True Love Never Dies, But It Might Just Kill You: Why Audiences Love the Toxicity of Twilight Romances
Résumé
20 years after its publication it’s time to revisit Twilight, taking a closer look at how this was marketed towards a specific audience. Twilight targets a teenage audience enthralled by a love story, yet despite copious use of the word ‘love’, danger and lust lurk close to the surface. How did an audience of romance readers fall into the horror trap for Twilight?
This paper highlights the targeted marketing of Twilight as a romance. The paper looks at the use of narrative archetypes to appeal to a specific readership and shows how Twilight utilises the history of Gothic novels and its heroines to revive a type of storytelling older than its vampires.
The paper showcases a number of capitalist aspects contained in the narrative, arguing that these are deliberately placed.
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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17951/kh.2026.0.84-97
Date of publication: 2026-10-20 13:44:15
Date of submission: 2026-03-30 13:24:52
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