I often joke among some of my closes friends that if there truly is a god, he either hates me or carries a sick sense of humor regarding how my life unfolds.
Roughly 3 years ago, I published a series of writing projects looking at the evolution and down turn of the Young Adult (YA) genre cinematically. The world of 2014 presented the genre in film as a culmination of cynical prepackaging, source material misrepresentation brought about as a result of market pandering to a lowest common denominator, fatigue from a high volume of low quality releases, building over the course of nearly a decade and a half.
“Young and Stupid,” was meant to study the then-current state of YA represented in film, still seen as lucrative at the time, via case study of the most high profile releases of the time that weren’t the financially successful trinity of “Twilight,” “Harry Potter,” and “The Hunger Games.”
In the interim, the cinematic landscape for this style has changed even further and so has my own perception of the phenomenon.
While never outright hostile towards it, the ubiquity of low quality films with little improvement catering to a small but very vocal and feverous audience seemingly unafraid to voice concern for literal translation of their beloved text over actual quality of filmmaking left me somewhat callous YA, a genre that I had generally circumvented growing up reading with little idea of how much it would have spoken to me had I given it a chance earlier.
Undeniable abuse of templates exploited by marketing aside, there’s a certain experimental nature to YA in terms of the concepts and ideas that it explores anchored by the constraints of its audience that squarely focus everything on more character driven narratives, that really speaks to me.
The trend for more concise and simplified writing lends itself well to a storytelling clarity that may not always make for high complexity but helps avoid major pitfalls of contemporary fiction, genre or otherwise, to lose sight of its goal amongst needless storytelling flourishes and while it isn’t without its major pitfalls and hang-ups, I’ve gained a newfound admiration for what it’s capable of that has me fascinated with it, reading it, and even in the current process of writing it.
As my feelings have changed on the matter regarding the literary landscape however, so has the nature of its adaptations.
Franchises are ending, paradigms have fallen, and the trends of popularity and formatting have fluctuated so spectacularly that the 3 years separating my first look at modern YA from now may as well have been a lifetime ago.
Thus, I have decided to reexamine the state of the genre once more in a monthly series, studying franchises and trends along with how their successes and failure have transformed YA’s representation in popular media.
“Younger and Wiser” kicks off in January, starting with the franchise that I left off on with “Young and Stupid.”
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