Two Questions...

[leahbobet]

...both spawned by the never-ending parade of posts about how terrible Twilight is.*

1) So two major YA series hit big in the last ten years: Twilight and Harry Potter. In the early part of each series, you saw what can be charitably called low production values in terms of craft, plots that revolved around blatant wish-fulfillment, and wholesale rips of the tropes of already established subgenres. Potter is the poster child for mainstream acceptance. Twilight is excoriated regularly in newspapers, the internets, and local bookstores in reenactments of the Five Minutes' Hate.

What's the difference? What causes that?

I have my own theory, but I want to hear yours.


2) Where do people get the idea that exposing a child to a worldview or idea at all means the child will automatically agree with, adopt, and adhere to that worldview or idea?

Really, peoples. You met kids?


*Haven't read it, not gonna, no opinion on the matter.

Comments

[lotusice.livejournal.com]

I really like what you have to say, here.

[barbarienne.livejournal.com]

Because even if you know intellectually that kids aren't necessarily going to be sucked into the maw of evil wrongthinking simply by reading a book, it's hard to let go of the desire to protect your spawn from even knowing about things you think are evil wrongthinking.

I can't fault crazy religious folks from wanting to protect their kids from liberal secularism, except insofar as I am a liberal secularist and think they are crazy religious folks. On this point I feel fine calling it a "culture war" and insisting that I want my culture to win.

In its ideal form, liberal secularism believes that merely being exposed to ideas won't corrupt someone, that tolerance for all ideas will allow the better, more useful ones to thrive, and all sensible people will see that Intolerance, Bias, and Selfish Materialism will be revealed as the worst destructive forces and ought to be avoided.

Unfortunately, the larger world I live in is one where 50% of all people are below average intelligence. This is not a bad thing, but it does make tolerance for everything a dangerous proposition.

Not all kids will be seduced to the dark side of the force by merely reading about it, but enough children are influenced by what they read, both for good and for bad, that it's not an unreasonable fear.

Idealistic secular liberals may permit their kids to read Twilight, but they at least want to make sure their daughters understand that there's more to life than being an uneducated, teenage mother with an abusive, stalker husband. There are quite a many young women these days who are from mainstream (read: not crazy religious kooks) households who obsess about getting married and having babies, to the point where they don't think critically about the traits of a suitable male partner. So disliking anything that seems to reinforce that attitude is highly understandable.

[pnkrokhockeymom.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I am not being extremely articulate today or very, um, smooth grammatically; I'm all clunky and hopped up on some meds. But I *think* that was about what I wanted to say.

And, also, *girl cooties.* To some extent there is probably a "girl protag/popular book" ewww thing going on. I know that I gave my son loads of grief when he was making fun of Twilight, because he likes those blasted Paolini things and I can't talk him out of it. I told him those were of approximately the same quality, with the same wish fulfillment and Mary Sue yick, as the Twilight books, but he refuses to believe me. Why? Girl cooties.

But he is really liking Scott Westerfield's Uglies, and that has a female protag. So I think I can beat that out of him by providing good materials.

And you know, that's my solution. Don't tell the kid they shouldn't or can't read it. Let them read it, discuss it critically, ask questions to problematize the relationships, and then it's a learning experience that might actually get them thinking about those "Love as Violence" tropes. And then provide lots of other quality reads to add to, complicate, and vary the message.

How else will you learn to discern if you aren't allowed to read crap?

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

Okay, the square kittens are cracking me up.

(I picture them kind of like a cube with a tail and a head sticking out. On which is a very irate expression.)

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

Because even if you know intellectually that kids aren't necessarily going to be sucked into the maw of evil wrongthinking simply by reading a book, it's hard to let go of the desire to protect your spawn from even knowing about things you think are evil wrongthinking.

Heh. I would be more on board with this explanation if more of the internet fuss were about One's Own Spawn. Instead, it seems to be about Everyone Else's Spawn.

There are quite a many young women these days who are from mainstream (read: not crazy religious kooks) households who obsess about getting married and having babies, to the point where they don't think critically about the traits of a suitable male partner.

This was always so. And it was normative and encouraged until about thirty-forty years ago. And, hell, if you look at people's dating habits during high school and for many, through the rest of their lives, still is so.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

Imagine that 99 out of every 100 adolescent Potter fans, on the internet and off, were obsessed with the same character.

99 of out 100 Due South fans are obsessed with the same character.

And the rest are obsessed with the dog. *g*

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

Yes. Not new, not unique, really mostly it's just in the air, in the cultural atmosphere. To the point where stuff like Criminal Minds can refute it or undermine it without even having to explain the setup.

(And do not apologize for like, talking. :) )

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

Oh, no worries. :) I can library it!

