Portrait of an Influential Fan: Laura Byrne Cristiano, Co-Founder of Twilight Lexicon

As part of this week's series on fandom, Vulture will profile a number of passionate, influential fans.
NAME: Laura Byrne Cristiano, 46, co-founder of Twilight Lexicon, the oldest Twilight fan site.

ORIGIN STORY: Laura Byrne Cristiano's Twilight fan story didn't begin with Twilight, but with Harry Potter. Through the now-defunct HP fan sites Sugar Quill and Werewolf Registry, Cristiano met a fellow fan of the wizarding world in 2003 named Lori Joffs, who developed a fierce new obsession in the winter of 2005. "Lori kept chattering about this new book Twilight, and I honestly read it at first just to shut her up," jokes Cristiano, who immediately found herself drawn to the world of Bella and Edward. "At the time, it wasn't like anything else out there," she explains. "Every other book heroine had these tremendous odds stacked against her: She was suffering from an eating disorder or was caught in a custody battle. And I'm not staying those stories aren't valid, but unless you were personally in that situation, it was kind of hard to relate." Bella, on the other hand, was "so ordinary, finding herself in extraordinary circumstances. It was very easy to say, well, how would I deal with this kind of situation?" And, of course, "you remember what it was like being in high school and being in love that first time and how crazy and full of tension and drama it was."

In 2005, Joffs began an e-mail correspondence with author Stephenie Meyer. "It sounds more impressive than it is, because back in the day, she wasn't the most famous person in the universe," Cristiano qualifies. Still, for two fans who were accustomed to idolizing the reclusive J.K. Rowling, an accessible author was a tantalizing idea. With Meyer's blessing, Cristiano and Joffs launched Twilight Lexicon in March 2006. "Stephenie said she was doing a lot of book signings, and fans ask the same questions in Detroit as they do in Hartford, but they don't connect with each other," Cristiano recalls. "We thought it would be really handy to have a website where we could put up a lot of facts and questions that fans have, so there was this common knowledge base. That was how our website grew." It now gets around 75,000 visits a day.

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