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

[quietus-x.livejournal.com]

I read "Flowers in the Attic" when I was in, uh, 7th or 8th grade, and I read the fuck out of it and enjoyed her other books because of how terriblebadwrongFORBIDDENOMG! it was. It was seriously a fast read, and thinking about it now makes me wanna read them again. :<

But, uh, let's be honest here, VC Andrews' stuff is pretty fucked up/disturbing, content-wise (I remember a youngish girl having sex with her stepdad in one of the books? Not to mention all the incest). But when I read it, I got the impression that it was something that wasn't aimed towards my age group (unlike, uh, those uh, Sweet Valley High or whatever books?), and that the subject matter dealt with broken people in harmful relationships/situations (the chick who was brainwashed/drugged into believing she was really her dead sister because her parents liked her sister more?).

Twilight, by contrast, does not portray the (questionably) damaging and harmful relationships in the books as harmful or damaging, but instead as healthy when they (maybe) aren't.

So that's how Twilight differs from VC Andrews. I don't know about worse, but Twilight's definitely aimed towards a younger crowd and doesn't seem to carry an awareness that the Edward/Bella relationship is kind of sketchy. By contrast, VC Andrews writes novels for adults, and I never got the impression that the stuff in the books was to be considered "normal" or "good" or whatever.


Also, this is totally off-topic but I have to say it every time I hear talk about Twilight:

Why can't people read LJ Smith's books instead? They're basically the same thing (no, really -- Vampire Diaries has almost the exact same premise as Twilight), but much better written, more interesting, and with more likable characters and a usually-present plot. (Also, it was my second fandom so I'd also really like LJS to get more attention as an author, because she's awesome and I love her.)

[seperis.livejournal.com]

God, don't start me on those. I liked The Vampire Diaries and The Secret Circle, don't get me wrong--and still do and re-read them regularly--but Stefan makes me nuts. Elena and Cassie I loved, but Stefan and Adam made me want to throw things. Gah.

(I was a huge fan of both Damon and Nick.)

But yes, I wish those had taken off better. God knows why they didn't. *sighs*

[quietus-x.livejournal.com]

Hahahahah, I liked the Night World most, and I still do. I like them SO MUCH AND I HAVE NO IDEA WHY.

I didn't like Elena that much, and I hated the fourth book (srsly, wut. TRILOGY MEANS DO NOT CAVE IN AND MAKE A FOURTH). Damon rocked my socks, Stefan was cool before I got old enough to realize that wow, self-loathing vampires are actually totally overdone (this was, I think, my second book with a self-loathing vampire, and the first was a Ravenloft novel before I knew what Ravenloft novels were). This was pre-Buffy for me, and after seeing Angel, okay, it got less cool.

I think they were just too early -- the supernatural romance genre didn't really get popular until a few years ago, after "In the Forests of the Night" (a terrible book with a terrible Mary Sue) was published, and after that, it kind of bloomed, but by then, LJS had stopped putting out new books for years.

They're being republished now, though the covers are kind of stupid-looking, so who knows: maybe they'll take off in popularity again. *crosses fingers*