Believe it or not, it’s been 10 years since Stephenie Meyer first unleashed Twilight onto the world. And to celebrate her decade reign of sparkly, non-scary terror, the super-rich author is revisiting the series. More specifically, she’s revisiting her characters’ genders.
Meyer just released Life And Death: Twilight Reimagined, a twist on the original story that swaps all the main characters’ genders. Waffling Bella has become a moody boy named Beau, while Edward—and his questionably dominating tendencies—have become a female vampire named Edythe. Shape-shifting wolf boy Jacob is now Julie, and so on.
According to an interview Meyer gave on Good Morning America, the author made the switcheroo because she was tired of random people referring to Bella as a damsel in distress, saying that “anyone surrounded by superheroes is going to be … in distress.” She went on to say that while she “wonder(s) if it will change how people look at Bella a little bit, to see her as him,” she feels “like it’s really very much the same thing.”
Naturally, she also hopes that the swap introduces a whole new world of readers to the series, presumably because while she’s already worth an estimated $170 million, she can always be worth a little bit more.