Still a Better Love Story than Twilight

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About

Still a Better Love Story than Twilight is a comment usually found on forums or as captions on image macros to critique pairings or people, objects or animals, saying that the connection between them, romantic or not, is a better love story than the relationships portrayed in the fantasy novel and film series Twilight.

Origin

The love story as presented in Twilight between a young girl named Bella and a vampire named Edward has been compared to other well-known novel and film love stories as early as November 2009, with a poll on SodaHead^[1] asking readers to choose the best love story among Twilight, Nicholas Sparks' The Notebook and William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. In 2010, a BodyBuilding forums thread^[2] compared the love stories in Harry Potter, specifically Severus Snape's unrequited love for Lily Potter, to those in Twilight. This was reemphasized in July 2011 when the Facebook group "JK Rowling Told a Better Love Story In 1 Chapter Than Meyer Did In 4 Books"^[3] was created. Additionally in 2010, there was a trend in YouTube comments on music videos calling things Better than Bieber, no matter what the quality of the song was.

Spread

The earliest use of the phrase in describing the relationship between two inanimate objects can be traced to a Reddit^[8] image post submitted on December 2nd, 2011, showing a plug about to be inserted into a socket.

Two days later, on December 4th, 2011, the comment was posted on a fan video of Discord from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic shared on My Little Brony.^[9] The following month, the Facebook fan page "Still a better love story than Twilight"^[10] was created, which has accrued 1134 likes as of July 2012. The phrase began appearing in comments on FunnyJunk^[11] that March.

The subreddit “Better Than Twilight”^[4] was created on December 25th, 2011, but it only managed to gather 234 subscribers as of July 2012, however there are more than 600 unique posts with the phrase throughout all of Reddit.^[5] On YouTube, the phrase is often found in the comments of movie trailers or short film clips that viewers find anticlimatic or uninteresting. On Tumblr, additional instances are posted with the tags "still a better love story than Twilight"^[6] and "better love story."^[7] There are more than 200 instances of images containing the phrase "better love story than" on humor site 9gag. ^[12] Collections of images with the phrase have appeared on Fanpop^[13] and Pop Hangover.^[14]