Twilight risk management

With New Moon, the second installment of the Twilight movie saga set to come out this week, I thought I would examine four types of risk treatments from the Edward Cullen point of view. They are ACCEPT, AVOID, TRANSFER and MITIGATE. (Spoiler alert! Stop now if you haven’t read the books and actually care about this stuff.)

In our saga, Edward Cullen is an immortal teenage vampire living in Washington state who falls in love with the mortal, Bella Swan. Edward can hardly stand to be around Bella because her blood smells pretty darn good; he fears he may kill her if he so much as kisses her. Fortunately for Bella, Edward has learned to control his carnal urges and – along with his coven/family of other Cullens – Edward doesn’t eat people any more. Because Bella is so yummy (from a vampire perspective)  she is at risk every time she is near Edward and his “brothers”. The risk is there, but everyone – including Bella has ACCEPTED it.

At the beginning of New Moon, Bella cuts herself and bleeds. One of Edward’s “brothers” who isn’t as good managing his blood thirsty urges, tries attacking Bella. Edward intervenes and saves her, but realizes that the vampire risk to Bella is too great. Although he loves her dearly, he and his family decide it’s best to AVOID the risk of hurting her. Edward would rather live without her than live knowing he had harmed her. They leave Washington.

Well, poor Bella is terribly saddened when her true love takes off unexpectedly. With lots of free time on her hands she begins to develop a friendship with Jacob Black, a native American teen living on a nearby reservation who also happens to be a shape-shifting werewolf. They build motorcycles and Bella starts to rev Jacob’s engine a bit. Here is an example of risk TRANSFER. The vampire left to protect his love and now she is hanging out with a werewolf who can shape shift at any time and harm those around him.

Later in our saga, Bella begs Edward to turn her into a vampire too so they can live immortally ever after. For our star-crossed lovers, this is the only way to completely MITIGATE the risk of Edward killing Bella.

So there you have it. ACCEPT, AVOID, TRANSFER and MITIGATE, Twilight style.

(And yes, I am already embarrassed that I know this much about the Twilight saga.)