Normally I'd make fun of how self-righteous YA writers and/or fans are about their waning gold rush/demographic desirability, but that preciously precious Slate piece doesn't deserve a response, genre notwithstanding.
sparkly vampires who love you longtime
Genius.
2: Ouch. I hate to quote myself,* but watching last night's True Blood remined me of the discussion, months past, when I too-crudely divided fantasy into the categories of "Growing Up Warlord" and "Everybody Loves Princess."
* A damnable lie.
Actually, I think I said "Everybody Loves [Girl's Name]," and someone else nicely changed it to "Princess."
In the world of YA fiction, particularly in fantasy, the darkest parts of being young can move from metaphor to reality.
Is this really the case in even the majority of YA fantasy? Or is this a case of Joss Whedon Rules Our World? What's the darkest part of being young that's reified in something like Redwall or Alanna or Howl's Moving Castle? Or are these somewhere over an invisible dividing line between "YA fantasy" and "children's fantasy"?
OT:
So, I'm going to France (Vannes) for a conference next week. I'll be there July 4-12. Do we even have any French commenters? Dunno.
But then, for reasons that are complicated and boring, I am flying to Heathrow on the evening of the 12th and flying OUT of Heathrow late morning on the 13th. I've never been to England, except to just be in Heathrow for a few hours. I guess I'll find a hotel or hostel or something. How far away from the London contingent will I be? Is there any hope of a meetup or is the timing/locating too tricky?
We are a sensitive lot and it does seem like there's a new YA kerfuffle every week. But I think everyone knows that the heady YA boom can't last and most of us don't much care because we didn't write our books for the sake of jumping on a bandwagon or landing a sweet movie deal. And, for all our defensiveness, most of the outrage doesn't seem to be directed at people questioning the future of the genre or the viability of the demographic, but in response to snide or hysterical critics who like to talk condescending smack about YA's readers and writers.
I think literally the only thing I know about YA fiction is that everyone involved in it is incredibly defensive about it. Everyone talks condescending smack about everything.
7 - You're ignoring two major features of American critical wanking. Any trend (in the arts, in behavior, what have you) is disturbing if it involves teenagers and contemptible if its primary enthusiasts are women. If a bunch of teenaged girls start reading books, this is cause for sneering and alarm.
And of course there's the problem that 90% of everything is, in fact, crap. So if people are predisposed to think badly of any genre, it's not hard to find examples of it that suck.
7, 8: Every book is Lucky Jim to some old Maugham.
Work with me, people. I can't do it all.
Don't forget the criticism that every non-fantasy YA novel is horrible and depressing, presumably because they're all written by Chris Crutcher.
Wasn't there a New Yorker piece last year that slipped a languid hand down the YA shelf? I don't remember the specifics, or even the tone, very well, but did it provoke a firestorm in the YA community?
5 - I'll hop on Howl's-- The sisters' attempts to move beyond the lives set out for them. Sophie's transformation from girl to crone and the need to separate from the mother figure. The consumption of the heart as a means of retaining or stealing power.
9- Agreed. This happens with everything women and girls consume en masse. Part of it is just the fine line between honest critique and contrarian douchebaggery, but there's power in moving markets and I think that freaks some people out. A lot of attacks on YA (romance, chicklit, etc.) go to this condescending place that feels creepily close to early diagnoses of hysteria: We must protect the mush-headed ladies!
Oh and, "Growing Up Warlord" and "Everybody Loves Princess" seem about right, though I feel you're missing something in the "Loser is Chosen"/"I Have Powers Now, Mofo" category.
17: I feel like I've read Loser is Chosen.
17: "Eat Laser Eyes, Bullies!", or, for the historically minded, "Fans are Slans". There's also the slight variant, "My Superpowers Make Me Emo" (hi there, young Wiggin!).
18: It starts, "I was going to Toshi Station to pick up some power converters..."
At this time, it's hard for me to decide whether I love snarkout or k-sky more. (That's also the plot of my new YA series.)
