There’s been a ruckus over in the YA book blog arena as of late regarding romance in the YA category.  I’m not sure where it started but I have read a few of the posts on both sides of the argument and they’re equally polarizing.  The argument is whether YA romance should change because of the “bad romance” that’s, as of late, been perpetuated in their pages.  Twilight is often used as a reference, making Edward the controlling abusive boyfriend and Bella the weak doormat of a girlfriend.  Their love is founded on nothing deeper than superficial looks (and smells), he stalks her, he commands her, he controls her and she loves him for it.  Other books like Hush, Hush are used but I haven’t read those.

I have read the Twilight series and I agree that Edward and Bella’s relationship is ridiculous and not something that should be emulated.  I read a similar relationship in the book Lament by Maggie Stiefvater between the female MC and her faerie boyfriend.  She loved him despite knowing nothing about him and only knowing he existed for a couple of weeks.  I’m not a fan of the lust = love that goes on in YA as it’s a bad message to send to the impressionable minds reading it.

Against Change

A common element in posts rallying for YA romance is that it’s “just fiction”(1) and “if you don’t like it, don’t read it.”(2)  The people reacting so strongly against YA romance need to stop taking books so seriously(3) and, basically, shut up already.(4)

1) Just fiction, is it?  Tell that to the swarms of rabid Twilight fans that claw at their own bodies to bleed for Robert Pattinson when he’s near.  Or those same fans inflicting bodily harm on those that don’t like Twilight and dare to voice their opinion on the matter.  Or all those thirteen-year-old girls that actually aren’t capable of differentiating fiction from reality and see Edward as the shining star of boyfriends and will actually mould their world to find a guy just like him.  Or Twimoms.

My argument is it is just fiction so long as you’re capable of determining where fiction ends and reality begins.  I’ve always found it ironic when people passionate about books hear opinions they don’t like resort to the “it’s just fiction” defense.  If it’s just fiction, why voice you opinion so adamantly against other adamant opinions?  Why have a book blog?  Why promote books?  Slightly hypocritical.

“It’s just fiction” only applies to those minds that are capable of making that distinction.  To everyone else, that “fiction is so much more.

2) If you’ve never read it before, how do you know you’re not going to like it?  In my experience, those are usually the same people that’ll chastise a poor review crying, “if you didn’t like it, why did you read it?” and equally harp on someone that pre-emptively judges something, saying, “don’t knock it until you try it.”  Really, you can’t have it both ways.

In the likes of Hush, Hush, it’s been getting rave reviews all over the place.  People are loving it.  If you happen to be a fan of YA romance in general, it’s probably going to be something you’re going to pick up based on the glowing opinions of your peers.  Being a reviewer, you’d think it’d be the reviewer’s job to voice concern with a book they thought would be one way but ended up being another.  Are they not allowed?  For all of the “don’t be afraid to post negative reviews” going around, does that only apply to some books?  I am a book reviewer.  If I pick up a book thinking it’s going to be one way and it just falls in line with all of the other same-old already out there, I’m going to say something about it.  As is the nature of a reviewer.  To throw the dissenting line right back at them, “if you don’t want to read my negative review, which will be quite evident from the beginning, then don’t read it.”

3) See 1) above regarding taking books too seriously.  This is the very reason why people on the “for” side want change in YA.  It’s honestly not all that healthy to draw blood for an actor that you only see as a character, nor is it healthy to physically lash out at someone that doesn’t agree with you about a book.  We’re trying to be both proactive and reactionary with this.  If we can get the word out that Edward is really a piece of shit that doesn’t deserve to be worshipped, then maybe the readers will start to see flaws in subsequent similar relationships in other YA romance books (which they are).  Yet books with such relationships are still being written so it’s a never-ending cycle.

This is another argumentative element that many people only use when it serves them.  Apparently little do they realize that they’re taking these books just as seriously when they rebut posts.

