Yeah, Lindsay referenced it in her Song Of The South and Coal Black And De Sebben Dwarfs reviews IIRC (definitely the latter)
I'm having to learn to pay the priceI'll admit. Twilight is a Guilty Pleasure of mine. For every part that's problematic, just chant "it's magic, they're soulmate" and it sorta works. Just don't act like those people in real life. They're all terrible.
Also, wow, didn't know The Ancient Magus Bride has that sort of plot going on. Their romance actually sounded kinda similar to Bella and Edward's. Is there a lot of Deconstruction going on?
The Ancient Magus' Bridge has a... REALLY shaky start. Like, by episode 4 it's fine, but the first few episodes have a ton of Unfortunate Implications and REALLY dark stuff the show doesn't want you to dwell on or think about. Like Lindsay said, the show is mostly a deconstruction (and about two people finding/discovering their own humanity through each other) than an actual romance, but I won't lie and say the premise doesn't have issues. It's also not really a romance. At least not in the conventional way one would define the term.
And I do agree with Lindsay that media aimed at girls, especially teenage girls, tends to be far more harshly judged than media aimed at boys. I recall during the 90s, how Backstreet Boys and other boy bands were called the worst thing ever, and guess who their primary audience was. Heck, you can see that all the time in music really.
edited 22nd Jan '18 11:56:04 AM by Ghilz
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So after researching (3 minutes of reading the trope page), it seems their relationship is a bit closer to Leon and Mathilda in The Professional (haven't seen that film either, though, just read the tropes page
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Backstreet Boys songs has this sorta Narm Charm to them that make them... timeless, I suppose? Though maybe it's just good ole' Nostalgia Filter.
That was a really good video and made me think a lot about the way I've treated Twilight. It kinda struck a chord with me. Not because of Twilight but because I understand where Lindsay's coming from.
I spent six years making fun of My Little Pony and the dudes who are into it. I actually had a friend who got into My Little Pony in its second season and the jokes me and mine made at his expense about it were relentless. Then one day on a lark, we gave the show a shot and found out just what it was that got so many people invested in it.
I've spent a lot of time since then thinking about the kind of things I've hated in the past just 'cause they were "cool" to hate. Sailor Moon. Boy bands. Twilight. Pumpkin spice. Etc. etc.
And Lindsay's right. A lot of the things that became popular hatewagons to jump onto are things that were popular with teenage girls.
edited 22nd Jan '18 12:40:40 PM by TobiasDrake
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.And the biggest substantive problems with Twilight? The stalking and domestic abuse (mostly verbal/controlling)?
Those are endemic issues in A LOT of media. Tv, film, books, music... Stalking is Love is a trope for a reason. Blaming Meyer for producing just one example of a crappy relationship wasn’t fair. I was one of the people who hated Twilight for the internalized misogyny, but in retrospect it was a symptom of the larger problem.
edited 22nd Jan '18 12:51:58 PM by wisewillow
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Just to give a dissenting opinion, I don't think Magus Bride gets "fine" by episode four, nor is it much a deconstruction. At best it's somewhat self aware. I'll grant that it shifts its focus some and partly moves to other kinds of stories after a while, but the problematic aspects are still there and not really mitigated, at least thus far. I also find the justification of "he's inhuman so he doesn't get what he's doing" somewhat problematic when the writer is human and the work itself doesn't really treat the problems as, well, problems. Anyway, happy to discuss this elsewhere, like the show thread, so I leave it at that.
On the subject of the video itself, yeah, that really hit home. I never really got into actively bashing Twilight, nor did I read them, but I joined in laughter when ever they were mocked in my vicinity and contributed to the atmosphere.
Some years later, someone, can't remember where, did bring up the same point as Lindsay does about the whole series being derided because it was aimed at women and young ones at that. Examining myself back then, I had to admit that even if I thought of myself as being beyond those kinds of prejudices and that I treated all media as equal on its pure creative merits, well, what other reason I had to think so badly of the franchise? It made me feel quite sucky and a bit more vigilant to falling in that same trap again.
It's actually one of the reasons why I'm so hard on Magus Bride nowadays. Transformers is a thing many people like but I can't appreciate due to its endemic issues and thus I'm pretty dismissive of it. Magus Bride has similar, though different, issues so I can't give it a free pass just because it's a gorgeous fantasy anime, something near and dear to my heart, rather than a CGI action flick.
edited 22nd Jan '18 3:45:17 PM by GabrieltheThird
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As an admitted "fan" of Twilight, I actually like it when in book 3 Bella stood up against the obvious abuse Jacob and Edward was throwing at her, standing her ground and saying she wasn't going to be treated like a toy in their feud, leaving when Jacob became violent towards her, etc. If only she didn't admit to "loving Jacob" in the final chapters (It's read more like a victim of abuse finally broke). So yeah, Twilight reads like that person on the Internet that gets so closed to a realization, than promptly ignores it and goes back to their usual self
edited 22nd Jan '18 1:16:50 PM by HottoKenai
I don't actually disagree with you, and yeah, if you want to take it to PM or the show thread, will be glad to go into more details sure.
I posted a longer comment about it at the video link, but it reminds me of how female-oriented fanfics like My Immortal, legolas by laura, and My Inner Life are held up as the most horrid creations known by humanity, but male-oriented ones like Thirty Hs are held up in high So Bad, It's Good esteem. Both wish fulfillment fantasies tossed out into the void, but some picked to pieces more than others. It stands out here considering the author of Thirty Hs actually now regrets writing the fic and filling it full of rape jokes, despite its popularity.
