/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.18074977]

YA poisoned the media landscape. Is there a way to fix it?

[Anonymous No.18075025]

>>18074977
Ready Player One isn't exactly YA...it's more like cringey would-be YA for nerdy manchildren.

[Anonymous No.18075028]

>>18074977
>Is there a way to fix it?
it will only get worse. People are already compartmentalizing their lives and growing so little spiritually that you could have a nuclear engineer who comes back home to watch anime while eating cereal. There is simply no need for mental maturity when all you need to do is memorize rote instructions and produce products without thinking why or considering the consequences of your choices. In a sense now that we live in a technologically, scientifically driven society there is no need to discipline one's emotions, so our future as a species is hyper-qualified workers who are mentally infantilized. YA will get targeted to younger and younger people as everything else in media, and adults will stop mentally developing earlier and earlier. They will lock their job qualifications outside of the door and go back to being literal babies in their private lives.

[Anonymous No.18075033]

>>18075025
It's not even YA. It's LitRPG, Science Fiction, Pop Culture Fiction, Dystopian.

[Anonymous No.18075045]

>>18075033
It could only be described as YA because of the age of the protagonist. But it's clearly a self insert on Cline's behalf, and it sure says a lot about him as a person...yikes.

[Anonymous No.18075058]

>>18075025
its YA in the same sense litrpgs are YA. it might not be YA the genre but it is YA the age group

[Anonymous No.18075071]

>>18075045
Guy wrote a poem nothing more needs to be said about him.

https://youtu.be/LwNOzWXb7RE

[Anonymous No.18075096]

>>18075071
Who cheers for this shit? This is revolting, both morally and physically. Shit like this raises major red flags.

[Anonymous No.18075113]

>>18075071
so his porn collection was small so he assumed his fetish was not covered? He does not want porn he wants softcore story with acting. I for example like superhero's and while the costume designers often do a good job, the script and acting are never up to the task, because its porn and they are trying to do it all cheap.
>>18075096
its not revolting, its just sad and kind of annoying that he is moralizing about porn.

[Anonymous No.18075119]

>>18074977
I wonder if throne of glass will get a tv show

[Anonymous No.18075120]

>>18075058
It's not YA the age group either

[Anonymous No.18075133]

>>18075071
>the person who wrote this is a published author
>of a best-selling book to boot
sometimes I wonder if I live in some kind of upside down reality

[Anonymous No.18075155]

>>18075120
the writing is but obviously as more and more time passes less relatable it is to that age group, originally it could have fit.

[Anonymous No.18075162]

>>18075133
2 things you need to learn is
>anyone can be an author
>best selling are meaningless words, often pr lies.
>getting a movie is not hard if you know the right people

[Anonymous No.18075165]

>>18075155
Stop trying to make it YA when its obviously not YA.

[Anonymous No.18075172]

this shit good

[Anonymous No.18075224]

>>18074977
Isn't Dune basically YA?

[Anonymous No.18075237]

>>18075162
this post sounds like massive cope my friend
why is it so hard to just admit that human beings love to eat shit?

[Anonymous No.18075247]

>>18075224
You can't retroactively apply market labels like that. It would be like calling novels written during the victoria era steam punk. The tropes and archetypes of modern YA Harry Potter, Twilight, Hunger Games, Maze Runner don't apply to something like Narnia.

These are books usually written by women, have structures that are analogue for school cliques, and dramatize teenage angst and transition to adulthood. They're not just bildungsroman.

[Anonymous No.18075249]

>>18075237
He's an e/lit/ists will enjoy purple prose, which puts emphasis on impressing the reader rather than informing them.

[Anonymous No.18075250]

>>18075224
seems pretty dark for YA

[Anonymous No.18075259]

>>18074977
I tried to read hunger games a long time ago and it was just awful. I don't really have a comment on the rest since I didn't read them except HP which I liked.
Seems like it's just Sturgeon's law at work, not some grand failing of society. After all social media retards don't tend to read.

[Anonymous No.18075312]

I mostly read sci-fi, fantasy, romance, and superhero prose novels. Here's everything I've read since I made a Goodreads account. I haven't touched philosophy since college.

