paninyas:

job8-9:

“But I also see a huge amount of putting down YA and generalising YA (often putting down and generalising by women, because internalised misogyny is indeed a thing).”

can we please stop pretending that the young adult scene is not actual garbage right now??? can we stop kidding ourselves?? no i’m not fed up with young adult lit because the majority of the authors in the scene are women. i’m fed up with it because the scene is fucking catty, repetitive, exclusive, and, to reiterate, GARBAGE.

• yeah, okay, first off: cattiness. i recently saw a blurb for some release or other boasting that is “better than the hunger games” like what the fuck?? what kind of dirty tactics? “pitched as x classic thing meets x series” seriously?? competition is one thing but climbing all over another series just to get your shit promoted is catty, dirty, and immature. damn straight i’m side-eying a book with cross-clique blurbs because that shit is ridiculous.
• which brings me to the repetitiveness. your young adult book is the hunger games with x twist? why the fuck should i care? couldn’t you have uploaded that to ff.net and called it a day? i’m legit so tired of white authors spinning each other’s work and calling it a day, meanwhile a woc author has to turn the world inside out in order to get published, and it’s like, are you serious?
• WHICH BRINGS ME TO: exclusivity!! haha like please go to your local barnes and noble and look down the teen fiction aisle. note how many of those authors are white. note how many of the covers feature white teenagers. note how many of those white teenagers are straight, cis, able bodied, etc. and then tell me that that’s not something to be fucking fed up with. like i dare you, straight white author, to tell me, queer black mentally ill woman, to stop bagging on a genre that refuses to represent me or even acknowledge my existence as a human being. go ahead.
• so yeah, finally, the combined aspects make it all garbage to me. like, absolute trash.

i’m fucking fed up and no, it’s not on account of my ~internalized misogyny~. i’m not gonna be quiet about it because i spend my money on these books. i spend money and time going through the teen fiction section and am disappointed time after time. the whitewashing, the queerbaiting, the exoticism and racism adds up after a time and its fucking infuriating. this isn’t to say that i think every YA book on the shelf is fucking trash because that’s ridiculous. i have read some seriously amazing debuts—amazing, original, inclusive works by authors who seriously need more attention. as a whole, though? YA is trash and it’s gonna be at least a decade before i even consider redacting that statement