brain drain
Tried to outrun a migraine last night, and it did go away but now it’s 3am and I’m wide awake. Colleen over at Chasing Ray just sent around the latest episode in the “What a Girl Wants” series (#6!) so I thought I’d share that with you. Lots of interesting takes on Twilight and the whole YA vampire obsession–and some new voices joined the panel, too; check it out here. You can read my response below:
“I have to say that vampire stories never appealed to me, and watching Bram Stoker’s Dracula on Masterpiece Theatre last year scared the bejeezus out of me…if I relate that to the few episodes of Buffy I’ve seen, I’d say the vampire genre for young adults today seems to focus more on seduction and less on the occult, which is probably a good thing. Probably. Either way, these topics are a way of talking about power, and I do think that fascinates teens; many young readers want to be mesmerized, enchanted, overwhelmed by a feeling they can’t control…at the same time, they want to kick ass, defend the righteous from evil, and be a kind of mutant that can still manage to dominate others from time to time. I haven’t read any of the Twilight books, but because I’d read anything written by Octavia Butler, I have read Fledgling. In that novel, a family of vampires has been experimenting with melanin in order to breed vampires that can better tolerate the sun. Butler complicated things by having her protagonist appear as an 8-year old black girl ~ she’s hundreds of years old, of course, but looks like a child and it was definitely uncomfortable to see her feeding from and giving a kind of erotic pleasure to her adult hosts. They did create an alternate kind of community, but real-world social relations (the constant sexual victimization of children) made it hard for me to take at times.”
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