Ok, but what's the dark part of being young that's made real in Farmer Giles of Ham?
Somebody should get Leigh a fruit basket.
Ok, but what's the dark part of being young that's made real in Farmer Giles of Ham?
HAM!
23: Probably has something to do with the blunderbuss.
Or, for that matter, Smith of Wootton Major.
23: Probably has something to do with the blunderbuss.
Maybe more passed between Giles and the Likely Lads than is recorded.
Maybe more passed between Giles and the Likely Lads than is recorded.
Farmer Giles was in Spinal Tap?
3, 17, and 19 covered the only thing I had to say. I am ok fine with the YA part, it is the fantasy elements that bother me just a little.
Just a little, as in wondering why. Why did Nancy Drew have to be so rich, why Tom Swift had to be so smart?
23, 25 - The gripping tale of Giles Rabinowitz and his childhood in prosperous Connecticut in the early '60s really tells us a lot about anti-Semitism and the conflict between assimilation and pride in ethnic heritage, all through the lens of his desire to eat delicious treyf. The shoutouts to Farmer Boy are really clever, too.
Leigh, you can like snarkout better here, because you have to endure me in real life.
But please allow me to be the first to offer you a fruit basket.
I don't see how anti-Semitism and the conflict between assimilation and pride in ethnic heritage are "dark parts of being young" that pass from metaphor to reality, though.
(In fact, I don't understand how a dark part of being young could pass from metaphor to reality. I mean, aren't the parts of being young in question actual parts of being young? But now that I've read the context, I see that it was just a sloppy sentence.)
In the world of YA fiction, particularly in fantasy, the darkest parts of being young can move from metaphor to reality.
Is this really the case in even the majority of YA fantasy? Or is this a case of Joss Whedon Rules Our World?
I would think that the largest sub-genre of YA fiction that would fall outside of this description would be humor.
I feel like there are any number of good YA books that are either (1) chock full of terrible puns and/or (2) involve a character who steps out of their normal life for some sort of adventure which does affirm their ability to take of themself but which is essentially harmless and humorous.
See Daniel Manus Pinkwater, as an example, and I feel like there are other good examples that are on the tip of my tongue.
29"Or to go another way, the change from Nancy Drew and Tom Swift to shooting laser beams out of eyes at bullies seems to me to be a significant enough change, a larger change than material conditions (still pimples and proms, 75 years later) would warrant.
I was thinking of that, but I thought it was just too much of a classic and is interesting in too many ways to fit that easy a summary.
But, yes, it would be the ideal standard for what I am thinking of.
Maybe I should reread The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz.
Okay. Now a little alienation is par for the course of YA, heck Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, Ishmael, the Alcotts were all alienated. Veronica Mars was alienated.
It used to be our fantasy figures were, oh, 10% smarter, 20% stronger, faster. Doc Savage was just very well trained.
The interesting difference in today's YA is that the readers feel, or want to feel, biologically alienated from their peers and classmates. Vampires or the special ladies, mutants, Buffy, Sookie Stackhouse are biologically different from those around them. A different species, and, as far as I know, not very often an inferior species that needs to be ruled. Of course their species deserves to rule "with great responsibility" And of course, "I'm not human" is no different in these cases from "Y'all are not human"
Now this is critique, as I have said, pretty old. In the 60s, since Odd John was fairly nuanced the early target was Van Vogt's Slan as the original.
And in the 60s we were close enough to remember the word for power fantasies based on biological alienation and species differentiation.
Huck Finn, the 19th-century semi-literate homeless orphan who spit and swore, might as well have been a hobbit for all I had in common with him.
40:I still haven't explained "why?" the change, but you do it for me.
Huck Finn = hobbit = different biological species from you, and from the description, a race obviously unfit to rule.
