Young Adult Literature Became the Playground, and Battleground, for Adults
This was interesting, although I feel the author was making two separate points here. One point was about the popularity of young adult (YA) fiction with adults, and the other was something to do with a book about queer kids being criticized and an attempt to remove it from a public library because children might find it. The thread that connects them was supposedly that the library system circulates 135 copies of 50 Shades of Grey, but how exactly that related to YA lit I&#x27;m not sure. The link is certainly weak, or lost on me. (The author started writing fan-fic for YA novels?). Smut has existed forever, certainly before the arbitrary transition period the author of the article has come up with, so I&#x27;m not sure I understand the link.<p>Anyways, of the two points, I find the latter one boring and tired, and so I&#x27;d prefer to talk about the first one. The author states:<p>&gt; My husband and I spent several years putting on pleasant faces when talk over cocktails drifted to “Which Hogwarts house would you belong to?” It all felt so juvenile and regressive. And I believe it was.<p>I was unable to escape this feeling at the time when Harry Potter was sweeping through the world. I&#x27;d just finished Lord of the Rings and, while I picked up a Harry Potter book, I just found it tough to get into. Then I watched the same thing happen with series like Eragon, Wheel of Time, Twilight, Song of Fire and Ice, Hunger Games and more (might have the order mixed up). I&#x27;ve read at least a single book from all those series (except Twilight) and while I&#x27;ve gone back and re-read Lord of the Rings 4 times since, I&#x27;ve never felt compelled to read those series, or watch the movie&#x2F;TV adaptations.<p>I&#x27;ve spent actually a not insignificant amount of time wondering why those books never clicked with me, while watching them become sweeping, generation-defining cultura phenomena. It&#x27;s bothered me, because I&#x27;ve been left out of a lot of &quot;which Hogwarts house are you&quot; type of conversations. But the thing that&#x27;s <i>really</i> strange is that I kept waiting for everyone to outgrow those books and move on. On the one hand, I understand mass appeal, and I understand not understanding mass appeal. Not everything is truly for everyone, and it never bothered me that those books missed me, but what bothered me was that we never let go of them as a culture. I still know people who call other people &quot;muggles&quot;, for instance, even though we&#x27;re all well into our 30s by now.<p>There are a lot of things I liked in my youth that I look back fondly on now, but realize they aren&#x27;t for me as an adult. Music, movies, TV, books (I had my own YA novel preferences), that, at some point, I just walked away from. Some of them were quite good, some of them were of broad appeal, but eventually, I outgrew them. What confuses me so much is society&#x27;s inability to outgrow a lot of these recent YA novels. The same way I&#x27;m confused about how Taylor Swift is <i>still</i> so popular with her original demographic.<p>There used to be a certain strategy that if you paid attention to, many media companies (especially Disney) would employ: They&#x27;d release some media series, say, Star Wars. Then they&#x27;d wait until the people who originally were kids&#x2F;young adults got older, had their own kids, and they&#x27;d re-release the property, or release sequels&#x2F;prequels, etc. (Star Wars being a good example because they&#x27;ve done this 3 time now, with the originals in the 80s, prequels in the early 00s, and the latest batch in the 2020s). You could see clear generational gaps between surges in popularity. But that seems to have just gone away now.<p>All in all, it&#x27;s not a real problem. I&#x27;m still just as tired of these media properties as I was a few years after they came out, but it&#x27;s not like it really affects my life. It&#x27;s just really strange to see the level of persistence, and I can&#x27;t find any historical comparisons.