawrence’s casting, for me, epitomizes both the best and the worst of the movie adaptations, and the way they smoothed out so much of what was spiky and unpleasant in the books. Unlike Aja and Emily, I’m more a book partisan than a movie partisan for this franchise — with the exception of Catching Fire, which I agree is a terrific movie and a so-so book — but Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss is both everything I love about the movies and everything I wish they had done differently.

Book Katniss is very pointedly a child. She’s starving to death, she’s potentially a person of color (there’s a popular fan theory that she’s meant to be read as a person of Native descent), and after she’s caught in an explosion in the first Hunger Games, she becomes hard of hearing.

Movie Katniss is a beautiful, glowing young woman who is the picture of health, and who is emphatically white. (Notably, the studio refused to consider any nonwhite actresses when casting Katniss.) The things that make Katniss especially vulnerable in the books — her childishness, her lack of nourishment, her nonwhiteness, her disability — just don’t exist in the movies. That makes it harder to be grossed out when you see her in the arena, because you don’t really feel that she’s a child, or that the arena is permanently and physically changing her, or that she’s at the mercy of a bunch of well-nourished rich white kids.

And in general, these movies tend to shy away from any exploration of power that is more nuanced than “some people have a lot of money and other people don’t.” They take a certain pleasure in spectacle, and they’re never quite able to distance themselves from that pleasure so that the audience can interrogate it, the way Collins distances her readers from the spectacle in the books.

The movies are just never willing to let Panem feel as gross as it feels in the books. They want us to enjoy watching Katniss be beautiful and badass without feeling like we are exploiting her, and they want us to experience Panem’s horror on an individual level (it is mean to these particular people, and that is bad because we like them) rather than on a systemic level (it is a system designed to withhold power from these particular groups of people, which makes it much like our own).

But having said all that: Jennifer Lawrence is absolutely extraordinary as Katniss. She’s able to be callous and withholding to everyone around her and also completely vulnerable to the camera, so that we always understand exactly how damaged Katniss is and why, and we also see why the people around her might not. The choices she makes as an actress do a lot of work pushing back against the movies’ tendency to make Katniss into a blank-faced action hero (“Please remember that after Katniss shoots a bow and kills someone, her face cannot be badass,” she told director Gary Ross when she was in auditions), and she has the kind of unforced charisma that makes it easy to understand why Katniss is such a valuable propaganda tool.

These movies might focus more on individual trauma than on systemic oppression, but Lawrence’s performance is so grounded and so emotionally authentic that Katniss’s trauma is always present and incredibly visceral.

Alex: I don’t think we can talk about casting without talking about the man I like to call “Potato Finnick.” Like she did with Katniss, Collins does a great job of describing the main characters (aside from Primrose, whom I literally cannot remember anything about) in a way that not only sticks in your head but also lets your imagination work. With Finnick, I was picturing vintage Jude Law or a young Ryan Gosling or Jesse Williams as the charismatic fisher prince from District 4.

But alas, we got none of those. Yes, I understand some of those dream castings are impossible without a time machine, but I was hoping we’d get someone memorable enough to rival those images in my head.

And instead we got … well … can you name the actor who plays Finnick (without Googling)?

How well did the casting department do when it comes to the rest of the characters? I cannot be the only one who is still holding out hope for a spinoff for Jena Malone’s Johanna Mason. I refuse to believe it.

Emily: Excuse me, Alex, but I absolutely remember the name of Sam Claflin. Now, that’s almost certainly just because I have stupidly trained my brain to remember the names of actors, and not because I’ve just loved him in his post-Hunger Games roles, like “the guy in that one romantic movie also starring Emilia Clarke.” But I do remember his name! (I’m also not really the person to consult on this, but I think he’s a very handsome fella.)

I go back and forth on the movies. The first is a wonderful announcement of a star arriving onscreen (to think that I initially thought Emily Browning should star! Please absolve me of my sins!), but Ross is a clunky action director, and he never finds a way to capture the over-the-top lavishness of what the Capitol is supposed to represent.

The second is the one where everything clicks. Francis Lawrence (no relation to Jennifer) is a stronger action director; the ways the story critiques existing power structures fits more easily into typical Hollywood storytelling tropes; and Jennifer Lawrence gives one of her best performances (arguably better than the one in 2012’s Silver Linings Playbook that won her an Oscar). Plus, the last 20 minutes or so create this headlong rush toward whatever the next movie is going to be, a sense that the world is coming apart at the seams and real change is possible.

