Controversial opinion:
Sex is YA isn't a bad thing.
YA means Young Adult, and as a teenager, it is not for teens. If a teen reads YA, that is their choice, and they should be aware that as the genre is called Young ADULT, it is meant for adults.
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Reading about YA author drama on TikTok and Goodreads feels like when I read a forum thread derail about professional wrestling. I'm sort of interested but at the same time I have absolutely no idea what's going on.
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dystopian ya novel in the vein of divergent/the hunger games/etc except the hero is a milf
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I am more and more seeing people call YA a genre and I think we really gotta stop that. It’s an age range and the books marketed to that age range include a huge amount of subjects that are wildly different from each other. I get that 15-20 year olds are on booktok and instagram and are getting flooded with shallow badly-written romance novels set in a vaguely dystopian society that’s based entirely in Aesthetics and clear-cut morality but that is not the only type of books marketed to young adults. Lumping everything that’s for teenagers into a genre that you believe is The Decline of Literature is perhaps not good for anyone.
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honestly the problem with booktok (and bookstagram) is not YA lit. it's not about people enjoying books that some might consider "low-brow" or whatever.
imo booktok is the culmination of several problems:
firstly, there's the homogeneity of algorithmic recommendations and the enormous influence those recommendations have on the publishing market. booktok recs tend to be of a very similar style and subject matter. they're easily digestible, easily bingeable titles that arent overly complex. booktok favors stories written by white women, often featuring characters with traumatic backstories and focusing on themes like overcoming adversity and the pursuit of romantic love. they are also usually very anglo-/americentric. none of this is necessarily bad, and none of it is by design, but it's not a coincidence either. it's the result of the constraints of short-form content on the one hand, and on the other, of an algorithm that amplifies, in broad strokes, the preferences of the core demographic of any given group of users.
secondly, it's about the commodification, not of reading, but of being Someone Who Reads Books (TM), which i think is just a particularly obvious symptom of online peer pressure and social-media-driven self-presentation. booktok doesn't encourage you to read, for example, sally rooney. it encourages the cultivation of one's own identity as someone who reads sally rooney. the problem here is not that sally rooney is a shit writer whose work has nothing of note to say. quite the opposite. sally rooney's work is relevant and interesting. in fact, it's being studied by scholars, and even if it wasn't, people can and should be allowed to enjoy some light reading, and yes, even Problematic (TM) fictional characters.
the real problem is the fact that the very nature of how booktok works actively discourages the critical discussion of the stories that it circulates. the problem is not millions of teenagers reading colleen hoover's slop (i love me some slop) – it's millions of teenagers encouraging each other to read and internalize – UNCRITICALLY – hoover's particularly romanticized depiction of abuse. tiktok's algorithm does not foster diversity of opinion. it doesn't foster diversity PERIOD. it doesn't foster slow, in-depth discussion. its only function is *make line go up* – line go up = clicks, views, engagement, money.
due to tiktok's popularity, booktok also has an enormous influence on marketing-related and (apparently, to some extent) editorial decision-making in the publishing industry. this is not just the fault of booktok, goodreads is part of the same problem. i mean, booktok has managed to turn colleen hoover's 'it ends with us' into a bestseller FIVE YEARS after it was originally published. it has also led to publishers dropping authors or DELAYING THE RELEASE of new titles after booktokers flooded the goodreads pages of unpublished books with one star reviews.
as i said, the underlying issue here is not unique to booktok. it's the same homogenization that plagues the movie industry, the tv industry, streaming services, etc. the publishing industry is just particularly vulnerable to such manipulations of public opinion. in the end, tiktok is not a social media app. it's an entertainment app and its content is focused on brevity. the biggest booktokers aren't simply avid readers. they don't post actual reviews of books they enjoyed. they're influencers who receive boxes of books from publishing houses to show off in haul videos like "have you guys heard of squarespace?" and that's it. the level of engagement with the texts themselves is like reading a blurb on the dustjacket, and unfortunately that is reflected in the selection of titles that become popular. if it can't be sold to you in 3 sentences, the algorithm will bury it.
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Just putting this out here cause I had to explain it to my mom, but here are the types of fiction (sorry if I leave out any)
Urban fantasy aka “I live in a modern society but turns out the creatures of old live in the forest” Ex: The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater
Paranormal (Romance) aka “My sexy neighbor is secretly a werewolf/vampire and I’m a human teenage girl” Ex: Twilight by Stephanie Meyer
Epic Fantasy aka “This is a crazy quest isn’t it my dear found family” Ex: Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo
High Fantasy aka “This is a crazy quest of prophecy isn’t it my dear found family oh look a dragon” Ex: The Lord of the Rings by J R R Tolkien
Dystopian aka “This future world is apocalyptic and quite obviously favors the rich” Ex: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
Utopian aka “This future world seems peaceful on the outside but that just covers all the absolutely insane problems only this 16-year-old can fix” Ex: The Lunar Chronicles by Marissa Meyer
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sorry this is not atla related, but have you ever read animorphs? i think you might enjoy it, it also has themes of children trying to navigate war on a huge scale and the ways they have to change themselves (and each other) to cope and hopefully change things. which is not to say it doesn’t have its issues obviously lol it was very much written in the 90s but it’s full of deeply compelling characters and moral issues and such
it's funny that you say that because my friend once spent upwards of 3 hours explaining the plot of animorphs to me as he remembered it from his childhood. so no, i have not actually read those books (i didn't really read children's books as a child, which i know is ironic coming a blog dedicated to a nickelodeon cartoon) but i basically feel like i have. this friend has since watched atla (i mentioned him here) and we've also talked about it at length (for at least a combined total of 3 hours, but probably far more); i definitely remember asking him at some point which series he preferred, and he said atla without a shadow of a doubt lmfao. but he's also the most sokkacoded person i've ever met in my life, so i think he might be biased.
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I think that YA has ironically become more infantile (on average) as it’s become more popular with adults. And I think it’s because adult YA readers (subconsciously or not) generally expect YA to be less challenging than books for adults (as in easier to read stylistically, but also simpler thematically and light on sexual or upsetting content), while the target audience expects YA to be specifically interesting to young adults (which largely translates to having young adult protagonists whose experiences are taken seriously, and without the ironic or nostalgic or therapeutic distance of an adult perspective).
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