i'd like to point out first, my del.icio.us tags include amtdi and non-con

[seperis]

You know, I thought I talked myself down off this one, because frankly, Twilight is not great literature and mounting a defense takes up valuable time reading non-con amtdi porn.

But you know, I just feel that inspired, plus I ran out of Dean/Castiel reading and my son still has Twilight in his locker. Go figure.

I have to know something; did I miss the memo that I'm supposed to be ashamed of being twelve? My apologies; see, when I was twelve? I never really considered to form my actions to meet an arbitrary standard that would come into existence twenty years later on my reading habits, because that? Would have totally pulled the Gor novels right out of my hot little hands.

As in, please to be putting down your AMTDI non-con for a second while ranting on how Twilight is ruining young girls. I will totally be there when fandom as a whole stops finding aliens made them do it rape as a fun and lighthearted fanfic pasttime. I mean, I will be there, but I'll still be writing it. Hell, throw in eroticized slave-fic with idealized sexual slavery and falling in love with your enslaver controlling boyfriend who stalks you...wait.

Writer responsibility comes up a lot with this, which I suppose is fair when one is writing cross-alien-species sexual hijinks and one is struggling to portray those sensitivity, or the reality of slave trafficking in the modern world, or hell, magical healing cock after rape and lets toss in mpreg for kicks, because there's a genre that's incredibly sensitive and socially conscious. I have zero interest in writer responsibility, to be honest, except for one key points--did they tell a story? That's it; that's where it starts and stops, with some codicils of audience. Twilight was readable to a huge group of people.

Maybe the mystery is the plotline? Because I agree; I cannot imagine why anyone would enjoy a fantasy novel about two people obsessively in love with each other and would do anything to be together.

You may pile your under the bed romance novels over to the left, please; lets do this right. Let's blackball the entire romance novel industry already. I want petitions against VC Andrews, Johanna Lindsay, Judith McNaught, Catherine Coulter, Virginia Henley (Okay, I could stand to lose her), and anything set in Viking England with a wee Saxon lass.

Seriously. I get hating them for being bad, as beauty is in the eye of the beholder; shaming young girls for something they've found to love is edging right into the reason I'm trying to stop myself from ever using the term "Like a twelve year old girl" again in any slash fic I write. Which will probably be something I'll have to pick up on beta because comparisons to teenage girls as insults to men is surprisingly common.

Please lay off the girls. And remind me again how Seeds of Yesterday ended. For the life of me, I couldn't find it with my other VC Andrews work.

Comments

[scarletts-awry.livejournal.com]

But I'm not sure how Shakespeare/Romeo and Juliet *is* a valid analogy with Twilight, and part of that is that I'm not sure what you're basing the analogy on.

And it's not a matter of *hating* Twilight. My feelings aren't strong enough to call it hate. It's a matter of adult fans being able to discuss a book or movie or tv show, and to discuss the problems a story has--any story.

I have zero interest in writer responsibility, to be honest, except for one key points--did they tell a story? That's it; that's where it starts and stops, with some codicils of audience. Twilight was readable to a huge group of people.

I disagree because by those standards we should never talk about racism, sexism, or homophobia in a huge slew of stories. Writer responsibility is a massively important thing, and I speak as a reader, a writer, and a recovering academic. Popularity does not excuse a story from critique. By analogy we would never talk about how Doctor Who is pretty awesome but the poor treatment given both Mickey and Martha is disturbing. Or about how Frank Miller may be a fascinating stylist in his original work but he has a very problematic attitude toward women. I mean, for me, half the fun of fandom is being able to take all these things apart.

To take the analogy to it's logical extreme, we would never be able to critique Birth of a Nation or Triumph of the Will. Both were hugely popular and are still hugely influential.

I think it's all the more sad and troubling that the hysteria over Twilight--among both lovers and haters--has actually blocked the possibility for most discussion. I honestly believe it's a book worth discussing, worth interrogating. I'm surprised that the classic Alpha Male has as much currency as Edward's popularity suggests, and I would like to know why.

Actually, I have an easier time understanding the young teenagers who read the Twilight books--even though I never read Flowers in the Attic, etc. I don't think kids are going to get scarred for life or anything, but I don't think that means we shouldn't discuss the story. And it has nothing to do with "oh think of the children" which is, of course, the bullshittiest of arguments. If Twilight were *not* YA, I'd still feel the need to discuss it and its phenomenon.

shaming young girls for something they've found to love

From what I've seen, that's not what most internet discussion of Twilight is doing. More importantly, young girls falling in love with a story does not mean that adults should be banned from discussing that story--which is what your original is suggesting with the statement that your only criteria for writer responsibility was did they tell a story.

[seperis.livejournal.com]

I disagree because by those standards we should never talk about racism, sexism, or homophobia in a huge slew of stories.

Actually, no. It doesn't. The difference between writer responsibility and writer choice are dramatically different, but dictating to writers what their ideology should be and how to express it is co-opting imagination for agenda. It also strips away a lot of literature that otherwise would not or could not be written when it does not fall under the arbitrary standard society places, which is why we keep having to reinvent the concept of obscenity every few years and debate the meaning of artistic merit. The writer has no responsibility to craft a story that does anything but tell a story. The reader is the one that decides whether the story should/could/does live up to their personal values and vote with the magic of credit cards whether or not the story is good.

Readers have the right of interpretation, of discussion, of meta and critique of the book in question. But as reader, I will as soon dictate an author's story as fly using my imaginary wings; that's a very quick path, not even a slippery slope, a path to censorship and the arbitrary enforcement of standards by the pop psychology flavor of the week.

[scarletts-awry.livejournal.com]

That is *not* what I'm saying at all.

Writer responsibility has *nothing* to do with dictating to anyone. It is *not* about moralization. It's simply the fact that I am responsible for these words I write, just as you are responsible for your original post, etc, just as anyone who puts forth any words in public is responsible for those words.

It sounds like you're taking the right to discuss a story and turning that discussion into some kind of censorship.

I am dissapointed that the parameters of your argument keep shifting instead of addressing what I've actually said.

[seperis.livejournal.com]

I'm disappointed that we went, of all places, to writer responsibility, which I do not believe in at all, in any way. This isn't an argument I want to make because to me, it goes against what I believe on a fundamental level about creativity. YMMV on this one, but that's not an argument I can work with because it literally makes no sense to me at all.