This is a bit of a meta rant, on topic but not solely aimed at the article.
I really, really hate how YA is called out as somehow different from the rest of the book universe.
As if being written for teenagers (if they're even written for teenagers, and not simply marketed that way) makes them worse books.
As if having sex and violence in a book somehow makes it better than YA books.
TFA talks about how unlikable-but-redeemed characters in teen books are treated as if they're dramatically worse than unlikable-but-redeemed characters in the broader book category. How YA authors are tarred with that brush for the rest of their careers.
It's such a stupid, and worthless, classification. Remember, award winning writers like Piers Anthony, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Heinlein all wrote books targeted at children as well.
No, of course not. Is that what you think people are referring to when they suggest you consider the difference between YA literature and literature intended for adults?
But it is. It is, quite clearly, literature intended for adults. It may be more smut and less Moby Dick, but it's not by any means written for children.
And, funnily enough, it also represents the same kind of mindless entertainment people refer to when criticizing YA books.
It's not Hemingway or Twain, but wait, didn't we read them in High School too?
Ayup. Smut is an incredibly popular (and profitable) adult literature genre. Followed closely by romance and power fantasies (which are safe to use in literature aimed at teens).
To head off on an even further tangent for a second: Piers Anthony is pretty deeply problematic himself, and I don't mean that in an "insufficiently 'woke'" sense, either. Many of his works have an unhealthy fascination with sexualized adolescent characters; one of them (his 1990 adult novel Firefly) graphically and sympathetically depicts the rape of a child.
There are plenty of other far more deserving authors that could take his place in such a comparison. Terry Pratchett is a pretty obvious choice, for instance. Or Tolkien, as someone else mentioned.
I seem to remember reading one of his “incarnations” books twenty years ago or so, where the justification for a middle aged man having a particularly kinky relationship with a fifteen year old girl (in both body and mind) was that due to time magic being used, she was technically legally eighteen and so everything was fine.
He also wrote a YA novel entitled “the color of her panties” so...
I will never cease to be baffled by what people are willing to put to print. These are some interesting questions.
If he's writing a book about some fantasy sex between some character and a child, I don't see why he shouldn't be allowed to do that, so long as he's not selling those copies to children.
If he is a pedophile, getting someone to bottle up such a central part of themselves is bad for their mental health. And nothing good can possibly come from having poor mental health. Although, it is hard to tell if this is the case, or if it wasn't contributed by his dodgy pen pal.
The pen pal, and the whitewashing of him, if he is indeed a molester, is personally a far bigger problem to me (and one which is being a tad overlooked imo), than the sex scene, although at this point in this comment, I'm still trying to separate the man from the work.
I can see why people would dislike him writing YA works. If he is a pedophile, I imagine part of the reason he has become so popular, is that he is uniquely able to "feel" the same things the reader might towards their peers.
Someone trying to emulate that without that sort of touch would have a greater difficulty in doing so. However, it does appear as if he has pushed some boundaries, and there are serious questions to be had about when young people should start to be exposed to charged sexual settings like this. And what sort of shock scenes is really appropriate in there. He might even need an actual editor who can rein him in.
I am not familiar enough with his work to comment further on this.
Disagree as YA is a fairly narrow collection of genres and its writers can succeed by relying on too many tropes.
Young adults would be better served by ignoring YA in favor of the wider book world, and books written before the YA genres existed.
As an aside, you’ll find a toxic adherence to supporting the YA genre in the Twitter communities mentioned in the article, most loudly by people who want to be big fish in a small pond, but also have that small pond be seen as large and prestigious. ;)
> YA is a fairly narrow collection of genres and its writers can succeed by relying on too many tropes.
YA, as pointed out in sister threads, includes books like Catcher in the Rye, The Hobbit, Ender's Game, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and so forth. Stereotypes like this one hurt these discussions quite a bit. Stereotypes also prevent people from reading good books.
> Young adults would be better served by ignoring YA in favor of the wider book world
I might agree with you if it was only authors who were intentionally targeting those genres. It's not. Publishers will take general books and market them as YA. I know of some really good authors who have been shoehorned into the YA market (Forthright, as one example).
> books written before the YA genres existed
YA has been around for over 200 years now. The YA category (as opposed to children's) came about around 1802 (per Wikipedia).
That is a revisionist YA history and appropriated booklist with the goal of adding more legitimacy to the genres. YA emerged in the latter half of the 20th century, as summarized fairly well in that Wikipedia article.
Revising history is a neutral exercise that just happens to have obscured the issue in this case. Happy to continue if you are ever inclined. I will try to use better words, too.
1) fuck Twitter and that entire social interaction method, I hate it with my entire being
2) "Positive buzz all but died off, as community members began confronting The Black Witch’s supporters, demanding to know why they insisted on reading a racist book. "
Reminds me how in Soviet Russia you couldn't read certain books or risk prosecution, but were of course required to condemn them, in public if possible. Which led to entire groups of politicians, artists, authors, condemning books which they weren't even legally allowed to read. Absolute fucking insanity.
>Reminds me how in Soviet Russia you couldn't read certain books or risk prosecution, but were of course required to condemn them, in public if possible. Which led to entire groups of politicians, artists, authors, condemning books which they weren't even legally allowed to read. Absolute fucking insanity.
The Twitter-driven mobs forcing people to retract statements and put out new, "correct" ones are merely online versions of Communists' struggle sessions.
People reap what the sow. This is their community and their livelihood and they've ripped it apart seem by seem in the name of little power grabs and self promotion and turned their lives into some power struggle theater.
I hope they enjoy it and I'm sorry for the people who had to walk away because they didn't want to play the game.
Twitter seems like reddit in the culture of clever one liners being more valued than depth. I'm reminded of r/askreddit where the top answers are so often just jokes. There's some good stuff in there, but overall it's not worth it. It doesn't bode well that some professional communities are so reliant on it (e.g. journalists).
> It was written for the type of white person who considers themselves to be not-racist and thinks that they deserve recognition and praise for treating POC like they are actually human.
I know nothing of the book but what we're seeing here is the next phase in the evolution of the social justice warrior. Slowly they have come full circle to realize their own hypocrisy. Better late than never.
Woking ourselves to societal disillusionment and eventual collapse. Saying this as a colored person who never saw myself “colored”. Did I face indirect racism ? Yes a hell lot more than I can count. But I ignore / stay away from people who don’t like me. That’s where it ends. I don’t want to be judged by the color of my skin but by the content of my character to borrow the phrase from a famous activist everyone knows.
I don’t like where the society is headed canceling ourselves back into the history and then into the future until there is nothing left.
> Among the book-buying public, though, that parade may be mostly passing unnoticed. The scandals that loom so large on Twitter don’t necessarily interest consumers; instead, the tempest of these controversies remains confined to a handful of internet teapots where a few angry voices can seem thunderously loud.
The most important part of this, may be how inconsequential this actually is.
I really, really hate how YA is called out as somehow different from the rest of the book universe.
As if being written for teenagers (if they're even written for teenagers, and not simply marketed that way) makes them worse books.
As if having sex and violence in a book somehow makes it better than YA books.
TFA talks about how unlikable-but-redeemed characters in teen books are treated as if they're dramatically worse than unlikable-but-redeemed characters in the broader book category. How YA authors are tarred with that brush for the rest of their careers.
It's such a stupid, and worthless, classification. Remember, award winning writers like Piers Anthony, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Heinlein all wrote books targeted at children as well.
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