I Wish The PNW Had A New PR Craze Kinda Like Twilight, But NOT Portlandia

Going back to 2007 and 2008, I NEVER liked Twilight. I always thought the story was stupid and the whole Team Edward and Team Jacob thing was stupid. But I LOVED the aesthetics. The weather, the trees, the emo fashion...

If it wasn't for the movies, I don't think I would have been so compelled into trying to live in this part of the country and I am still deeply envious of millennials who grew up here. That was a great time to be a teenager so long as you lived in the right part of the country, which I didn't.

Somehow, Gravity Falls doesn't get people to come visit or try to live here in the Pacific Northwest, but it still holds up pretty well after so many years. Gravity Falls came out during one of the worst years of my life, but happens to take place almost exactly in the part of the state where one of my closest friends is from.

I wish we had something new like both of them, because Portlandia caused a lot of damage to Oregon. Fred Armisen, a second-rate Gen X comedian on SNL, encouraged the most obnoxious kinds of liberal white people to flood into Portland and try to turn it into a bad copy of Williamsburg. Fortunately, the man-bun lumbersexual ukulele hipsters have mostly left, but the damage is still done. 

When you think of the average Portlander, and by extent the average Oregonian, you're probably thinking a young person with a beanie, big glasses, and long-flowing hair for the women. I want that to change. We need something to showcase the rainy forests and mountains and that is both cool and brings people here. I feel like the lumberjack image needs to be shed because the reality is that most of the lumber towns around here are basically the same as coal towns in Kentucky and West Virginia.

Twilight's problem isn't that it's about vampires or that it takes place in Forks, Washington, it's that it's badly-written and panders to evangelical tweens who peaked during the Bush years. Like, if you were to make something viral that involved vampires in the Pacific Northwest, you could do a far better job than Stephanie Meyer.