On YA, Insipidness, and the Dystopian Now
I should say that I wasn’t going to write this post. I realize that that’s a very ominous statement with which to open a blog post, but I feel like it’s a necessary caveat here. I’ve been busy writing and I wasn’t going to blog, for a variety of reasons that will likely become apparent, but the blogging thoughts are overtaking my mind. So, blog I must.
(It will make my friend Sean happy, in any case.)
The other day, Sean wrote a blog post about dystopian literature. In it, he wrote:
Most of these dystopian novels are written by Americans, in the majority of cases for American readers. A smaller number are written in Britain, which hasn’t exactly been blameless these past ten years either. The teenagers and adults who make up the bulk of these books’ intended audience will never experience the kinds of abuses of power they describe. They will, however, sit idly by while those exact same abuses of power are committed on a daily basis by their governments, for their ostensible benefit, against innocent people whose names they will probably never learn and whose voices they will never hear.
So, why is dystopian fiction so popular? Because it’s a band-aid. It’s a convenient way for readers to vicariously experience the thrill of indignation over injustice from a position of absolute safety.
It’s an interesting argument, though I don’t agree with it. It’s not that I necessarily disagree with the political positions he espouses, though mine are, perhaps, quite a bit more . . . multifaceted? thorny? than his. I think that this thorniness is in part due to the very fact that I’m American, and he’s not (well, he sort of is, but I’d leave it up to Sean to talk about that; mostly, he’s Irish)–I’m both part of the political machine he’s criticizing as well as well as aware of the deeper emotional nuances of what happened during and after 9/11. I’m also highly aware of the way political discourse works in America. Here, you don’t talk about politics or religion at dinner parties.
(Sean tells me that an American dinner party sounds downright boring.)
I think of my blog a bit like a dinner party. I want all sorts of readers to be welcome here. I don’t want to scare you off with my opinions on politics or religion, and so I stay largely quiet about that stuff, although readers may grok a sort of holistic sense of where I stand politically over time (like, if you have a suspicion that I’m a feminist, because I’m always going on about feminism in Doctor Who, well then you’d be right).
I wonder if what Sean perceives to be a failure of American YA authors–particularly authors of dystopian works–to seem adequately politically engaged really comes out of that. Particularly in writing for a young audience, I would imagine that many writers don’t want to come out and say, hey, kids, you’re really the dystopian villains here. It’s off-putting; in Miss Manners parlance, it’s rude. And so we have political arguments buried under metaphorical and subtextual layers.
Those arguments are certainly there, though. My sense after reading the entire Hunger Games series is that Suzanne Collins’ message was very close to what Sean is arguing. We’re the Capitol, not the districts. We distract ourselves with fluffy bloodsports at the expense of those who are hurting. This is what made the whole Hunger Games nail polish thing so absurd. How obviously and blindly do we want to ape the habits of the Capitol when they’re a metaphor meant to comment on the commercial nature of . . . well, us?
If you’re a careful reader of dystopian literature, you see this again and again: arguments and criticisms of our current society buried beneath the surface. In Uglies, for example, our contemporary society led to widespread environmental downfall. The dystopian government acts in a way that encourages young people to get plastic surgery, develop eating disorders, and engage in cutting (everyone in mainstream society is also an idiot). To me, this doesn’t sound solely like it’s a message meant to give young readers an outlet–to let them ” vicariously experience the thrill of indignation over injustice from a position of absolute safety.” I suspect that these aspects of the text are meant by the author as a critique of our own, current society. They’re just couched in sufficient metaphor to make them approachable for a young, politically diverse, largely American audience. And honestly, if an author’s goal is to inspire political change or enlightenment in a young audience, I suspect this is the way to do it. You don’t shout at your audience about how wrong their positions of political privilege is. You persuade them, through use of abundant metaphor and through compelling characters. You let them connect point A (the novel) to point B (their political situation) themselves. I mean, my peers who are out there Occupying Wall Street grew up learning about the evils of war and government, about the importance of fighting back and protesting, through books like Animorphs and The Giver.
