One can argue that The Twilight Saga had many cringe-worthy moments, especially in the sequels. However, one stands above all others. Nothing quite beats the weird relationship between Jacob Black and Renesmee Cullen, the vampire-human hybrid daughter of Edward and Bella. While franchise author Stephenie Meyer tried to explain their connection by having Jacob imprint on her as a werewolf, that doesn’t make their relationship any less problematic.
Imprinting is the means by which Quileute shape-shifters, aka werewolves, find their soulmates. It’s difficult for any of them to explain how it feels. But it seems as though there is an immediate connection that can’t be denied. Nothing else matters except this one person.
The Issues with Jacob and Renesmee’s Relationship in Twilight
The main reason that Jacob’s imprint on Renesmee is so problematic is that he imprints on her as soon as she’s born. More often than not, imprinting happens when one is an adult, and because they’re dealing with soulmates, there is always a sexual component involved. So, when Jacob imprints on an infant child, it’s immediately a problem — for both the audience and for Bella, who fully understands the implications of Jacob’s imprint.
Jacob tries to explain that he’ll be what she needs him to be throughout her life — a mentor, a friend and then eventually a lover when she grows up. Like Bella, any reader or viewer would cringe at the weirdness of the situation. His explanation doesn’t make the circumstance any less weird and inappropriate. It also doesn’t help that Jacob spent years in love with Bella, and then suddenly, he’s in love with her child.
Bella Turned Into a Disposable Vessel
While Jacob’s imprinting on Renesmee may seem like an easy way to wrap up his storyline, considering he’s left in the dust of Edward and Bella’s romance, it was not a great move to pair him with their daughter. When Bella was pregnant with her, Jacob hovered around Bella under the idea that he was mourning the last vestiges of his friend and love. But after Renesmee is born, he acknowledges that he was hovering because he could already feel the connection to her.
The majorly offensive implication behind this situation is that Bella was never truly someone Jacob romantically loved. He never respected her boundaries and got in the way of her true happiness, but a very small part of him was redeemed because his love seemed real. After Renesmee was born, though, it was almost as if Bella was useless to him. She was merely a disposable host whose primary purpose for Jacob was to carry the love of his life. Once she did her “duty,” he moved on from her.
The situation translates well to real-life situations of women who are mistreated during pregnancy. There are horrible and outdated standards that claim women are only useful for carrying children and continuing a man’s legacy. Unfortunately, many people still believe these standards hold true today, and it can sometimes create an abusive dynamic between pregnant women and fathers. In some ways, Bella and Jacob’s relationship represents the gendered roles women are forced into and can never escape. To Jacob, Bella’s biggest accomplishment was getting pregnant and dying during labor, just so he could imprint on the child.
Imprinting Conveys Potentially Abusive Stalking
Another abusive aspect of general imprinting is stalking in relationships. One of the earliest stories of imprinting that Jacob tells Bella about is between Emily and Sam. The latter imprinted on Emily, despite being in a relationship with Emily’s cousin Leah. Emily would continuously tell him they couldn’t be in a relationship, but he kept pleading. One day, the two got in a massive fight when he lost control and physically attacked her as a werewolf. At the hospital, he threatened suicide, and she agreed to begin a relationship with him.
The books and movies play this off as a romantic tale of love persevering all, without addressing the clearly problematic spirit to it. Sam manipulated her through stalking, breaking her relationship with Leah and emotionally abusing her with threats of suicide. If this happens between two adults, what would it look like for an adult imprinting on a child? The movies end before Renesmee grows up and evaluates her relationship with Jacob. If she were to feel disgusted by Jacob’s obsession with her, the chances of him letting her go would be slim at best. The werewolves are betrayed as compulsive beings whose love knows no bounds. In every case that’s known about imprinting, not once did the victim ever succeed in rejecting the men who imprint on them. They always end in a Stockholm Syndrome type of relationship that they have little odds of escaping from.
Jacob’s imprinting reflects poorly on Edward and Bella as parents
At the end of Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 2, Jacob jokingly asks if he can start calling Edward, “Dad.” Edward says “No,” but in the original book, Edward and Jacob’s final encounter involved Edward saying, “Goodbye Jacob, my brother, my son.” In both instances, there is this clear line being drawn that Jacob will, in fact, one day become Edwards’ son-in-law, and Edward is totally fine with it.
This just makes Bella and Edward look bad as parents, since, as noted above, Bella was actively informed by Jacob of the negative consequences of imprinting gone wrong with Emily and Sam, and yet that imprinting gone wrong was, instead, treated like a grand romantic situation, and so Bella doesn’t see anything wrong with Jacob doing it with Bella’s own daughter. That is not a good look for Bella.
The best defense for Jacob’s imprinting on Renesmee is that it COULD be a platonic love between Jacob and Renesmee, so that you could argue that Edward calling Jacob “Son” suggests that the imprinting would make it so that Jacob is Renesmee’s brother. However, all of the indications in the actual book (and the movie adaptation) makes it clear that Alice Cullen, the adoptive sister of Edward, uses her precognitive powers to show that the most likely scenario IS that Jacob and Renesmee end up together, romantically, and Edward knows this, and is still totally on board with it. Edward being fine with Jacob’s romantic interest in his young child also highlights the big age gap between Edward and Bella (you can almost imagine Edward saying, “What, you’re not centuries older than her? Then you’re way ahead of the game!”). The whole situation does not reflect well on Bella and Edward as parents.