33 - YA is a broad genre (how's that for a dreadful pun?). Post deal, I get asked "Why YA?" and "Why fantasy?" a lot. Crouch has her reasons and I wanted to offer mine. I'm not looking to define the mechanisms or appeal of YA fantasy as a whole, just to suggest that for me, the potential and appeal of the genre can go beyond hot rich people being assholes to each other (but with ghosts!).
Dear god, please look after little Quayden and Uncle Edith and, if I can ask for one more favor, let this kerfuffle evolve to include stuff about race because really there has been no more perversely addictive internet wank ever than Racefail '09. (Which I guess was about grown-up Sci-Fi and not YA but whatever. New territory, value added.)
Buffy, Sookie Stackhouse are biologically different species
Vive La Différence!
Quayden
God help me, you people made me be rude to my dearest friends when they told me a potential entirely hypothetical baby name that's a variant on the aiden madness.
Standen would work if you wanted a boy who didn't go very far in Hollywood.
43:No, nothing to do with Racefail
I know Leigh Bardugo is not "Lora Leigh" but this is what I came up with on the first search at Amazon
Carmella Dansford is a Fyrebrand, which means she can create fire out of nothing. But more important is the fact that she and her two sisters are some of the direct descendants of the Tyre. Because of how mad the Tyre became, there is a government agency (PSI) trying to locate all of his bloodline and it's not usually for good things, from what Carmella has been told.
Slan. A persecuted genetic or biological minority with superpowers derived through bloodline or at birth. Same as it ever was, but it really wasn't that big before the comic books in the 60s. Heinlein didn't touch it much, as much as Campbell was attracted to PSI powers.
And very obviously the privileged white males are into superheroes as much as anybody else.
But it does seem to me that there is a general atmosphere, an ethos being taught to very young kids through various media, that valorizes biological differentiation, that wants to make biological difference a source of power over others.
Harry Potter is what he is because of his very special parents, a way different kind of people that the ones whose closet he grew up in.
It's a ubiquitous narrative, and very interesting to me.
Granted that a lot of superheroes are made not born, but they are also rarely educated into their powers. Power is physically derived, it's from the blood and bone.
I'm not looking to define the mechanisms or appeal of YA fantasy as a whole
No, of course not, but for obvious reasons that was the paragraph of your post that most invited replies.
I stand with the Esquire (I think) writer who wrote, in one of those magazine lists of things that magazine people magazine hate, "[t]hat punk-ass bitch Harry Potter."
Standen would work if you wanted a boy who didn't go very far in Hollywood.
If his middle name were "D'livier" he could be in that movie with Edward James Olmos.
43 I thought you were not an SFF fan. How did you end up getting into Racefail? And it wasn't all that addictive, it started going into circles quite quickly.
I think most fantasy has more to do with escaping real conflict through fantasies of omnipotence than it does with exploring it. Full of hostility toward the "normal" -- i.e. our actual situation, the real world and the people who live in it with us.
Phillip Rieff, who granted was a little nuts himself, talked about three eras: the ancient world of fate, the medieval one of faith, and the modern era of fantasy. In his last book, "My Life Among the Deathworks", he argued that absent the concept of the sacred modern fantasy ended by collapsing love into a death cult. A shame he died before he got to see the vampire romance shelf at his local bookstore.
53 Fantasy has strong escapist elements but I don't think those derive from the fantasy of omnipotence. Omnipotence gets boring quickly. I think it's more the desire for a world in which our difference makes us exceptional as opposed to just aberrant.
Has anyone else here watched Misfits? That was an amazing first two seasons. All the teens get some power that reflects their own special insecurity--the paranoid girl hears what people are thinking, the weird loner turns invisible when no one is paying attention to him, etc. It all has extremely disastrous results.
55: I have! I keep trying to get everyone I know to watch, and no one is listening to me!
52: racefial, for all its flouncing, petty point scoring, storm in a teacup internet drama was actually quite a good thing to happen to science fiction/fantasy as it finally made plain what should've been obvious all along, that the public face of these genres was mighty pale and that this needed changing.
Meanwhile, genderfail is the new racefail. e.g..
