Summary: Sometimes when a person protests too much, you assume they are mocking the protesters. Sometimes they are just really zealous in their protesting. It can be hard to decide, as in this case of a Twilight fan gone loud about Stephen King's review of the Twilight books.
How I wrongly assumed a parody when passion went loud, or the case of the angry Twilight fan, or..why we must forgive the tastes of others...
BLOT: (14 Dec 2011 - 04:44:21 PM)
How I wrongly assumed a parody when passion went loud, or the case of the angry Twilight fan, or..why we must forgive the tastes of others...
[Note: originally spotted the video on a recentish (week or so ago) post by Nick Mamatas.]
When I saw the video, embedded below, of a Twilight fan upset about a comment Stephen King made denouncing the writing of Stephanie Meyer1 ("Stephenie Meyer can't write worth a darn. She's not very good."); I thought it might be a parody of Twilight fans getting all excited and irate. Why did I think it might be a parody? Well, here is a person defending Twilight, and she is ticking off many stereotypes of a typical fan:
- Young, passionate female.
- Stumbles over more complex words.
- Considers pop-writings like those of King to be classic literature.2
- Regularly argues from the stance of her own tastes in books and history of reading.
- Makes shallow attack on looks [though takes it right back].
- Claims a story that regularly involves a teenager being on the brink of death due to an emotionally troubling older man is nice and "unthreatening".
- Claims that other people just can't understand the magic.
- etc.
In other words, while any grouping of Twilight fans is going to include a mix of characteristics similar to that, a percentage per person so that the whole gets a bit of a label,3 you rarely get one who seems to be so much of-the-stereotype without a little bit of fakery. Two things before, if, you watch the video: I am not doing this to make fun of her, and I am embedding it so you don't have to risk reading Youtube comments (I refuse to read the Youtube comments because they are Internet comments, on Youtube, and nothing good has ever come of that) :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDQ2h4hrors
I watched it, and as I said I thought maybe it was a parody, and then clicked on her other videos. There is one where she breaks down in tears talking about the new Breaking Dawn movie. One of the reasons she is crying, outside of outright amazement? She is sad that she will only get to do this "one more time"; meaning see a new Twilight movie in theaters, which would be the forthcoming second part of
In this second video, she seems to be at a midnight showing or some such, but there doesn't seem to be a group of people with her. Her videos seem to be just her and not various reading groups and whatever. And she has a number of them. It would be rude as hell for me to assume that she is lonely in her real life, but it at least seems to me that she engages into the online aspect of fandom to some degree outside of the offline aspect of it. She's getting into this Twilight universe and online there are people who talk about it and obsess over it. And hate it, can't have a good obsession without a good spot of villainy. Twilight, in this case, is not merely a collection of books but a method and key of interaction involving others.
And this, I think, is a topic towards which I am going to devote a bit of my librarian mind-set. How the big break out books since about '03-'05—
This is not to say that those books that have both are an automatic bestseller, but simply that when the books get swept up into both, they transcend books as we think of them—ink printed on dead trees—and become also entangled with the concept of best friends, online identities, book clubs, midnight release parties, movie tie-in editions, merchandise, and so forth. The passion behind these things drives the books, drives the sequels and the websites, and often drives the sales. It also leads to a self-identification with being a reader-of-the-book or a hater-of-the-book. People name children after beloved book characters, theme their weddings after them, and in general flavor their worldview, at least for a time, with the fact that the world is a world that has that book in it. That book-series centered lifestyle itself is what is assumed to be under attack when someone points out that the books underneath the madness are not all that good, or, conversely, tries to defend them. It self-feeds.
Hence the videos were fans of one series say FUCK YOU to Stephen King, and talk about King pushing his opinions in their faces when he talked to one reporter and other reporters reported it and it was pushed, especially by King, into anyone's face at all. And, frankly, no matter what he thinks it is not he who matters when it comes to how much you enjoy the Twilight series, unless you consider Uncle Stevie to be a dictator of your tastes, much like Oprah Winfrey but without, as it were, the fancy stickers and new editions lapped up by book-clubs everywhere.
Loneliness is a hell of a disease, and the need to have something to bond over, to focus on, makes for one prognosis. For this reason, I say let's, in general, let people have their hobbies and their likes and dislikes.5 Just try to remember, just because they don't like yours, they are not attacking you as a hobbyist, no matter how much it seems like such. Unless they are actually attacking you as a hobbyist, and hell, what do they know? Being either a lover or a hater helps to pass the time in this world, and well, we'll all be dead in 100 years anyhow. Life is short, filled with pain, yadda yadda yadda...be kind.
1: Like the video, this was about two and a half years ago.
2: I'm not bashing King here, I'd generally agree that his early novels are classics of contemporary horror literature, though will probably suffer a degree of dating over the next few decades.
3: Whether the percentages are high enough that the label is justly deserved is up to debate.
4: The first part of
5: Note that this is not me saying that just because someone likes something, you cannot have an opinion about it and that you must accept as being of equal value as anything else. I'm just saying that, when it doesn't matter and when you are not on an official selection committee, or, maybe, not really super tired of fanbois and fangurls and needing to vent...just let it go.
OTHER BLOTS THIS MONTH: December 2011
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Written by Doug Bolden
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