I can’t pretend as if all YA dystopian literature functions this way, of course. Some is fairly bubble gum. But some of everything is fairly bubble gum. Which brings me to the topic of insipidness. A few days ago, my agent sis SE Sinkhorn posted a rebuttal to the New York Daily News article which had whinged about insipid YA by authors like Walter Dean Myers (of all authors to pick on, what a weird one, but I digress). It contained the following quote, from Catherine McCredie, senior editor of young adult fiction at Penguin Group Australia:
This is (to my ears) a fresh and welcome attack on contemporary young adult literature. Those of us who produce YA literature are used to hearing that too much of it is too dark, but we don’t usually hear it’s too insipid. And I agree that most of it probably is, just as most contemporary adult novels probably are – especially compared with the ancient classics.
There’s a name for this fallacy, but I forget it. Essentially, there have been a lot of terrible works–of literature, of music–but their place was never secured in the canon, and so we forget about it. Instead, we crow about how wonderful the golden age was, as compared to today, because we don’t have the wondrous variety of insipid works out there to prove us wrong. This comes up in YA quite often, actually, when older readers gush about the wonderful works of their childhood, and seem to forget that for much of the 70s, 80s, and 90s, “YA” was dominated not by award winners, but by packaged monthly romance titles (for a fairly accurate retrospective on, say, 80s teen lit, check out Cliquey Pizza). Essentially, as Sturgeon asserted, 90% of everything is crud. If I can be a bit unbearable for a moment, I’d like to suggest Phoebe’s Corollary to Sturgeon’s Law: 90% of everything has always been crud.
I suspect that Alexander Nazaryan, and maybe Sean, would view this as a cop-out. Even if there is a lot of fluffy, stupid, mindlessly entertaining literature out there, we shouldn’t be complacent in that–we should endeavor to write Good Work, Important Work. You know, more Homer, less Walter Dean Myer. Of this, I am of two minds. And I’ve been of two minds since graduate school, when I read Ulysses, then promptly declared myself mostly done with the classics. While many of the classics were, and are, enjoyable to me–while I love YA literature, that like more classical, exalted work plays games with narration (Liar by Justine Larbalestier) or genre (Imaginary Girls by Nova Ren Suma; How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff); while I like books that are beautifully written (Like Mandarin by Kirsten Hubbard) or affecting (A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness), I also like me some bubblegum. I don’t like to be bored; I don’t like to be preached to. Sometimes, I want to read something that is mindless, distracting fun. I find value in that.
And going back to Sean’s initial argument, I’m not sure, either, that the weight of the responsibility of political change should rest mostly or even especially on works of dystopian science fiction, meant for teenagers or not. Oh sure, he’s not the first one to make this argument. Just a few weeks ago, I watched a three part video online where Robert J. Sawyer tried to argue that Star Wars has ruined movie SF because it used to be all sorts of deep, like Planet of the Apes, but now it’s all dumb, like Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones. Or something.
But Star Wars wasn’t the first fluffy space movie. Heck, it lifted most of its tropes from old Flash Gordon serials, and those hardly ruined the science fiction of the 40s. And today we have plenty of political sci-fi, though you wouldn’t know it from Sawyer’s cherry-picked examples. District 9, anyone? Somehow, there was room for that, even in a film climate that’s mostly about Michael Bay movies. Perhaps these creative works simply do different things, for different audiences.
And that’s pretty much how I feel about all of these wider discussions about what literature for young adults should be, or do. Essentially, there’s room for all sorts, and the presence of one in no way negates the possibility that the other will find its audience. I might not love all of it personally (a fact that’s reflected, as always, in my reviews). But then, I didn’t exactly love Ulysses, either. I’m hardly the sole arbiter of taste, good or otherwise, and I wouldn’t trust anyone who tells you that they can define quality for you, either. History is what really defines quality. The works that are solid will live on–whether Alexander Nazaryan likes them, or not.
