Oh,

Your character doesn't need to be likeable. They need to be legible. The reader needs to understand every decision they make even when it's wrong, even when it's ugly, even when they want to shake them. Likeable is easy and forgettable. Legible is what makes someone stay with you for years. Make the logic of every bad choice visible. The reader doesn't have to agree with it. They just have to follow it.

Something neuroscience-y that helps with prose: attention is selective. A character will not notice everything in a room. They will notice what matters to their goal, fear, desire, training, wound, or obsession. A jealous character notices hands. a hungry character notices food. A soldier notices exits. A lonely character notices pairs. Description becomes character when attention has a bias.

lots of handwringing and discomfort about the phenomenon of kinks forming before puberty but if you think about it’s it’s much scarier to imagine a world where kinks only ever appear without warning when you’re fully grown

on your 18th birthday—wait no let’s say 25th birthday—you must undergo the traditional ritual and be assigned a kink that will determine the course of your sex life forevermore and place you within the corresponding faction. you close your eyes and pray that it’s something kind of classy and chic and practical and affordable and not something that will freak you out or embarrass you. the girl before you comes out crying; she’s autistic and got “prolonged eye contact”. you gulp. someone else is hastily pulling up Wikipedia. the anarchist guy covered in ACAB pins scowls at the floor, resentfully contemplating his uniform fetish.

Man, these YA dystopias are really starting to reach for fresh concepts.

one sexually mature adult woman dares to defy it all… what will happen to her world when she walks out of the ritual with a kink for feet…. AND inflatable pool toys?