I marked this as informative but almost marked it as lunacy because holy shit that's ridiculous. This honestly makes people scared to write, because apparently writing anything you haven't experienced personally is horrible and wrong and you just don't get it (but high fantasy is popular...).
If nothing else, JK is a great "character writer"
There is a character, the son of Hades, who is gay. But it's not a huge part of his character or anything (late into The Heroes of Olympus he gets a boyfriend and there are some implications early on that he's gay but nothing major). I don't think it ever even came up until THoO. He's honestly a great character and I will be so angry if they crank up the gay factor to an 11 and make that his primary personality trait instead of a background mention.
"Your OC is now Asian because that's what I want."
Most of those are so hamfisted and forced. Yikes... only one I really found funny because she made the author sound like an alien trying to describe humanoids.
I'm Pagan and was in the right age range for this series at the time but never read it or had any interest in it. It's really annoying to see teens come into groups thinking they are the child of x deity because of this series. I also found a lot of Percy Jackson stuff when I was Googling for actual information on mythology. More times than I can count. There are way better works of fiction and fantasy inspired by mythology!!!
That's disturbing. I noticed this too. It's not healthy and would have once been one of those quirks you didn't go around broadcasting. If you like weird shit fine but don't be so open about it especially under your real name. The only one of those super popular ya books I was into was Twilight but I read Anne Rice quickly after because I saw on the reviews of Breaking Dawn that Meyer is apparently the new Anne Rice.
Though I’m sure this is not a surprise to either of you, but it’s just part of the greater infantilization that is going on. I used to not think it was too big of a problem when it came to entertainment since escapism is inherent (comic book movies can be a lot of fun, and I prefer Super Mario over Grand Theft Auto), but it seems a lot of people are trying to have it both ways: claiming that whatever children’s cartoon they are watching has profound life lessons and is therefore SRS BSNS. Too often do I see people in their 30s posting on Facebook about how the most recent episode of Steven Universe or DuckTales “destroyed” them. These are often the same people who think mean tweets are comparable to actual abuse or flip their shit when Martin Scorsese compares Marvel movies to theme parks, so I guess it’s not a surprise. Given how quickly they are to condemn something that doesn’t completely adhere to their beliefs, it’s no wonder they stay away from entertainment that has nuance.I saw tweets saying that the Percy Jackson announcement had "saved 2020 from being a complete shitshow."
When I was in that age bracket in the 00s the only YA series I liked were Harry Potter and Artemis Fowl (the first four, I heard it got fucking dumb afterwards). I didn't read many of the others, like I read a bit of Percy Jackson and the first book of Rick Riordan's Egyptian gods one (which I thought were mostly dumb, especially the Egypt ones with the black MC playing basketball with monkeys) and tried to read Hunger Games before I put it down since the first person-present tense writing style annoyed the hell out of me. I watched a few movie adaptions of YA books and some of them like The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising are among the worst and most boring shit I ever watched, although the Percy Jackson adaption was too funny/stupid to hate. When I was in that age range (around the time Harry Potter finished up) I moved onto The Hobbit (which is technically YA) and Lord of the Rings/Silmarillion pretty quickly and not long after read lots of Star Trek and especially Star Wars novels, Michael Moorcock's works, and ASOIAF.
Well, Paige Cee/LegallyPaige who is discussed at the beginning of this thread will literally DNF and one-star a book just on the basis that the main character is a cishet white male, regardless of the writing quality. And for some unfathomable reason she seems to have a lot of sway in the YA book community.