56: If anything, I feel like the second season had way too much plot development. It's either going to lose steam because it can't possibly catch up with FuturePlot in an interesting way, or it will have to turn into something else altogether. I guess with Robert Sheehan gone (my least favorite part of the show) it has a chance to do that.
I'm sure that Robert Sheehan is a very nice young man and he's a perfectly able actor, but holy shit that character was annoying and unfunny.
in one of those magazine lists of things that magazine people magazine hate, "[t]hat punk-ass bitch Harry Potter."
"I don't hate him hate him, but I do magazine hate him hate him."
I violated one of my long-standing rules and read the Slate article. (I usually avoid Slate in the way I avoid all activities that make me yearn for the sweet surcease of death.) And you know what? There's absolutely nothing wrong with it. The authors talk about how they got into writing YA fiction, what it's like to write it, and joke about being adolescent at heart. That's it.
61 - You see nothing wrong with it, I think Crouch presented YA not just as a glutted genre, but also as a bankrupt one. Potato, potahto.
Oh God, I'm just imagining "Racefail, but with Bob McManus" by analogy to James Nicoll's "everything is worse with libertarians". Possibly the best ever way to have a really bad time on the Internet.
Also, some of the livejournal/fannish types might know this: who the hell is "juggzy" and why have they dropped a hundred or so uniques on one of my posts from this weekend, although the referrer chain ends at a BUGGER OFF page?
62: Why yes, people frequently have differing opinions on things. There is only one right way to pronounce potato, though.
Who is up and can explain this crazy shit that is happening to me? My computer blips out because I wasn't paying attention to how little power was left and it decided not to warn me. I turn it back on and iCal decides to prepare an email about every notice I've entered for the past two years. My AirPort has forgotten my obscenely long and stupid and unchangeable WEP Password. I get back online and it won't let me go to Gmail. I can see Google, and that I'm still logged in, but it won't let me see my mail.
What is up?
I have been awake for a long time. The good news is that the AutoSave happened only about five sentences before the blip.
Up, but not technically adept. I can report that Minneapolis seems to be pretty much a flat Portland with no Powell's and no beer in the grocery store, for whatever that's worth.
re: 66
Clear your cookies and start again? [For Gmail, I mean]
68. What's the bad news?
66. ttaM is probably right. It's a fact IME that Gmail does go down (apparently regionally) for 10 min or so from time to time. People seem to prefer not to speak of this, but you may be OK in a while anyway.
re: 70
Yeah, gmail is actually quite unreliable. I expect they take it offline in order to do something evil.
52: Racefail wasn't entirely self-contained, I guess. I have a friend elsewhere on the interwaffle that was all up in it and I couldn't help but rubberneck and, alas, dip a rhetorical toe in here and there. It was terrible and, as you say, repetitive, but also for some reason not quite dull.
elsewhere on the interwaffle
We're all always already elsewhere on the interwaffle.
Apparently it's just FF that's doing it. Safari (which I hate) will let me see Gmail after I confirm. FF hilariously tells me I need a security exception, but when I attempt to tell it what site I need it for, it laughs and says I don't need a security exception for Gmail.
I've been having a bunch of weird problems with FF lately which are sometimes solved by using IE, perversely enough. Also, the Google toolbar doesn't work with the newest version of FF. Google's attempt to drive people to Chrome? FF's attempt to slow Google's galactic domination? Or just another bit of complete unfairness specifically targeted to make my life a little more difficult?
Firefox has been rapidly cycling releases recently, so that might be part of it.
Firefox has been really weirdly hosed lately, it's true. My natural inclination is to blame flash, but there might be more to it than that.
first volume of her own epic fantasy YA trilogy coming out next year
Let us know when.
77, 78: It has. I've stopped complaining that work makes me use IE.
I am loathe to get any of the newest FF updates after I just spent all that time getting the icons off of my toolbar bookmarks. Little pictures that I didn't choose cluttering up the top of my browser? Do not want!