I always thought My Immortal was considered So Bad, It's Good, myself.
edited 22nd Jan '18 6:46:37 PM by KarkatTheDalek
Oh God! Natural light!Huh. I'd been thinking about the backlash towards Twilight recently, and then click this thread on a whim to find that video.
I'm really glad to see such a video, and she did a good job with it. And I will freely admit, I got a laugh out of the Ready Player One scene.
Can't say I like that book.
There are certainly legitimate reasons to dislike Twilight (I myself do not like the book for those reasons), but it's... not unique at all, as said in the video, and well, thirteen-year-old me was there at the height of the backlash and none of it had anything to do with those legitimate reasons. It was just "This is popular with girls and women, therefore it's a Bad Thing". Most hadn't even read any of the books or watched the movies.
What drove that point home, I think, was the fact that my fellow teenagers at the time praised Eragon, which if I'm being honest... Really isn't particularly good, either. Although I've heard The Inheritance Cycle does get a lot of backlash, I've never seen it.
Also, re: fanfic... While I'm definitely not going to say all fanfics are masterpieces, I've always felt more than a little uncomfortable with something female-dominated (which fanfic really was/arguably is) being so hated. Which, incidentally, also ties into the "We really hate teenage girls" sentiment, since much of the fanfic hate I saw and have seen is generally aimed at the teenage girls writing it. If general sentiment towards fanfic has changed, I don't know. I've stopped paying attention to it.
It's actually that hate that caused me, when I was a teenage girl, to stop writing fanfic entirely.
..There was a point somewhere. Still, excellent video. I'm hoping it helps some people think.
/crawls back under rockYeah, the hate-dom for that book series was pretty harsh (maybe not as much as Twilight, but that's kind of a futile discussion IMO). When I read the pages about it here on T Vtropes they were full of people complaining how shit the books are (to the point that the main page was locked for a while).
1 2 We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. -KVEragon got rightfully shredded by most of the people I know. The difference between it and Twilight? I've never met a fan of it. General consensus on Eragon among the people I knew was "it's garbage" but since there was no one trying to defend it, let alone promote it, the conversation ended there.
Conversely, were there people defending Twilight? Were there people shoving it in everyone's face? Oh yes. Very much so. It's easy to forget, giving that most of those defenders have now aged out of being in love with it, but what separated Twilight from so many of the other problematic works that Lindsay mentioned was just how popular it was, and just how loud that fandom was in promoting it.
I was in highschool at the height of the books' popularity. The first film came out just before I graduated. And I spent entire classes listening to the fangirls behind me drool over the series. At length. For entire classes when they were supposed to be working. And if I was finished my work and tried to talk about anything else with anyone else who was sitting near me, only so long could go by before one of those girls needed to interject something about Twilight—my own personal hell would doubtless involve the memory, on loop, of trying to discuss Cal Leandros while the fangirls kept interrupting to tell me Twilight was better. It's a level of obsession I'm more used to expecting from that one person at the anime convention, as opposed to half the female population of my classes. As a phenomena I hadn't seen anything like it before, and I haven't seen anything like it since.
I'd also note that the accusations that Stephanie Meyer can't write? Entirely legit. I read the books (because I try not to mock things I haven't read) and was shocked by the general lack of quality. I've read other books aimed at teen girls. Hell, I've got a soft spot for a fair amount of the romcomish stuff that gets marketed to them (the paranormal romance stuff that mimics Twilight, not so much). It's a lot better written than this. Which I think is another thing that needs to be considered when talking about the backlash aimed at Twilight. Lots of other popular series use the same problematic tropes...but they often hide it under better writing and prose. Twilight doesn't have that going for it, so the ugliness is there for all to see. The difference between those other works and Twilight is rather like the difference between early and later Frank Miller—the problems were always there, but it's only in one of them that there's no decent writing to conceal the issues, meaning that while in the one case only a critic might notice the problems, in the other, your average member of the public can spot it. To make matters worse it spawned the aforementioned legion of imitators, many of them similarly badly written and hitting all the same problematic tropes, and while the Twilight phenomenon is itself mostly over, the damage (for lack of a better word) that it did to the YA and fantasy genres goes on (I had to stop buying fantasy once I noticed that most of the shelves were filled with either bad paranormal romance or bad ASOIAF wannabes).
Which is why I have to disagree with Lindsay somewhat here. Did the dislike of the series get expressed in ways that are coded, or even explicitly, misogynistic? Yeah, absolutely. Does society as a whole tend to mock and deride things that are marketed at women? Yes we do and that's a problem. But Twilight really was that bad and its fandom really was that obnoxious, and consequently there's probably a better series she could have used to explore that (Tobias mentioned MLP earlier which could have been interesting).
I... I think you missed the point.
Yes. Twilight has deep flaws. But it’s mediocre; it’s not some incompetent nightmare on the level of the worst fanfiction. Yes, it was everywhere. Yes, the fans could be annoying. But did we see the same backlash against teenage boys’ obsession with the Heath Ledger Joker (god, that was a creepy couple of years)? Or boys who were obsessed with Harry Potter? Not so much.
And a LOT of it was directly at Meyer. Really condescending, aggressive mockery. Haha, this creepy lady wrote a story about her sexy dream; how gross! Wow, isn’t she pathetic?
I didn’t see the same mockery leveled at Paolini or Nolan (the Dark Knight is overrated; fight me) back when they were in their hey day.

I thought she already did Birth of a Nation as the Nostalgia Chick.