(no subject)

[olivermoss]

After coming across a historical marker sign and having it turn out to be about Twilight, I decided to finally watch the movie. I decided that I needed to watch it understand modern culture. The world building made no sense and the plot was incoherent. I guess whatever was such catnip to people was in the books, which I wont read. But man, I've watched some seriously jank and low production values genre stuff for reasons, but this was a hot mess by my standards. The baseball scenes? WTF? Also, when I saw images of Edward in that baseball outfit I assumed it was an edit due to a fandom in-joke or maybe something from a commercial.

Also, the obvious Mormon coding started jumping out at me way earlier than I expected.

The bits with Oregon City in it were barely there, but other scenes were obviously Oregon and not Washington. I will also never get over this whole 'vampires are obvious in sunlight so Washington is safe because it's so rainy except for a few days' thing because it is so far from reality it's insane. Like, the world building is pure nonsense, but also what is this weird and geographically incoherent version of the PNW they are showing?

Comments

[mistressofmuses]

It's true... sometimes a particular fanon interpretation takes off and kind of becomes what you see and absorb from the outside.

I feel like at least some of the weirdest bits of the Twilight saga came at the very end. I wonder if you could just bookend it - skip all the middle shit and watch the second part of the last one. (Though that's where some of the weirdest stuff was, it's also the stuff that even fans seem to not love. So it's true that the earlier parts are probably where some of the most relevant cultural stuff is contained.)

True. You don't want to worry about seeming too close to some other thing - especially a thing you don't even know much about! - but also, good to make sure nothing unintentionally seems like a reference to something that it's not.

[olivermoss]

I've watched Contrapoints video on Twilight a few times so I know some of the crazy stuff, but sometimes there's nothing like actually watching the canon everyone is talking about, writing about, making fanfic of, writing about the fanfic, etc to put things in perspective. Also, like the pea coat iconicness totally missed me. I'll probably go movie by movie, but get more of my own stuff done first.

[mistressofmuses]

I need to watch her video on it... I think it's been languishing in my watch later playlist forever at this point.

But yeah, hearing second-hand never really quite captures things the same as experiencing it directly does.

[olivermoss]

Also, it's just taken as given that most people have read/watched the series so it's not meant to be a replacement. Not just her video, but most places and a lot of crit just assumes knowledge of things that, despite all my time consuming media for the purpose of understanding crit, I don't always know

[mistressofmuses]

Yeah, that's a good point. I've run into a lot of criticism of that nature - where I'm interested in something examining xyz trope or whatever, but whatever it is I'm watching or reading expects that I also already have complete knowledge of every canon mentioned. And sometimes that's fair, but this is the case even with stuff that sort of seems to be portraying itself as a primer.
(And that can just be a skill issue; too many people just have a poor understanding of what a 101 exploration (or even a more advanced discussion that doesn't suppose total familiarity with specifics) Other times it just feels like a weird assumption.)

[olivermoss]

It can be really hard to judge what level to aim for, and people who know a lot about a thing tend to way overestimate where the floor is. And if you overexplain then some of your audience dips because they think it's too basic of an essay, video or otherwise.

I still remember vividly HBomberguy being about to explain who James Rolfe is and then going 'wait, I don't need to explain that' and I was very annoyed.

[mistressofmuses]

Yeah. It is a difficult thing to judge. (I know there's an xkcd comic to that effect, about how much people overestimate what a layperson knows about specialized knowledge.) So yeah, it's a fine line between giving a useful introduction to a subject and not alienating the people who DO know something about it.

Right?! Sometimes I DO need the explanation, actually!