[pnkrokhockeymom.livejournal.com]

To the point where stuff like Criminal Minds can refute it or undermine it without even having to explain the setup.

This. I am surprised to hear people say that the Twilight books present this love/possession/sex/violence trope as a model for teen relationships, as if it is somehow the first popular *anything* to do so, as if that is not the *standard* presentation girls get. As if they won't absorb that message without those books.

I wonder sometimes if the Twilight presentation of that sort of relationship--which is so very, very obvious, without any attempt to pretend it's something else, where the boy is literally a monster and the danger is literally that she'll be killed, and she believes that is the whole purpose of her being, to succumb to that--is why some groups of people are so freaked out. Not because they *disagree* with the motif, but because they are made uncomfortable by its not having been dressed up as something else. Because they don't like being made to confront the fact that this IS the dominant narrative. So they'll pretend it's scary, and new, and dangerous, and evil, because they want to deny the parallels between that and their own cultural narrative about het-normative relationships.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Potter escapes because it's for kids, and though its structure is dead cliche, the decoration (the spells and so forth) are rife with wit and cleverness.

Twlight is supposedly for an older audience, it is a fairly blatant argument for abstention, substituting lots of emo and angst for sexual activity.

[tithenai.livejournal.com]

*gasp!* What's wrong with Amelie? (For serious -- the movie is cinematic perfection to me.)

[shiroiko.livejournal.com]

I've read all but the last of the Twilight novels and all of the Harry Potter novels.

Harry Potter was fun fluff. Yes, it was annoying how all the adults were generally painfully stupid and Harry lucking into the solution to the main problem of each book was a bit simplistic, but overall they're an entertaining read and feature some great side characters (Weasley twins for the win!).

Twilight was insipid. Really... just horrific. I really just can't take another idiot Mary Sue protagonist. Bella is boring as all hell, and yet everyone loves her. The author never SHOWS why everyone adores her so much, she just SAYS they do, and that there is some shoddy writing.

On top of that there's the quite disturbing relationships that Bella involves herself in. Both of her love interests act in extremely creepy and abusive ways and yet the author's viewpoint is that this is romantic, not a warning sign of dysfunctional relationship. I cannot stress how purely disturbed I was with the actions the two main love interests throughout the first three books. Pnkrokhockeymom summed it up well in defining the theme of both romantic relationships as "love is possession". It makes me frightened that Meyer thinks this is what romantic relationships should be like.

As for the Mormon thing, having real nearly everything OSC has written and then reading the Twilight books makes me wonder if it's just a coincidental link between the two writers writing some weak and painfully underutilized female characters or if the religion both share has somehow influenced both of their views of what females are capable of (or NOT capable of, in both cases) and what their roles in life should be. I'd really want to read more fiction by Mormon writers to find out.

[pnkrokhockeymom.livejournal.com]

But that IS the approved message from that camp, and I don't think those girls are getting that message just from Twilight; they're getting it everywhere, wrapped in many other colors. They are getting it from the federal government in the form of abstinence-only sex education ("do you want to be the used and chewed up piece of gum? ewwwww. save yourself for your one true love or you are dirty"). They are getting it from EVERYWHERE. It is the approved narrative on that side.

[pnkrokhockeymom.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes, this. And not just emo and angst, but emo, and angst, and the threat of certain violence if you go too far.

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

Quoting from the Onion A.V. Club article that coined the phrase (http://www.avclub.com/content/node/57870):

The Manic Pixie Dream Girl exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is an all-or-nothing-proposition. Audiences either want to marry her instantly (despite The Manic Pixie Dream Girl being, you know, a fictional character) or they want to commit grievous bodily harm against them and their immediate family.

Not everyone minds the stereotype -- some stereotypes are perfectly likable. But it's certainly evolved to the level of stereotype.

[tithenai.livejournal.com]

So far as I'm concerned, I will never read Twilight because the actual books couldn't possibly be better than cleolinda's recaps of them. And even there I got bored at a point. I really enjoy the industry of mockery that's sprung up in its wake, though.

1) I enjoyed the HP series. There was often stuff to nitpick, but I enjoyed it. On the other hand, I picked up Twilight, flipped it open randomly, read two pages, and burst out laughing. The writing was just terrible. Rowling, for all her flaws, at least had invisible prose mos of the time. But Bella's first person narrative is so syrupy and ridiculous that I couldn't stand it. I may yet try to read them, but knowing how the series develops, I can't really be bothered.

2) You know, I mocked the Bible Belt's book burnings (alliteration ftw!) and their notion that children would START PRACTICING WITCHCRAFT ZOMG if they read HP. But I think there's something more insidious going on with the Twilight books. I mean, to be perfectly honest, I think 19th century novels inform my morality alot more than I like to admit. I don't think it's a reason not to read books, mind, or to keep your children from reading them; I think it's all the more reason to encourage discussion of books kids read.

