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Stephenie Meyer is the author of the wildly successful Twilight series and Soulja Boy is the creator of the wildly successful "Soulja Boy" song, and you've no doubt seen or heard about these two pop culture phenomenons dozens of times. If you've somehow managed to avoid both of these things, I'm in love with you.

The Pointless, Biographical Similarities

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Stephenie Meyer never even wanted to be a writer. She'd never written any stories or treatments or proposals, she was happy being a Mom, and just wrote the Twilight vampire novels for herself, with no intention of ever seeking out a publisher. Her experiment in self-amusement eventually reached a publisher, obviously, who offered her lots and lots of money to write more vampire novels. Soulja Boy, similarly released "Crank That (Soulja Boy)," a catchy(?) hip-hop(?) jam(?), independently on YouTube, without knowing whether or not it would actually do well. It did, and is currently at over one hundred million views, and Twilight has been on the New York Times Best Seller's list more times than I'm comfortable admitting.

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Art is subjective, but Soulja Boy is not a very good rapper, and Stephenie Meyer is not a very good author. These two facts, taken alone, aren't that remarkable; there are tons of bad rappers and writers out there, and some of them are even successful, and that's just how life will go until someone figures out how to fix life. What's particularly striking here is that, when Soulja Boy reached a certain level of success, an actually talented rapper (Method Man), came out to ridicule Soulja, saying "I think he sucks, [and is] garbage." Coincidentally, when Meyer reached her level of success, an actually talented writer (Stephen King), came out to ridicule her, saying "Stephenie Meyer can't write worth a darn. She's not very good." Plenty of people are shitty at things, but these are two cases where the shittiness was so profound that established veterans needed to go on record and tell the world that an artist was terrible. Meyer and Boy's badness was actively offensive to other artists.