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owlectomyDescription Many speculative fiction novels include a romantic subplot with often a paired coupling at the end. This is particularly so in YA. How can feminist writers resist or re-imagine different kinds of endings if a large sector of the reading public has been encouraged to expect romance? Is a desire for romance one of many basic human desires?
Location Assembly
Schedule Sat, 10:00–11:15 am
Panelists M: Trisha J. Wooldridge. Hiromi Goto, Lauren K. Moody
Hiromi Goto: This is an area of particular interest to me as a writer and reader and viewer of film and television. My last 2 novels were YA crossovers. I like to stay relatively aware of what's going on in the area that I'm writing in. Have read children's and YA literature throughout my life. As a feminist and a reader, you look for material that's inclusive and diverse but also for trends and tropes. It's very clear from a very early age that there's a strong romantic element in a lot of stories. I've always wondered why there's so much focus on romance when there's so many other things one could focus on. I wanted to speak about this to a group of people who've also thought about this at length, and I'm hoping to learn something.
Lauren K. Moody: I work at an independent children's bookstore, I specialize in comics and YA and I write YA (not published yet). My coworker and I stood in front of our YA section looking at it wondering if there was anything at all without romance in it. "Uhhhhh..."
Even the books that, if they were adult, wouldn't have a romance, would at least have a romantic subplot or a hint of a romantic subplot. Children's fiction is sold to parents, teachers, and librarians, and there's a lot of gender essentialism. YA is different bc teenagers buy their own books, but still, there are boy books and there are girl books. Even in "boy books" you have romance. That doesn't necessarily translate in other age groups or genres.
Trisha J Wooldridge: I'm an author of middle-grade, and an editor with Spencer Hill Press, which started out as YA Paranormal Romance and then we grew and got bigger. I wanted to ask the panel, the panel description sounded like you can't have a romance ending and still be feminist. I wanted to throw that out to the panel.
LKM: Of course you can. Romance is the highest-earning genre in publishing and is sold mostly to women. That in and of itself is kinda feminist. It's the power to demand what we want, and they give it to us because we're going to buy it. Maybe you can't -- I hate to say can't, because writers play with tropes -- it's harder to do it within the set tropes of the romantic genre. One of the problems with romance that shows up in YA is the classic triangle, which means that your characters are a girl and two guys who are fighting over her. So your 3 main character slots, 2 of them are guys, and then you can't have a strong female relationship.
HG: I don't read a great deal of romance -- I used to read Harlequins, when I was 12. Not to disparage people who still enjoy them, because there's something to be said for familiarity. It can be therapeutic and enjoyable. The heavy-handed inclusion of romance in YA -- there's a grooming of expectations towards romance. It's very heteronormative. It's sending specific social cues to younger readers. It's happening at a larger scale, and, does that seem feminist to me? Not necessarily. Thinking as a writer, having a romantic element in a narrative is just one of many possible stories or adventures or situations that you could have. It's a way of selling a book to a particular perceived audience. Readers expect a romance, so we'll provide a romance -- it's circular. How do we break out of this orbit?
TW: For the first time, I'm starting to get non-romantic plots, characters of color, non-heteronormative characters. Genres create their own expectations -- let me send you another one that's just like this!
HG: Publishers should solicit writers who are doing this work. That can tap into a wider array of different kinds of stories.
LKM: At the Sleepy Hollow panel we were talking about the importance of family relationships and the friendship between the two main characters. If we have a basic desire for intense and committed relationships -- we can look for that outside romantic relationships. Intense friendships, intense family bonds.
HG: I don't necessarily think romance is a basic human desire, but companionship, not to be lonely, to be seen and understood, a strong intense connection, everyone longs for that. It's often diverted to romance in narratives, and that's an easy plot device. It's a plot device that I find unsatisfactory. It's different if it arises in an organic, natural, believable way -- great! But if they're just trying to boost up the plot, add titillation, the suspense of whether they won't kiss, it doesn't work for me because I'm 47.
LKM: Or for me and I'm 27.
HG: The use of the love triangle, it goes back to "Is it feminist." The love triangle centering on who gets what -- it doesn't allow for relationships between women. There are books out there that have YA characters who don't go through their life searching for a romance because they're trying to survive, or trying to do something else. Their struggle is about saving the world, maybe. Half World is about a young teen girl and how she's searching for her mother in an inverse Persephone narrative, and their relationship even when they're apart. There are stories like that out there. It's hard for those stories to do well in the publishing industry because everything is based around sales numbers, and that kind of book doesn't necessarily hit the bestseller list because it doesn't follow the tropes. So, even if you write these stories, how do you get them out to a larger group of readers?
