Thunderhorse31 said:
I'll try to put this as sensitively as I can:
Teenage girls are dumb.
Now don't report me misunderstand me, I'm not saying that in order to like Twilight you need to be mentally challenged or something, but teenagers tend to be impulsive and shallow and into bright/shiny objects, so a concept like "sexy vampire sweeps unpopular girl off her feet" gets eaten up without a second thought (literally).
I may be dating myself here, but I experienced the same phenomena back in high school when Titanic came out. I had (girl)friends in my class who saw it in the theater 12, 14, and even 20 times (by their own admission), for no other reason than they found Leonardo DiCaprio to be hot. That's it. I asked them what they thought about the plot or the special effects, and their response was usually "Who cares? Leo is amazing."
So there it is. James Cameron's most successful movie (pre-2009) wasn't because of his script or his vision or his budget, it was because of that wonderful chemical process known as puberty that makes teenage girls insane.
Twilight benefits from the very same process.
As usual, science explains all
While this is true, in that Twilight fulfills a teenage fantasy--multiple fantasies, actually,--of having guys fight over you, and being adored by someone rich and educated and superhuman, it doesn't take into account the huge number of fans who are middle aged women--Twimoms, as they like to be called. And I actually find them creepier than the fangirls, because at least with the teenagers it can be blamed on immaturity.
I asked them what they thought about the plot or the special effects, and their response was usually "Who cares? Leo is amazing."
This is very very true. I was driving my cousin home last year, she was around fifteen, and we were discussing Twilight, and I said, "You know Edward's a stalker right?" to which she replies, "a hot stalker." And I nearly had to pull the car over as I tried to form coherent sentences.
Internet Kraken said:
You know, I've heard far more people berating Twilight than praising it. Makes you wonder if this series becoming widely known was only due to people praising. Maybe all this hate for Twilight has actually resulted in the series getting more attention than it would have normally acquired?
But no! That would be impossible! All this blind hate surely only leads to productive things!
Twilight is fascinating to me because it's everywhere in the media and gets attention from all different types of people: hard core fans both young and old, hardcore haters, both young and old, and those who are in the middle--people in it for the lulz, or who like the material but recognize it for what it is.
I think one of the reasons it gets so much
negative hype is because there's a huge disconnect between the quality of the material, especially the books, and how much praise and devotion it receives, and people struggle to understand why.
