aieeegrunt wrote:There is more than a little "nerds with little experience with women" and the tail riding closet misogyny in this thread (frex: how could educated women be so shallow).
Allow me to change that, then.
Twilight is basically Transformers/Big Dumb Action Movie for girls,
No, it isn't. It's Porn. Straight up,
chaste porn with several horrific moral messages along with it--some of which stem from Mormonism.
Characters? Action? Plot? These things matter not in porn. Having read bits of the books, just...look at the epic descriptions of the male characters physiques (especially Edwards) and you can practicelly hear the masturbation.
And that's perfectly okay. Porn is perfectly fine (Though it's more entertaining if they actually fuck).
The problem comes when its represented as anything
other than porn. Romance novels have always been at least partly pornographic--hell, Dracula itself is a dime store romance with supernatural elements that can be summed up as:
"Foreign count comes to England and starts stealin' all the ladies. the guys get pissed about it and kill him to save their women from his illicit grasp."
and that is exactly how several woman have described it to me. Many women kind of roll their eyes at Schwartzenneger and Optimus Prime, but for some reason they don't seem to feel a need to have an internet mantrum about it like the hate and vitriol Twilight inspires on the net.
When the romantic, idealized lead is a creepy, manipulative, overprotective stalker, there comes badness.
Not that the heroine is much better (manipulative, shallow, co-dependent reader surrogate that she is).
It's not that they're girly and popular, it's that they're
morally reprehensible and popular.
In the real world it's just how relationships actually work, instead of childish stuff where you accede to every demand to make a girl put out.
