Juuust saw the trailer for “The Fallen” and... that’s it, right? That’s the new Twilight?
How come Young Adult stuff has become so... formulated? “Plain but pretty brunette, white female lead, who inevitably falls in love with a guy (also white, of course) while the movie around it tries to have plot and mysteries and lots of drama?” Be it Twilight, Hunger Games, Divergent... now... this. It’s a bit... exhausting in how repetitive it is. How predictive.
With Twilight, when it came out, I was a teen myself and due to everyone in my grade reading it and... me being stuck on a beach for two weeks, having desperately run out of books to read after half a week and my friend having the first Twilight book at hand... I actually read it and I’ve seen nearly all the movies. It was... okay? Like, if you take Bella out of the story, it’d actually be pretty decent? The Cullens and their background stories individually seemed really interesting, but in the end this started the trend of “There could be plot here, but let’s focus on this plain but pretty brunette, white girl who inevitably falls in love with this guy and to spice it up we got this other guy ready for a love-triangle”-trend.
Suuure, the Hunger Games had some deeper... I don’t know, I gave up after the second movie, but I rest assured that the books had like plot and not just “Where’s Peeta?”. Was probably the movie makers’ fault for hardcore focusing the movies on the love situation instead of giving them depth. I mean, it had an interesting take in that while the female lead was not utterly useless and helpless without the guy around, it was the guy who was painfully useless. There was an interesting world suggested here, but instead of diving more into that and explaining it in terms people who haven’t read the books would actually, you know, see as something that makes sense, they rather focused on Gale-Katniss-Peeta-drama-looove... and then they pick the two who don’t have any chemistry? How is that even a thing? I was so stunned at the end of the first movie when Katniss actually chose the bland, boring, useless one over the handsome, funny, quippy guy she had chemistry and history with. Bold choice there. Totally lost me, but... bold choice.
By the time Divergent rolled around, I wasn’t even ready to give it the benefit of the doubt because the trailer literally told me all I needed to know. “Hello. I am trying to become The New Thing. I’m going to be a mixture between Hunger Games and Twilight and my lead is even more expressionless than Kristen Stewart was.”. And, considering the fact that the last movie didn’t even make it on the big streen, I must have been right with my assumption of this not being worth my time.
There was a bit of silence after that. Like. I don’t know, I was hopeful that maybe we’d now move on from the Twilight scheme? This however... feels so hard like Twilight that it feels more as though it should have come out in, I don’t know, 2013 or something. I mean... I feel as though it’s safe to say that the Twilight hype has pretty much died down by now, right? And this... thing... is trying to be a fusion of Shadowhunters and Twilight, with the lightest teasing of Harry Potter by placing it in a special fancy castle school? I guess?
My point - there is a point to this, actually, somewhere, just be patient - is that I’ve never understood why YA novels have such a hard time focusing on their actual stories and have to push the romance into the forefront of it all? I’m not saying that all the YA novels should cut all the romance. I’m just saying that I’m kinda growing tired of YA movies abandoning the world-building for the sake of showing more love drama as though that is all that matters to young adults?
Which is literally the reason the Percy Jackson movie got me into the books. Because there was zeeero romance. Just three friends, on a mythical quest, with monsters and gods and yes, please. No romance sounds amazing. Also the reason I got into the books, because romance doesn’t rear its head literally until the last half of the very last book in the series and just yes. I want to read and see about friendships and world-building, not soap-opera levels of love-drama. Which Riordan did with the sequel series, so there’s that...
Which, in my personal opinion, is the reason Harry Potter worked so well. It was mainly about friendship. Harry, Ron, Hermione. Yes, there’s gotta be some romance because otherwise I don’t know the heads of teenage girls will explode because obviously aaall females need to have romance in their franchises or else the franchise loses their interest. Obviously, or something, I don’t know. But it was a side-note. Ron and Hermione, not Harry. That... thing with Ginny happened even more on the side-lines and it was never about Harry’s epic love for Ginny with a dash of world-saving it was about world-saving, friendship and as an additional bonus, he found a girl along the way. I do not understand why that concept can’t catch on. Why the concept of loveloveloveloveloveTHEREMUSTBELOVE is the one that dominates.
So, the point of this point is that I’ve reached the point where I’d really love to see an asexual, aromantic main character. By now, it’s literally the only way that I can see it happening that romance isn’t the main focus.
Like, set it up with the two hottest hunkiest guys on opposite sides of a supernatural spectrum falling for the female lead and then have her turn them both down and make them be just friends and then focus on a group of friends saving the day, instead of the day-saving being a side-note in the “epic love story”.
How far away are we from that, in the progress of rainbow-acceptance? We’re now including gays and bisexuals in our big franchises, right? So? Give me a number? Years? How long do I have to wait?
