Twilight: Aro’s Dark Backstory Explained
Michael Sheen’s Twilight saga villain Aro has a surprising in-depth canon backstory that sheds light on the Volturi leader’s dark, grisly past.
While Aro is mainly known in the Twilight saga as the ruthless leader of the Volturi, his character has a surprising in-depth and dark canon backstory. Although author Stephenie Meyer reported has no plans to write another Twilight novel any time soon, the franchise’s creator is certainly not short on material. Meyer provided backstories for almost all of Twilight’s major characters during the original saga’s writing process, highlighting the level of canonical detail behind the Twilight saga’s events.
While authoring these backstories, Meyer delved deeply into the history of the Cullen clan’s members and the tribe of werewolves that they clashed with. However, the author’s work was not limited to heroic Twilight characters, with the Twilight saga’s villains all carrying established, detailed backstories of their own. Many of these backstories go a long way to explain these villains’ respective falls from grace and their subsequent descents into darkness.
However, one pivotal villain from the Twilight saga has a backstory that explains his entire history without ever outlining the source of his evil. While his fellow Volturi member and minor Twilight villain Marcus became an emotionless monster due to a formative heartbreak, the Volturi’s leader Aro has always been an irredeemably power-hungry villain. While his canon backstory does not explain where his villainy came from, the Twilight antagonist’s origins do explain where he got his powers, how he set up the Volturi coven, and the steps he took (and characters he killed) to become the saga’s most powerful vampire. vampire.
Aro’s Early Vampire Life
Born in Greece in 1300 BC, Aro is presented as an ambitious character from early in his early childhood by Stephenie Meyer. In these formative years, Aro was endlessly hungry for power, so much so that the villain is one of few characters in the saga (alongside the more minor Twilight villain Laurent) to willingly become a bloodsucker rather than being transformed via a trick, an attack , or an emergency that left him needing to be rescued from death. In this way, Aro became a vampire by choice in his twenties to bolster his ambition and soon started a coven by recruiting Caius and Marcus. Although those two vampires were also power-hungry, neither of them could compare to Aro, which should have made him comfortable in his ability to control his coven. However, Aro’s fatal flaw was paranoia, and the villain was always certain that he would be betrayed, which confirms soon led him to betray one of his closest friends and a beloved family member.
Aro’s Worst Crime
After the Volturi’s three-person coven begins to gain political influence, Aro turns his sister Didyme into a vampire and recruits her to his cause in a decision that soon sets up Marcus’s tragic Twilight backstory. When Marcus and Didyme fell in love, Aro was initially happy with the match, assuming it would make his coven even stronger. Over time, however, Aro grew to realize that happiness made the pair content and limit their ambition. Meanwhile, Aro’s paranoia convinced him that Didyme’s love for Marcus meant she would side with him over her brother if a disagreement arose between them, prompting Aro to take desperate measures despite no such fight ever even occurring. As a result, Aro killed his sister to ensure Marcus’s loyalty, hiding the murder after the fact and even pretending to help Marcus search for her killer. Ironically, the plan backfired, and, instead of making Marcus more loyal to the Volturi, Aro’s murder of his mate left him a hopelessly diminished shadow of his former self.
Aro, Jane, and Alec
While killing Didyme set Aro’s ambitions back canonically, discovering Twilight saga villains Alec and Jane soon saw the antagonist forget about his former friend’s heartbreak and the death of his sister. A pair of immortal children (gifted children born to human and vampire parents), Jane and Alec, were still very young when their abilities manifested. This led to their hometown village attempting to burn them for witchcraft, but Aro arrived in time to save them before killing every human in the village to ensure no one knew of their existence. The powerful twins became subjects loyal to the Volturi, resulting in their roles as minor (and under-utilized) villains in the Twilight saga.
Aro’s Love Interest Sulpicia
Unlike most of Twilight’s vampires, Aro sought out a human mate rather than a fellow vampire to ensure that he would have total control over her. While the likes of Twilight’s Jasper Hale and Alice Cullen bonded because of their shared experiences as lonely nomadic vampires, Aro instead sought out a human he could mold into a subservient vampire. He found one in Sulpicia, a young woman he was able to woo and later turn.
