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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 26, 2026

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I think the issue is that male sexual fantasies and power fantasies usually get bundled together.

There's no power fantasy in the flipped version of Twilight so it comes across as self indulgent even for fantasy. Unless you count Bella smelling so goshdarned good vampires want to eat her (I don't) or her inability to be impacted by magic (I guess)

The male version would be closer to Wanted with some tweaks. You get good at something (perhaps due to an unearned genetic legacy) and after a lot of blood and pain,preferably other men's, you get to kiss Angelina Jolie in front of your cheating ex. Because those are the sorts of men who do that.

(Wanted itself is partly a subversion - Angelina Jolie isn't suddenly into some random schlub, there's actually a believable plot reason for that to happen - but the skeleton is there)

There's no male power fantasy in the flipped version of Twilight so it comes across as self indulgent even for fantasy. Unless you count Bella smelling so goshdarned good vampires want to eat her (I don't) or her inability to be impacted by magic (I guess)

The second half of Breaking Dawn is a sudden power fantasy, where Bella turns into a vampire and instead of the clumsy damsel-in-distress becomes strong, badass and good at everything, and her anti-magic grows from a curiosity into an awesome power that ends up saving the day by neutralizing the Volturi trump cards.

I’d say that what saves the Twilight-style of fantasy (“powerful people are fighting over little ol’ me, my goodness”) from being purely fluffy and self-indulgent is that an internal psychological conflict replaces the external conflict for mastery and power. That internal psychological conflict could be anything ranging from a simple fear of literal physical danger, to more abstract concerns about how one relates to one’s own agency, one’s own sense of dignity, etc. There’s usually a “hitch” somewhere, some sort of internal tension between acceptance and reticence. So the two types of fantasies are actually more structurally analogous than they appear. It’s just that in the Twilight-style fantasy, the struggle is harder to see (for an external observer) because a lot of it happens in the MC’s internal monologue.