But I suspect I would find Twilight unbearable now, having just absorbed 31 chapters of Luminosity. I love the Luminosity characters and it would be infuriating to have them revert to fools.
I hope that in writing Luminosity I haven’t discouraged anyone from reading Twilight. They are flawed books, it’s true. But the biggest flaw is misplaced emphasis, I think. They have the resources, embedded in the text, to be truly fantastic; as it is they’re mostly just easy and pleasant reads, because Meyer pays attention to the weaker parts of her characterization and world. It is my guess that if you’ve read Luminosity, it will encourage you to read the canon books the way I first read them, automatically sifting through the content to get the good parts and mentally apologizing for the bad parts.
luminous!Bella doesn’t bear the same relationship to canon!Bella that rational!Harry bears to canon!Harry. canon!Harry could not have become rational!Harry—MoR couldn’t be a single point of departure fic. Too much else is in the mix. Whereas canon!Bella, making a handful of different choices when she was nine or ten or eleven, could have become luminous!Bella, and changed everything. (All the other characters are the same, changed only insofar as my copying is imperfect and insofar as they react to a different Bella.)
If you like, think of canon Twilight as slightly inferior, thematically different fanfiction of Luminosity :P
I hope that in writing Luminosity I haven’t discouraged anyone from reading Twilight. They are flawed books, it’s true. But the biggest flaw is misplaced emphasis, I think. They have the resources, embedded in the text, to be truly fantastic; as it is they’re mostly just easy and pleasant reads, because Meyer pays attention to the weaker parts of her characterization and world. It is my guess that if you’ve read Luminosity, it will encourage you to read the canon books the way I first read them, automatically sifting through the content to get the good parts and mentally apologizing for the bad parts.
luminous!Bella doesn’t bear the same relationship to canon!Bella that rational!Harry bears to canon!Harry. canon!Harry could not have become rational!Harry—MoR couldn’t be a single point of departure fic. Too much else is in the mix. Whereas canon!Bella, making a handful of different choices when she was nine or ten or eleven, could have become luminous!Bella, and changed everything. (All the other characters are the same, changed only insofar as my copying is imperfect and insofar as they react to a different Bella.)
If you like, think of canon Twilight as slightly inferior, thematically different fanfiction of Luminosity :P
I like that framing. I may just do that. :)