I suppose I'll break out the Sparklepire Adventures tag for this

[meganbmoore]

Rants about Rants about YA and girl cooties

I suppose it says something about the people talking about YA who I actually notice that I don't think I'd heard of John Green until I read this yesterday.  Looking him up on wikipedia, his books don't sound like my thing, based on the brief mentions in his profile.  They don't sound bad, mind you, just

Comments

[moonspinner]

Yeah, I was just about to say something in this vein. That moral of Twilight seemed to be pretty much, "Go after what you want, whatever the price to you and to others... and not only will you get it, but everything will work out perfectly fine!

"Turn into a vampire and lose your human family... LIES! Turn into a vampire and not be able to have children... LIES! Turn into a vampire and become a blood-thirsty, mindless monster for the first decade... LIES! Get married and turn into a vampire and lose your best friend/ also-ran boyfriend... LIES! (He becomes your son-in-law and as immortal as your baby! Goody!) Turn into a vampire and NOT be able to have mind-blowing sex... ROTFLMAO!"

Yes, Bella is a Mary Sue. Just as much as Bruce Wayne - billionaire vigilante who can take down Superman is one. Or as much as Peter Parker - "I got bit by a spider and grew biceps over night" is one.

Does it bother me? Hell no. I don't watch Peter Parker kiss Mary Jane and think, "what does she see in him?" (Well not much). Men have their escapist fiction all the time. Women deserve their own. There's enough space in this world for trashy novels (films, music) for everyone... AND high art-form for the more intellectual beings in our mist.

[meganbmoore]

Over in the DW version of the post, there was some discussion about how Katniss, who is used, abused and pushed around and fights for what's important to her but loses everything and ends up broken in a lot of ways, is held up as the ideal, perfect heroine all others should be held up against, while Bella, who fights for and keeps her agency and goes after and gets everything she wants, is hated and looked at as an example of the kind of heroine no other should try to be like, and "the anti-Bella" is used to describe a "good" heroine.

(I like Katniss a lot and I get what Collins was doing with her and think she was largely successful, but I also think that most fans who go around praising Katniss as The Most Amazing are only looking at the "badass action girl" aspect of her character, and not her arc as a whole or the fact that what really gets her through things is her ability to adapt and create a "fake self" to manipulate the media and audiences, which is also what ends up making Katniss herself be manipulated and used, even if she's aware of the manipulation.)