Phoebe
Phoebe is a 20-something writer who lives in New York State with her husband and cat. She is a dork, not a geek or a nerd.
Her debut novel, Starglass, will be released from Simon and Schuster Books for Young Readers in Summer 2013.
25 comments
Something I found shocking when I first moved to Canada is that Canadians like to talk about politics. It is so, so deeply wonderful. They all claim to be jaded and cynical – and they really believe they are – but they're TALKING, and they have no idea how rare and glorious that is. I always felt politics was this black hole of despair, but Canadians have been a balm to my heart.
Which brings me to my own take on the dystopian trend, I guess. I see your point, and I see Sean's, but my feeling has been more along these lines: the world seems pretty hopeless, and it's easy to feel helpless to change anything, even when you are one of the privileged folks who are living in comfort while wars and devastation rage elsewhere. No matter how we try to numb ourselves to the suffering around us, we feel it. I think these books are trying to say "you are not powerless. It's possible for an individual to stand up and make a difference. There is a good fight that needs to be fought and it's going to be fought by ordinary people who didn't think they could do it."
"you are not powerless. It's possible for an individual to stand up and make a difference. There is a good fight that needs to be fought and it's going to be fought by ordinary people who didn't think they could do it."
Beautifully said <3
One of the things I thought interesting in the UGLIES series was the reasoning behind the beautification process. In Westerfeld's dystopia, people were made "pretty" so there would no longer be any distinction between pretty and ugly, fat and thin, short and tall, black and white–everyone would be uniform. So it's sold as a way of eliminating prejudice. The subtle (or not-so-subtle) message is that people in power may have good intentions, but that doesn't mean they will always do the right thing. And, of course, the prejudice didn't go away (see the pretties' attitude to the uglies, and to the Smokies). I think this just goes to underscore the point that YA can be used to challenge readers to think about the world they live in. Just because our world is not an oppressed dystopian nightmare, we need to realize how easily such things can come about. Oppressive regimes don't gain power by saying, "Hello, we're an evil oppressive regime, and we've come to take over your lives!" And I think Westerfeld helps us see that.
Wonderful reading, Colin! I have to admit that when I read Uglies a few years ago, I wasn't the biggest fan due to other narrative reasons, so I think I may have missed that level of subtext–but I think you're spot-on. This is definitely a critique, like "Harrison Bergeron" and The Giver before it, of good-intentioned efforts to, say, "level the playing field," and how those efforts can go awry. And I doubt Westerfeld meant this as a distraction from our own problems, but rather a commentary on them.
Oh, ULYSSES, how I both love and abhor you.
All excellent points. I think the reason I struggle so much with this topic is that it's just so EASY for people to look down their nose at juvenile fiction and call it lesser because it's written about the childhood/teenage experience. It immediately puts this stamp on childhood/adolescence that says, "Anything that happens during this time is immature and frivolous and NOT IMPORTANT." Unless it's a book about the coming of age of a sex-starved young man who wants to know What It All Means, but I digress.
BUT. I generally agree that 90% of everything is crap, and what are you going to do. Of course the classics are the classics — they are the works that survived. Of course the thousands and thousands of books released every year aren't going to be classics. That would kind of defeat the purpose of HAVING classics, no? I struggle with this. I WANT to write "important" work. I mean, duh. At the same time, there is nothing wrong or evil about having literature that doesn't strive to, as Nazaryan put it, "elevate." There's nothing wrong with wanting to read it. We don't live in a vacuum where everyone has the same literary tastes or wants or needs.
AND STUFF.
AND THINGS. Don't forget things.
Unless it's a book about the coming of age of a sex-starved young man who wants to know What It All Means, but I digress.