[Anonymous No.18075374]

>>18075028
In what way were people more mentally mature 100 years ago?

[Anonymous No.18075378]

>>18075312
>>18075312
oh god pls be a joke, I thought my standards were low but you're reading spinoff novels of scifi movies

[Anonymous No.18075389]

>>18075312
>star-wars and capeshit

[Anonymous No.18075392]

>>18075312
is Yoda: Dark Rendezvous in your backlog?

[Anonymous No.18075398]

>>18075378
forgive father for I have read warhammer books

[Anonymous No.18075407]

>>18074977
Twilght's cover is unironically /lit/ as fuck.

[Anonymous No.18075417]

>>18075392
No, should I add it?
>>18075389
>>18075378
I pretty much only watch mainstream movies, listen to mainstream music, etc. I only care about being entertained and enjoying myself.

[Anonymous No.18075418]

>>18075398
>forgive father for I have read warhammer books

[Anonymous No.18075465]

>>18075417
I have garbage of my own that I read, but at least I feel guilty enough that I try to balance it out with literature and good non-fictional books.

[Anonymous No.18075483]

>>18075465
That's fine for you. I feel life is meant to be enjoyed.

[Anonymous No.18075484]

>>18075417
>No, should I add it?
yes. also if can read comics "vader and" are usually good, like "Darth Vader and the Ghost Prison" or Darth Vader and the Lost Command

Darth Bane and "Legacy of the Force" books 6-9 have a good rating from me.
Maul: Lockdown and Shatterpoint (Star Wars: Clone Wars #1) are also ok.

[Anonymous No.18075488]

>>18075418
>>18075312
The amount of effort that went into reading all this could've been spent on

>raising your bench to 300 lbs squat to 400 lbs, and deadlift to 500 lbs
>learning to survive in the wild
>2 semesters of algebraic geometry
>2 semesters of quantum field theory
>learn to make friends and influence people
>read half the books on the harvard five foot shelf
>seducing a poor girl and breeding her

[Anonymous No.18075490]

>>18075407
would be more lit if they were male hands.

[Anonymous No.18075493]

>>18074977
The Hunger Games are unironically great and don't deserve to be put next to ready player one or throne of glass

[Anonymous No.18075497]

Book burnings

[Anonymous No.18075503]

>>18075483
The problem I have with the spinoff novels is they always feel noncanonical. Like reading the Frank Herbert's sons novels but much much worse.

[Anonymous No.18075516]

>>18074977
The way to fix it is to end capitalism. Profit as a predomenant motive for the publishers and marketing innovations have forced authors into writing formulaic garbage full of tropes which only serves to create a fandom and pander to the reader's most basic urges. Get rid of the profit motive and people will be free to write not what makes money, but what they want to write.

[Anonymous No.18075526]

>>18075465
do not torture yourself. it took me half a year to finish mein kampf and I just dropped The Romantic Manifesto by Ayn Rand

[Anonymous No.18075536]

>>18075488
How much effort do you think it takes to read a book?

[Anonymous No.18075539]

>>18075488
Do you plan on going into the wild? better reasoning would be that the time could have been spent on making yourself more marketable for the job market. I spend 3 months reading star wars books (read like 50 of them) and right as I finished the EU was made non canon. I was angry but I did not regret how I used my time

[Anonymous No.18075540]

>>18075536
depends on the book innit

[Anonymous No.18075548]

>>18075493
I dont know. first 2 books of throne of glass were kind of ok in that teen book way. I could not get into hunger games and I finished the divergent trash fire (all the books)

[Anonymous No.18075550]

>>18075526
I have this problem where I imagine someone coming over to my house and will judge my goodreads shelf. Is there any way to privatize some of your guilty pleasure shelves but make public the rest? I don't want them to see the garbage I've been reading but at the same time I want to show off that I'm more well-read then they are. Yeah yeah call me pretentious I don't care (unless you're coming over to my house in which case i do care what you think of me)

[Anonymous No.18075555]

>>18075488
Yeah well how come you're not an astronaut, smartypants?

