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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.
no subject
no subject
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?