- Joined
- Jan 31, 2020
Oh man, ask me about my thesis why don't you.
While not exclusive to these two series, and while not entirely responsible for them, Harry Potter and Twilight were the one two punch for many of the worst trends in modern day publishing and spec fiction, including the following:
-More or less creating the entire modern genre of YA Fiction, and the publishers obsession with catering to what they feel to be the most lucrative market
-Killing off pretty much the entire previous YA Market... 20 years ago, YA covered everything from Enders Game to Animorphs to Shannara, you had a wide range aimed toward every kind of reader. How its all various riffs on Harry Potter, Twilight, or crap that caters to those readers, and essentially nobody else, which is a problem, because...
-The real money in YA has never been teenage girls, but single middle aged women, who account for between 50-70 percent of YA readership. That was the big thing publishers noticed about Twilight - what was once called the Twilight mom demo. Tweens grow up and grow out of it... middle age women, especially lonely middle age women, are cash cows hooked for life.
-The impact on spec fiction publishing catering to that demo was what catering to virginial basement dwelling men was to comic books... lucrative at the price of losing all the markets you had before and no growth. Not only do young boys no longer read most modern YA - because almost none of them are written for men - fewer and fewer young female readers do either. Publishers, like the comic book industry, realized too late the new group they built the entire industry around wasn't growing, would never grow, and they would need to increasingly cater to every crazy desire the die hard had in order to keep them around.
-There was a ton of overlap between die hard Potterheads and the older Twihards... ESPECIALLY online.
-Perhaps the most consequential Fueling much of the online fanfic and fandom communities, which is a problem because...
-These upjumped fanfic authors flooded into the industry, all the same middle age female liberal arts majors with bad dyejobs who write the same books. The number of terrible modern spec fiction authors who started writing fanfics range from NK Jemison, to Rae Carson, to Seanan McGuire, to pretty much every last one of the cookie cutter authors I mentioned here.
-Those fandoms quickly became breeding grounds for the most toxic circles in all of speculative fiction - folks who sent death threats to any blogger who trashed Twilight now lead Twitter lynchmobs against authors and people they don't like.
-They were the first fandoms to really take advantage of online networks like Twitter or Tumblr... and they set the drumbeat all the others quickly began dancing to. Which led to...
-You ever wonder where all the woke reboots and crap came from? Corporations who stupidly assumed that Twitter represented the real world, and not a cohort of cat ladies who have no lives.
-Every other annoying trend inserted into pop culture - be it love triangles, Strong Female Characters TM, social justice messaging - came from attempts to cater to this demographic, or as in the case of the speculative fiction industry, because this demo increasingly began taking over spaces that once belonged to more rational people, and turned them into circlejerking echo chambers.
-They became to spec fiction and pop culture especially what your cliché comic book guy nerds were to comics in the 80s and 90s, only magnified by social media and obsession with social justice.
Long story short? You can track every awful trend in modern popular culture over the past 20 years to the same demographic.
You want to track every awful change to pop culture over the past 20 years? It follows the same demographic that became more and more toxic and whose influence only grew over the years, turning into a cancerous feedback loop that kills everything it touches.
The young Harry Potter fangirl became the teenage Twihard, became the 20-something liberal arts major interning for a publisher cranking out or reading YA novels, became the chunky 30 something SJW hipster chick screaming about Gamergate and Sad Puppies, became the sad 40 year old pansexual cat ladies with bad dye jobs who think Twitter and nerdy pop culture need to cater to them because its the only thing that gives their lives meaning anymore... and if they still feel empty, they'll settle for destroying anything other people like, or remaking it in their image.
It's also why that same group has always been Lindsay's core audience and die hard fans - they live vicariously through her, and others like her, for the same reason that
Moviebob and other fat Gen X nerds live vicariously through Kevin Smith... because living vicariously through them is one of the rare things that proves that maybe they haven't wasted their lives basing their entire lives around media that officially was made for children.