TW: I wish I knew that answer. We have several bloggers, but they pick which books they want to review,
LKM: [long silence] So... When you talk about change in publishing, you have to talk about every level, from self-publishers to large publishers, and booksellers as well. From the perspective of us at WisCon, we can find those books that don't have romance. Working at an indie bookstore, you notice that if one person really likes your book and has the power to put it in the hands of people it makes a difference. We got them to stock Tamora Pierce, Patricia Wrede. We hand-sell stuff. That helps new books also, but we need to have books to advocate.
TW: When I was growing up there were an awful lot of books that didn't have romance. Tamora Pierce...
LKM: Has romance. They started as romance. They started as a romantic historical fantasy novel, and her publisher said maybe not. Her influence in YA is maybe part of why contemporary YA has so much of a focus on romance.
TW: A lot of the stuff I read wasn't speculative. What we call now, contemporary, there were more coming-of-age stories without romance. Are You There God, growing up as a dancer stories, growing up with cancer stories, divorce, being fat. Is there a difference between speculative and non-speculative?
HG: The kind of writing has shifted too. 30 years ago it was wordier, there was more text, longer sentences. The YA I've seen seems less wordy than 30 years ago. There's a fast-paced streamlined plot. Combining the romance with the speculative plot ramps it up even further -- there's a greater sense of loss.
LKM: When I was growing up I felt like your only choices were middle grade and grown-up fiction. There was grown-up fiction with teen main characters, that was aimed a little younger, but... YA is a totally different genre from what I read growing up. But yes, I agree that romance is an easy way to up the tension in a speculative plot. Writers and publishers are used to having that lever.
Audience: A lot of the intimate relationships in books I read as a kid were in horse books, boy-and-his-dragon books.
LKM(?): They still exist, but more in middle-grade. I think that's shifted as publishing is more comfortable with teenagers having romantic and sexual relationships.
Audience: I'm asexual and I'm trying to figure out how queer identities play into this.
LKM: There are issue books, there are queer main characters in speculative fiction who aren't the main characters... we're still figuring this out. If you're looking for queer characters in YA, it's still issue books. Books about (white, male) characters having problems with being gay, or being trans. The only asexual char. I know of is in Karen Healey's Guardian of the Dead.
HG: There are a lot of issue books if the main character is not from the white straight "mainstream." It's the same way for books with younger children. Your identity is figured around a multicultural thing -- a festival or something, very visual and easy to identify as an ethnic marker. It's not about the individual but it's about what the individual may represent. That's also true of books that involve a disability. The thing that makes you different becomes an issue. That difference defines them. It's not interesting stories per se. There are more books being published that don't do this now, but it's depressing.
LKM: Shannon Hale's new book, Dangerous, the girl was born with one arm, and that's not the plot. It's awesome.
Q : Are stories for teen girls being downgraded by marketing them as YA, whereas books about young men are marketed as adult?
LKM: They're not. Ender's Game is marketed as YA now. It's younger YA that doesn't have romance -- when you hit older YA, you hit romance really hard. For boy books they may not be as important but they're definitely there. It's like some editor decided that all YA has romance in it.
Audience: I was a sleepaway camp counselor, and within 8 hours all the campers had paired up all the counselors. It is a universal that young adults are exploring that... but isn't there a way to do it more healthily. I grew up reading Andre Norton. They almost all have a boy lead and girl lead, but they're healthy relationships. They're equal partners. There's no romance, but there's a partnership.
HG: The models of relationships to be found... what we read shapes the way we think. As a feminist reading these texts... Twilight was, and is, a huge force. That version of the idea of romance is profoundly disturbing. To think that it could inform the formative years of precocious readers -- if there's a 6-year-old, 7-year-old reading those books and thinking that's true love, it can have a profound influence.
LKM: Teen Wolf models healthy relationships very well. When characters break up they don't just pine for each other and get back together. They can become friends and get into a different relationship. That's how teen relationships actually work. In books you have one or two main characters and you follow their story... you don't have the multi-season TV show that allows you to explore lots of different aspects.
Aud: I feel like the romance plot starts in a lot of ways with Disney and it'll be interesting to see a generation whose first Disney movie was Frozen, how does that change their expectations growing up?