The problem, of course, is that Collins’s cynicism — in which all new bosses become the old boss, because the channels that power has carved in our society are so very deep and hard to fill in — is precisely the wrong kind of cynicism to try to depict in a Hollywood film.

Both Mockingjay movies are … fine, but their attempts to adapt the book mostly straightforwardly reveal how the movies never quite found a way to build a larger political philosophy of their own universe. That was fine in the first two films, where Katniss is only slowly getting her education, but the last two films need to be about Katniss realizing how little will actually change due to her actions. She gets to be alive. That’s about it.

It’s not that Hollywood movies, and even Hollywood blockbusters, can’t handle a darkly cynical tone. But it’s much harder to tell cynical, big-budget stories that are, in essence, about how this sort of storytelling creates easily digestible tales of heroes and villains that ignore how the rich and powerful will always be rich and powerful, and if you somehow join them, your interests will suddenly shift, unless you are an incredibly strong-willed person. And even then …

Hollywood struggles to tell stories like this because Hollywood hates to think about being part of the problem. The Hunger Games worked as a storytelling skeleton when its haves and have-nots were abstract depictions of some other world’s problems. But, paradoxically, the closer the series got to depicting problems in our world, the more Hollywood seemed afraid of implicating itself.

Every YA franchise has to have a ship war

Constance: While we’re dealing with casting, I think one of the issues that really hobbled the movies is that none of the young male cast is anywhere near Lawrence’s level. I think that’s one of the reasons the love triangle tends to get dismissed as silly YA nonsense: No offense to Liam Hemsworth as Gale or Josh Hutcherson as Peeta, but neither of them is at Jennifer Lawrence’s level of charisma. So whenever you see her onscreen with one of them, it’s like you’re watching a lioness casually swat around a field mouse. There’s just no comparison.

But I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for the love triangle, in part because it was my way into the franchise to begin with, and in part because I think it’s actually a really effective tool for character exploration. Whatever boy Katniss is leaning toward at a given moment tells us an enormous amount about what she thinks of herself at any given time, and her complete inability to express what she feels to either one of them is one of her more heartbreaking traits.

In particular, I’ve always appreciated that Peeta, whose primary characteristics all code as feminine, gets to be the romantic male lead in this grim and gritty action franchise: He’s the empathetic one who is a good communicator and a good cook and an artist, basically. Those are all valuable traits that this franchise respects, and they are all absolutely what would normally be assigned to “the girlfriend” in a male-led franchise.

Or maybe I just identify with Peeta because I too love bread and I too would die for Katniss. Either way.

What about you: Team Peeta or Team Gale? Or (dark horse) Team Johanna? (Gotta agree with Alex, I would absolutely watch a Johanna spinoff.)

Alex: Gale blew up Katniss’s sister. How could anyone be Team Gale? Peeta may be a little needy, and his main survival skill is painting himself as a rock, but Gale is a fuckboy. Gale made Katniss’s life more difficult with each action he took.

Like, could you imagine being Katniss and outlasting all your fellow teenage murderers, getting stung by mutated bees, watching your childhood friend die, and then having to deal with Gale claiming you’re not spending enough time with him and that his feelings are hurt?

Thank u, next.

And then when you go back into the Hunger Games, he’s out there acting foolish and decides he wants to be the man? And because he’s a fantastic idiot, he bombs your little sister, a.k.a. the entire reason you’re in the Games?

To be honest, I’m not into Peeta and Katniss that much either, but the idea of those two being together is still better than Katniss being with Gale. Even if the real relationship should have been Peeta and Finnick forever.

Eleanor: Eh, this is another reminder why I didn’t love this series: The love triangle did not do it for me at all. Constance, I read your explanation of how it’s a great tool for character explanation, and I get it on an intellectual level. But on a heart level, I just don’t care! Love triangles are like jokes: If you have to explain them, something went wrong.

So I am neither Team Peeta nor Team Gale. I don’t care about either of them. Team Katniss. Team “don’t do a love triangle unless you’re really going to commit to it.”

Emily: I guess if forced to decide, I am Team Peeta because I like that Katniss goes for someone who can maybe sort of begin to understand her trauma, rather than someone more exciting. But in both the books and movies, I always liked that idea more in theory than execution.

