Two Questions...
Sep. 24th, 2008 01:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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.
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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no subject
Date: 2008-09-24 07:40 pm (UTC)Potter is enjoyable even for an adult. There are levels where it deals with morally complex issues in morally complex ways. Furthermore, the story grows and changes over the course of the seven books, moving from Gary-Stu-but-Fun to a fair degree of thoughtfulness about the price of being a hero. Potter also has an essentially idealistic mindset and message re tolerance, standing up to injustice, sticking by one's friends, etc.
Twilight, from what I hear, has a main character who is essentially a Stupid Teenage Girl (as opposed to a Clever Teenage Girl), and few adults can enjoy that. If one was never a STG, then one certainly hasn't developed more tolerance for it with age. And if one is a former STG, being reminded of it is probably painful rather than entertaining.
That said, my understanding is that Twilight is appealing to many despite the STG behavior--the author does enough hand-waving and other entertainment to make the books enjoyable. I think, however, the implosion came down on the last book because instead of STG becoming capable and smart, she went fully down the STG road; in addition, the melodramatic stuff moved into silly and squicky, and broke the suspension of disbelief.
I suspect that more than one ex-reader of the Anita Blake books now has a trigger point for when a vampire author moves from the interesting to the ludicrous.
Potter never crossed the ludicrous line.