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Doctor Spaceman posted:Lindsay has a video from a few years ago that was good I gave this a watch, and I don't disagree with a lot of it, but it feels like Lindsay's overall point is, "Yeah, Twilight isn't that well-written, and it's guilty of having anti-feminist elements, but Meyer wrote it as wish-fulfillment, so...eh?  ."I don't know. Now I feel like I shouldn't have said anything on the subject. - Anyway, new AVGN episode out on Mission Impossible for the N64: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnceSzQ-CpI
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Aug 22, 2020 06:19
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Kaiser Mazoku posted:I mean you have to at least raise an eyebrow at a book series aimed at teenage girls where the two love interests are a creepo stalker and a literal babyfucker. I don't think you understand what literal means. Also I'm pretty sure the whole werewolf imprinting thing is presented as unambiguously bad in general as well as in that specific case. Like that doesn't make it fine but you're also stretching the truth to paint Twilight as uniquely bad which is what people are talking about when they say it doesn't deserve the level of hate it gets.
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Aug 22, 2020 06:27
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Twilight and the Bay Transformers can both be terrible.
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Aug 22, 2020 06:29
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Dire Lemming posted:I don't think you understand what literal means. what does it mean
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Aug 22, 2020 06:52
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Kaiser Mazoku posted:what does it mean Well in that context it would mean that there is actually, literally you might say, sex involving an infant in the book which, if you need clarification, is in fact not in the book.
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Aug 22, 2020 07:29
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It isn’t just Transformers. There has been plenty of media targeted at men and boys that have gone through the same trajectory of immense hype and popularity followed by immense backlash, e.g. The Da Vinci Code, Eragon, Ready Player One and Sword Art Online. You could even point to the whole “violent video games will corrupt kids’ minds” panic of the 90s as an example since those were aimed almost exclusively at boys at the time. It’s just something that happens whenever a piece of media becomes popular in a way that others find inexplicable. Sure, Twilight isn’t significantly worse than your average Mills and Boon novel, and RPO isn’t significantly worse than your average nerd self-insert story, but they both became extremely famous and somehow got turned into movies while other, better stories got left in the dust. Mocking them is just a way of getting some amusement out of the whole thing, and it’s all in good fun as long as you don’t cross over into mocking the fans.
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Aug 22, 2020 07:33
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Bakeneko posted:It isn’t just Transformers. There has been plenty of media targeted at men and boys that have gone through the same trajectory of immense hype and popularity followed by immense backlash, e.g. The Da Vinci Code, Eragon, Ready Player One and Sword Art Online. You could even point to the whole “violent video games will corrupt kids’ minds” panic of the 90s as an example since those were aimed almost exclusively at boys at the time. RPO's pretty bad, because it's not trying to actually engage with audience's own 80's nostalgia like a better story would, it's just the author directly talking down to the reader about their own 80's nostalgia via their self-insert protagonist. It's the written equivalent of that one person who won't shut up about their favourite topic at a party and crowds you into a corner so you're stuck listening to them spiel on and on.
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Aug 22, 2020 07:39
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Neddy Seagoon posted:RPO's pretty bad, because it's not trying to actually engage with audience's own 80's nostalgia like a better story would, it's just the author directly talking down to the reader about their own 80's nostalgia via their self-insert protagonist. It's the written equivalent of that one person who won't shut up about their favourite topic at a party and crowds you into a corner so you're stuck listening to them spiel on and on. imagine being in the bathroom at a bar and ernest cline is right next to you and just finished doing rails off the tank cover in the handicap stall
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Aug 22, 2020 08:12
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Dire Lemming posted:I don't think you understand what literal means. Also I'm pretty sure the whole werewolf imprinting thing is presented as unambiguously bad in general as well as in that specific case. Like that doesn't make it fine but you're also stretching the truth to paint Twilight as uniquely bad which is what people are talking about when they say it doesn't deserve the level of hate it gets. This isn't at all true, werewolf imprinting was definitely painted a romantic "true love" deal. I was a certified Twilight fan for about six months as a teen, so trust me.
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Aug 22, 2020 08:19
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TA Metis posted:This isn't at all true, werewolf imprinting was definitely painted a romantic "true love" deal. I was a certified Twilight fan for about six months as a teen, so trust me. Yeah, the baby's born and then once it is she immediately ages up to like- I dunno, 18-19? However old Jacob was- and then immediately stops right there. Conveniently. Which is fine, it's whatever, I'm all fine with stories going 'Wrap it up' on things and giving them convenient ways to gloss over things. See: Mario games, Kirby games, The Lord of the Rings with it's Load Bearing evil ring, etc.
