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

[veejane.livejournal.com]

In re #1, the difference is that Snape is not sparkly. He is greasy. If he were sparkly, I would larf and larf possibly people would opine about it.

(Also, I mean, the latter HP books have been judged somewhat harshly by Yours Truly, but I don't think they ever inspired a review in the Washington Post that ended, "Reader, I hurled." I don't know what happens in books 6 and 7 of the HP series -- not having read them -- but I can't recall their being described as actually sucking. Sloppily edited and overinflated, yes.)

In re #2, the whole idea of exposing children to things in a positive way is that they model the behavior they witness. Not in all ways, and not by any stretch a complete world-view, but... monkey see, monkey do isn't a saying for no reason. So yes, exposing a child to a worldview gives that child the chance to espouse that worldview later on. Where normalizing behavior that is beyond the pale is concerned (wherever you set the pale to be), the chance is more than most prefer to take.

I speak primarily from the perspective of somebody who points and laughs rather than takes the ramparts in these arguments. Although, I have to say, Twilight is SO much more point-and-laughable than HP. Even the excerpts I have managed to subject myself to have included Felonious Abuse of a Thesaurus in the First Degree, to say nothing of "Oh shut up and tell me what happened already, you fulminating author" syndrome. And anyway, it has sparkly vampires and that will never stop being funny.