Aud: Do we want what we want and then buy the books, or do the books tell us what we want? I know that I wanted sexual relationships in books but not real life, and I think in some ways that hasn't been helpful. The YA people at my local bookstore say that the majority of people buying YA are grown women. Romance readers are driving the market in YA. The books that young readers are reading are being shaped by a whole different set of readers.
LKM: It's always been written for somebody else, I think, especially middle-grade. Kid lit is always shaped by grown-ups so they need to be held responsible, they need to take responsibility. The people who the books are aimed at are often not the people spending the money to buy them. Grown-ups are the ones who have the economic power, they need to use that power responsibly.
HG: Librarians hold a lot of power. All hail the librarian.
TW: Librarians won't buy a book in middle grade if you mention drug use, even though kids may have to deal with that.
HG: The school library system is a whole other thing.
LKM: And they have school boards to answer to.
Aud: I dislike when you get to the end of the book and you get an epilogue that leaves no ambiguity about the future, like Harry Potter, Hunger Games. It would be great to get rid of that type of thing.
HG: The idea of feminist endings... I don't believe in closure, especially at the book level. That kind of pat, finished narrative. After that, everything is all good, nothing bad happens. That's a very overbearing kind of imposition to the idea of narrative. Endings signal new beginnings. It should be a structure that opens up, not a closed structure. That speaks to me as a feminist ending.
LKM: Fantasy has its roots partly in the fairy tale, so that's upward mobility class-wise. That's getting married to somebody noble. Let's write about women who've already had their happily-ever-afters and are still having adventures, having stories. Women who are older having stories. If we can have that story in adult fantasy... we can have characters who are going to grow up into that, in YA.
Aud: Stories like Mary Robinette Kowal's series where you can have a married couple who are having a realistic relationship, having arguments.
LKM: Patricia Briggs's Mercy Thompson series.
Aud: Chronicles of Narnia, there's really no romance, and strong female leads in a couple of the stories.
LKM: That's middle-grade, though. It exemplifies that middle-grade family relationship that vanishes when you hit YA.
Aud: Dealing with Dragons series by Patricia Wrede also deals with after the happily ever after.
It's not just what we can have besides romances, but what other different kinds of romance can we have.
LKM: A healthier variety of relationships -- bi characters, ace characters, relationships that end.
Aud: Does romance make a difference in deciding whether a book gets published as middle-grade or YA?
HG: There's a strong influence from the publisher -- if you're going to write YA, your MC should be 2 years older than your audience. That's very specific. That exerts certain parameters around how you're going to approach your text, because ultimately you want to get your book published. There's a significant difference between what a 12-yr-old experiences socially, psychologically, and what a 14-yr-old experiences. I have hopes for online publishing, nontraditional publishing, opening up the arena.
TW: For YA, middle-grade, you may not have access to computers or e-readers. You have this need for physical book copies. Some schools won't allow e-readers for designated reading time because they can't tell if you're going online and playing games. It costs more to do a print run, and it's more expensive because small presses do smaller print runs. If you don't have immediate sales, it makes it tough.
Aud: Andrew Smith -- writes YA for teenage boys, but bisexual boys coming to terms with bisexuality, not in an issue book. That's refreshing, I wish more people would do that.
Something I find frustrating about WisCon panels talking about romance fiction is the assumption that romance fiction, or fiction with a romance plot, is explicitly about modeling a real-life romantic relationship. I think that it can be that -- I think it often is that -- but I think romance in fiction so often plays out as an arena for self-discovery, for articulating one's own desires, for thinking about the parts of oneself that are able to be loved and valued, and what one desires and values in other people. As much as I hate badly done love triangles, a well-done love triangle is about how to know who you are and how to know what you want, and I think that's bigger and deeper than a lot of people give it credit for.
That doesn't mean that I wouldn't like to see a lot more diversity in terms of characters and relationship types in YA, because I definitely would! I don't really mind if you have a relationship between straight white able-bodied characters and you say "Oh but it's universal." I mind if you have an overwhelming majority of relationships between straight white able-bodied characters and you say "Oh but it's universal."
(I appreciate Hiromi Goto's comment about librarians, by the way, but the philosophy of public librarianship in a lot of places has swung so much towards ordering whatever is going to be popular that ideologically we almost might as well be Barnes and Noble.)
I think the question of having *healthier* romantic relationships in YA and the question of having romantic relationships not be such a singleminded focus in YA are two separate questions. (That's just panel topic drift. But really, I was more interested in the latter. I am -- sort of torn about "healthy" relationships because I think that not many teens are really that self-actualized. I think realism is a positive good and I think modeling healthy relationships is a positive good and you can't necessarily have them both at the same time. So. Complicated.)
