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Two Questions...
...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.
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.
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Weirdly, Clare Abshire in The Time Traveler's Wife doesn't protag at all, but that story totally worked for me and had me in tears by the end. I was okay with letting it be a story about Henry and his profound weirdness, I think because his weirdness causes a lot of problems for him, and the story's really about finding as much happiness as one can in the face of Fate What Completely Fucking Hates You. In this case, happiness takes the shape of love, marriage and parenthood, which I was surprisingly okay with, perhaps because in that story, all three are under threat in a way that they totally aren't in a typical romance novel. In a typical romance novel, the threat to lasting happiness comes from factors internal to the characters, but as a reader you know that five pages from the end the characters will have overcome (or, more likely, completely discarded) those internal factors and everyone will live Happily Ever After. In The Time Traveler's Wife there's no such guarantee -- the conflict is driven by something entirely internal to Henry, but it's also entirely not under his control and something he has no way of getting rid of. The shotgun's on the mantelpiece from the very beginning of the story, and oh yes, it does go off.
It occurs to me that the supernatural-romance stories I've seen (read: Buffy, anything by Laurel K. Hamilton) pretty much all involve the supernatural protagonist overcoming the negative aspects of his/her supernatural-ness if he/she is to obtain Twu Wuv. It'd be interesting to see a story where the supernatural protagonist just can't. Bonus points to anyone who can do that and also make it not a tragedy. Fewer bonus points to anyone who can make it a tragedy but not follow the hubris model.
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I don't have your address, but I could mail it to the bookstore or something.
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