I get what everybody involved was going for, but also, I’m the kind of sadist who enjoys how badly Collins tries to make Team Gale fans feel bad about their life choices throughout the end of Mockingjay. “Yes!” I laugh, from atop my tower of mild Peeta affection. “Suffer for your decisions!”

But, really, what I wanted was for Haymitch and/or Effie to find love. Maybe together? Why not!

Aja: Okay, okay, I stand ready to be mock(ingjay)ed for all my life choices, but hear me out. You know all the things that Constance very rightly points out above about how Collins uses the love triangle to posit two different versions of who Katniss could be? That kind of thematic complexity is usually what I live for and appreciate most about good romances, and especially well-done love triangles. But here, it doesn’t work for me at all. And not just because I actually thought Gale was a pretty good romantic foil for Katniss for most of the series (sue me), but because I also thought, for most of the series, that his philosophical role in the rebellion was also a pretty good foil for Collins’s political machinations.

I felt then and still feel now that Gale made some pretty valid points about the need for radical systemic disruption coming from outside the system, and seeing the ham-fisted way Collins not only exploded the ship (sorry) but made Gale himself the bearer of a needlessly ironic, overly Shakespearean moral about how violent protest is an inherently immoral slippery slope and “both sides made some bad points” was so deeply infuriating to me.

Like many people, in my case perhaps because I grew up around guns and soldiers, I honestly didn’t realize that I was apparently supposed to be growing more and more wary of Gale’s militant radicalization until the climax. But I was also reading The Hunger Games alongside Derrick Jensen’s critiques of the way violence is used as a socioeconomic tool. Jensen’s observation that “violence done by those lower on the [social] hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims” made a really strong impression on me, including shoring up my skepticism of the moralization happening in the last book.

To me, although Collins’s use of the love triangle as an expression of her moral philosophies was an important literary tool that I respect, and although I especially appreciate what she did in terms of subverting gender norms with Peeta, I think it ultimately failed completely.

Collins ultimately took a high-handed approach to themes that she had built up with far greater complexity until that point — themes like the difficulty of resisting an oppressive system without resorting to the tactics of the oppressor, and the way the socioeconomic consequences of that resistance so often fall upon the most vulnerable members of society. But then it turned out that she’d built up all those themes partly in order to paint radical resistance in the absolute worst light possible — and she mapped each of her ships onto the “right” and the “wrong” side of that facile political discourse. No matter what you think of Gale, he deserved better.

Am I suggesting The Hunger Games itself should have been more radical? Not exactly, but I think everyone who was struggling then and now to #resist in an increasingly violent political age also deserved a more nuanced, or at least less condescending, take on the use of violence as a tool for social change. Maybe not full-on Braveheart, but at least a little more The Purge.

Ten years ago this month, the first Twilight movie sparkled broodily into movie theaters. By then, the four-volume book series had already been published in full, made the best-seller lists several times over, and was safely established as a cult phenomenon for its target demographic of teen girls — but with that first movie, Twilight became mainstream.

In the fall of 2008, America at large was introduced to the story of Bella Swan, teenage everygirl, and her fraught, star-crossed love for glitter-streaked vampire Edward Cullen. Twilight introduced us to Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson, and it continued the Harry Potter tradition of the YA book-to-movie franchise as a dominant box office force.

It also became a cultural flashpoint. Think piece after think piece by turn celebrated Twilight’s cultural dominance, mocked its shimmery vampire mythology, and feared the effects that romanticizing its tortured, dysfunctional love story might have on its teen readers. In 2008, Twilight was adored, but it was also hated, feared, and mocked.

Here in 2018, we finally have room to get a little perspective on the whole thing. In celebration of the 10-year anniversary of the first Twilight movie, Vox culture writers Constance Grady, Alex Abad-Santos, and Aja Romano joined forces with deputy managing editor Eleanor Barkhorn to look back at the unlife and legacy of the Twilight phenomenon.

Constance: When the first Twilight movie came out in 2008, I was 19, and I was positive that the entire franchise was a blight on the pop culture landscape. Before the movie even came out, I made up my mind about it. I read the posts about how the Edward-Bella love story ticked all the boxes of an abusive relationship; I shook my head over Stephenie Meyer’s bland, boring sentences; I howled over the whole concept of everything that happened in Breaking Dawn. (He chews the baby out of her uterus!)

