#oh and--weirdly it's pronounced “gooey-duck”

[gisellelx]

Twilight Advent 22, Day 13

Masterpost/prompts

Dec. 13- What college major did each one of Bella's human friends choose?

Okay so. So time for some realism. One of the things I hate most about the movies, and then how fandom has taken and run with what was in the movies, is the idea that somehow Forks is like a suburb of Seattle--the school is super multi-cultural and chic; everybody has college dreams, prom is at a gorgeous golf course, everybody has a car, etc.

Forks is nothing like that. I had the privilege, if you can call it that, of traveling there before Twilight took off (who woulda thunk, given how enduring the series wound up being in my life!). There's really fantastic, worth-driving-six-hours-from-Oregon hiking and mountaineering to be done there. But as a tourist, you use Forks as a basecamp and you don't stay long.

Without Twilight, there is nothing in Forks, y'all. There is a diner, and a TruValue, and a bank, and like, a laundromat? The hotel we stayed in was an apartment complex that couldn't make it because there were too few people living there and they finally turned it into a motel because that at least kept people from squatting in the vacant units. It is an economically depressed town and the kids who grow up there don't have many prospects unless they work hard at making them.

So. There basically are no college majors. Few of the kids from Forks go to college. Of those who do, even fewer stay there. Most of them can't hack it. This is actually one thing the books ironically got right (though it was no doubt due to SM not knowing the standard US high school curriculum; she did not do this on purpose). They were teaching Bio I to 11th graders and Romeo and Juliet to seniors, where both would be part of the 9th grade curriculum at a high school with a high rate of college matriculation. So that means there were two levels of science below introductory bio, and three levels of English below what is typically taught as English 9, and so the first two years at that high school are basically a middle school curriculum. Ergo, you have a whole lot of kids who are not going to college.

I think Tyler, Lauren, Mike, Eric and Jessica did not go. Jessica probably attempted to go to Peninsula Community College in pre-nursing but the science was too hard and there was no English there. Eric also went briefly--as the class valedictorian, he got into U-dub and went down to Seattle for most of a year. But it was too far and too hard and after having felt like the king of the hill at his high school, he got depressed and zoned out on the hot new game, Call of Duty, eventually developing a pattern of absences, failing or withdrawing from most of his classes, and having his registration privileges revoked. So he moved back home. They stay in Forks or Port Angeles and have perfectly respectable, pay-the-bills jobs as adults—Mike probably joins the police force, Eric and Tyler take up the trades, Lauren eventually works her way up in one of the in-home daycares in town; Jessica trains as a CNA and works at Forks Community Hospital.

Angela and Ben go on. Angela gets in to Evergreen State (Go Geoducks!) and goes there because it's not too far and Ben goes to Peninsula and completes the Bachelor's in Business Management there. Angela gets a degree in early childhood ed, and moves to Seattle to take a job at a montessori school. She eventually gets her master's and becomes an elementary principal many years later. She and Ben don't stay together, but they remain good friends and he eventually also gets hired as an account manager at Microsoft and every now and then, they get a drink together.