Young Adult Literature Became the Playground, and Battleground, for Adults

https://brownstone.org/articles/how-young-adult-literature-became-the-playground-and-battleground-for-adults/

by lando2319 • 3 years ago

26 24 3 years ago

Zeratoss• 3 years ago

I don't really understand the connection between increased adult YA readership and the culture war stuff that the article tries to make. Seems to me the author just dislikes YA. Pretty sure the "think of the children," hand wringing would occur regardless

lincon1273• 3 years ago

Well that makes sense if you think the author dislikes YA, as she obviously does not. She just very much dislikes the idea that grown adults can co-opt a genre not made for them and then police it by only taking into account their own stunted values. Most importantly though, it seems that she mostly hates that there's so many excuses for these people's behaviour, and that adults partake in YA circles so unapologetically. The connection, knowing this, is then quite clear.

fatfingerd2• 3 years ago

It doesn't seem to me like it is a direct choice of adults to consume juvenile media, rather all media has adjusted to the curse of the marginal user and prefers to market garbage that can be sold to anyone.

mathteddybear• 3 years ago

I've read TFA, she obviously dislikes YA

watwut5• 3 years ago

I read article and author dislikes both YA and adults. Autor also conflates kids books with YA books.

Autor also conflates conservative anti-lgbt movement with pretty much anyone who reads youth adult literature which makes even less sense. The calls to remove books with lgbt content from libraries are purely political and have zero to do with what books are read by adults.

vintermann2• 3 years ago

YA, like "New Age" 30 years ago, is not a genre. It's a marketing category.

Marketers built a profile of the buyer they want to target in their minds - a glorified stereotype. The buyers themselves didn't identify with the label.

But the marketers then demanded products tailored to this stereotype. And of course, many authors caught on, and were willing to move towards the marketers caricature of what they had in common, in order to get access.

So there's no co-option here. People are just fighting over a marketer-created niche. The niche is a bad fit to reality (in more ways than the audience hardly being young adults) but it's got enough money behind it that it's not easy to challenge it.

COGlory4• 3 years ago

This was interesting, although I feel the author was making two separate points here. One point was about the popularity of young adult (YA) fiction with adults, and the other was something to do with a book about queer kids being criticized and an attempt to remove it from a public library because children might find it. The thread that connects them was supposedly that the library system circulates 135 copies of 50 Shades of Grey, but how exactly that related to YA lit I'm not sure. The link is certainly weak, or lost on me. (The author started writing fan-fic for YA novels?). Smut has existed forever, certainly before the arbitrary transition period the author of the article has come up with, so I'm not sure I understand the link.

Anyways, of the two points, I find the latter one boring and tired, and so I'd prefer to talk about the first one. The author states:

My husband and I spent several years putting on pleasant faces when talk over cocktails drifted to “Which Hogwarts house would you belong to?” It all felt so juvenile and regressive. And I believe it was.

I was unable to escape this feeling at the time when Harry Potter was sweeping through the world. I'd just finished Lord of the Rings and, while I picked up a Harry Potter book, I just found it tough to get into. Then I watched the same thing happen with series like Eragon, Wheel of Time, Twilight, Song of Fire and Ice, Hunger Games and more (might have the order mixed up). I've read at least a single book from all those series (except Twilight) and while I've gone back and re-read Lord of the Rings 4 times since, I've never felt compelled to read those series, or watch the movie/TV adaptations.

I've spent actually a not insignificant amount of time wondering why those books never clicked with me, while watching them become sweeping, generation-defining cultura phenomena. It's bothered me, because I've been left out of a lot of "which Hogwarts house are you" type of conversations. But the thing that's really strange is that I kept waiting for everyone to outgrow those books and move on. On the one hand, I understand mass appeal, and I understand not understanding mass appeal. Not everything is truly for everyone, and it never bothered me that those books missed me, but what bothered me was that we never let go of them as a culture. I still know people who call other people "muggles", for instance, even though we're all well into our 30s by now.

There are a lot of things I liked in my youth that I look back fondly on now, but realize they aren't for me as an adult. Music, movies, TV, books (I had my own YA novel preferences), that, at some point, I just walked away from. Some of them were quite good, some of them were of broad appeal, but eventually, I outgrew them. What confuses me so much is society's inability to outgrow a lot of these recent YA novels. The same way I'm confused about how Taylor Swift is still so popular with her original demographic.

There used to be a certain strategy that if you paid attention to, many media companies (especially Disney) would employ: They'd release some media series, say, Star Wars. Then they'd wait until the people who originally were kids/young adults got older, had their own kids, and they'd re-release the property, or release sequels/prequels, etc. (Star Wars being a good example because they've done this 3 time now, with the originals in the 80s, prequels in the early 00s, and the latest batch in the 2020s). You could see clear generational gaps between surges in popularity. But that seems to have just gone away now.