But I was also completely fascinated by the franchise. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I picked up the first book to see what the fuss was all about, and even though I thought the love story was creepy and the prose was blah and absolutely nothing happened until about three-quarters of the way through the book beyond some vampire baseball (vampire baseball!), I kept turning those pages. I was compelled. I couldn’t help myself.

I hate-read every Breaking Dawn review, and every review of the movie. I developed opinions on Kristen Stewart (bit her lip too much) and Robert Pattinson (I appreciated his palpable hatred of the franchise). I spent so much emotional energy thinking about the whole Twilight thing that I was, for all intents and purposes, a fan. I was just a fan who hated it.

Looking back 10 years later, I don’t think I was necessarily wrong about most of the things I disliked about the franchise then. Bella and Edward’s relationship does have some disturbing power dynamics (which we’ll get into in a bit). Myer’s prose is pretty bland. The structure of the plot is bananas. (I was wrong about Kristen Stewart, though, and the way she was penalized for sometimes seeming mildly uncomfortable with the Twilight phenomenon while Pattinson was lauded for his outright hatred of it says a lot about gender politics circa 2008.)

But I also think that I clearly found Twilight really compelling when I was 19, and I was mad about that, because smart girls weren’t supposed to like books and movies like Twilight. There’s a weird, creepy eroticism to those books that is calibrated to speak precisely to the sexual and romantic fantasies of teenage girls, and I was a teenage girl. It did speak to me. And that pissed me off.

There are few pop cultural products that our society likes to shit on more than the pop culture created for teenage girls, and Twilight circa 2008 was the pinnacle of that phenomenon. This was a franchise that was built for teen girls, marketed to teen girls, and loved by teen girls, and because of that, it became accepted common knowledge that all correct-thinking people could only despise and revile it. So when I look back 10 years later, I find it difficult to untangle my hatred of Twilight from my own internalized misogyny, and from my profound and at the time unexamined belief that anything made for teenage girls must inherently be less-than.

How did you feel about Twilight back in 2008? Has it changed for you since then?

Eleanor: I was 24 when the first movie came out, and I think being just past teenagehood made all the difference for me. I loved the movie — fully, earnestly, without irony, without reservations. I loved the moody Pacific Northwest setting. I loved the longing glances. I loved the vampire baseball! (But then I am a sucker for the “characters with superpowers show off their superpowers” scene that these movies always tend to have. Ask me how I felt watching Tobey Maguire leap from Queens rooftop to Queens rooftop in the 2002 Spider-Man.)

I had spent my teenage years full of feelings, full of angst, full of deep, painful crushes on mysterious boys. And I’d mostly felt embarrassed by those feelings. I wanted to be calm, detached — a Cool Girl, to reference Gone Girl, another best-selling book turned hit movie. Seeing Bella feel so many of the things I’d felt was tremendously validating. I was normal! I’m okay, you’re okay, etc.

The fact that I watched the movie at 24 instead of 19 also meant that Twilight inspired a fair amount of nostalgia for me. By my mid-20s, I was no longer having those intense feelings anymore. I was turning into a much more practical, grounded person — realizing that I should be looking for stability, kindness, and shared values in the men I dated, rather than hotness or mysteriousness.

This was a necessary step in my maturation as a human being. (I’m very glad to be married to my kind, stable husband, whom I met at church, rather than the hot guy in my algebra class who sometimes showered me with attention and sometimes ignored me.) But it came with a sense of loss — intense teenage feelings have a particular joy and drama to them.

Twilight came at just the right moment for me to be a fan: I was close enough to my teenage years to appreciate the validation of my feelings, but far enough away that I could appreciate, rather than be embarrassed by, the romanticization of those feelings.

And that’s why I never fully understood all the hand-wringing about whether Twilight was “good” for women, or whether Bella was a “good role model” for girls. Pop culture doesn’t need to be instructive to be good. It can simply show people as they are, rather than as they should be. Bella isn’t a character I want to be like as an adult, or want my daughters to be — but that’s fine. Fiction for young people is full of spunky, plucky young women role models. It’s okay for Bella to capture a particular way that many young women are — even if, with the benefit of a few years of hindsight, we recognize that’s not the way we want to be forever.

