Twilight has become so prevalent in our society today that people have actually begun using it as an excuse for their behavior. Apparently, it’s normal now to just say “I blame Twilight” when things go wrong or when you want to do something outside of the norm. Here are four specific things that Twilight has been blamed for since the phenomena began.

 


During the opening weekend of Breaking Dawn, Illinois police arrested Olivia Christina Ornelas, an 18-year-old girl for driving under the influence after crashing her car. These two seemingly unrelated facts became incredibly relevant when Ornelas blamed her intoxication and crashing her car on her boyfriend for not taking her to see the newest Twilight film that night like he promised. Huffington Post reported that she was reportedly very upset when she explained this to the police, who then charged her with driving under the influence and unlawful consumption of alcohol by a minor.

 

Above was just the first incident that I noticed someone blaming on Twilight. After intense Internet research, I discovered a lot more, including one about two runaway kids back in June ’09. According to The Examiner, two 13-year-old girls skipped school and set up an overnight camp in the woods of Gloucester due to inspiration from series.

The girls left letters and notes under their pillows and in friend’s lockers to explain why they had run away — and it was these letters that implicated Twilight involvement. Apparently, parts of the notes to friends were copied word for word from a letter in the fourth Twilight book, Breaking Dawn.

“The letters followed the same story line where they said they had to get away because they were endangering people by staying around and that the reason would become apparent to people later,” said Rockfort police Sergeant Schmink, who was familiar with the series because of his daughters.

The letters under their pillows also made specific references to characters in the books. Pamela, one of the girls, even made the “a” in her signature incorporate two fangs with blood dripping from them.

These clues and the missing camping supplies eventually allowed police to find the girls in the woods.

“The reason these kids left wasn’t drugs or alcohol, they weren’t lured out of the house by a predator and there wasn’t a bad family environment,” Schmink said. Twilight was the only reason these girls left home. Who knew a book could be so powerful?

 

A while ago there was a highly publicized biting epidemic that also blamed Twilight. Teen couples had begun biting each other as a sign of affection, sometimes even biting hard enough to draw blood.

“For me, biting is the way to show affection toward the other person and to just get a crazy adrenaline rush and not so much to mark territory or to show I belong to something, but just to show the other person I care and there’s a deeper sense of affection,” Michael Kaplor, 16, told Good Morning America in July ’09. The teens drew blood to feel powerful, getting an adrenaline rush from the experience.

The problem with this trend is that biting can lead to disease. The bites can become infected and can spread blood diseases like hepatitis, syphilis and HIV.

The connection was made to Twilight when teenagers started getting tattoos of bite marks. It was the first indication that the kids weren’t taking hickeys too far, but were actually mimicking this prominent part of pop culture.

 

The last thing people often blame Twilight for that I feel the need to mention in this post is the ending of relationships, specifically divorce.

I’ve heard from a lot of people that women will actually break up with boyfriends or divorce husbands because they aren’t as perfect as Edward Cullen. Women, especially Twi-Moms. Specifically, one of readers commented on a post about Twi-Moms and said that one wife felt that she deserved to have two men vying for her attention like Jacob and Edward do in the books.

The Twilight books are highly romanticized and very fairytale-like in that Bella gets a knight in shining armor that puts their love above all else. This is something that every girl wishes for in a relationship, but it’s also very improbable. Unfortunately, Twilight seems to have raised expectations and with these expectations, it has also raised divorce rates.

 

Have/Would you ever blamed anything on this series? What do you think of these incidences? What else do people blame on Twilight?