(edited to provide actual link)

[shiroiko.livejournal.com]

The LDS church believed in Jesus (and both Old and New testament) but has additional books of teachings as well and well as additional prophets. Wiki's brief synopsis of the differences is "Perhaps the most distinct difference between the LDS Church and other faiths is the belief that its founder Joseph Smith, Jr. was a prophet who received a visitation from God the Father and Jesus Christ ... and was directed to translate what became known as the Book of Mormon, a volume of scripture..."

So it's like Christianity plus a bunch of other stuff... a LOT of other stuff... and that other stuff is all things generally though of as heresy by other Christian sects. Actually, several sects consider the LDS church a cult rather than a church.

[tithenai.livejournal.com]

Huh. Well, the more I know... Thanks for explaining.

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

I'm loath to think that I have anything new to say after 68 comments -

I read Twilight when I was in library school, when only the first book was out, and I had a really mixed reaction, roughly:

-That it was fair-to-middling on a craft level, perhaps half a notch below Harry Potter. But I think that our culture considers romantic writing more mockable than non-romantic writing - even among romance writers, there are web sites dedicated to mocking purple prose or bad covers, and Fabio is a joke that I can't find any parallels for in Tom Clancy war-porn-suspense or another genre marketed at men.

-That it was, despite craft flaws and feminist doom, kind of sexy and compulsively readable.

-That it was hella creepy from a feminist point of view, to such an extent that I had read the entire thing fully expecting Bella to figure out that it wasn't wise to have a vampire boyfriend with an anger problem and jealousy/possessiveness issues.

-That in my own youth I had read my way through Sailor Moon, Fushigi Yuugi, and later a long run of Japanese romance novels, all of which exposed me to hella creepy views of relationships and sexuality, and I hadn't been brainwashed by them, and it was vaguely condescending of me to expect other children to be brainwashed by them. (I was also much annoyed by Naomi Wolf's excoriation of Gossip Girls and similar novels, for the same reason.)

I think my reaction got less mixed as the books became both creepier and sillier as the series went on - to the point where I'm not particularly concerned about The Children, I just think they're hilarious.

[barbarienne.livejournal.com]

And yet, a square kitten is still less creepy a notion than the flower-kittens Bujold created in Cetaganda.

[barbarienne.livejournal.com]

Exactly. And it has become the approved public narrative at a time when many of the parents are people who grew up during the time when the message was completely the opposite: free love, destroy the sexual double standard, who needs a piece of paper to approve their love, wheee isn't the pill cool!

The tail end of the baby boom and the early folks in generation X are the parents we're talking about. Those of us from upper-middle-class-white-America families (by and large the liberal secularist set) are freaking the fuck out at what the religious right is doing to our country. We don't want them to brainwash the next generation. We thought we were the generation that broke the cycle of badness and now women could get on with claiming their equality.

As for it being about Everyone Else's Spawn... Well, heck, you can't make a public case about it if it's only about your kids. That you take care of in your home. Unfortunately, the asshole opposition who would like to see women barefoot, pregnant, and uneducated, don't hold back from pushing it into the public, so there we must fight.

Said, of course, as a childless woman. ;-)

[kateelliott.livejournal.com]

#1

Rowling has wit; there are some really funny bits and passages in the Potter books. Also, I liked many of the characters and the way they interacted. There were also plenty of cliches and lazy writing, but her cleverness out weighed that, for me as a reader (although I found the epilogue disappointing). Not Michael Chabon level writing, needless to say, but an enjoyable light read with some deeper themes.

I could not get far into Twilight. The writing fell flat, it was too angsty serious, the girl bored me, and I, having grown up in a small town, could not even for a heartbeat believe the beautiful high school vampires. It just all struck me as dumb.

#2 Dunno.

otoh, my children have extremely similar political and worldviews to my own, so I wonder if I brainwashed them!

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

("do you want to be the used and chewed up piece of gum? ewwwww. save yourself for your one true love or you are dirty")

Is that like a for serious ad?

I wonder if large portions of Americans would find some of our subway ads shocking. ("Being Desi doesn't stop AIDS. Use a condom.")

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'd noticed in the news coverage of the Texas polygamy thing that most people who self-identify as Christian seem to turn up their nose at Mormons. I must admit I find it a little funny that the cry of heretics ee! is still alive and well in modern times.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

This is, yes, why it surprises me so much that people are so up in arms about this particular thing. Because I don't think I remember the experience of teenage sexuality more keenly than anyone else really, and...that. That's what it was like; that's what the concept was.

And where did we get that from? Oh, just...the air. The world.