Rambling, half-formed morning thoughts

[chocolatepot]

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?

Comments

[lliira]

I've never heard the "YA is more original" stuff. I think it's... well, wrong. YA as a genre never made a lot of sense to me, though. There are too many sub-genres, and I've seen too many books shoved randomly into YA that I would have put into fantasy, and that are put into fantasy in other book stores -- but they don't have explicit sex, so they're put in YA instead. And then you get stuff like people picking up a Robin McKinley book for their little children thinking that, because she won a Newberry Medal for a novel that is actually quite adult, she must write kids' books. And they go home with Deerskin.

I think HP is not easy to emulate without straight-up copying. Also, it's well-written; not perfectly written, but JKR knows how to write and is a professional about it. It's also very, very easy to pretend any teenage romance is "just like Twilight", because so many people already have the delusion all romance novels are the same.

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.

I don't see the love triangle in Twilight as being like that. Also, that idea has been phenomenally common in romances since there have been romances. It's not the most incredibly original thing anyone has every thought of ever -- but nothing really is. None of the important parts of HP are though, either. (I knew Ron and Hermione were going to get together from Book 1 because of Star Wars.) It's all in how the writer puts things together and writes them.

I see blurbs like covers. Sometimes they're good, and say something about the book. Usually they're nonsense.

[chocolatepot]

I think HP is not easy to emulate without straight-up copying. Also, it's well-written; not perfectly written, but JKR knows how to write and is a professional about it.

What's notable to me, though, is that people didn't pick up on the superficial elements and write tons of stories about boy heroes + boarding schools for kids with powers + battle between good and evil. There were some - Charlie Bone, Percy Jackson, Pendragon to an extent - but IIRC it's not like everyone was angling for the Harry Potter Slot the same way. And when I picked them up or read a summary I didn't go, "wow, with a few substitutions this could be an HP AU." And now that I think about it, The Princess Diaries didn't see a huge amount of this either. (Gossip Girl, Private, etc. did, though, but they weren't as blockbustery as all this, just prolific.)

The love triangle isn't quite like that in Twilight, but while there isn't the imperative angle there's a definite class thing between Cullens and the rez/vampires and werewolves in the universe. I'm not saying that it invented the plot/theme/thing, just that its extreme and explicit use in YA fiction comes from there. And it's not just that, it's that combined with the necessary series, and the sf/f angle which was refined by THG into post-Event dystopia, that seem to be in everything I pick up. Occasionally one aspect or the other is less, but when I look at the Children's Books (get with the program, Amazon) Kindle Store page I can see the Twilight or HG origin. To quote myself from LJ, I'm not saying YA is terrible and people should stop saying it's good, I just think the idea that "it's better than adult fiction because it's more original" should go away.

[lliira]

Heh, I've never heard the "better than adult fiction because it's more original" thing :-). I think saying any genre is better than others is kind of silly anyway, and YA as a genre never made much sense to me, so there's that. Anything that puts the Redwall books and the Judy Blume books and the Nancy Drew books and The Hero and the Crown and The Westing Game all in the same genre makes me think... so, the genre is "fiction"?

[chocolatepot]

I wish I could find any places where people are saying it, because I know I saw it really recently and that's why I had it on my mind! But it's very hard to google for it. There was a point after HP when there were a lot of articles about "why are adults reading YA?" and people responded with "because it's more original". TBH I think they did have a point at one time, because YA was a smaller hybrid market and didn't get half the attention it does now.

I would definitely Have Words with someone who classified them all together as a genre, but I think there's worth in using it as a ... fuck, I totally had the right word for this the other day when I was brushing my teeth. Classification? There are commonalities that run through it. But it's interesting to think about the way that some people see the genre as more important and some the audience-classification - would you split YA fantasy from adult fantasy, etc.