Well, I think that's part of the thing, which I didn't work into the blog post because hoo it was already 2000 words long. I think the idea that any literary value be placed on works written about teenagers, and works written about young men of color, and works written by people of color or women, or works written by the queer experience, and so on, can all be very threatening for those who hold "the classics" in particularly high esteem. Because traditionally, the mechanism of history in preserving certain works is very flawed. It's privileged certain narratives and voices over others. When we talk about trashy books, we're often not talking about works enjoyed by upper middle class white well-educated heterosexual men. For all the flaws in this period of history, it does represent a diversification even within the literary canon, and that's not even touching on the broader range of work that's commercially popular.
An' stuff.
Would teenagers actually get that, though? I first read the His Dark Materials books when I was fairly young- I must have been in my early teens when the last one came out. Read as an adult they have a very obvious (maybe too obvious in places) pro-atheism/secular humanism and/or anti-religious message. But when I read them first that went completely over my head. I just thought the idea of God being a villain was this neat twist that I'd never seen before.
I think the problem here is the context in which the "message" is given. His Dark Materials is set for the most part in parallel worlds that resemble ours, but with airships an daemons and (awesome) talking polar bears and ghosts that drain your soul. I think that's why the message didn't click with me- the idea that the corrupt church controlling this fantasy land was supposed to be a commentary on the same institution in real life never occurred to me.
I feel like if dystopia YA authors want to get more political they need to stop setting their stories in far-flung future societies that have so little resemblance to our own times they might as well be separate universes. Instead they need to make more "20 minutes into the future" books, where the dystopia is the result of real problems and social movements going on right now.
For example, if someone wanted to right a book that's really focused on critiquing the way modern society over-emphasizes appearance and beauty, and they wanted teenagers to get the message, instead of writing Uglies as a far-future adventure story full of hover struts and operations that turn you into an idiot, why not write about a time in the near future where our own society's preoccupation with appearance has advanced to such a degree that ostracizing and shaming "ugly" people- at school for example- is seen as normal or even desirable. You could add the conceit that medical advances have made cosmetic surgery much easier and cheaper, and so its treated as a given that people who aren't deemed attractive enough will "fix" themselves when they turn 18. And then our plucky heroine has the scales lifted from her eyes and realizes that everything she knows is a lie and all that.
You might argue that such a story wouldn't really count as a dystopia. But to a teenager, I feel like that would be a dystopia, far more so than a nebulous authoritarian government taking over the world. When you're that age its your peers and the immediate authority figures in your life that most have the capacity to make you miserable- maybe YA dystopias need to start trying to tap into that?
… Wait, what was the point of this post again? I think I went off on a giant tangent there. Uglies is terrible and should never have been written? Is that what we were talking about? Yeah, let's go with that.
I feel like if dystopia YA authors want to get more political they need to stop setting their stories in far-flung future societies that have so little resemblance to our own times they might as well be separate universes. Instead they need to make more "20 minutes into the future" books, where the dystopia is the result of real problems and social movements going on right now.
You and Sean are both arguing from the POV that this is something that YA authors want or need to do. As I said in my post, it's not–it's not as if authors of dystopian books have a unique burden or obligation to do these things. As for whether teens will "get it," I don't think teens are stupid–I caught the social satire in The Giver when I read it at nine. Moreover, even if they don't "get it" on first read, that's not to say that the work won't continue to have an impact on them when they're older–not to say that they won't realize the deeper nuance of a work long after reading.
why not write about a time in the near future where our own society's preoccupation with appearance has advanced to such a degree that ostracizing and shaming "ugly" people- at school for example- is seen as normal or even desirable.
Because, man, seriously, that sounds like a boring, terrible book. Plus, what I said about the importance of couching message in metaphor to make it easier to digest.
I think I went off on a giant tangent there. Uglies is terrible and should never have been written?
Dude, not cool. It might not be my favorite book (and it's not; I actually very much don't like it), but I'd appreciate it if you didn't come out full jerkface here, okay?
