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

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

[lifesscar.livejournal.com]

O.o

... shouldn't people be happy their children are reading? Because my little sister who hates reading is reading that damn book and I'm kind of jumping for joy.

Pre-teens and teenagers = crazy. Most of them level out with age, but I doubt not reading a book with questionable content will really be the deciding point.

*shrugs*

[seperis.livejournal.com]

Pretty much yeah. I'm so there.

[ithiliana.livejournal.com]

I am flashing back to the many many times friends of mine talked to me about their kids reading sf/comic books/etc. with horror, and I pointed out that I read sf (dad drew the line at comic books, damn him) my whole entire life and still do and gee, look I'm an English professor, and not a deranged maniac, and isn't it good they're reading and not doing drugs?

I am happily child free, but as a former child (whose parents except for the comic book thing and that was just dad being an asshold about them being too easy to read which showed he had no concept of visual literacy), I find it disturbing about how many parents try to control reading (latest example in this neck of the woods being Rowling). It's like the U.S. at least just has to go bsi over what children/adolescents are reading every few years...

[lifesscar.livejournal.com]

Oh God, I remember the Rowling fiasco. Weren't there reports of people actually burning the books?

My honest to God belief right now? You're worrying about a child reading a book with a weird/stalkerish guy? What the hell have you been doing the years they've already spent growing up where you were suppose to be showing them what wasn't acceptable. If you think your pre-teen/teenage girl will think that that is what it's all about, you should be asking yourself where the hell you went wrong and working on fixing that skewed view instead of fucking with a damn book because it doesn't have magically powers that make it draw you to it and suddenly believe that was right. It was there before or else they wouldn't be enthralled with it. Honestly, a bit of common sense would go a long way.

Placing any blame on any book is like saying we start off as adults and shrink down to babies. Backwards. Except, in today's society, we continue to be showed over and over again that none of us will accept responsibility even if it's stabbing us in the eye and whatever the hell utensil is doing the stabbing is gonna take the blame when it's your own damn hand clenching it.

[ithiliana.livejournal.com]

One of our alums who was a teacher had the Rowling books in her classroom for the kids, and one girl asked to take one home to finish. What she didn't tell her teacher was that her father had forbidden them. When he found her reading it, he ripped it apart.

He did come in and reimburse our alum for the book, but yeah, total destruction. There were burnings. THere was a video put out from a fundamentalist group in Florida claiming that the books were teaching children to be Satanists. They were the most challenged (as tracked by the American Library Association, even more than Judy Blume's books--and Judy Blume wrote a great defense of Rowling's books).

And exactly--a book does not magically make people do whatever the book is about (many people see/read Hamlet without killing a close relative)--and I share what I think is seperis' ire about how the so-called great literature (which, as I tell my students, really gets into sex, death, and perversion!) is exempt from criticism on these grounds while popular books, especially those kids like, is criticized to the nth degree.

ETA: edited to fix html error!