books and flowers

“History, huh? Bet we could make some” 🏳️‍🌈

JOMP day 5

So you build your protagonist. She has no personality traits beyond being decently strong-willed, so that her quirks and interesting traits absolutely can’t get in the way of the audience’s projection onto her. She is dainty, birdlike, beautiful despite her protestations that she is ugly–yet she can still hold her own against significantly taller and stronger combatants. She is the perfect mask for the bashful, insecure tweens you are marketing to to wear while they read.

You think, as you draft your novel, that you need to add something that appeals to the basest nature of teenagers, something this government does that will be perversely appealing to them. The Hunger Games’ titular games were the main draw of the books, despite the hatred its characters hold for the event. So the government forces everyone into Harry Potter houses. 

So the government makes everyone choose their faction, their single personality trait. Teenagers and tweens are basic–they likely identify by one distinct personality trait or career aspiration, and they’ll thus be enchanted by this system. For years, Tumblr and Twitter bios will include Erudite or Dauntless alongside Aquarius and Ravenclaw and INTJ. Congratulations, you just made having more than one personality trait anathema to your worldbuilding. 

Your readers and thus your protagonist are naturally drawn to the faction that you have made RIDICULOUSLY cooler and better than the others: Dauntless. The faction where they play dangerous games of Capture the Flag and don’t work and act remarkably like teenagers with a budget. You add an attractive, tall man to help and hinder the protagonist. He is brooding and handsome; he doesn’t need to be anything else. 

The villains appear soon afterward. They are your tried and true dystopian government: polished, sleek, intelligent, headed by a woman for some reason. They fight the protagonists, they carry out their evil, Machiavellian, stupid plan. You finish the novel with duct tape and fanservice, action sequences and skin and just enough glue and spit to seal the terrible, hollow world you have made shut just long enough to put it on the shelf. 

And you have just destroyed YA dystopian literature. Because you have boiled it down to its bare essentials. A sleek, futuristic government borrowing its aesthetic from modern minimalism and wealth forces the population to participate in a perversely cool-to-read-about system like the Hunger Games or the factions, and one brave, slender, pretty, hollow main character is the only one brave–no, special enough to stand against it. 

but divergent was clumsy make-believe the whole way through. it aped the forms and functions of dystopian lit but the writer didn’t actually have any real, passionate, sincere anger to put on the page. she didn’t know what it was talking about, so she didn’t have anything worth listening to.

Character A: [falls asleep in Character B’s bed]

Character A: that was the best sleep i’ve had in weeks

Me:

i analysed the books tumblr ya is wild about & heres a venn diagram about how we all love birds, being gay and murder

french: :)

english: oh boy

french: :)

english: oh no

french: :)

english: oh geez

english: :)

french: don’t

german: :)

english: oh dear

spanish: :)

english: no don’t

spanish: :)

english: oh lordy

polish: :)

english: i changed my mind

UK english: ladybird!

american english: ladybug

french: weird

dutch: :)

french: …what

dutch: the good lord’s little animal

french: …ok

irish, polish and russian: *giggling*

french: …just tell me

Dutch: :)

English: … tell me

Finnish: :)

English: for fuck’s sake

asl: :D!

english: tell me?

Romanian: :)

English: huh?

Latin: :D

English: what?

Slovene: Behind God’s back

Serbian:

Italian: :)

English: what now?

English: :S

Welsh: …

English: a longing for something or somewhere which no longer exists, to which you can no longer return; the longing for the lost homeland of your ancestors, which you know only through blood and tradition, and will never feel under your feet

English: ladybird

Welsh: :) :) :) :) :) :)

English: look, you literally just made fun of me for my lexical limitations, why are you -

Welsh: little red cow :)

English: aw :)

Happy Sunday 📖

My copy of Anna Karenina has arrived (this one’s published in 1980).