Location Assembly
Schedule Sat, 10:00–11:15 am
Panelists M: Trisha J. Wooldridge. Hiromi Goto, Lauren K. Moody
Hiromi Goto: This is an area of particular interest to me as a writer and reader and viewer of film and television. My last 2 novels were YA crossovers. I like to stay relatively aware of what's going on in the area that I'm writing in. Have read children's and YA literature throughout my life. As a feminist and a reader, you look for material that's inclusive and diverse but also for trends and tropes. It's very clear from a very early age that there's a strong romantic element in a lot of stories. I've always wondered why there's so much focus on romance when there's so many other things one could focus on. I wanted to speak about this to a group of people who've also thought about this at length, and I'm hoping to learn something.
Lauren K. Moody: I work at an independent children's bookstore, I specialize in comics and YA and I write YA (not published yet). My coworker and I stood in front of our YA section looking at it wondering if there was anything at all without romance in it. "Uhhhhh..."
Even the books that, if they were adult, wouldn't have a romance, would at least have a romantic subplot or a hint of a romantic subplot. Children's fiction is sold to parents, teachers, and librarians, and there's a lot of gender essentialism. YA is different bc teenagers buy their own books, but still, there are boy books and there are girl books. Even in "boy books" you have romance. That doesn't necessarily translate in other age groups or genres.
Trisha J Wooldridge: I'm an author of middle-grade, and an editor with Spencer Hill Press, which started out as YA Paranormal Romance and then we grew and got bigger. I wanted to ask the panel, the panel description sounded like you can't have a romance ending and still be feminist. I wanted to throw that out to the panel.
LKM: Of course you can. Romance is the highest-earning genre in publishing and is sold mostly to women. That in and of itself is kinda feminist. It's the power to demand what we want, and they give it to us because we're going to buy it. Maybe you can't -- I hate to say can't, because writers play with tropes -- it's harder to do it within the set tropes of the romantic genre. One of the problems with romance that shows up in YA is the classic triangle, which means that your characters are a girl and two guys who are fighting over her. So your 3 main character slots, 2 of them are guys, and then you can't have a strong female relationship.
HG: I don't read a great deal of romance -- I used to read Harlequins, when I was 12. Not to disparage people who still enjoy them, because there's something to be said for familiarity. It can be therapeutic and enjoyable. The heavy-handed inclusion of romance in YA -- there's a grooming of expectations towards romance. It's very heteronormative. It's sending specific social cues to younger readers. It's happening at a larger scale, and, does that seem feminist to me? Not necessarily. Thinking as a writer, having a romantic element in a narrative is just one of many possible stories or adventures or situations that you could have. It's a way of selling a book to a particular perceived audience. Readers expect a romance, so we'll provide a romance -- it's circular. How do we break out of this orbit?
TW: For the first time, I'm starting to get non-romantic plots, characters of color, non-heteronormative characters. Genres create their own expectations -- let me send you another one that's just like this!
HG: Publishers should solicit writers who are doing this work. That can tap into a wider array of different kinds of stories.
LKM: At the Sleepy Hollow panel we were talking about the importance of family relationships and the friendship between the two main characters. If we have a basic desire for intense and committed relationships -- we can look for that outside romantic relationships. Intense friendships, intense family bonds.
HG: I don't necessarily think romance is a basic human desire, but companionship, not to be lonely, to be seen and understood, a strong intense connection, everyone longs for that. It's often diverted to romance in narratives, and that's an easy plot device. It's a plot device that I find unsatisfactory. It's different if it arises in an organic, natural, believable way -- great! But if they're just trying to boost up the plot, add titillation, the suspense of whether they won't kiss, it doesn't work for me because I'm 47.
LKM: Or for me and I'm 27.
HG: The use of the love triangle, it goes back to "Is it feminist." The love triangle centering on who gets what -- it doesn't allow for relationships between women. There are books out there that have YA characters who don't go through their life searching for a romance because they're trying to survive, or trying to do something else. Their struggle is about saving the world, maybe. Half World is about a young teen girl and how she's searching for her mother in an inverse Persephone narrative, and their relationship even when they're apart. There are stories like that out there. It's hard for those stories to do well in the publishing industry because everything is based around sales numbers, and that kind of book doesn't necessarily hit the bestseller list because it doesn't follow the tropes. So, even if you write these stories, how do you get them out to a larger group of readers?
