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

[cucumberseed.livejournal.com]

Not having read Twilight, not sure, but I have some guesses, and take these for what they are worth, which is not an awful lot at all. Take these also with half a question mark at the end.

1) Twilight got recognition after the Potterdammerung, and perhaps that vein in adult readers of YA can only be mined once.

2) Similar production values does not mean similar outcomes. Rowling and Meyers may be comparable writers but their books are quite, I'd imagine, different. There might be differences in style that make one more engaging to adults than the other.

3) Potter's POV is a boy, Meyers' POV is a girl. Both of them display reasonable facsimiles of average gendered/age behavior, and for some unfaaaaaaathomable reason, readers find one set of behaviors more irritating than the other.

4) All wish fulfillment is not equal; I might argue that being a special snowflake because you have magical powers and a great destiny appeals to more ages/sexes/sexualities than being a special snowflake because a pretty magical thingamabob decides you are their soulmate. OTOH, to test that, we'd need to pair Twilight off with a Magical Girlfriend series to make sure that, again, the wish fulfillment is not constructed to be highly gendered (and not to skew the data before the test, but I have a conclusion and therefore would not be the best one to test it).

5) Girl Cooties.

6) On the other side, I've heard that the Twilight books promote some very fucked up relationship and gender dynamics, and while the Potter books have some fucked up dynamics (relationship and gender dynamics, no less) a lot of them are kind of mitigated by the fact that the POV characters are other than us, they are magicians, and a lot of their creepy dynamics involve use of wish-fulfillment power. Bella is a normal human being and her dynamics involve being in a relationship with a controlling, jealous person (with super powers, who sparkles).

[csinman.livejournal.com]

Somewhat guiltily, I admit #5 is one reason I've not read it. In fact, when I picked it up in the store and realized the main conflict was centered around whether or not some people end up snogging, I had to wipe my hands on my pants.

(Seriously, romance is good and all, but Twilight didn't appear to have the political and social plotting depth of Potter. No $17.99 from me!)

[cucumberseed.livejournal.com]

While I have every reason to suspect it's a foul book, and not fun at all, I cannot just dismiss that factor. Also, while I like a story with love, I am a hard sell on a story solely about love.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

Eh, I'm sorta there too. I generally don't care for books centred around a romantic conflict, unless there are wider repercussions to that romantic conflict. Like, say, A Fine and Private Place's major conflicts could be termed romantic, but being in the relationship or out of it isn't...the referent? It's both itself and a symbol for the question of being alive, being dead. How much you engage with the world, and what the benefits and drawbacks of that engagement are.

*steers comment off tangent*

It's when the romance is the be-all and end-all, unexamined, I think, that I am not the reader for the book. But what I find puzzling and, I admit, a little funny, is how most of the discourse has jumped over "I am not the reader for this book" straight into "EEEEVIL".

[cucumberseed.livejournal.com]

I will say that it makes me nervous that my 12 yo sister read the series and loved it, but then, everything makes me nervous for her.

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

I am not the reader for Dara Joy's books, though I know a few people who are hugely fond of them. They're all-romantic-conflict, all-the-time, but I get the impression that the female protagonists protag like crazy.

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.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

I really do need to read that book. I keep hovering over it in bookstores.

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

I was going to say "if I can find my copy I'd be happy to send it to you", and then I glanced up and saw it staring at me on the bookshelf.

I don't have your address, but I could mail it to the bookstore or something.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

Oh, no worries. :) I can library it!

[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.