Stephenie Meyer Swaps Bella and Edward’s Genders in ‘Twilight’ Rewrite

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Stephenie Meyer is celebrating the tenth anniversary of her popular and highly lucrative vampire-romance tetralogy with…more vampires, and more romance. She’s decided to squeeze the last ounce of milk from the proverbial cash cow’s teat published a rewrite of the first Twilight novel, but with the gender of the main love interests swapped.

Instead of Bella and Edward, Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined will follow a boy named Beau (short for Beaufort) and his relationship with a girl named Edythe. In the foreword to the anniversary edition, Meyer explains the gender swapping was in response to the criticisms of Bella being a “damsel in distress,” insisting that she was instead a “human in distress.”

During her interview earlier today on Good Morning America, she continued to elaborate on said distress: “It’s always bothered me a little bit because [any human] surrounded by superheroes is going to be in distress. We don’t have the powers…I thought, ‘What if we switched it around a bit and see how a boy does,’ and, you know, it’s about the same.”

But before you accuse of Meyer of simply searching-and-replacing characters’ names in the original manuscript, she has assured everyone that the story and characters’ personalities do eventually deviate from their original counterparts the further one gets into the book; Beau is “more OCD” and is “totally missing the chip Bella carries around on her shoulder all the time.”

Twilight (10th Anniversary Edition) and Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined is now available via Little Brown Books.

(h/t Entertainment Weekly)