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

[pnkrokhockeymom.livejournal.com]

To the point where stuff like Criminal Minds can refute it or undermine it without even having to explain the setup.

This. I am surprised to hear people say that the Twilight books present this love/possession/sex/violence trope as a model for teen relationships, as if it is somehow the first popular *anything* to do so, as if that is not the *standard* presentation girls get. As if they won't absorb that message without those books.

I wonder sometimes if the Twilight presentation of that sort of relationship--which is so very, very obvious, without any attempt to pretend it's something else, where the boy is literally a monster and the danger is literally that she'll be killed, and she believes that is the whole purpose of her being, to succumb to that--is why some groups of people are so freaked out. Not because they *disagree* with the motif, but because they are made uncomfortable by its not having been dressed up as something else. Because they don't like being made to confront the fact that this IS the dominant narrative. So they'll pretend it's scary, and new, and dangerous, and evil, because they want to deny the parallels between that and their own cultural narrative about het-normative relationships.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

This is, yes, why it surprises me so much that people are so up in arms about this particular thing. Because I don't think I remember the experience of teenage sexuality more keenly than anyone else really, and...that. That's what it was like; that's what the concept was.

And where did we get that from? Oh, just...the air. The world.