Am I? I don't recall saying that. I do think some YA authors want to include social commentary in their dystopian fiction- otherwise they wouldn't be trying to- but I never implied that authors should should. Sometimes a story is just a story, and that's fine.
See, this is my point- what exactly is The Giver satirizing? What element of our own world is reflected in that book? Maybe I just wasn't paying attention when I read it, but the society presented in that book was so obviously not like our own that any point it may have been trying to present was lost on me. And hey- that's fine, if it was just meant as a piece of dystopian fiction. But if Lowry was trying to critique his own society in the book, I think he went about it the wrong way.
Oh yeah?? I challenge you to a Book Duel! I'm going to write this thing and get it published and then we'll see who sells more copies! The game is on! Two books enter, one book leaves! In the end there can be only one!
I just remembered I can't write! Never mind!
But seriously though, lo-fi near future dystopia is the bee's knees. I guess I just wish more dystopian authors would realize that it doesn't take Big Brother to break a society, nor does it take armed rebellion to fix one.
I feel like you may be mis-interpreting the role of metaphors in dystopian fiction.
I would argue that early pioneers of dystopian fiction didn't use metaphors to make people aware of issues they weren't familiar with or didn't recognize, but rather they used metaphors as a sort of mirror, reflecting what people already thought back at them in a way that was more organized and simplified. An example of this is Animal Farm, in my opinion the best dystopian novel ever written. The entire conceit of the book relies on the reader already being familiar with early soviet history. No one is going to read it ignorant of why Stalinist communism is bad and come out the other side with that viewpoint.
Another obvious Orwell example would be 1984, which quite a lot of people completely misunderstood because they didn't go into it already aware of the issues Orwell was commenting on.
Another point to be made here is that I simply don't think metaphors and wearing kid gloves are an effective way of changing how people think. Entrenched ways of thinking are very hard to alter, especially in young people who may never have questioned their own opinions before. A gentle metaphor is all too easy to ignore- "it's just a made up world in a book, that's not what my society is like"- whereas confronting someone with issues taking place in a slightly altered version of our own world (or even an alternate present) makes it much harder for them to ignore.
Basically, if you're trying to drop that anvil make sure it hits with enough force to wipe out the dinosaurs.
No way, compared to the discussions I usually have online this was like a polite conversation over tea and crumpets
I feel pretty blah about lo-fi near future dystopia personally. Like, snooze.
See, this is my point- what exactly is The Giver satirizing? What element of our own world is reflected in that book? Maybe I just wasn't paying attention when I read it, but the society presented in that book was so obviously not like our own that any point it may have been trying to present was lost on me. And hey- that's fine, if it was just meant as a piece of dystopian fiction. But if Lowry was trying to critique his own society in the book, I think he went about it the wrong way.
Lois Lowry is a gal, btw.
But it's fairly transparently a criticism of institutionalized efforts at inclusion and norming–over on this side of the pond, we're seeing the repercussions of such efforts through, say, the No Child Left Behind program. There are study guides and such on this stuff. The failure of one student to grok a theme doesn't necessarily mean that young people as a whole are incapable of understanding that theme.
And I disagree with you about Animal Farm, too–part of the art of that book is that it works perfectly well as a fairy tale, given a completely literal and surface reading. It can be understood as a myth without knowing a thing about communism, though obviously knowledge of that adds an additional level of meaning.
Basically, if you're trying to drop that anvil make sure it hits with enough force to wipe out the dinosaurs.
Honestly, I really hate anvicilicious literature. I know a lot of kids do, too. Few people really love being lectured to.