Alex: I mean, I understand the hand-wringing and analysis of whether Bella is a “good role model” because of Twilight’s audience. The books were being consumed by teenage girls (and younger-than-teenage girls), and the natural response from adults, when it comes to any piece of culture as popular as Twilight was, is to fret over “what is it teaching the children?”

Many adults seem to believe that books for younger audiences should follow a certain moral code or provide some kind of moral guidance. Though overhauling the way we teach kids about books and how we approach books ourselves warrants its own entire article.

I read New Moon — the one where Bella wants to die so Edward will come and save her — and I’ve seen every movie except Breaking Dawn Part I. I guess my main impression of that one book and the four movies (I don’t want to speak for Stephenie Meyer’s entire oeuvre) is that Twilight is both a not-so-well-written book and a mildly exciting movie franchise.

But like Constance said, it gets criticized exponentially harder than other pieces of pop culture because teenage girls like it. I think some of that criticism is warranted, in that the book wallows in shallow descriptions, but it gets magnified because of who its target audience is.

One of the things I wish the movies had done more of was lean into the vampire action. There wasn’t enough vampire baseball. If you’re gonna give these vampires magical superpowers — elemental manipulation, mind-reading, pain projection, etc. — then show us those powers. Make it seem cool to be a vampire. Or at least make it seem cooler to be an immortal high schooler than Twilight often did, with the characters just trolling around a Pacific Northwest high school looking for an eternal mate.

Aja: We also can’t really talk about whether Twilight was instructive or not without talking about the kinds of real-world legacies it left us with — including a full decade and counting of YA novels with extremely problematic relationships at their centers. Despite the many red flags flying around Bella and Edward’s relationship — starting with their 87-year age difference, his stalking and controlling behavior, and the fact that he wants to bite her more than any other human he’s ever met, fans loved the couple. And because plenty of Twilight fans were so interested in their codependent passion, publishers started marketing books that featured similar relationships as a selling point.

(One of the most disturbing of these books was Hush, Hush, a New York Times best-seller that featured a hero who literally stalks, threatens to sexually assault, and tries to kill the teen protagonist. It’s a controversial book that’s currently being made into a movie, so the phenomenon is still very much with us.)

But we also have a whole generation of Twilight fans who turned the publishing industry on its head with their insistence and demand for trope-filled stories that indulged their fantasies. And their unashamed consumption of a brand of media that nakedly catered to them arguably presaged the flourishing romantic comedy resurgence we now appear to be in the middle of.

Twilight fans were also responsible for one of the most remarkable and underdiscussed publishing phenomena in history, in that they essentially built an entire new publishing genre from scratch. They started by creating a controversial but very effective system of pull-to-publish Twilight fanfiction — stories that centered on Bella and Edward analogues, without any copyrighted names or details. Then, backed by the money and enthusiasm of ravenous Twilight fans who wanted to read more, more, more, they created their own small-press publishing houses in order to ship those fics-turned-novels directly to their audiences.

It was from one of these Twilight fandom publishing houses, created for and by Twilight fans, that Fifty Shades of Grey — which was originally a massively popular Twilight fanfic called “Master of the Universe” — originated. By blowing the doors wide open on the potential financial power of fanfiction, and introducing it to mainstream culture for the first time, Fifty Shades of Grey forever changed publishing. And it wouldn’t have existed without this very specific way in which Twilight fans commercialized their fandom.

We could debate endlessly whether the marketing of any of these fics was “good” or “morally instructive,” but I do believe these fans were galvanized to do what they did because they were forced to spend years defending their hobby and their reading pleasures. And we all know the best way to defend your hobby is to find a way to make money from it.

Constance: Aja brings up a great point here: Twilight was such a giant franchise that it had a real effect on pop culture. So what do you think is its most lasting legacy?

An interesting counterbalance to the wave of YA romances about creepy, mysterious, controlling boys that Aja correctly pegs to Twilight’s popularity is that Twilight also fundamentally changed the way we talked about those romances. Before Twilight, they were considered silly and fun and not really worth critiquing, but the criticism of Twilight was so heated and so pointed that it ended up influencing the discourse around practically all relationships built on the Bella-Edward model.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a lot more sophisticated about the power dynamics of its relationships than Twilight was, but I don’t know that it could have gotten away with a ship like Buffy-Angel in a post-Twilight era. When Buffy first aired, a scene where Buffy wakes up in the middle of the night to find Angel sitting on her windowsill passed without comment, but after Edward Cullen, it became one of the scenes that people brought up when they talked about why they don’t like that pairing. That’s because one of the things the hand-wringing over Twilight established is that it is creepy when a boy breaks into a girl’s bedroom to watch her sleep, the way Edward does with Bella.