[Anonymous No.18075570]

[Anonymous No.18075589]

>>18075555
I've applied. But NASA only wants single men who've never had children. Something about those people being able to make cold rational decisions in life threatening emergency situations.

[Anonymous No.18075591]

>>18075548
Hunger Games has problems but actually has workable themes and explorations of deeper issues. It's geniunely quality literature. Throne of Glass is just meh read to turn your brain off to. I personally found nothing of worth in the one book I read from it.

[Anonymous No.18075595]

>>18075589

*who've had children

[Anonymous No.18075604]

>>18075550
have 2 accounts. I used to freely rate outright erotica but then I got shy about it so I kind of get what you mean.

[Anonymous No.18075616]

>>18075591
The 'deeper' issues only come out in the last half of the last book.

This is the problem with a lot of the YA stuff like maze runner and hunger games.

The entire high-concept premise is built on its ability to draw in a large audience of children. The next 80% of the book is focused on delivering more of that drug and maintaining that audience. At some point in the last book the author is filthy rich, and at this point he feels guilty and obligated to put in some shit in their about the "human condition" or shoehorn in some "deep philosophical themes" but all of that is done retroactively in some silly twist. The book's primary purpose is to make him money.

[Anonymous No.18075629]

>>18075616
Nope, it's all over the place. They symbolism and themes are a constant, it's just spelled out in the last books.

[Anonymous No.18075633]

post YA

[Anonymous No.18075638]

>>18075616
I'd like to add Ready Player One to that list. The author essentially put in a half assed "too much video games is bad for you" at the end, which is funny since his entire success banked on the cultural addiction to VR videogames. That makes him a hypocrite. Does he even believe in the advice he's spouting?

In other words it's wrong to think of these 'writers' as wanting to tell some deep tale about the human condition, and the premise of the book (survival games/mazes/virtual reality world) as a mere plot device to facilitate that. That's completely backwards. These writers come up with a money making formula with mass appeal, and then tack on the human element at the end as an afterthought because they feel obligated to.

[Anonymous No.18075647]

>>18075629
If it's all over the place why doesn't the author delve into it more deeply or allot more pages to it? Why is the YA novel format PLOT PLOT PLOT PLOT <some human stuff interspersed in the footnotes> PLOT PLOT PLOT PLOT?

It's because the author is afraid of boring the readers and scaring away the teens with too much slow paced character development or musings on society.

[Anonymous No.18075675]

>>18075071
A guy like that doesn’t really want a girl that’s smarter than him, in reality it would piss him off

[Anonymous No.18075678]

>>18075071
>"I don't wanna watch those shallow vapid whores, I wanna see real smart women getting fucked!"
Wow, what a powerful feminist statement.

[Anonymous No.18075681]

>>18075237
He's right. I could get a movie made right now because of who I know.

[Anonymous No.18075683]

>>18075616
high-concept or war or whatever are always just a backdrop for the romance of power fantasy/pamper fantasy

[Anonymous No.18075686]

>>18075683
>pamper fantasy

wtf is that? sounds like diaper fetish age-play shit

[Anonymous No.18075688]

>>18075678
truly an ally

[Anonymous No.18075713]

>>18074977
YA keeps using the same cookie cutter formula because it sells well. Until people stop eating the same formulaic shit up, we'll keep getting the same formulaic YA.

[Anonymous No.18075717]

>>18075686
its when a character (usually female) gets a care taker or an ass kicker who constantly talks about how amazing and brave she is, despite her having done nothing to earn the praise. sometimes its combined with "poor me" stories were MC is an orphan who find out they actually have an amazing "true" family that comes to take care of them. Where the lead will act antagonist and like everyone around them is a jerk when in realty everyone adores her or is just acting normal. if there is sex, the partner (sometimes female) will always be "worshipful" during the act and generally act like it was the best they ever had or the flaws were endearing.

[Anonymous No.18075728]

>>18075713
more people are born everyday. people stop but there are always new people.

