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Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan
Vampires haven't become "sanitized;" the original threat of STDs (and a lack of understanding about disease and death) that spawned them has been replaced by a purely social trope, the Social Outcast-slash-Bad Boy who must be brought into the popular social circles, or used as a vehicle to escape the selfsame social circles.
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When you adopt a tone of sweeping dismissal, do take care to follow the argument being made and actually refute it. You've merely changed the subject.
You've also attempted to justify unimaginative writing by pointing out that, from the point of view of sales, it meets the needs of a given market. Additionally you've tried to excuse sentimental writing by sentimentalizing its audience.
I'm not trying to pick on you, but these strategies are deeply irritating.
Your summing of the history of vampires as the rise and fall of STD fear morphing into James Dean worship confuses the etymology of symbols in pop culture with their usage in a quest to be socially responsible about metaphors, which hinges on the idea that art is reducible to a message. I disagree.
Fiction needn't be healthy in any socially improving sense. Those who've tried to push that agenda have left us with either pabulum or propaganda.
All my life, I've known people who made their living writing novels about vampires -- John Shirley, Nancy Collins, Poppy Z. Brite -- and
none of them has been interested in diluting the unavoidable brutality of monsters in order to sell teen romance. This isn't conceptual evolution, it's commodification. It's what happens when an idea is used too routinely and loses its, um, fangs.
Vampire oversaturation has everything to do with parasitic corpses being recycled as boy bands and nothing to do with some revolutionary and socially correct new way of appealing to "YA." Many young adults had already been reading about vampires.
The market isn't proof of talent or quality. It is simply the market. People here have complained about being sick of the way vampires are now depicted and used Twilight as their example repeatedly. It isn't an anti-populist argument because the point is the quality of the novels and films themselves, not which special audience happens to like or despise them.
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This suggests that this trope can be transferred to other characters/caricatures, something less fantasy and more grounded in the elements of life that will become important to YA as they mature into collegiates"
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The "trope" doesn't need to be "transferred" to other "caricatures" because the qualities you're describing are so general as to apply to virtually any remedial teen novel or television series. The idea has been used in endless contexts already. Perhaps Meyer's doing a better job of using it by not sentimentalizing The Lost Boys would have left many of us less nauseated with her Twilight franchise.