#fandom ya

[ninja-muse]

The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England was starting to bug me, so I put it aside last night and binged this to clear my brain! Zoe Rosenthal Is Not Lawful Good contains:

a Jewish MC

an aroace enby

an autistic guy

the greatest show nobody’s heard of

multiple comicons

bullet journals

Master Plans

the lies we tell ourselves

technically legal kidnappings

found family

so much cosplay

a definite good time

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have you talked about loveless and Eliza and her monsters? could you share about those?

Sure!

I liked Loveless but I wasn’t in the right headspace to love it, which is unfortunate because I was really hoping I would. (This might’ve been part of my problem.) I found the story a little long and meandering, but really liked the complexity of the friendships and Georgia’s journey to finding herself. And it is great for aro/ace rep! Some very relatable moments and just enough Ace 201—it’s a spectrum, ace and aro aren’t necessarily a package, etc.—that it’s permanently on my ace recs list. :) I can see why so many people love it and see themselves in Georgia, but since I never bought into amatonormativity as much as she did, that wasn’t me. (Another part of my problem, I’m sure, since I always go into ace books hoping I’ll see myself.)

I really liked Eliza and Her Monsters though! I saw a lot of myself in Eliza, from the love of creativity and the ease of online friendships, to the outsider awkwardness and mental health stuff. Zappia did a good job portraying all the fandom and online stuff, and juggling all the issues she brought up. (I was surprised by how many issues were in it, actually.) It’s been months so I don’t remember a whole lot else, but I know I was constantly annoyed at her parents for not seeing her, that I really liked Warren, and there was at least one moment of catharsis near the end. Very good “fandom YA”, as I call it. On the rec list!

(I have reviews here and here.)

Have you read either or both of these? I forget.

[ninja-muse]

One more towards my goal of reading ALL THE FANNISH YA!

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Eliza and Her Monsters - Francesca Zappia

In brief: Eliza Mirk is the creator of the hit webcomic Monstrous Sea. She’s also a misfit in her school and family. She’s good with her double life, no really. But then she meets Wallace, who writes fic for her comic, and balancing everything starts to get hard.

Thoughts: At this point, I’d like to think I’m a connoisseur of fannish YA and this, folks, is one of the best I’ve read. It’s certainly the one that gets closest to how creativity feels, how online popularity feels especially in the face of brickspace loneliness, and also how depression and low self-esteem feel. (I identified with Eliza a lot.) Also, in terms of fictional fandoms, Monstrous Sea is a pretty cool one and I loved that it was excerpted along with its art.

This isn’t strictly a story about fandom, though, or about a girl stretched to her limit, though that’s a large and lovely part of it and the way the fandom feels, and its fans, struck me as very real. The rest of the story, the meat of it, is about family expectations and how those can go wrong, and about hope and courage and finding solace in art and in people, and again, that all felt real and truthful even if certain aspects of, say, Eliza’s family felt over the top. I admired the way Zappia captured Eliza’s life in all its messy, spiky glory and the way she did the standard YA coming-of-age differently.

For all that I’m waxing poetic about the plot and the themes, though, I think character is where Zappia really shines. She creates flawed, complex people and lets you in on their flaws without making that obvious. Her secondary characters (Eliza’s family, Wallace’s friends) have personalities that don’t necessarily feel deep but are, or that lie outside what you’d expect from the genre. Everyone has a voice and Monstrous Sea is exactly the sort of story Eliza would be telling.

I do think the cover blurb mis-sold the book, though. It made it sound faster and more dramatic than it was, like the Big Moment came closer to the beginning and the tension in the story was to do with that, when really the tension comes from other sources and the Moment, while sudden, is foreshadowed or at least built up to, and it’s really a story about Eliza discovering who she really is and what she wants out of life, and gaining the courage to be herself, and that’s a slow thing, spurred as much by her friendship with Wallace (who is a sweetheart) as the dramatic fandom stuff. It’s exactly the sort of leisurely, meandering, structured mess that I love in YA contemporaries.

So yeah, this absolutely hit me in the feels, if people are still saying that. Eliza’s highs were my highs and her lows meant sympathy, indignation, and … not tears, but it was close. It’s a poignant, wonderful read in a lot of ways, and not one I think should be limited to teens. There’s a whole subplot about parents and their expectations that I think a lot of adults could benefit from thinking about too, especially if they have or want children. And then, of course, there are the creative, geeky adults who were creative, geeky teens…

Anyway, the only reason I’m not rating this higher is that this didn’t blow me out of the water. It was simply very, very good.

To bear in mind: Deals pretty strongly with mental health issues, up to and including suicide, but also deals with therapy and medication. Also contains fandom dog-piling, people with very specific ideas about physical health, and people who think fine arts and the humanities aren’t worthwhile.

8/10

[ninja-muse]

Finished! And it was pretty darn good too!

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Starting this morning!

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Geekerella - Ashley Poston

In brief: Elle’s living under the thumb of her stepmom and stepsisters while dreaming of ExcelsiCon’s Starfield cosplay contest, which will get her to film school. Darien’s just gotten the lead in the Starfield reboot and is trying to adjust to being The Topic in a fandom he’s part of. When a crossed connection starts them anonymously texting, they discover a lot about themselves—and each other. First in a series.

Thoughts: This was so cute! Wonderful fannish retelling, good romance, and a heart-warming light read!

This is an excellent, creative modernization of Cinderella. I really liked how Poston reimagined the characters, especially the beauty vlogger stepsisters and the green-haired fashionista of a fairy godmother, and how she brought the fandom to life in backstories, quotes, marathons, empowerment, and community. I also liked that this wasn’t strictly from Elle’s point-of-view, that there was a little bit of Pride and Prejudice judgementalism going on, and that both characters are dealing with abuse throughout, not just Elle.

(It’s a serious tackling of abuse too, but not a dark and gritty one. More a display of the methods and signs, so readers can recognize it in their day-to-day. Still twisted my heart and gut in sympathy, though.)

Given that this is both a retelling of a common fairy tale and a YA romance, there’s a lot of predictability in how this story goes. There aren’t many surprises, though the changes to the characters and the Hollywood stuff keep things interesting, but surprise isn’t the point, I don’t think. Poston’s aiming for light comfort reading and nailed it.

Honestly, my biggest problem is probably that what we learn about Starfield doesn’t feel internally consistent. (There seem to be timeline issues, among other things.) Followed by the stepmother’s motive or rationalism of her abusiveness, which felt slightly weird to me but is still within the realm of believability.

But that’s, like, spoiled reader problems, nothing major. Geekerella was light and funny and fannish and cute, perfect for a day of binge-reading, though it took me a little longer than that because I was reading over the work week.

Warnings: Child abuse. The pressures of celebrity and Hollywood. The nastier side of fandom. Homophobia and classism from the villains.

7/10