TW: I wish I knew that answer. We have several bloggers, but they pick which books they want to review,
LKM: [long silence] So... When you talk about change in publishing, you have to talk about every level, from self-publishers to large publishers, and booksellers as well. From the perspective of us at WisCon, we can find those books that don't have romance. Working at an indie bookstore, you notice that if one person really likes your book and has the power to put it in the hands of people it makes a difference. We got them to stock Tamora Pierce, Patricia Wrede. We hand-sell stuff. That helps new books also, but we need to have books to advocate.
TW: When I was growing up there were an awful lot of books that didn't have romance. Tamora Pierce...
LKM: Has romance. They started as romance. They started as a romantic historical fantasy novel, and her publisher said maybe not. Her influence in YA is maybe part of why contemporary YA has so much of a focus on romance.
TW: A lot of the stuff I read wasn't speculative. What we call now, contemporary, there were more coming-of-age stories without romance. Are You There God, growing up as a dancer stories, growing up with cancer stories, divorce, being fat. Is there a difference between speculative and non-speculative?
HG: The kind of writing has shifted too. 30 years ago it was wordier, there was more text, longer sentences. The YA I've seen seems less wordy than 30 years ago. There's a fast-paced streamlined plot. Combining the romance with the speculative plot ramps it up even further -- there's a greater sense of loss.
LKM: When I was growing up I felt like your only choices were middle grade and grown-up fiction. There was grown-up fiction with teen main characters, that was aimed a little younger, but... YA is a totally different genre from what I read growing up. But yes, I agree that romance is an easy way to up the tension in a speculative plot. Writers and publishers are used to having that lever.
Audience: A lot of the intimate relationships in books I read as a kid were in horse books, boy-and-his-dragon books.
LKM(?): They still exist, but more in middle-grade. I think that's shifted as publishing is more comfortable with teenagers having romantic and sexual relationships.
Audience: I'm asexual and I'm trying to figure out how queer identities play into this.
LKM: There are issue books, there are queer main characters in speculative fiction who aren't the main characters... we're still figuring this out. If you're looking for queer characters in YA, it's still issue books. Books about (white, male) characters having problems with being gay, or being trans. The only asexual char. I know of is in Karen Healey's Guardian of the Dead.
HG: There are a lot of issue books if the main character is not from the white straight "mainstream." It's the same way for books with younger children. Your identity is figured around a multicultural thing -- a festival or something, very visual and easy to identify as an ethnic marker. It's not about the individual but it's about what the individual may represent. That's also true of books that involve a disability. The thing that makes you different becomes an issue. That difference defines them. It's not interesting stories per se. There are more books being published that don't do this now, but it's depressing.
LKM: Shannon Hale's new book, Dangerous, the girl was born with one arm, and that's not the plot. It's awesome.
Q : Are stories for teen girls being downgraded by marketing them as YA, whereas books about young men are marketed as adult?
LKM: They're not. Ender's Game is marketed as YA now. It's younger YA that doesn't have romance -- when you hit older YA, you hit romance really hard. For boy books they may not be as important but they're definitely there. It's like some editor decided that all YA has romance in it.
Audience: I was a sleepaway camp counselor, and within 8 hours all the campers had paired up all the counselors. It is a universal that young adults are exploring that... but isn't there a way to do it more healthily. I grew up reading Andre Norton. They almost all have a boy lead and girl lead, but they're healthy relationships. They're equal partners. There's no romance, but there's a partnership.
HG: The models of relationships to be found... what we read shapes the way we think. As a feminist reading these texts... Twilight was, and is, a huge force. That version of the idea of romance is profoundly disturbing. To think that it could inform the formative years of precocious readers -- if there's a 6-year-old, 7-year-old reading those books and thinking that's true love, it can have a profound influence.
LKM: Teen Wolf models healthy relationships very well. When characters break up they don't just pine for each other and get back together. They can become friends and get into a different relationship. That's how teen relationships actually work. In books you have one or two main characters and you follow their story... you don't have the multi-season TV show that allows you to explore lots of different aspects.
Aud: I feel like the romance plot starts in a lot of ways with Disney and it'll be interesting to see a generation whose first Disney movie was Frozen, how does that change their expectations growing up?
Aud: Do we want what we want and then buy the books, or do the books tell us what we want? I know that I wanted sexual relationships in books but not real life, and I think in some ways that hasn't been helpful. The YA people at my local bookstore say that the majority of people buying YA are grown women. Romance readers are driving the market in YA. The books that young readers are reading are being shaped by a whole different set of readers.
