Question about Young Adult genre
So…
When I was a kid and teenager, we didn’t have “Young Adult” per se. Teenage stuff I guess was pretty conservative, and mostly consumed by much younger kids. Stuff about high school was mostly interesting to 11 year olds?? In the 80s, what most young teenage girls seemed to actually be reading was Stephen King and V.C. Andrews. Teenagers *loved* that stuff. Maybe I just had liberal parents and so did my friends, idk - and I was a latchkey kid.
Adult horror, mystery, and true crime were big. And if we were geeks/nerds, our literature was usually in the adult section… adult sci fi and fantasy.
Do teens still even read adult material???
Reading was the *one* safe space lots of young people had to learn about sexuality and adult situations, other people, other cultures.
If adults didn’t approve of what we read, we read it anyway, and I think maybe Gen X teenagers didn’t have as much oversight or surveillance because of latchkey culture but also because there simply *weren’t as many people our own age.* And of course if you were into nerdy or counterculture material, you consumed it anyway, on the sly. (LGBTQ material was often consumed quietly as well.)
Don’t young people read stuff they’re not allowed to read, BECAUSE they’re not allowed to read it?
And in general, don’t young people read adult fiction anymore????
Short answer: yeah, things have changed, a lot.
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There’s a little question and a big question that are baked in here. The little question is the explicitly literary one: Why has the YA “genre” exploded, and displaced more-adult-oriented forms of literature to such a large extent, especially among teens?
(But not only among teens. All sorts of people are reading YA these days, including people who are “much too old” for it. That’s a portion of the answer right there – teens are doing it, in part, because everyone is doing it. But the trend is clearly being led by the youth, so that doesn’t get us very far.)
There’s a lot going on. I’m sure that I haven’t noticed all of it.
Part of it is the growth and mainstream-ization of fandom. YA, being hyper-accessible and (even more so) very easy to talk about, works to its best advantage in a world where your enjoyment of a work is largely predicated on a large number of strangers also being really into it, producing fanwork, etc.
Part of it is the continual multiplication and specialization of genres, which is a thing in every medium. Back in the day, when many fewer books were written and the pool of authors was much less diverse, there were just many fewer different kinds of books that you could read – and if the genre conventions of your favoritest kind of book were nonetheless not quite right for you, well, you adapted, because what else could you do? But the technology of writing marches on, and at some point we developed a superstimulus crack-hit form of literature that is targeted directly at the preferences of [certain book-loving subspecies of mostly female] teenagers. If you read a YA novel, it’s not going to have a lengthy excursus on some middle-aged dude’s sexual fantasies or on Napoleonic War naval tactics or on Stephen King’s feelings about the meaning of family, it is going to give you exactly what you want, all the time. Assuming you go into the book wanting that thing. Which it turns out a lot of people do.
(SIDEBAR: This is precisely akin to the changes in TV-for-little-kids that we’ve seen since the childhood days of the Gen Xers and the early millennials. Once upon a time kids’ TV was made by people who fancied themselves writers or entertainers, and a lot of its content was aimed over the heads of the “target audience” towards their parents or older siblings. [One of my childhood memories of Sesame Street involves a one-off Muppet named “Ross Parrot” who was a blatant parody of Ross Perot, which my parents had to explain to me at some length.] Then people started doing actual research into how they could best grab and hold the attention of actual children, and the results took us from Barney the Dinosaur through Elmo’s World and Blue’s Clues to whatever we have now, and it all drives parents absolutely batty but works much better for the kidlings themselves.)
Part of it is the changing tides of fashion and stigma. Which is to say, “cultural shifts produce self-perpetuating spirals.” Back in the day, liking grown-up stuff was cool and being childish was a social death sentence, so lots of people gravitated towards old-for-their-age stuff even if maybe they wouldn’t have done so based entirely on their own private preferences. Nowadays, pretension is the Most Uncool and pop trash is In, so there are concrete social advantages to favoring something that’s explicitly Not Really Serious and Not For Adults. Obviously this can’t explain anything on its own, but it does contribute to the dynamic.
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But all of that is an attempt to answer the little question. And the little question is largely subsumed by the big question, which is: Why have the kids these days become so much more prudish and less adventurous? Because of course it’s not just about taste in books, it plays out in all sorts of arenas.
Again, there are clearly going to be all sorts of contributing factors.
“The internet” seems like an elephant-in-the-room. If nothing else, as you say, it’s given kids a lot more access to each other in unsupervised contexts, and so it’s made the Independence of Adulthood a lot less enchanting; much of what teenagers really want out of independence, as far as I can tell, is the opportunity to engage with each other away from the prying eyes of their parents and other authority figures, and right now that’s trivial. Relatedly, the fact that adults and their shenanigans are readily accessible through the internet probably makes them seem a lot less powerful and mysterious, and a lot more like less-cool versions of teenagers.
A big thing, I would posit, is the particular culture of fear in which the current crop of adolescents grew up, prompted heavily by the 2008 depression. There have been many waves of culture-of-fear, of course, but this one is notable for being so individual in its scale. The fear isn’t fear of getting drafted into Vietnam, or fear of nuclear war or race riots, or fear of terrorism, or anything that might call for rebellious action or rebellious community; it’s fear of being poor and miserable and isolated because you screwed up somewhere, because your ducks weren’t quite in a row. Certainly it incorporates fear of having someone plaster your misadventures or your ill-conceived comments all over the internet, and becoming a laughingstock or a pariah forever. It seems to me that this sort of fear is unlikely to inculcate a spirit of adventurousness. Quite the reverse.
(Climate change is a complicating factor here, but even now I’d posit that fear-of-climate-change mostly isn’t real as a psychologically dominant factor.)
The rise of social justice plays into this a lot. The figure of the Exploiter has become a cultural bogeyman, and I would imagine that he dominates the vistas where restless young Gen Xers once hoped to roam. On a brighter note, if you’re gay or trans or whatever and you find yourself with weird yearnings, you don’t have to escape into slightly-too-grown-up fiction and dream of unfettered exploration, you can just find information and community with a snap of your fingers.
On and on and on.