Ohten said:
Trivun said:
In b4 Stephenie Meyer ruining vampires. If ANYBODY DARES post that here I will be so pissed off. If you don't like Twilight then don't post about it, just ignore it. Nobody forced you to watch/read it or hate it.
Burying your head in the sand doesn't make something that's as major an insult to literature as calling someone's deceased mother a cheap street walker go away. Most people hate Twilight for one very, incredibly simple reason. It's bad. It's a horrifically terrible piece of work that doesn't deserve a shred of the popularity it got because the individual who crapped it out has a tenuous-at-best grasp of fiction writing and her writing is choked to the gills with blatant Mary/Gary Sues and deus ex machina that becomes so commonplace you never really need to bother becoming emotionally invested in Helpless Jane, who seems hell bent on setting back the feminist movement a century, or her verbally- and mentally-abusive stalker undead special-snowflake boyfriend.
So I'd say Meyer sure did ruin vampires and werewolves for me with that horrendous, steaming pile of text so many emotionally-damaged 10-year-old girls think is the be-all end-all of fiction literature.
But she's not the one who invented any of the modern vampire stereotypes. She's simply one of the many tag-along writers who won the equivilent of the lottery by being the one who happened to be standing there when Hollywood decided to launch a major exploitation of the paranormal romance genere. It's also noteworthy that her paticular spin on this stuff is very coke and bubble gum, it's not likely to offend anyone, where a lot of similar other works I have an awareness of include material that someone might find offensive if they looked at it from the wrong perspective with a low enough IQ. A franchise can be ruined if say some trouble maker decides to go through the books, looking for anything that can be remotely offensive, and then decides to start a campaign about it for five minutes of fame. Sort of like what happened with Orson Scott Card, and that spilled over into the whole "Shadow Complex" game loosely based on his work with people even going so far as to demand it be boycotted.
I can't say she's ruined literature, or the concepts. She's just a mediocre writer (I can't criticize too badly as I've never been published and actually tried to be once) retreading trite material that became a mockable stereotype long before she was involved, and which has already seen better treatments.
HOWEVER even so, I'm arguably simply being a fandom snob, because honestly she's taken these ideas and sold them to a whole heck of a lot of people, and made bucketloads of cash off of it (or at least made those bucketloads of cash for those producing products based on her work).
Really though, for those who read this far let me tell you exactly what this seems to be to me, coming from a jaded 34 year old: FEAR STREET!
No, really... some of you might be too young to remember those books or be on the fringes of Fandom when they were big (and monsterously so), but really RL Stine and the authors allegedly sharing that name turned out what was basically a lot of horrendous horror cliques at a Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew/Harry Potter type reading level. Admittedly there were some interesting ideas involved at time, and I've seen worse world/mythology building (believe me) but in general most of it was hardly original. It sparked tons of imitators, spin offs, and discussion. People were screaming that Fear Street was pretty much ruining literature and the horror genere as a whole. I remember this fairly clearly.
Eventually what more or less "killed" Fear Street was that some of the young adult novelists (albiet outside of this paticular series) started putting stuff into their books that should have been reserved for an older audience (ie sex and graphic/detailed violence) which got attention, and of course much like video games now people were all over "young adult horror" as being responsible for the ills of society, blaming school violence and
such on these books which everyone in the right age group was reading. The most prolific name/author (and arguably in the end one of the least popular since people felt he didn't go far enough which I guess was part of the time) moved on to horror novels intended for a much younger audience (Goosebumps, which was once a Fear Street spinoff) and so absurd that nobody could really seriously blame problems on it (hence it's continued survival).
The point being is that Stephanie Meyer seems to mostly be successful due to a tween/young adult audience form most of what I've seen. It's the same crowd. Every tween trend is viewed as destroying whatever it's emulated. I don't care for the whole "Twilight" thing, but at the same time I don't think it's going to anymore destroy the overdone Vampire/Paranormal Romance genere, than Fear Street destroyed horror in general.
