• Zink@programming.dev
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    8 hours ago

    Why does the real world have to be a YA novel adaptation with paper-thin and one-dimensional villains who are not believable?

    • mfed1122@discuss.tchncs.de
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      2 hours ago

      Young Adult Dystopian literature, imo, is really under-respected. It captures realities of politics and power in a way that is understandable and relatable to even people with only partially developed minds, and simultaneously it depicts those realities in a way that is often more accurate to reality than the more subtle “adult” approaches. Reality ain’t always subtle or complicated. In fact, it’s often such a repetitive tune that anyone who really cares to listen to the music is driven nuts by it and wishes it would play a different melody for once. Novelty is a lot more necessary to make entertaining media, but reality has no obligation to be entertaining. Ultimately, I think YA fiction is often great “by accident”. In being a product for developing minds who are only hearing the endless hymn of humanity now for the first time in their life, it is able to be entertaining without requiring creativity on behalf of the producers - in the same way that gimmicky toys that sold well 50 (or even 500) years ago can still sell well today: there’s a child born every minute who hasn’t seen the gimmick yet and isn’t old enough to be tired of it. But in the case of YA fiction, the exploitation of this dynamic actually frees authors from the constraint of catering to so-called refined tastes that demand things like subtlety, nuance, creativity, unwillingness to rehash the same old ideas, and so so on. These tastes are really just demands for more stimulating entertainment. As a result, YA lit may not be very entertaining to the perceptive adult reader, but by shedding this need for “lowly” entertainment it can ironically begin to function more like “true art”, or at least one flavor of true art: holding up an undistorted mirror to the world regardless of whether you find the reflection entertaining to look at.