Edward Cullen: Also into Cats
So, after yesterday's write up in my buzznet (which finally forced Miss Random to get one, ha-ha!), my friend Gwen brought up an interesting point:

But... but... but... vampires are sexual.... feeding is simply a metaphore [sic] for sex... did she MISS that!?!?!?!?!

Oh wait, right, never mind, she missed EVERYTHING ABOUT VAMPIRE MYTH EVER!!!

To be fair, in older Slavic mythology vampires weren't sexual beings. In fact, one old folktale has the vampire not drinking blood but eating the dead flesh of a corpse in a church. And originally vampire myths had more to do with fear of the walking dead coming back to get the living than with sex (medical technology at the time couldn't tell the difference between comatose or nearly dead and actually physically dead, meaning some people were buried alive...it's a whole thing).

BUT since Palidori and Stoker at least, vampires have been symbols of sex and especially in Stoker's case the presence of sex in a sexually repressed society. Dracula symbolizes the fear in Victorian England that foreigners would come and taint English blood and take their women. Dracula as a novel also seemingly reinforces the traditional gender roles: when Lucy becomes a vampire rather than doing the good, English thing and being a pure woman who gave birth to children (there was a certain amount of philosophy in that time where your wife was the sacred, pure and seemingly virginal mother of your children who you had sex with for procreation. If you wanted sexual pleasure? Whores) she feeds on children. Gasp, shock, horror, you get the idea.

But ANYWAY, yeah. Feeding in vampire mythology has become a metaphor for sex and sexual activity.

And in Twilight, Edward feeds on wild cats.

...so, if we look at this metaphorically, Edward Cullen is also into caaaaats into bestiality.

Of course, all of this information about the history of vampire mythology would come as a shock to Smeyer, who stated in an interview:

Basically, I'm a coward. So I'm not at all informed about the horror genre, and I don't think it's influenced my writing. I've never considered Twilight a horror novel, though. To me, it's a romance. Still, I wasn't intending to publish the story, or even to make a finished book of it. I was just writing for my own enjoyment, and it wasn't until I knew that Twilight would be published that I began to think about whether my vampires were too much the same or too much different from the others. Of course, I was far too invested in my characters at that point to be making changes*. I wasn't very familiar with the canon, in any case, because I don't read horror novels (ironic**, I know). So I didn't cut out fangs and coffins and so forth as a way to distinguish my vampires; that's just how they came to me.
-source

* Kill all your darlings, dear. This has about five different applications in your case. If you are so over-invested in your characters that you can't make changes to them? That's a problem. Good authors, by which I mean the non-Laurel K. Hamilton sort, realize that while their characters are very, very real to them, they are not real people. And becoming over-invested or obsessed with your characters can make your writing lazy and can lead you to the excuse of "they just did whatever they wanted!"

Good rule of thumb: something you write for yourself that means that much to you should never be published, unless it's posthumously.

**You're an author. You should fucking know what irony is. THIS IS NOT IRONY.

Here's another tip: if you are a professional author? At least Wikipedia your facts. That way you can say you put forth some kind of an effort.

Once again, feel free to link Smeyer here. Destroying her soul has become my calling in life.