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Let me add, I think what really bugs me is how irritatingly hypocritical people are in this thread. I don't give two sh*ts about Twilight but when a bunch of people who have been invested in various forms of fandom and addicted to videogames, give some attitude to teenage girls for being rabid fans of something, it strikes me as retarded.
Why?
It's not as simple of a comparison as equating two "fandoms" in terms of their obsessiveness. You're talking about aesthetic or otherwise potential value in asserting that you like
any kind of thing. Values are easy to reduce to absolutely nothing, as every value of anything in the entirety of the universe is arbitrary and engendered by human hand, but that's not some problem inherent to this debate either. We still have to have conversations about things which are more valuable than other things, and it shouldn't be hard to conceive of good arguments as to why "videogames" are more valuable than this narrative, unless you're
that one person in political or ethical debates that pipes in with the oh-so-useless "well guys it's all relative!"
Furthermore, you are equating Twilight to videogames, which simply cannot be done. Twilight is an instance of a genre, something like modern gothic literature (of which I am no connoisseur, but tend to like, by the way.) "Videogames" is a genre itself. I don't hear lots of people disparaging twilight fans for liking vampire stories, and especially not literature in general. They disparage Twilight
itself for being a vapid waste of a story, and these same zammers which hate twilight similarly hate certain videogames. I don't have to defend the artistic merit of "videogames" to hate on twilight; I might have to defend the artistic merit of Shadow of the Colossus.
I don't really care if teenage girls are rabid fans of something, especially not books; books are awesome. That's not the issue. The issue is the thing
of which they are rabid fans.
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I want to pre-empt any possibility of you conflating me with other replies in this thread, and state that poldoran and mazra's points are not very good either. They seem to have been snookered into the same retarded comparison of genres to a single narrative, so honestly everything that's going on here is just totally ridiculous.
Edited, Dec 5th 2009 12:17pm by Pensive