LKM: It's always been written for somebody else, I think, especially middle-grade. Kid lit is always shaped by grown-ups so they need to be held responsible, they need to take responsibility. The people who the books are aimed at are often not the people spending the money to buy them. Grown-ups are the ones who have the economic power, they need to use that power responsibly.
HG: Librarians hold a lot of power. All hail the librarian.
TW: Librarians won't buy a book in middle grade if you mention drug use, even though kids may have to deal with that.
HG: The school library system is a whole other thing.
LKM: And they have school boards to answer to.
Aud: I dislike when you get to the end of the book and you get an epilogue that leaves no ambiguity about the future, like Harry Potter, Hunger Games. It would be great to get rid of that type of thing.
HG: The idea of feminist endings... I don't believe in closure, especially at the book level. That kind of pat, finished narrative. After that, everything is all good, nothing bad happens. That's a very overbearing kind of imposition to the idea of narrative. Endings signal new beginnings. It should be a structure that opens up, not a closed structure. That speaks to me as a feminist ending.
LKM: Fantasy has its roots partly in the fairy tale, so that's upward mobility class-wise. That's getting married to somebody noble. Let's write about women who've already had their happily-ever-afters and are still having adventures, having stories. Women who are older having stories. If we can have that story in adult fantasy... we can have characters who are going to grow up into that, in YA.
Aud: Stories like Mary Robinette Kowal's series where you can have a married couple who are having a realistic relationship, having arguments.
LKM: Patricia Briggs's Mercy Thompson series.
Aud: Chronicles of Narnia, there's really no romance, and strong female leads in a couple of the stories.
LKM: That's middle-grade, though. It exemplifies that middle-grade family relationship that vanishes when you hit YA.
Aud: Dealing with Dragons series by Patricia Wrede also deals with after the happily ever after.
It's not just what we can have besides romances, but what other different kinds of romance can we have.
LKM: A healthier variety of relationships -- bi characters, ace characters, relationships that end.
Aud: Does romance make a difference in deciding whether a book gets published as middle-grade or YA?
HG: There's a strong influence from the publisher -- if you're going to write YA, your MC should be 2 years older than your audience. That's very specific. That exerts certain parameters around how you're going to approach your text, because ultimately you want to get your book published. There's a significant difference between what a 12-yr-old experiences socially, psychologically, and what a 14-yr-old experiences. I have hopes for online publishing, nontraditional publishing, opening up the arena.
TW: For YA, middle-grade, you may not have access to computers or e-readers. You have this need for physical book copies. Some schools won't allow e-readers for designated reading time because they can't tell if you're going online and playing games. It costs more to do a print run, and it's more expensive because small presses do smaller print runs. If you don't have immediate sales, it makes it tough.
Aud: Andrew Smith -- writes YA for teenage boys, but bisexual boys coming to terms with bisexuality, not in an issue book. That's refreshing, I wish more people would do that.
Something I find frustrating about WisCon panels talking about romance fiction is the assumption that romance fiction, or fiction with a romance plot, is explicitly about modeling a real-life romantic relationship. I think that it can be that -- I think it often is that -- but I think romance in fiction so often plays out as an arena for self-discovery, for articulating one's own desires, for thinking about the parts of oneself that are able to be loved and valued, and what one desires and values in other people. As much as I hate badly done love triangles, a well-done love triangle is about how to know who you are and how to know what you want, and I think that's bigger and deeper than a lot of people give it credit for.
That doesn't mean that I wouldn't like to see a lot more diversity in terms of characters and relationship types in YA, because I definitely would! I don't really mind if you have a relationship between straight white able-bodied characters and you say "Oh but it's universal." I mind if you have an overwhelming majority of relationships between straight white able-bodied characters and you say "Oh but it's universal."
(I appreciate Hiromi Goto's comment about librarians, by the way, but the philosophy of public librarianship in a lot of places has swung so much towards ordering whatever is going to be popular that ideologically we almost might as well be Barnes and Noble.)
I think the question of having *healthier* romantic relationships in YA and the question of having romantic relationships not be such a singleminded focus in YA are two separate questions. (That's just panel topic drift. But really, I was more interested in the latter. I am -- sort of torn about "healthy" relationships because I think that not many teens are really that self-actualized. I think realism is a positive good and I think modeling healthy relationships is a positive good and you can't necessarily have them both at the same time. So. Complicated.)
(no subject)
24/5/14 20:12 (UTC)