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

babbling becuase not much time!

[ithiliana.livejournal.com]

You posted about this earlier, right? And I liked that post then, and this one is even better!

(I had to read all the responses too, and, wow, great discussion.)

I read everything I could when I was a kid, and then we had to have Special Meetings to let me check stuff out of the "adult" portion of the library because of policies back in the 1960s (we were supposed to be happy with the kid's section until we graduated high school). I read everything in the kid's section by the time I was in junior high. And at home, I read through the five foot shelf of books, and all the stuff my parents had, and yeah, I found Gor in the adult library, and it was hot, and I read Rafael Sabatini in early high school and got a hard on for pirates and.....let me see, I had to ask my Dad what circumcision meant in 8th grade because we were on the road driving to Texas so no dictionary handy, and I was reading a Michner novel about Israel, and he damn well told me what it meant.

The only problem he had was comics, and given all the freedom I had to read in every other way, I cannot complain too much. My parents were big on reading (and yeah we talked about what I read when I wanted to), but they didn't try to control it in any way (other than the comics, sigh), and gee, I turned out okay (and am a feminist too, and I wrote some pretty hot non-con and rapefic if I do say so myself).

So while I don't want to read Twilight, and snicker a bit at sparkly vampires, I have absolutely no problem with the people who do and who love it, and share your question of why the continual insulting of 12 year olds (my mum lives not far from Forks, Washington, and she was trying to say fandom is worth today, and I reminded her of the Beatles, and Frank Sinatra).

This culture gets very nervous about young women, whether children, adolesent, or in their twenties, expressing pleasure and joy. And we seem to go through periodical *omg book is all at fault* (Rowling, or Judy Blume, and now Stephanie Meyer).

So, um, great meta and lots of think about but must dash now!

Re: babbling becuase not much time!

[seperis.livejournal.com]

Months ago when I first read it, I think? I totally groove the teenager-point-of-view. I have my diary from my terrible teens. Bella, at least for me, was not far off the mark in how my fantasy live was lived. Though ages fourteen to fifteen, it was teh brooding Phantom of the Opera instead of the hot vampire.

There's a strong tendency to treat teenage girls as mindless sponges that will break beneath a breeze, which teaches them, sadly enough, that their strength is based on how they are interpreted by other people. That's got to change.

Re: babbling becuase not much time!

[ithiliana.livejournal.com]

*thinks back to ye olden days* (I could never keep diaries successfully--I kept starting them and giving them up--I realized when I found LJ that the problem with a diary is there is no audience to give me feedback! I WANT an audience!).

*coffs* Um. OK. Brooding Phantom, check (which reminds me: do you read Pratchett?)

Barnabas in Dark Shadows, OMG YES!!! (Also Quentin Collins even MOAR--werewolves!!!).

Although I have to say I didn't read/like many books with adolescent girls, because I didn't like them, didn't like being treated as an adolescent girl, tried to be a boy as long as I could (didn't work, damnit), etc. etc. But that was because, way back then (I'm in my fifties) teenager girls were treated as mindless sponges who existed only to get married, blah blah blah!

So, WORD!