#ya media

[prokopetz]

Today's aesthetic: YA media where being a monster or having gross super powers or whatnot initially appears to be a blunt allegory for having some very specific flavour of neurodivergence, like literally a textbook presentation, but as it goes on it becomes increasingly obvious that the writer doesn't realise this.

[fluffycakesistainted]

x

Even more unfortunately, it's not just teen/ya shows it's scifi/fantasy/"genre" shows in general. They're pretty much non-existent on network tv right now, and the ones on cable/streaming, it's the handful of episodes every 2+ years shit 🙄

[kiwisandpearls]

I love it when discussions about how we should be consuming things other than kids media suddenly derail into making fun and judging people for consuming media that’s for a younger age demographic that’s so cool so fun so amazing so

[jinglebellrockstars]

am i the only one who finds shit like this lame af like "no child protagonist of childrens media, let the adults handle the cool stuff that child audiences wanna do and identify with! youre too immature and stupid to be the hero you wanna be!" like bro use your brain and think about Why stories centered on kids tend to have kids to hero adventures

[prokopetz]

It's actually vital for there to be ostensibly queer-friendly YA media where the leads are all some flavour of gay but go out of their way to prove how Normal they are about it while the villain is queer-coded like something out of The Rocky Horror Picture Show because everyone should have the chance to be represented in media that sucks ass.

[prokopetz]

I don’t really have a dog in the whole child-soldiers-in-YA-media thing. Some YA media acknowledges that the situation is bad, but the kids have to do it anyway because every single adult who could have intervened is incompetent, indifferent, or complicit, and some YA media just never brings it up in the first place, and both approaches are fine – you have to consider the target audience, after all.

I will, however, give a piece of YA media the side-eye when it wants to do the “actually, these are child soldiers, and that’s fucked up” thing, but only when the bad guys do it, while simultaneously celebrating the good guys for doing the exact same thing. Like, what exactly are we implying here?

[prokopetz]

YA media: “One day a young girl gains extraordinary powers – but there’s a twist!”

Me: “Is the twist that her powers or the source that grants them is what’s causing the story’s central problem in the first place, and she ends up having to permanently give up her powers and/or erase her own existence in order for everybody else to have a happy ending?”

YA media: “... not necessarily.”

[prokopetz]

i think YA literature functions as a litmus test for the circumstances of an adult reader’s upbringing: there are those who look at child protagonists routinely being forced to grapple with potentially life-threatening problems unassisted because every single adult they know is indifferent, incompetent, or complicit and think “this is bizarre and unfathomable, who in their right mind would allow this?”, and there are those who look at that and think “yeah, sounds about right”.