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Rambling, half-formed morning thoughts
Oct. 26th, 2012 06:44 amSo 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?
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?
