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

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

we'd need to pair Twilight off with a Magical Girlfriend series

I can think of loads of Magical Girlfriend stories, but they're all movies: Amelie and everything else hewing to the Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype. Don't know of any involving YA protagonists, though.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

D'you think it's too far off to call The Wonder Years a bit of a Magical Girlfriend Series?

(Admittedly, I don't remember all of it well.)

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

Oy. I'd have to watch some of it again to make that call; I think I was maybe twelve when it came on. Winnie certainly came off as Attainable Yet Unattainable Girl, but from what little I recall, the magic of that was the everyday magic of a girl changing from "that girl I rode bikes with all summer" into a woman. Which may very well be sufficient.

[tithenai.livejournal.com]

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

[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]

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