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Aug 22, 2020 08:36
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Really? I thought there were some werewolves who resented it because it's something that completely change their life and they have no control over, like they're happily married and then they imprint on some random person they meet and it turns their life upside-down. Though this is more going off the Lindsay Ellis/Dan Olson videos than my own very vague memories of the books so my view is probably skewed. edit: I guess the magic age up ending is basically the author going "Actually no it's fine just don't think about it too hard everything works out in the end see" even if it was a point of contention earlier. Dire Lemming fucked around with this message at 08:47 on Aug 22, 2020 |
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Aug 22, 2020 08:37
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RareAcumen posted:Yeah I'm with Arist on this one, people gave the Transformers movies poo poo but it was never like a national conversation about how dangerous this was to our poor young male audience like Twilight was. I guess it being a big action focused movie where the romance was never very compelling was part of the reason for that but Twilight got a lot of poo poo for not really deserved reasons.  (kidding)
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Aug 22, 2020 08:43
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Dire Lemming posted:Really? I thought there were some werewolves who resented it because it's something that completely change their life and they have no control over, like they're happily married and then they imprint on some random person they meet and it turns their life upside-down. Though this is more going off the Lindsay Ellis/Dan Olson videos than my own very vague memories of the books so my view is probably skewed. That definitely happens, but it's more like "well, it's true love! what are you gonna do." The main one who resents it is the only female werewolf, who can't imprint on anyone because of weird biotruths I think?
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Aug 22, 2020 08:48
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Aug 22, 2020 10:08
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Yeah, put that way it really sounds very stupid, doesn't it? As someone who never read Twilight and continues to never want to, I quietly assumed the dude in question would have to wait at least the full 18 years for this nonsense to start making sense. Making a 7-year old look like 17 due to accelerated aging doesn't magically make the 7-year old an adult. I would have mistakenly assumed the author of Twilight would understand this, and reading this poo poo in the middle of the novel would have made me so mad my head would have exploded, like that guy from Scanners
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Aug 22, 2020 10:42
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The best Twilight-related content is that time Anna Kendrick tweeted "Holy poo poo, I just remembered I was in Twilight.".
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Aug 22, 2020 12:12
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Neddy Seagoon posted:RPO's pretty bad, because it's not trying to actually engage with audience's own 80's nostalgia like a better story would, it's just the author directly talking down to the reader about their own 80's nostalgia via their self-insert protagonist. It's the written equivalent of that one person who won't shut up about their favourite topic at a party and crowds you into a corner so you're stuck listening to them spiel on and on. And it's not even as though they have anything interesting or insightful to say. "Yes, I also recall ALF. Now please leave."
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Aug 22, 2020 12:46
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Alaois posted:imagine being in the bathroom at a bar and ernest cline is right next to you and just finished doing rails off the tank cover in the handicap stall  We came here to motherfuckin' do 80's trivia night, and we can loving do it, alright?!
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Aug 22, 2020 13:11
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Ready Player One is loving terrible and his follow-up (although almost certainly written before) is somehow lazier and worse. It's pretty funny that a Twilight fanfiction written by a grown adult that it also worse than Twilight in every way managed to become one of the best selling books/series ever.
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Aug 22, 2020 13:40
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I would say that criticism of 50 Shades is more warranted than Twilight because it does have an actively harmful representation of bdsm relationships.
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Aug 22, 2020 14:00
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Arcsquad12 posted:I would say that criticism of 50 Shades is more warranted than Twilight because it does have an actively harmful representation of bdsm relationships. this is something that is extremely common with kink, people use fiction as an outlet for fantasies that they know would be harmful or self destructive to actually literally do in real life. (see: all the erotic/romantic fiction popular among women that is either thinly veiled or not at all veiled rape fantasy content, which is more or less what 50 shades falls into.) and I don't think it should be required that any media of that sort have a big blaring neon red disclaimer "DON'T ACTUALLY DO THIS". that's kind of a condescending way to look at it, frankly.
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Aug 22, 2020 14:51
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nine-gear crow posted:Stephanie Meyer just released a new Twilight novel the other week and it's already sold so well it's revived the whole enterprise, so a resurgence in interest, positive and negative, in the franchise is a gimme at the moment. It was basically dead before this though once the movies were finished, fwiw. Is it just as funny as the 3rd novel? Which had the vampire fetus kick so hard it broke the main characters spine and Edward had to eat the baby out of her.