I can weigh in as someone who taught Animal Farm and The Giver to 10th and 11th graders in the same course. Obviously, my students' reactions don't make one "better" than the other, but I think they do carry a certain weight in a discussion of how dystopian lit. affects actual, honest-to-goodness young people. Animal Farm, to them, felt impossibly historical. We might as well have been reading the Magna Carta. The Giver, on the other hand, at least got them talking in hypotheticals–what would you do? It wasn't perfect, but it was something. Our discussion of jobs was particularly lively, as many of them were futilely seeking summer employment in this cruddy economy, so the choice between an assigned, but guaranteed career and getting to choose a job if you can find one that will have you actually had vocal proponents on both sides.
But I agree that reading works that seem impossibly futuristic can have an anaesthetizing effect, no matter how excellent they are. One thing I really liked about Shatter Me by Tahereh Mafi (possible spoilers) is that the Big Changes, mostly environmental and then following that governental, have occurred within the teenage protagonist's memory. There is a sense that they could be reversed, even, with the right action. I do hope to see more of this–it is a bit scarier, and I could see it having a potentially more galvanizing effect.
You know what? I think I was being a bit of a jerkface back, and I'm sorry for that. I still think that the problem is that you're supposing that authors–of a certain type of literature–are obligated to successfully seed a message in in a certain kind of way. I'm not convinced they're unsuccessful already (I think Westerfeld's books, for all their faults, are fairly straightforward in their messages, easy to understand for a young audience). More so, their existence doesn't eliminate the possibility of more hard-hitting politically relevant novels finding their audience.
Sometimes I want to read mindless entertaining fluff as opposed to deep literature that makes you use the grey matter.
Word.
"There’s a name for this fallacy, but I forget it."
I think it's a form of the spotlight fallacy. Sample A is taken from B and more emphasis is placed on it…in this case it's the good 10% of foundational-type literature. So without careful consideration we conclude that all of B is like the A sample.
Mmm . . . that's close but it's not quite it either. I spent like an hour combing through lists of fallacies looking for it. It's obviously a form of sampling bias, but meh.
I really like your central theme here. Hunger Games, to me, was a stringent critique of many aspects of my society… with Americans living in the capital, and all the countries where all my stuff is made competing just to survive.
From China to Thailand to wherever we move our companies next, people's lives depend on the fact that I like eight-dollar T-shirts. The Hunger Games are real, and people really are… well, hungry. When FoxConn workers stood on top of their factory and threatened suicide last week., I knew it was District 6 refusing to go back to the mines or similar.
Yes, exactly–the idea that we're the dystopian oppressors is in no way a new one. Collins knew what she was doing.
"When we talk about trashy books, we're often not talking about works enjoyed by upper middle class white well-educated heterosexual men."
I'm not a huge Stephen King _fan_, but I honestly appreciate his writing quite a bit. His content doesn't appeal to me, but the man can tell a good story. Yet – horror and westerns and WW II fiction and Tom Clancy's military thrillers, all of which fall into the category of works enjoyed by (many) upper middle class white well-educated heterosexual men don't come in for mainstream criticism at all that I know of. It's genre fiction and it has its occasional academic champions, etcetera and so on.
YA has a double burden, I think – first, the one everyone's talking about here which is that it's aimed at people who are not emotionally mature (and therefore, their aesthetic choices are likewise still forming); the second is the one brought up by Meghan Cox Gurdon, that YA fiction (and MG) should be educating kids. Like it or not, both of these presuppositions weigh down analyses of MG/YA – not necessarily doubling the height of the hurdle, but definitely setting up secondary goalposts after the first have been successfully attained.
I think Steph's take about embracing the criticism and ignoring the peeve (I've summarized a bit) is the best way to go. Nothing wrong with setting the bar high for good writing.
Apparently, no one has to worry about the upper middle class white well-educated heterosexual men or has to go to critical bat on their behalf, because those bro's got it all figured out.
I actually AM a huge SK fan! But then, he's recently received some accolades by the intellegesia–the National Book Award. Much to some individuals' chagrin.
