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

[ex-fandrogy.livejournal.com]

For a lot of young readers (and their parents) these books are the first time they consider issues like female agency, or what is appropriate for "children". So I think it's easy for the critique to get especially heated because it's part of a larger discourse of feminism, female readership and its relationship to sexuality, and the discursive creation of "childhood" (itself a relatively recent invention in the Western World, and a product of leisure time when youths no longer had to work). I think especially with the Meyer books, it might be the first time that these readers have thought critically about gender representation, which seems to be the chief complaint among paid critics who have shunned the series. And this may be only tangentially related, but it may also be the first time some readers encounter a Mormon author (unless they've read some Orson Scott Card). LDS has a tradition of "celestial" or eternal/spiritual marriage which, in a series about immortal beings, could be read as especially important.

I should also add that all I know of the books is what I've read on Wikipedia (I know, I know) and what my mother has told me of them. Yes, my mother reads the series.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

A big chunk of this is part of why I think people are up in arms, yes.

I do have to ask, though: what's with the Mormon thing? In terms of mainstream American culture, I mean. I suspect I do not get that part of the discourse, since really, all you Christians look the same to me. ;)

[ex-fandrogy.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure I know what you're asking. Are you asking where Mormons fit within mainstream American culture, or how they're commonly characterized, or what they actually believe? (I'm not Mormon, but I've known quite a few of them and they never shied away from answering my questions about doctrine, and they were all different shades of devout.)

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

All I know about 'em is what I've read on Wikipedia too. I've also only read the first Harry Potter book, and it didn't do a lot for me.

Neither of them are telling particularly new stories. Harry Potter taps the tradition of British school fiction, e.g. Tom Brown's Schooldays, with a dash of Dickens at least as far as the naming conventions are concerned. The summaries of the Twilight books that I've seen come off to me as tapping into ... daytime soap opera. That's enough for me to say "sorry, think I'll pass."

Harry Potter also arguably did a decent job of presenting supernatural characters who were about more than just Being Supernatural Characters. People have families, start families, are part of a community which has internal tensions and tensions with the larger community which it both belongs to and is separate from, and are also part of that larger community. For all that HP didn't really do it for me either, I appreciated that; it's something I've recognised and appreciated in other well-done stories about a Community Apart. (I watched the movie Fame for the first time about a week ago, and it handles this quite smoothly.) I'd expect the same thing from a story about, oh, I dunno, grad students or professional show jumpers or any other chosen community which demands a lot of time and effort from people who ultimately still have to pay the rent.

I get the impression that once the Twilight books get into supernatural territory, the rest of the world becomes an annoyance, something that exists only to distract Our Heroes from their Sekrit World of Supernatural Awesum.