lythefairystan - Tumblr blog

[lythefairystan]

everyone rise for the truest of all ancient texts:

[lythefairystan]

yall remember qwop?

[lythefairystan]

normalize processing difficult situations privately

[lythefairystan]

Happy 10 years in the ball pit

[lythefairystan]

this is a safe space for people who think they’re “bad” writers btw you’re not a bad writer, you’re learning and i love you

[lythefairystan]

i hope you're doing alright

[lythefairystan]

[lythefairystan]

This Pride I hope that all of you never ever forget that no amount of sanitizing your sex life or sanding down of your LGBT edges will make bigots accept you. So, don’t debase yourself by capitulating an inch to them, especially in ways that throw your fellow community members under the bus.

[lythefairystan]

succession au where jenny nicholson releases a 4 hour deep dive on all the problems with brightstar adventure park, which domino effects into the complete and total destruction of the roy family empire

[lythefairystan]

in my "can i get a waffle, can i PLEASE get a waffle" era right now

[lythefairystan]

I'm a strong believer in positive engagement.

You don't make students enjoy "classics" by shaming them for enjoying YA. The same go with plenty of other things. Recommending media with diversity in a positive an appealing way will always do much better good in the world than shaming m/f shippers for shipping m/f. Recommending diverse music with love and passion will do a lot moe good than shaming poeple for enjoying pop music. Because as an adult who've been a teenager, let me tell you I've never bent down to arguments of authority without grudge and resent.

Also, I have news : you can like classic AND YA. You can ship m/f couples AND be interested in learning and being an ally, you can listen to Taylor Swift AND get interested in history of African music. You can be cultivated AND be your own person with your own tastes and experiences.

The point of activism should not be to punish other poeple into conforming in a mold of superficial "progressivism", it should be to create a better world. Be careful of poeple who enjoy a power trip with superficial online discourse.

[lythefairystan]

kendall roy would definitely wear that “i am kenough” shirt from the barbie movie

[lythefairystan]

the blueprint

The failmarriage of the day is Goncharov and Katya from Goncharov!

[lythefairystan]

tangentially related (my previous post wasn’t actually about YA, but it did make me think about this) but my take on adults who, when reading fiction books they like in their spare time, only want to read like…… YA… is pretty much the exact same as my take on people who go to a restaurant and order their steaks well-done.

which is that it is not what i would personally choose to exclusively consume, and i do see it as limiting yourself and excluding a lot of really fantastic options, but also at the end of the day it is not really my business and i am weirded out by the culture of people acting personally affronted by another person’s consumption habits. 

[lythefairystan]

honestly

[lythefairystan]

appreciating that a character is well-written does not mean agreeing with their actions or decisions.

[lythefairystan]

Something I never hear anyone talk about in the 'why are Young Adults (late teens to early 30s) reading so much Young Adult (teens) fiction These Days' discussion is how surprisingly difficult it can be to transition from kids books to adult fiction.

And I don't mean in terms of content. Forget themes, characters, plots, etc. I'm talking pure practicality.

As a kid, most of the books you read are calibrated to you exactly. Your local library likely has a 'children's' section, and that section is likely split into smaller sub-sections based on age group. 0-5, 5-8, 8-12, teen. A lot of your interests and experiences are pretty easy to guess at based on average developmental stages (eg. most 16-18 year olds will relate to Coming Of Age stories), so it's probably pretty easy for you to walk into a bookshop or library and find a book aimed at you specifically.

But get to 18 (or younger) and start straying into the 'adult' section, and suddenly nothing is calibrated anymore. When people complain that all 'grownup fiction' is about white middle class heterosexual couples going through angsty divorces in their mid-forties, this is what they're complaining about. They can't find books they can personally relate to, or that are about topics that they are interested in.

And yeah, sure, books shouldn't have to be relatable to be good or enjoyable. But there's also nothing wrong with wanting to read a book about young people, when you're young. Or queer people, if you're queer. Or people from your particular culture, religion, or ethnicity.

Even if we ignore the relatability aspect entirely, there's also nothing wrong with wanting to read a fantasy book that isn't just 'Tolkien but drearier' or a sci-fi that wasn't written by some guy in the 1960s who thought that women were just another kind of alien.

The problem is, fundamentally, that finding the books you like amid the haystack is a skill that most people are not being taught.

As a result, when they get past YA and try using the old tricks of just picking up whatever is on the bestseller list at the moment, or whatever their local library is currently touting as their 'book of the week', they frequently end up with something that isn't suited to their tastes.

And maybe they love it and it opens up a whole new genre that they'd never considered, but more often they hate it but feel obliged to slog through because this is a 'grownup book' and they have decided they want to be a 'grownup reader'.

A few times being burned like this, and they come to the conclusion that all adult fiction is boring, and that the people who read it are all either mature geniuses of the type they could only hope to be, or slogging through like they were and only pretending to like it.

Thus they run back to the familiarity of YA—which is fine, to be clear, there's nothing actually wrong with reading YA as an adult— but there's every chance that somewhere on the bookshelves is a potential favourite author of theirs that they will now never know because they were never taught how to find them.