The Thesis That Never Was: Christopher Pike, Twilight, and the Year My Advisor Was a Piece of Shit

Back in 2011, the biggest academic question on my mind wasn’t Shakespeare, or Milton, or whatever canonical old white guy we were supposed to be fawning over in grad school. It was this:

Why has no one ever compared Christopher Pike’s Last Vampire series to Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight through a feminist lens?

And I don’t mean casually compared — I mean deeply, academically, unapologetically.
Like:
Sita vs. Bella. Female autonomy vs. female self-erasure. Ancient, ruthless agency vs. sparkly abstinence metaphors.

My brain eats pop culture for breakfast, and in my teens I was a hardcore Christopher Pike fan. So when it came time to choose a thesis topic — literally ANY thesis topic in the entire world — my manic little grad-student brain lit up like a Christmas tree. Suddenly I could see it:

A thesis that challenged, analyzed, subverted, questioned womanhood, monstrosity, power, and desire in YA vampire lit.

It was bold.
It was original.
It was academically juicy.
It was… honestly GOLD.

And then—

my advisor was a piece of shit (but dressed in a blazer with elbow patches to throw people off).

There’s really no softer way to say it. The man (or woman — but let’s be honest, it was definitely a man) managed to squash that spark with the precision of someone who was far more skilled at extinguishing ideas than nurturing them.. 

So the world never got my Christopher Pike vs. Twilight analysis.
The world never saw the feminist argument that lived in my head like a feral cat scratching at the wallpaper.
And honestly? I still think about it.

Because here’s the thing: I had something.
Something smart, weird, fresh, and genuinely worth saying.

And every time someone gushes over vampire feminism discourse — the Buffy takes, the Sookie Stackhouse takes, the endless Dracula re-re-re-interpretations — I think, Y’all don’t even know. You missed the Pike angle. The Sita reclamation arc. The contrast with Bella’s passive self-sacrifice.

We could have had it all.

I could have been the bitch who wrote that thesis.

But instead, I ended up with a graduate-school trauma origin story and a really good excuse to write a future blog post titled, “My Year at WIU: The Academic Horror Story Nobody Asked For.” And just when you’d think the experience couldn’t get more absurd, my advisor — a flaming, self-interested, ego-inflated dumpster fire of a human being with the shamelessness of a raccoon chewing through drywall — had the audacity to ask to be on my thesis panel when he was the reason the thesis never came to fruition.

Honestly, this post is just me finally putting the idea somewhere so it stops pacing angrily in the back of my skull. Maybe one day I’ll resurrect it — with fangs, feminism, and the perspective of someone who now teaches college rather than surviving it.

But for now?
This is the thesis that never was.

And the advisor?
Still a piece of shit.