Rambling, half-formed morning thoughts

So fandom tends to be the great defender of YA. The main argument for YA's superiority is its originality - it blends genres, everyone comes up with strikingly different universes, because there's no/very little push to be literary or to depict the struggles of the everyday (the stereotypical adult contemporary fiction novel usually brought up in this discussion is of a man having a midlife-crisis).

But the thing is ... is YA really that original? There was a chart kicking around on Tumblr for "if you liked THG, you might like this" and I got two of them, ones listed under arranged marriages (shut it!). I've mostly read one (Matched) and just started the other (The Selection). And they both strike me as so derivative of THG and Twilight.

The universes are decent. In Matched, there's a sort of Giver-like managed utopia where the government decides how much you exercise, exactly what you eat, what your job will be, and, of course, who you marry. The Selection ... I'm not far enough in to quite get it, but there's a caste system (which determines your job) and a monarchy where the princesses marry out of the country and princes marry in with girls selected in a Bachelor-like thing. Both have talk of how the inner/urban part of the country is peaceful and regulated, and the outer areas have ~rebellion brewing~.

And you know what else they both have? First person narration (Matched in present tense) in a very flat voice, and a love triangle where the heroine has to choose between the Guy Society Wants For Her/Higher-Status Guy and the Guy Society Says She Can't Be With/Lower-Status Guy. Ripped from Hunger Games, which ripped it straight from Twilight. ETA: And, of course, they're written for trilogies - not even "wow, this first book did well, I'll write a sequel to follow up on it" but "this book ends on a cliffhanger to set up for the next book".

All the blurbs on the backs of these books are written by other people in the same narrow sub-genre, which really just goes to show what a narrow scope is going on. It's all going, "if you liked this, you want more of it!" which is really not what I used to like about YA.

What confuses me is that I don't remember this happening when HP was big. There were a few taking off on it, yes, but I don't remember there being such a glut. Maybe the fact that romance was not a big issue in them, due to their source, that made them seem less samey, IDK.

How is this any different, is my main point, than the stereotypical contemporary adult fiction? Do most people who like YA for its originality just not care about this aspect of originality, or is it just that "YA is more original" is a meme that people don't think about when they say it?

TGIF

The one thing I hate about Pinterest (and Tumblr) is that the repins aren't attached to the original. I see the benefit to keeping them static as of the time of repinning/reblogging and not allowing other people to basically alter posts on your own board/blog, but I always end up editing mine for dates and then I'm annoyed that inaccurate dates are now on other people's things under my name. THAT DRESS IS 1924 NOT 1923, OH NO.

I would like to see Ruby Bentall play a main character. I like that The Paradise is less lessony than Lark Rise, but she's basically playing the same character only slightly less stupid. Matthew McNulty is so hot, but he's NOT IN IT ENOUGH and I resent that. ETA: the costumes are actually terrible in this, though. Elaine Cassidy's look cheap and the shopgirls' are too 1880s.

Someone posted Hook/Aurora gifs in Tumblr and now I ship it. I don't know why I'm so suggestible.

I think the way I'm doing this ppt is to have each slide with a fashion plate and an extant dress/ensemble from the same year that shows the basic points of the dress in the plate. I think I'm going to try to find more casual photos to work in as well. It's going to be a combination of fashion history mythbuster, dating tutorial [insert joke here], and I guess I'd call it hints on being more accurate/using more variations. So everyone gets something! Not many people seem to really do the 1920s, I think because all you tend to see is robes de style or waistless tubes with straps. So I want to show the blousing and the faux-sashes and the gathering to one side and the long skirts. I'm not sure how many people would necessarily be interested specifically for the purpose of dating, but given how many museum dates for the '20s seem like someone just threw a dart at a timeline it'd probably be useful. I'm not planning to spend much time on the mythbusting specifically - just showing all these examples will basically do it.

This nail polish does not want to come off. It's a light color so I thought it would be easier, for some reason, but it's really sticking. I'm going to try working at it again tomorrow.