78: Fuck you,I'm busy. This hamster wheel isn't going to spin itself.
Yeah, and then when they went to Firefox 4 they fucked with everything in the UI. So all my mouse-autopilot-brainshit went to pot.
My lazy unwillingness to respond to FF update notices might be paying off? I figured it just meant I was leaving some gaping security hole for someone to come rob my identity find the $5 of my soul.
I just updated to 5.0 yesterday, so that probably has something to do with it. I got it to recognize Gmail at least.
85. Weird. I went to 5.0 this week, and didn't have that problem. How did you persuade it to behave?
79. Oh, you don't have to worry. If she gets shy, I'm going to have the thing made into a sandwich board and wear only it for a month.
79 Macmillan has it set for June 2012, but I'll let you know when the moment nears.
87 I'm touched. That's a very heavy sandwich board or a very small font.
It'll be the dagwood of sandwich boards.
86: Clearing cache and cookies, and then demanding the security exception. It's still acting a little funky, like my Google Reader shows that there are new things, but then says there are no new things, but will reveal new things if requested for all the things.
I am hoping this is just a hallucination produced by being awake way too much over the past few weeks.
In better news, I'll be turning in a somewhat complete version of my dissertation to my adviser in like two hours!
I have lately been informed of a particularly dire-sounding YA epic fantasy series.
It isn't indicated whether the denizens of the Everneath refer to the world we know as the Overbove, but I assume they do.
90: Congratulations. Only a couple more obstacles to cross and you'll be Dr Bear!
Only a couple more obstacles to cross and you'll be Dr Bear!
From ABD to ADB!
Jesus fuck, finishing this thing reminds me of accounts people give of having an infant and suddenly never knowing whether one is awake or asleep due to dangerous levels of sleep deprivation. I'm glad I got a job that motivates me to finish but I am so tired I might die.
Congratulations, AWB! It Gets Better.
Quick! Save your files before you pass out!
Yeah, you don't want to go through this.
I have a friend who was mugged at knifepoint in Brooklyn (near Ft. Greene, I think) and absolutely refused to give up her backpack, which had her unfinished thesis in it.
Sleep my friend, because soon they'll call you doctor awb-ert!
day or night, you can't tell at all, doctor awb-ert!
you don't need to print a tree
to explain the eighteenth century
you just used all the GB, now you're
doctor awb-ert!
91: "Nikki longs to spend these months reconnecting with her boyfriend, Jack, the one person she loves more than anything. But there's a problem: Cole, the smoldering immortal who first enticed her to the Everneath, has followed Nikki to the mortal world. And he'll do whatever it takes to bring her back- this time as his queen."
In unrelated news, how is feminism doing?
I guess some other character must glow when breathed upon.
Re: 110, I know, and pointedly chose a different word.
Geddit? Cole? He's smoldering?
And Jack was lonely while Nikki was in Everneath.
In unrelated news, how is feminism doing?
Congrats!
(Also, 102 is genius.)
102 is genius
There was a recent Savage Love Podcast where Dan Savage got a kick out of a caller using the "It gets better" formulation to describe the status of said caller's heterosexual relationship.
Congratulations AWB. Now if you want any German documents you'll have to submit proof of your Doktorkeit so that they can put your new official name on it.
Thanks, everybody! There's still a lot of work to do, of course, but my adviser has to be able to tell the department that a dissertation exists in order to schedule the defense.
Preliminary and progressive congratulations, AWB! How that must concentrate the mind.
Back to the YA SF: the Dwarf Lord and I were checking our shelves against "Growing Up Warlord" and "Everybody Loves Princess", vs. our previous catchall of "Kid Finds Hands". Dwarf particularly thinks the Picaresque need not be either, although it often collapses into Growing Up Warlord.
Jenny Crusie asked recently why there are so few female trickster characters (collective answer: they come across as villainesses unless in the service of the male sexual ego, i.e. the Manic Pixie Dreamgirl).