All in all, it's not a real problem. I'm still just as tired of these media properties as I was a few years after they came out, but it's not like it really affects my life. It's just really strange to see the level of persistence, and I can't find any historical comparisons.

syntheweave• 3 years ago

One of the most important qualities in storytelling is believability: it might not be true, but you want to believe it. And pop fiction resonates at the large scale that it does through its ability to reflect beliefs that people already hold. Sometimes this is a short-lived thing like the narratives of an electoral cycle. Other times it is a larger founding myth like "the land of the free" or "he died on the cross for our sins".

And what people do is seek out the media that help reinforce those beliefs. They look for talk shows that are like their politics, and stories about heroes that are like them in some way.

And so, for every long-lived franchise there is a subtle interplay between the fan demographic and the kind of story that they believe in so wholly that they will dwell on it and seek out every last piece of merchandise.

With Star Wars, most analysis views it as an accidental Rorschach blot: it addresses multiple political beliefs in a way that lets you read into the story the things you want to see. This is an extremely delicate balance, hence every Star Wars sequel(even when the original trilogy was in its theatrical run) has been a source of enormous fan controversy.

Harry Potter has a more obviously polarizing context: Harry does not seriously address the everyday issues of the wizarding world, they're just a backdrop to the elite power struggle he's thrust into. Topics like house elf slavery or mudblood discrimination are simply dropped on the floor, rather than being addressed with satire like in a Terry Pratchett novel. And so HP appeals in the sense of normalizing society as a fixed form, with unsolvable problems and nobly entitled actors within it; the longstanding HP fan, you may notice, does not self-describe as a muggle.

It's an interesting thing to do, to go through and do this analysis by belief, to determine why cops like the Punisher or why battle royale games became so popular in the 2010's. I don't think it's actually that new a phenomenon, it just becomes more obvious after you get older and realize that some people never stop being fans.

silvestrov• 3 years ago

Harry does not seriously address the everyday issues of the wizarding world

In this way HP is more realistic for the adult world (and what most adult people can do) than all the preaching stories.

Not every character needs to be a always fully good and flawless God.

circlefavshape• 3 years ago

There are a lot of things I liked in my youth that I look back fondly on now, but realize they aren't for me as an adult

FWIW for me one of those things is Lord of the Rings. Po-faced and boring in comparison to Harry Potter (and I'm in my 50s)

lotsofpulp• 3 years ago

I cannot even finish watching the Lord of the Rings movies. Extremely boring to me.

Harry Potter, on the other hand, I read and then watched just a few years ago in my 30s, and I found it very entertaining.

Everyone has their own preferences.

COGlory4• 3 years ago

It's not that I expect everyone to like what I like, but LotR is widely considered to have value beyond entertainment. Consider that it's the topic of a number of PhD dissertations. It's clearly not just YA literature - it is another level of complexity, and to me, that explains its broad apoeal. Read it as a kid for the adventure, as an adult for the symbolism and messaging.

watwut5• 3 years ago

What confuses me so much is society's inability to outgrow a lot of these recent YA novels. The same way I'm confused about how Taylor Swift is still so popular with her original demographic.

Why is it weird? People liking what they encountered in their youth was normal. Generation that grew up on Beatles kept liking Beatles while their kids moved on something else. Generation that grew up on Jazz, kept liking Jazz while their kids moved on. And people who liked westerns as a young adults kept watching westerns as adults.

It is "outgrowing" only if you are moving into something more valuable in some sense. It is outgrowing only if maturity somehow precludes enjoyment of that thing. What happens with these however is that maturity is not preventing enjoyment at all, so people stay.

Also, Wheel of Time or Song of Fire and Ice were meant for adults. They are literature written with mature adults as audience.

COGlory4• 3 years ago

Why is it weird? People liking what they encountered in their youth was normal. Generation that grew up on Beatles kept liking Beatles while their kids moved on something else. Generation that grew up on Jazz, kept liking Jazz while their kids moved on. And people who liked westerns as a young adults kept watching westerns as adults.

Because, in a way jazz (and the Beatles) wasn't, Taylor Swift was music engineered for young adults. Her songs wrote about being in highschool, she has an album titled 19.

watwut5• 3 years ago

The reason adults who hadn’t read a book since college embraced Harry Potter was that it was uncomplicated: linear, familiar in its fairytale structure, binary (good vs evil), and guaranteed a fairly easy satisfying end

I do not think so. Bookshelves are full of linear books with familiar fairytale structure and binary good vs evil. Easy satisfying end also pretty much given in a random book.

vintermann2• 3 years ago

YA is a marketing segment first and foremost. Sure, there are some authors that buy into it and try to write the kind of thing they think the industry's market segment wants. (I'm sure it helps a lot with pitching their books to the publishers).

But generally speaking, I think that if a book gets popular with the "wrong" audience, then it's the industry that needs to look into their assumptions, not the audience.

Young Adult Literature Became the Playground, and Battleground, for Adults

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