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Aug 22, 2020 15:04
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As a person who was once a teenage girl reading Twilight I gotta say, the majority of 'problematic' stuff that people point out completely went over my head. What I thought was creepy about this whole imprinting business was that it was one sided (?) There was actually a very interesting minor thing mentioned at the very end of the last book, when another half-vampire shows up and he's kinda surprised and intrigued by Renesme's (or whatever her name was) existence, because he thought he was one of a kind. And I imagined Renesme stuck between this one werewolf for whom she was destined and this other guy who's the only male of her species. Meyer had some awful ideas for Renesme's potential love life, nuff said. But really, the worst part of these books at the time for me, was that they were way longer than they should've been, very boring in parts, Bella was an isufferable rear end in a top hat, Edward was bland like paper, and Jacob would never loving understand that he wasn't the most important person in the world. I thought it was really funny some people were team Jacob or called it a love triangle, when Jacob was just an annoying third wheel all the time and never treated like a serious option by Bella. I did not mind sparkling vampires, however. I still don't get what's the problem with that. Also, for all the problems I had with it, I still read the entire thing and it was enjoyable enough. I was never a fan though (I actually didn't know any one person who'd openly like Twilight. Probably even the girls who did like it would pretend it was only ironically. It was the same with Justin Bieber, ftr. Everybody listened to his songs and learn all the lyrics and then would say that it's just a joke and they hate him, really. Social pressure is a scary thing). And, well, compared to all the books Twilight inspired it really is a mostly harmless trashy romance. Unless you assume people reading it must be stupid and unable of critical thinking.
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Aug 22, 2020 15:05
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macabresca posted:But really, the worst part of these books at the time for me, was that they were way longer than they should've been, very boring in parts, Bella was an isufferable rear end in a top hat, Edward was bland like paper, and Jacob would never loving understand that he wasn't the most important person in the world. I thought it was really funny some people were team Jacob or called it a love triangle, when Jacob was just an annoying third wheel all the time and never treated like a serious option by Bella. There's a goon doing a Let's Read over in the Bran and that does seem like the books' main sin, they're boring and the characters - especially Bella - are frankly unlikable.
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Aug 22, 2020 15:08
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macabresca posted:I did not mind sparkling vampires, however. I still don't get what's the problem with that. Also, for all the problems I had with it, I still read the entire thing and it was enjoyable enough. I was never a fan though (I actually didn't know any one person who'd openly like Twilight. Probably even the girls who did like it would pretend it was only ironically. It was the same with Justin Bieber, ftr. Everybody listened to his songs and learn all the lyrics and then would say that it's just a joke and they hate him, really. Social pressure is a scary thing). lmao I had exactly the same experience down to the justin bieber songs, how funny. there was definitely a like two month-long period where we liked twilight for real, then suddenly it was "ironic" like and we pretended the previous fervour hadn't existed. ah, teenage girls. such precious memories. Metis of the Chat Thread fucked around with this message at 15:12 on Aug 22, 2020 |
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Aug 22, 2020 15:08
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Dawgstar posted:There's a goon doing a Let's Read over in the Bran and that does seem like the books' main sin, they're boring and the characters - especially Bella - are frankly unlikable. I'll check it out, I've never read Twilight in English so I'm curious how was it in the original. And god, I'm getting so frustrated now thinking about Bella, lol. She was the most pretentious and judgemental shithead on the planet. TA Metis posted:lmao I had exactly the same experience down to the justin bieber songs, how funny. there was definitely a like two month-long period where we liked twilight for real, then suddenly it was "ironic" like and we pretended the previous fervour hadn't existed. ah, teenage girls. such precious memories. I was the annoying one, who always called it out. Well, *I* was interested in a genuine literary discussion, but they were just saying memes!
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Aug 22, 2020 15:44
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Arcsquad12 posted:I would say that criticism of 50 Shades is more warranted than Twilight because it does have an actively harmful representation of bdsm relationships. You know what....you're right. I think I remember hearing about people actually getting physically hurt trying to replicate the poo poo from 50 Shades.
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Aug 22, 2020 15:55
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IronicDongz posted:ok but at the same time, it's not like... presenting itself as a DIY bdsm book. it's a fantasy. you're not supposed to take it as a blueprint for how to actually have a kinky relationship irl. why not? I think content warnings should be a cultural standard in the same way acknowledgements and other prefaces are.
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Aug 22, 2020 16:13
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Content warnings are different to assuming that people will act out everything the characters do in a story unless you explicitly warn them not to. I don't think that should be a consideration outside of media aimed at very young children.