And The Vampire Diaries, the next big vampire romance franchise after Twilight, went out of its way to subvert any Twilight comparisons with its central romance between Stefan and Elena. That show very pointedly played the big reveal that Stefan was a vampire in an echo of the famous “Say it!” / “Vampire,” scene in Twilight, but in this version, Elena ran screaming in the other direction as soon as she realized what Stefan was. There’s even a scene in one episode where Elena is watching Stefan sleep, rather than the other way around, and he tells her it’s creepy.

There’s plenty for us to critique about the gender politics of The Vampire Diaries, but it’s a show that clearly wanted to be the woke alternative to Twilight, and the way it positioned itself to take that slot was by subverting the tropes that the Twilight discourse had established were gross.

Eleanor: The only love triangle YA story I really got into after Twilight was The Hunger Games, which provided an interesting (but also maddening) foil to Twilight. I saw The Hunger Games get treated a lot more seriously as a franchise because of its apparent critique of income inequality (the movie came out just months after Occupy Wall Street), and because Katniss was in so many ways the anti-Bella: tough, resourceful, independent. Also in The Hunger Games’ favor: Jennifer Lawrence, who played Katniss, was much, much better at the celebrity image game than Kristen Stewart.

But I found everything about The Hunger Games a little too perfect; the good role model protagonist and the “serious” commentary on today’s social issues was all a bit much. I still appreciate Twilight’s stubborn refusal to be anything more than what it was: an evocative, albeit problematic, teen love story that took its characters’ feelings seriously.

Would it be a stretch to call movies like Brooklyn and Lady Bird part of the legacy of Twilight? Of course, they’re in an entirely different genre; they’re also more nuanced and better acted, and the relationships at their center are largely absent of the troubling power dynamics we discussed above. But they fill a place in my heart that Twilight once did, for the way they show that the stories of young women and their romantic choices are important and worthy of deep study.

Alex: The world would be a better, kinder place if everyone was required to watch Brooklyn. Though I’m not sure if it and Lady Bird are a part of Twilight’s legacy or are simply terrific stories about teenage girls growing up that haven’t been given the credit they’re due.

Twilight’s more direct legacy is Fifty Shades of Grey and the phenomena — the backlash and the fandom — that followed it. Right? When Fifty Shades came out, article after article depicted and chided its readers as desperate, horny middle-aged women. The book was considered “mommy porn.” Like Twilight, Fifty Shades is no beautiful tome of language. But the criticism of it seemed amplified because women, particularly women of a certain age, were really into it. And If there’s one demographic whose taste people like to judge more than that of teenage girls, it has to be moms. Poor moms.

Aja: I definitely think we can’t discount the fact that a lot of the teen girls who got vilified for loving Twilight grew up and got vilified for loving New Adult erotica, so I’m doubling down on the stance that Twilight’s legacy is creating a generation of women who became loud and proud about their fictional kinks as a result of being perpetually shamed for them. I want to think that ultimately, this confidence outweighs all of Twilight’s problematic tropes.

I will add that Twilight sparked a weird purity backlash in YA literature whereby depictions of sex and sexuality between teens became newly taboo, in part because of all the hand-wringing over Twilight and its ilk. I think that’s taken a while to wear off, in part because Twilight’s imprint was so indelible.

Also, there’s one really obvious thing Twilight bequeathed us, simple but huge, and that’s “Team X” and “Team Y.” Twilight made shipping, and discussion of shipping, a standard part of the pop culture discourse around media franchises, and it did so specifically via “Team Edward” and “Team Jacob.” (And the perennial underdog, Team Bella.) These ideas — and the specific concept of shipping as rooting for your pairing or character, or “team,” to win the love triangle — entered the pop culture landscape with Twilight, and now they’re ubiquitous. And crucially, by framing shipping as a pastime akin to rooting for a sports team, they made shipping into something harmless and fun rather than yet another toxic, galling thing to shame fans for doing. If only for this, I am Team Twilight all the way.