I think you're right about the double burden, and I think it's important that writers for teens and children be aware of the fact that kids will grok "messages" (whatever that means) because they're an impressionable audience–though some writers disagree, and I understand their thinking. But I still think there's value in fluff, and I think escapist value can be more significant than many critics realize. Mercedes Lackey, for example, was a great help to me when I was a bullied middle schooler. Her books were escapism, but they were also a comfort. I doubt "serious" lit like Homer would have helped me in nearly the same way.
I think Steph's take about embracing the criticism and ignoring the peeve (I've summarized a bit) is the best way to go. Nothing wrong with setting the bar high for good writing.
Different books work in different ways to achieve different goals. We can choose to set the bar high for ourselves, if it helps us realize our work better. But there are writers who consciously write commercial, fluffy work, for teens and young people, and I still feel that this is fine, fundamentally. Mercedes Lackey need not–and should not–be Homer.
Sometimes I think all of this is a result of YA authors just caring too much what the academy, what "serious" writers outside our community think. This isn't a call for groupthink, but there was serious concern, in the original AW post and the comments on steph's post, that we're perceived as unserious because of how people comport themselves in public. I think this misses the dual audience that YA authors have, of both teens and peers. It also puts too much weight on a critical community that fundamentally does not want or understand us.
You are so smart and on here.
Vague tangent: Right now I see a lot of people critiquing time traveller stories that uses having a white, straight, male traveller to avoid engaging with the horrors of the past and I think that's important. It is important that we have more stories like 'A Wish After Midnight' and um the Octavia Butler book (is it 'Kindred'?) and other variations of that kind of approach to time travel and it is bad that the less politically dangerous, uncomplicated time traveller story has come to dominate so heavily. At the same time, I don't think that because say Connie Willis, or Terry Pratchett doesn't include complicating political factors that affect their time travellers makes their narratives bad, or apolitical on their own. They're charting a different experience of time travel, which is valid, but of course it IS bad that this has come to be the ONLY experience that gets published. How the industry deals with this problem of dominance, while keeping the bubble gum lost of us like to buy, is probably one of the most charged and hard issues for publishing as the economy declines.
I've always considered dystopian to be a mirror to what our society is and will be in a short time- which is probably why I loved Uglies. In YA, though, since dystopian is all the trend (or was, I suppose, in 2011) all these fluffy romances-disguised-as-dystopia are coming out, and while I actually like most of them, I hope that writers (like you!) continue to come out with thought-provoking futuristic fiction that makes us think beyond the confines of our own lives and focus more on society as a whole.
As a teenager, I'm able to catch subtext (no, really, I AM), so I love this sort of mental exercise. Just like how I likened the Capitol with the West, I'd love to be able to think about the metaphors authors in YA employ. Teens aren't dumb!
Also, to expand on a comment above, yes, Canadians talk about politics, and a lot! I've mostly been listening to my father talk to his friends, but sometimes I even throw in my opinion. And we're all cool with that. I hadn't known that it wasn't the case in the US. though. Hmm.
Thanks for backing me up there, Rida! It occurred to me after I wrote that that maybe it isn't ALL Canadians (maybe Vancouver is a pocket of weirdness! It is in other ways), and that I'd make Canada mad at me. Usually the only generalization I feel safe making about Canadians is: "Canadians hate it when people make generalizations about Canadians."
I'm from the same place so- okay, maybe Vancouverites are weird. And that last line- for SURE. If one more person asks me if it ever DOESN'T snow in Canada…
Wow, what a fantastic discussion. I'd just like to add my two cents that the success of dystopian YA can be attributed, I think, at least in part, to how dystopian the world that we force teenagers live in is (holy awkward sentence but oh well). I'm talking about high school, of course, which often has it's own kind of totalitarian government, who are in the thrall of select privileged citizens, who in turn heap abuses on the hapless proletariat beneath them. Citizens are forced into completing pointless tasks for no real reward, maligned by those who profess to care about them, and either endure or exact emotional abuse born of general frustration.