Twilight: Bringing friends together.

No matter what you think of the Twilight Saga, and the opinions are many and varied, even among my friends and acquaintances, good things have happened as a result of this fandom phenomonon. Acting careers have been launched or boosted. People are reading. And friendships have been forged and strengthened.

Fandom brings out the best and worst in people. The stereotypical fanatic who spends hours and hours internet stalking the object of obsession is a mere percentage of the population of any fandom. You don't have to be even slightly crazy to call yourself a fan but it certainly makes life more interesting. If you've ever witnessed a gathering of fans, especially those of a sci-fi or pop culture icon, you will realise that we're all a little nutty, but that's not like it's a bad thing. For my part, time spent with people of a like-mind is motivating, uplifting and just down-right fun.

I've heard the "psycho-social experts" claim that you can't make friends on the internet. I humbly beg to differ. I may not be in constant contact with absolutely every person on my facebook friends list, but there are two or three who share my current Twilight obsession who I can count as real friends. People I know will still be friends when the sparkle settles, because we have other shared interests, respect and empathy for each other and an understading of the lives each of us leads outside of the fandom. There are a few more who were already my friends and still are despite my tendency to relate every conversation to something Twilight-related. Before the internet, I had penpals. One or two of them are now internet pals.

I tried to avoid Twilight. Really. I had been sucked into other fandoms just by showing an interest and I didn't want to experience the Everybody's Doing It reaction again. Surely Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and Dr Who were enough for one mid-life crisis. I refused to read the books, even when my eldest daughter insisted I would love them. That reversal alone should have had me reading them. It was going to the movies with my husband and another couple that delivered the sucker punch. Twilight was the only movie showing that we all wanted to see, that none of us had already seen. I left the cinema with my phone in hand, calling my daughter to thank her very much for the new obsession that I'd needed like a hole in the head! Next day I bought the first book, finished it in two days and had to wait nearly 36 hours before I could get the next one. I read all four within a week and a half, then began again and read them in a week. It would have taken less time if I hadn't had to eat, work, sleep...

Around that time, we moved into a new rental home and found ourselves with new neighbours to become acquainted with. As it happened, the neighbours on either side were already friends, and one evening, I left my house to find them all smoking out front of the nearest neighbours home. I stopped briefly to chat and heard familiar tunes playing on the other neighbours laptop. The strains of my favourite song on the Twilight soundtrack reached my ears and the rest is history. The three of us go to the movie premieres together, buy each other Twilight-related goodies and talk endlessly about the Saga. I'm sure we would have been friends anyway, but having Twilight in common was an immediate "in".

The fandom has also helped forge a bond with my pre-teen daughter. We attended Supernova ( a pop-culture convention) together in April this year and both had photos taken with Alex Meraz, who plays Paul, a member of the wolf-pack in New Moon and Eclipse. Last year it was Justin Chon, who is Eric in the Saga. Next year, please God, it might be Jackson Rathbone, the insanely talented actor who plays Jasper Cullen. If so, this 50 year-old fangirl will probably die happy.