[Anonymous No.18075739]

>>18074977
dumb take, these books don't PREVENT "good books" from existing, and I don't believe they even slow down the rate of "good books" being produced.

it's a separate product and I won't give a normative take on people who enjoy something I don't.

-t anon

[Anonymous No.18075763]

Women write YA, men write bildungsroman. Get it right.

[Anonymous No.18075846]

>>18075763
How do you distinguish between the two? Just having a underage main character makes novels YA these days.

[Anonymous No.18075863]

>>18075846
Female writers are preoccupied with interpersonal relationships, particularly in high school and college where their life peaked. The rest are background detail.

Male writers with transcending the limitations of your past self, the rest are background detail.

[Anonymous No.18075875]

>>18075863
I don't know.
I find that women are just as likely to write about middle aged wish fulfillment as they are about teenage stuff. But I guess in the context of YA that's not the case.

[Anonymous No.18075962]

>>18075875
Females like to romanticize their school days because they're brains are wired for it. The angst of rebelling against your parents. The internal war of choosing the nice guy or the bad guy. The drama of losing your virginity. Cliques based on Cosmo personality quizzes (hello hogwarts). Female tribalism. Close circle of friends and slut shaming other circles.

All of these tropes show up. And all teenagers, boy or girl, naturally attracted to them because they're going through school and experiencing the same thing. But the females want to constantly relive this under different settings which is why female authors make up the bulk of YA books.

[Anonymous No.18075965]

>>18075312
>Star Wars
>Capeshit
>Orange Man Bad
Shit bait, here's a (you) though

[Anonymous No.18076074]

>>18075739
given that self publishing exists and unpublished "books" from watpad made it all the way to movies, I dont think there is any issue in reaching the audience. complaint comes down to "why is everyone too stupid to enjoy my book"

[Anonymous No.18076086]

>>18075962
male write seem to write the same shit but from male perspective. any growth they have usually comes from powers they have been handed or "learn" more easily that it is to make tea.

[Anonymous No.18076112]

>>18076086
Yeah but that's more of a phenomena in Japan and the east (see all of shounen) then it is in the states. It might just be because men read less than women in general so the book market is dominated by YA.

[Anonymous No.18076158]

>>18074977
>Is there a way to fix it?
Not without fixing the education system as YA has always, and this goes back to bildungsroman of the past, been inseparable from some form of pedagogy, and ours is thoroughly poisoned.

[Anonymous No.18076237]

>>18076112
seems to be the same in the west. a lot of coming of age stories are basically that except the boy has one girl in mind instead of choosing between the new hot thing or a childhood friend. a lot of internal stuff is usually about how they have a chip on their shoulder from being bullied by chad or being raised by their grandpa. coming of age books have their own formula and they are far from high minded art that is superior to female trash

[Anonymous No.18077035]

>>18075250
Throne of glass is pretty dark as well for a YA. But it’s still market as one.

[Anonymous No.18077124]

>>18074977
ya is actually good cause it levels the palying field for poc writers

[Anonymous No.18077252]

>>18075071
fractally pathetic, pathetic on every level and at any resolution

[Anonymous No.18077413]

>>18074977
Try to do better with your own story and see if it takes off? Or help signal boost what IS good

[Anonymous No.18077444]

>>18074977
the "media landscape" has always been shit relative to their consumers. it's not really remembered now, but back when books were the main media source (late XIXth century - WWII) most of the stuff you'd find on bookshelves was simplistic, trope-filled, shallow, mass-produced talentless rubbish, made only to be bought by the masses. "Keep the Aspidistra Flying" shows this quite well.

[Anonymous No.18078414]

>>18075374
People thought like adults in their teens. They had families and took on their responsibilities (or didn't) but they thought of themselves as independent individuals and they were definitely more aware of the reality of life than people today.
It's relatively normal today to not have matured as an individual in your fucking 30s, we live in an infantilized society.
The average 20 to 25 years old who just came out of college is completely unequipped emotionally or mentally, people in this age range are still babies.

[Anonymous No.18078547]

>>18075250
YA fiction almost always involve death and sex so I have no idea what you mean by this.