4) No.  To throw that line back at them yet again, “if you don’t like it, don’t read it.”  At least this time you know what you’re going to get so if you further subject yourself to articles that only make you angry, you have no one to blame but yourself.  How about not clicking on the post titled, “Why YA Romance Needs to Change”?  That would be a good start.

It’s the main reason why I don’t read romances of any kind (for the most part).  I’ve never been a fan.  There have been a few YA that I have read that I’ve liked, like Sea Change by Aimee Friedman where the female lead actually has a backbone and knows when to put her foot down.  But if something is labeled as YA romance, or I read that the central plot is some sort of love issue, I’m going to skip it.  It’s rare I end up reading one but why would I subject myself to that?  I don’t mind the occasional rant but after a while they’d just get redundant.

I’ve also seen comments chastising bloggers for being feminists, as if that’s a bad thing.  Yes, how bull dyke-y of us to get cranky when yet another book comes out with a doormat for a female lead and a stalker for a love interest.  God, the nerve, right?  Maybe you want to be Mary Tyler Moore in your apron and pearls cooking dinner for your husband and 2.4 kids but I don’t.  I don’t have anything against housewives and I don’t see them as weak for not donning a skirt suit and going out into the working world, but it’s not a lifestyle I’d opt into myself.  It doesn’t mean I should get the word ‘feminist’ spit at me as if it’s a four letter word.  That’ll just make me laugh.

I’ve seen others say that it’s okay to have wimps for main characters because not everyone is Xena.  Um . . . okay . . . while I’ll agree that not every chick can jack a guy against a wall with one hand but I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s okay to have weak female characters.  Yes, not everyone has a strong personality but I don’t think it’s right to perpetuate that it’s okay to be weak and submissive and bow down to stronger personalities.  Why is it okay to perpetuate the notion that finally giving into your stalker because he “might not be that bad”?  Really?  That’s okay?  Some jackass is harassing you at school, calling you a prude for not going out with him, badgering you for a date and you finally acquiesce to just shut him up . . . and end up falling for him . . . that’s okay?  I honestly pity upcoming generations of women if that’s okay.

I also saw one blogger rant on about all of this being called rape culture and how disgusting all of the people making the association were for even making it because rape is such a horrible thing.  Yeah, it is.  But what’s being forced to date your stalker?  What’s being forced to date a bully?  What’s being forced to fuck someone just so they might leave you alone?  To get a better idea of the notion of YA romance and rape culture, read this blog post.  It uses Hush, Hush as an example.  It quotes off of this blog post about society’s perpetuation of “you’re damned if you do, you’re damned if you don’t” for women.  So am I a cold-hearted bitch for ramming my elbow into a guy’s spine when he decided to cop a feel in a bar?  Or am I just crazy?  When I tell a guy to his face to fuck off, what kind of bitch am I then?  It’s the notion of don’t you dare stand up for yourself ever if you don’t want to be ostracized but if you don’t stand up for yourself and you end up getting raped, well you brought it on yourself and you deserve it you disgusting whore.

So what then?  How is that not disgusting?  So we have books that are teaching pre-pubescent minds to acquiesce to that creepy guy’s request because otherwise they’d be some form of a bitch and we don’t want that, but that only leads to stalking and death threats and rape and so on and so forth.  That’s okay, is it?  It’s not disgusting what some of these books are saying is okay?  So all teenage girls should go out and give their stalkers a chance?  Let’s see what comes of it?

As I said, for those of us that can differentiate fantasy from reality, it’s fluff.  Flight of fancy that gives us a chance to escape.  Personally I’d step on the nuts of some of these characters with my five inch stilettos (I was always much more fond of Jasper than I ever was of Edward) and go after their non-restraining order friends but that’s just me.  But for those that don’t, therein lies the real issue and the one which we’re currently rallied for.

For Change

While I agree with much more of the “for” side than the against, there’s some polarizing stuff that I do think is going too far.

