Seldon2639 said:
For perspective's sake, though, is the "your life revolves around your life interest" any different from any romantic comedy? I mean, a review of even some of Gaiman's work would have some very similar undertones of female vulnerability, male heroism, ect.
Every form of media focused on romance is based in large part on the premise that "my life revolves around my love". I mean, come on, from D.N Angel and Full Metal Panic to Stardust, to John Cusack's extended resume, it's all about obsession (perhaps love) being the driving force in someone's life.
True, the male-centric stories tend more toward the deed of daring do, but even that's tinged by the "manipulative *****" aspect; and if we assume that young men are just as empty-headed as young women, then the entire catalog of tropes in that genre are doing just as much harm.
How about we count it all as escapist fantasy, and assume that the readers (male and female) can distinguish between fiction and reality.
Having never read the books, but getting informed second-hand (not a good way to go about it, but I'll be damned if I could have slogged through them
) I ended up coming to more or less the same conclusion as MovieBob here, simply on a very broad level. The difference was that, while I very much disagree with virtually all the series' implicit assumptions (and later conclusions) surrounding sex, femininity and all that jazz, much of the backlash against Twilight seems to be based less on that and more on the fact that it is the story of a girl (well... the story of things
happening to a girl, maybe), and girls like it a lot.
If we saw a similar story with a male protagonist, it would be similarly ridiculed--although your arguments were very much to the point, the crux of the discomfort people feel with all this "your life revolves around The One" lies with Bella's complete and hilariously old-fashioned lack of agency. Of course, if it were a male protagonist we wouldn't be criticizing him for being a co-dependent limp noodle, but for acting like a... lady (for "the vulva is a void while the phallus is a presence"). And, of course, if it were directed to the male audience the story would not be so riotously popular, since the idea has little cachet with dudes in our culture. Thus the criticism would be correspondingly low-key.
Anyway, let me get back to the probably-controversial assertion that Twilight is hated so virilely because of its fans--not because its fans are merely annoying (annoying fans get plenty of hate no matter what!) but because its fans are females. This is where your arguments really take on merit with me, because there does appear to be a double standard.
Males get and love books with sometimes-dodgy moralism that is tailored to their particular programmed* idiocy, at least on the level of Twlight, and females get and love books with sometimes-dodgy moralism that is tailored to their particular programmed idiocy, yet it seems there is an immense upwelling of disdain and hatred for the "tweens" who love Twilight which has little basis in the reality of Twilight's effects. It is going to be little more than a speed bump in the vast majority of people's development, and it is hardly the end of our civilization as we know it. People forget that this is "escapist fantasy" and fail to realize "that the readers (male and female) can distinguish between fiction and reality" (apologies for mangling your words).
*When I say "programmed" I mean "things that culture dictates, marketers pick up on, and then the things they produce and how they market it propagates what culture dictates".
