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

[csinman.livejournal.com]

From that angle, Potter has the mundane but easily approved message, "Good is better than evil," while Twilight... I think I'd have to read it to really say, but it's certainly not as easy to pinpoint. There's your answer right there!

"I don't know what this means on a deeper level, so I'm going to shit a square kitten on the Internet and forbid my kids from reading anything but my old Bobsey Twins collection."

[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.)

[barbarienne.livejournal.com]

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