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Aug 22, 2020 16:36
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IronicDongz posted:ok but at the same time, it's not like... presenting itself as a DIY bdsm book. it's a fantasy. you're not supposed to take it as a blueprint for how to actually have a kinky relationship irl. EL James, and a lot of 50 shades fans, were famously hostile to anybody who said that the relationship in 50 shades was at all abusive. Especially if you ever said or implied that there was rape (including, you know, the part where christian tries to get her drunk in order to get her to literally sign away her bodily autonomy.) Like, this isn't a matter of 'oh some people have kind of dark fantasies'; she literally believes the story she wrote was a perfectly normal, if dramatic, romance and bdsm relationship and will fight you if you say otherwise.
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Aug 22, 2020 16:49
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Yeah, 50 Shades is weird because there was the level of "Oh my god, if you tie a knot like that in real life you could wind up with long-term nerve issues..." that falls under typical book/movie vs. real life thing. Which can be a problem, but is pretty typical. But then there's also her just writing a deeply hosed and abusive relationship based on what she imagines BDSM to be like and then sticking by it until the bitter end. As a reminder, Dan Olsen's series of videos giving a lukewarm defense of the 50 Shades movies covers that kind of stuff. James was so invested in it being a beautiful perfect relationship as written that she basically blew up any sense of normal romance movie plotting or conflict that would have made the movies work and got the one good director fired. It's what wrecked the most basic attempt to give the first movie a real ending along with all of the second and third movies.
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Aug 22, 2020 17:19
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Twilight has a lot of unfortunate implications and idealizations of what would be very bad behaviors in an IRL partner, but yeah it's not unique in this within fictional romance stories even if you set aside the discourse around whether or not people can separate fictional portrayals of uncomfortable behaviors from IRL abusive partners. But it is also a symptom of a ton of wider issues that still happily going unaddressed and unchallenged because all a lot of the critics wanted to do was go "Ewww look at this dumb romance novel for feeemales how can they be so dumb?"
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Aug 22, 2020 17:56
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All I remember people talking about re: Revenge of the Fallen that went into more specifics than "film bad" is about how badly it treated its two female leads. Not to say there wasn't a misogynist undercurrent to the backlash to Twilight, but I do think that implying that the responses to Twilight and Michael Bay's Transformers films are in no way comparable (as far as reading into the negative implications of the works themselves) is a bit disingenuous.
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Aug 22, 2020 18:33
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I actually gave Twilight a shot, because i used to scoff at Harry Potter ("It's plagiarized Neil Gaiman 'Books of Magic' for dumb babies!") when it first crashed, and my girlfriend got me to see that hey, it had some merit. Maybe this new take on vampires would be the same. But...may be wearing rose-tinted glasses here looking at the past, but my reaction and that of many people holds up. The main points of concern were the creepiness of a stalker 90-year-old after a high school girl, the cultish 'everyone must pair up, single people are the devil' mormon undertones that become overtones, the rehabilitation of the 'perfect but clumsy everygirl getting married right out of HS' theme..... The whole imprinting on babies thing was kicking a dead horse by the time it happened. Well, there was a lot of flack over the glittery vampires, but that feels almost quaint in retrospect.
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Aug 22, 2020 18:41
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My Transformers movies breaking point was how they managed to make the Dinobots boring.
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Aug 22, 2020 18:43
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Ibblebibble posted:My Transformers movies breaking point was how they managed to make the Dinobots boring. I really hope that with the success of Bumblebee being an actually decent movie we'll start getting better Transformers films, one of which I hope is Beast Wars. Because THE Dinobot is better than Grimlock and all his friends. And he's possibly the only transformer besides Tarantulas to be a literal cannibal.
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Aug 22, 2020 19:13
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Whang! explores porkchop sandwiches
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Aug 22, 2020 19:23
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I involuntarily screamed "Get the gently caress out of here! gently caress, we're all dead!" upon reading this sentence.
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Aug 22, 2020 19:26
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Arcsquad12 posted:I really hope that with the success of Bumblebee being an actually decent movie we'll start getting better Transformers films, one of which I hope is Beast Wars. Because THE Dinobot is better than Grimlock and all his friends. And he's possibly the only transformer besides Tarantulas to be a literal cannibal. Man, this brings back memory. I had that Dinobot-toy that was a Stegosaurus, until my dumb kid rear end broke it. One of these days I have to trawl eBay to see how much those things cost nowadays.
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Aug 22, 2020 21:23
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Libluini posted:Man, this brings back memory. I had that Dinobot-toy that was a Stegosaurus, until my dumb kid rear end broke it. One of these days I have to trawl eBay to see how much those things cost nowadays. Snarl. His name is Snarl. 
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Aug 22, 2020 21:31
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