Opinions

If you haven’t noticed I’m a bit opinionate. Yes, really I am. I try very hard though to only be opinionated about subjects that I have knowledge of because, honestly, how can you have an opinion about something you know nothing about?

I recently got into a debate with someone over the Twilight series. First let me say I’ve read all of the books and I enjoyed them. Are they literary award winning pieces? No. Are they fun little bits of mind candy? Yes.

The person I was debating with has never read the books, nor seen the movies, but was very opinionated based solely on what she had heard from friends, whom I’m guessing didn’t discuss ever specific detail of the books with this person.

The person said “I don’t think they’re going to make the Breaking Dawn movie, because my friend was telling me it’s fairly detailed sexually anyway.”

I responded by telling this person that the sexual content in the 4th book is not that detailed, of course I’m not sure what this friend considers “detailed”.

The person then says “Well, considering the entire time Bela (yes, she misspelled the character’s name too) and Edward haven’t had sex (because it’s a meant to be a teen movie) and then in Breaking Dawn they have sex on their honeymoon and then she ends up pregnant. The teen era may just frown on making the movie is all. I’m not saying it’ll show the “sexual content” but the obvious point is there”

I responded “But don’t married people have sex??? I don’t think it’s meant to be a teen movie or series, that’s just the group that identifies with it because of the age of the characters”

So then I started to wonder. What did the author intend? And I found an article where the author tells us just what she was thinking:

Q: What inspired you to write Twilight? Is this the beginning of a series? Why write for teens?

A: Twilight was inspired by a very vivid dream, which is fairly faithfully transcribed as chapter thirteen of the book. There are sequels on the way--I'm hard at work editing book two (tentatively titled New Moon) right now, and book three is waiting in line for its turn.

I didn't mean to write for teens--I didn't mean to write for anyone but myself, so I had an audience of one twenty-nine year old (and later one thirty-one year old when my sister started reading).

And something else I found interesting about the author was this:

Q: What other young adult authors do you read?
A: My favorite young adult author is L.M. Montgomery I also enjoy J.K. Rowling (but who doesn't?), and Ann Brashares. As a teen, I skipped straight to adult books (lots of sci-fi and Jane Austen), so I'm rediscovering the world of teen literature now.

So after this the person tells me “regardless if married people have sex or not, for the PG-13 rated movies it’s still not technically supposed to be a part of the content”

Um, WHAT? The PG-13 rating is this: PG-13 - Parents Strongly Cautioned - Some material may be inappropriate for children under 13. Films given this rating may contain sexual content, brief or partial nudity, some strong language and innuendo, humor, mature themes, political themes, terror and/or intense action violence. However, bloodshed is rarely present. This is the minimum rating at which drug content is present; While PG-13 films usually have more profanity than PG films, this is not necessarily the case. A film that is given a PG-13 rating due to profane language and/or racial insults is given this rating because it contains more of these elements than a PG rating would permit, or the film contains uses of stronger profanities than a PG would permit. A film rated PG-13 for "intense violence" is given this rating if blood is present in a violent way. In recent years, this rating has been used for the majority of American films released.

And after all of this, my point truly is, how can you have an opinion on something you know little or nothing about? I can respect, “I don’t want to see ‘Twilight’ because that just doesn’t look like a movie I’d like” or “I don’t want to read ‘Twilight’ based on the reviews and articles I’ve read”, but to outright say “this movie sucks” or “those books are garbage” are pretty strong opinions and I would expect the person saying these things to actually be able to back it up. If you read the book and found it miserable, then I respect your opinion 100%. I’ve certainly read some books and seen some movies that made me recoil at the horror of the awfulness contained within them. However, if you think everything that is liked by pre-teens or teens is junk because of the group that gravitates towards it, then that is an opinion based on such a large spectrum it’s hard to believe it’s a valid opinion. I know a number of teens who love the “Lord of the Rings” series. This is a series that has been highly acclaimed. I wonder if that person would also say these books and movies are “junk”? It’s also a series I don’t particularly care for. I’ve seen the movies, and honestly I tried to read the books, but I couldn’t get interested enough in them. Not my kind of book I guess. But I won’t devalue those books just because I didn’t care for them, and certainly not because of the majority of people who did like them. I can’t even say I hated them, mostly because I couldn’t finish them, so I don’t have enough information to give a solid opinion on those books.

Let me simplify this one more way. My son won’t eat peas. He hasn’t had them since he was a baby and I doubt he remembers what they taste like, but as he tells me “they are green and that makes them yucky”. However, he does like broccoli. Loves it actually. If he based his opinion of peas “they are green and that makes them yucky” on broccoli (hey, it’s green, so it must me yucky) he really shouldn’t like broccoli either. But he gave broccoli a chance and found out it was pretty darn good. I still hold out hope for the peas, but that’s another battle for another day.

If you want to be opinionated all I ask is that you are giving an opinion based on some factual experience with what you are feeling so strongly about, otherwise you might just be jumping off the cliff with all the other lemmings.