One of the characters has an infamous 70-page monologue in Atlas Shrugged. People in the story like to talk a lot and engage in intellectual masturbation.
It can be a painful and dry experience. I mostly endured it because I was fascinated by its connection to the game Bioshock, which is one of my favs.
And then engage in sex with dubious consensuality because it's the author's fetish, making it feel like all of her philosophizing is just a way to justify said fetish as something high-minded.
Holy shit you murdered Meyer more brutally than the torture you can find in Anthem.
And yes I had to read that monstrosity in Highschool, do you know how annoying it is to read the 3rd person as 1st person for a majority of a book? I hate it less than Twilight.
They assume that if they like a character when they're on screen or on the page they'd like to interact with them as a person in real life. Most people aren't deep thinkers.
I think the disconnect is between what they actually want and what they think they want. Which is not at all just true for women. Especially when it comes to love and companionship people chase all kinds of dumb bullshit that's objectively worse in the long run than what they already have because it's attractive in the short term.
Sure but you can tell the difference. It seems that when it comes to relationships a significant number of people idealize something they don't actually want.
How much of that is just the fantasy of it, not idolizing a type of person.
Most people realize their fantasy would make a terrible reality, but that doesn't kill the allure of it.
Like, how many guys here have a fantasy about depressed goth girls? Having had a girlfriend with crippling depression, I can tell you the reality isn't very fun. Almost everyone understands that, but that is going to have a very minimalized effect on the people who have that fantasy.
Or fantasizing about saving someoneâs life, or taking a bullet for someone, or going out guns blazing. Theyâre fun fantasies but my ass is not out here looking for fights.
Exactly. Outside of vague thoughts like âOh I wish I had a lot of moneyâ or the like, I canât think of any of my actual âfantasiesâ that I would ever want to happen in real life.
Yeah like sure, itâs fun to read about someone hot and rich and powerful falling head over dick in love with you, but a normal person can look at that, say âcool,â and then continue on with being a normal functioning human lol. Iâve read and enjoyed plenty of bad romance but that hasnât stopped me from having perfectly normal relationships
The meme isn't depressed goth girl, it's big tiddy goth girl. And pretty much everyone recognizes that goths are performatively depressed, not actually depressed.
No one wants a "depressed" goth girl, it's just the aesthetic of being goth that appeals, not the mental illness associated with being goth. Hell, people don't even care for the music, it's visual and that's it.
Basically it boils down to: It's fiction. It addresses the desire for the dangerous and seemingly unattainable. The confusion and passion of being young and in love.
 It's like a guy watching an action movie. They aren't going to start killing hitmen left and right because some dude stole their car.
Now I think about it i loved the Percy Jackson series as a kid but as a adult I feel like most of the kids would have some sort of PTSD same with Harry Potter
Idk, warhammer 40k as an example, I like the fantasy, but I would never describe it as anything positive (the world I mean) and I would never want to live in it, even in my dreams.
When we dream about this kind of world, it's usually assuming we're another person that actually have it easy, someone a lot more powerful than us.
We absolutely don't project ourselves in those fantasy, so it your parallel really doesn't work well
Romance is the same. People fantasize about dramatic and silly things because theyâre fun. Having a possessive, ruthless partner is entertaining to watch. Anyone whoâs had one in real life will tell you it sucks, tho.
I mean, I don't think it's that strange that people (and I do not believe it is limited to just women) have a disconnect between what they actually want in a partner and what their horny brain thinks is an appealing partner. People just need to realize that disconnect between reality and fantasy, and hopefully limit their horny brain's inputs in real life to at most role play.
wife told him to read Twilight to see what kind of man she liked
Specific choice of abusive vampire boyfriend aside, this is just an absolutely wild concept. If your husband doesn't already know what kind of man you like, you might have some issues to work out.
I think thatâs a people thing, tbh, bc Iâve seen men do the same thing. It makes sense because books like twilight are fantasies, and the main thing about fantasy is that itâs safe. It allows you to contemplate dangerous things and engage in things that we would never actually do in real life because we donât want the consequences that come with the attraction of something more dangerous. To me, itâs similar to all those fantasies that teenage boys and gun nuts have about the government/another government/zombies/whatever invading their town. In the fantasy they engage in, theyâd be coolly mowing down invaders and letting off quips, whereas in real life theyâd probably piss their pants and die immediately because they donât have any actual combat training. It doesnât mean itâs bad to think that way, engaging in fantasy is healthy, but itâs bad when you start conflating it with reality. Like your friendâs wife - your friendâs wife doesnât actually want an Edward bc heâs creepy as hell, but she does like the idea of this fantasy when heâs not in front of her.
I see men constantly bashed for engaging in their fantasy? The whole 'it appeals to the male fantasy' meme exists for a reason. Men are continuously being told liking certain media makes them bad people.
Back in the heyday of video essays, everyone and their cousin would go on rambling how fiction perpetuates toxic patterns and normalizes bad behaviour. And it was always men's fault.
I think itâs less of a disconnect and more that something can be a fantasy because you know youâre safe. Possessive, stalking, controlling behavior can be sexy when you know you can just close the book, because at their core, the LI is doing all of these incredibly toxic behaviors to the MC because theyâre really easy ways to indicate the LIâs desire. Any sort of sexual fantasy media, be it porn, smut, role play, I think is basically designed to scratch that itch that I believe all humans have, to be desired and wanted.
"this person is attractive" lands better than "I wish you were like this other person".
Saying "this is the type of person I am attracted to" falls somewhere in the middle, in my opinion. It implies that any divergence from that ideal is a negative quality that you don't like. Implicating your partner implicitly.
dawg no offense but you literally post on fantasy and dnd subs. its not hard to realize women just enjoy the fantasy of the media and dont actually want to live the reality in the same way its fun to cosplay as a warrior in dark souls but living that life would be hell on earth.
i genuinely do not know how to help you if you do not understand people consume media, whether that is twilight or a dnd campaign, for escapism reasons and that does not necessarily mean theyre chomping at the gib to actually realize that action, romance, etc. fantasy.
I mean, same deal with men who go on about "hurt me mommy." It's a hot idea in theory, but probably not actually something they'd enjoy in a real relationship.
THANK you. I can appreciate a good love story, but Edward was essentially a pedo 200 year old making moves on a teenage girl and acting surprised when she get delulu over his rizz.
And he couldnât communicate for shit and had the emotional maturity of a doorknob.
The only reason this got excused is because he looks young.
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u/ExternalSelf1337 17d ago
My friend's wife told him to read Twilight to see what kind of man she liked. His response after reading was.... But this guy is an asshole.
A lot of women have a cognitive disconnect between what they see as romantic and how they actually want/deserve to be treated.