For Love of A Vampire: Twilight & True Blood
Constance July 30th, 2008
O noes!
Twilight’s got all the cooties: romance, girl and YA — no Harry Potter adulation for this series. Shoot, it’s as bad as Sex and the City, except – it haz shoes? It should haz belly dancing. Does it? Myself does not know, not being a romance fan nor generally a YA reader. (I am a fan of belly dancing, and for long time now.)
[ No wonder the media has heralded Twilight as the next Harry Potter and Meyer as the second coming of J.K. The similarities, however, are largely commercial. It's hard to see how Twilight could ever approach Harry Potter as a cultural phenomenon for one simple reason: the series' fan base is almost exclusively female. The gender imbalance is so pronounced that Kaleb Nation, an enterprising 19-year-old radio show host-cum-author, has launched a blog called Twilight Guy, chronicling his experiences reading the books. The project is marked by a spirit that's equal parts self-promotion and scientific inquiry -- "I am trying to find why nearly every girl in the world is obsessed with the Twilight books by Stephenie Meyer" -- and its premise relies on the fact that, in even attempting this experiment, Nation has made himself an exceptional guy indeed. ]This is an interesting piece, though, because it attempts to track similarities, if there are any, and contrasts, which there certainly are many, among Buffy The Vampire Slayer, the Harry Potter series and the Twilight series, and their audiences.
Another quote:
[ If Harry Potter has a vampire-loving, adolescent female counterpart, it's Buffy Summers. ] Continue Reading »