Last month saw one of the most important holidays in human history – not Halloween, but the 20th anniversary of the publication of the first Twilight book. 

Social media – or at least the side of social media I'm on – went crazy. The number of people proudly rereading, rewatching, recosplaying, and generally celebrating Twilight without shame was truly incredible. And though I'm not one to post much publicly, in spirit I was right there with them. 

Have I ever read any of the books? No, I haven’t. Does that make me a fake fan? Almost definitely. Is that accusation powerful enough to motivate me to read the books? Absolutely not. And you know why? Because Twilight is bad.  

As much as I love it, it is really, really bad. I love the movies for the crazy, laugh-out-loud experience of watching them in a group. I also love books – but to sit and dedicate my own personal reading time to a book I know I won’t actually like? I'm not committed enough for that.  

I can acknowledge that though I have a genuine love for Twilight, it's a love based on irony.  Irony, and a shared nostalgia; despite the fact that I didn't even watch Twilight until I got to university, when I did, I was blown away by the cult-like fascination and love the people around me had for it. Watching Twilight with a group of people who can quote every single line of dialogue is one of the most genuinely joyful experiences one can have. Even though I hadn't experienced a Twilight phase as an adolescent, I was happy to share in the celebration. 

Interestingly, Twilight is one of a few things I’ve experienced a delayed appreciation for; another is One Direction, which I listened to obsessively during lockdown in 2020. The band takes on a different type of nostalgia for me than most people of my generation, as their songs remind me of when I was sixteen and listening to them long after they split up, rather than being ten and begging my parents to take me to a concert. Still, the allure is the same; while I do think many of their songs (shout out to "What a Feeling") are genuinely good, I don’t get excited when I hear "One Thing" because of its quality. I get excited because of the memories it brings me, and because if I’m in a group of people who also experienced a One Direction phase – albeit at a more normal time in their lives – the shared nostalgic memory is incredibly powerful. 

The thing is, media like Twilight and One Direction songs which hold so much nostalgic power now were not always considered so-bad-they’re-good; once upon a time, they were just bad.  

It’s an endless cycle: the things that are popular in a particular era, especially amongst teenage girls, are ceaselessly made fun of. Five to ten to twenty years later, they are still mocked, but they’ve also retained a cult-like reverence as artifacts of that time period. Those same teenage girls now laugh at how cringey they were when they dressed up as Bella for the Breaking Dawn: Part 2 premiere in 2012, only to dress up like her for a Twilight themed club night in 2025. 

There's a phenomenon of constant pessimism surrounding pop culture in any period, a forever sense of things were so much better back then. It's a feeling that's been omnipresent for as long as I can remember; when I was a kid in the late 2000s and early 2010s, all everyone could talk about were the late 90s and early 2000s, and years later, the late 2000s and early 2010s became revered for its club music and "aesthetic". It's even happening again now with a period as recent as 2020. Social media, especially TikTok, is full of nostalgia-bait videos using songs and trends that were popular during quarantine. The comments are always filled with young adults reminiscing about how happy they were only five years ago, and how it's just not the same anymore. In reality, we weren't all happy during lockdown. For many, it was an incredibly stressful and even traumatic time. Even for those who didn't experience major illness, the loss of a family member, sudden unemployment, or mental health issues worsened by health anxiety and a lack of socialization, it was still a period of widespread instability and isolation on a global scale. And yet, nostalgia is powerful enough to override all the fear and uncertainty. We remember the songs we listened to and the shows we watched, not how distressed and lonely we might have felt while experiencing them. 

My hypothesis is that everyone thinks pop culture peaked when they came of age, and that nothing will ever compare to it; however, they can't know that this is happening until after the fact. While they're actually coming of age, they're busy reminiscing about the things that were popular when they were little kids, or even before they were born, because that's what older generations tell them was the peak of pop culture. It's only in retrospect that we gain an appreciation for what we had. 

It's like how wearing band merch, tons of layers, and knee-length jean shorts when you were a kid was embarrassing, but is now cool as long as it's done "ironically". Some say this is due to the death of cringe culture, but I disagree. Cringe culture still very much exists — just not retroactively. Nothing stays embarrassing for too long, thanks to the power of nostalgia.