Like giving any book with even a hint of a supposed “bad romance” a bad review simply to send a message.  To crawl into a writer’s shoes (as I stand in them so frequently), the messages that a lot of people pull from books the author is usually oblivious to.  I can guarantee that SMeyer didn’t intentionally write the Edward/Bella/Jacon triangle the way many of us interpreted it.  Personally it makes me question just what her definition of a good relationship is but that’s besides the point.  A lot of the times that subliminal message isn’t even realized until other people point it out.

Just like we had that issue with “white privilege” and people “not noticing” that the cover models didn’t match the race of the actual character, we have the “rape culture” notion beaten into our heads that even subconsciously, while we’re writing a romance, we’re writing characters that we don’t see as being weak or submissive until someone else points it out to us.  Basically it’s not a notion that we’ve actively adopted but something that’s bred there from birth.  While it doesn’t make it right, it doesn’t make it okay to brow-beat people for writing what they feel is a love story.

In a perfect world every woman would recognize a creep right from the beginning and have the nerve to stand up to him.  But that’s not the case.  While I’m not condoning bad romances in YA, I’m saying look at the other side of the coin before tying the author to a stake and setting it ablaze.  A book doesn’t deserve a bad review because the MC didn’t kick the love interest in the nuts when you thought she should.  If we did that for every single romance, YA or otherwise, we wouldn’t be promoting shit.

Striking a balance is key.  If you really feel that the relationship isn’t a good one, mention it.  Will it really kill the rest of the book for you?  Most book bloggers out there are over the age of consent so they can read a book for its entertainment value while giving it a more critical eye.  I mention the relationship in Lament in my review of it -

As for the relationship between Luke and Dee . . . meh. Dee does become pretty reliant on Luke to get her out of tough situations but when the time comes for her to step up to the plate, she’s capable which is a nice thing to see. Instead of relying on someone else’s help, she finds the strength within to remedy the situation. That’s an awesome thing right there. When all seems lost, the MC makes it not lost with no one’s help but her own.

And so help me, every time Luke called Dee pretty girl, I wanted to punch him in the throat. From the second he said it I felt it was so patronizing, especially within the context of some of his sentences. There were times where I thought it actually belittled Dee but she loved him calling her that. Whatever. To each her own and some junk.

Am I perpetuating the problem?  I’m sure some would see it that way.  But I’m also not one to go absolute shit when I disagree with it.  That would just make me angry way too often and that’s a lot of expended energy.  I mentioned parts of the relationship that I didn’t like.  I felt that Luke’s comments were patronizing.  It doesn’t mean they actually were.  It’s just how I read them.

So I mean a line has to be drawn somewhere here.  If you read Albatross by Josie Bloss you’ll see that the line isn’t so blurred at all in that story.  Micah’s a prick.  Plain and simple.  The way he treats the MC is despicable but the point of the story is to actually showcase a bad romance, not mask it as something it isn’t.  There is no “leave it up to interpretation” here where I think there is in a lot of the other stories.

I can only attest to what I’ve actually read.  I’d have to read Hush, Hush to be able to say, one way or another, that I would agree with the above-linked blog post in its interpretation of the relationship.  I have made myself very clear in my reviews of Twilight about how I felt about that one.

Yes, weakness bothers me.  No, I don’t find the act of falling in love as inherently a weakness.  I also don’t interpret lust as love.  Love actually requires knowing someone for more than a nanosecond and liking something other than their looks.  We all interpret things differently based on how we were raised.  Just like with any situation, multiple people can interpret the same scene multiple ways.  There are situations where the situation is undeniable.  If a girl is asking for help to get away from a bad situation and it’s being denied to her, there’s something wrong there.  But if a guy calls a girl “pretty girl,” some girls would find it endearing while others would find it condescending.  Not everyone has that feminist streak and not everyone is going to interpret everything as an assault on the female psyche.  It’s not a bad thing to be a feminist and stand up for women’s rights but some perspective is required.

So let’s not be so quick to chastise the authors of what one would consider a “bad romance.”  Understanding and evaluating both sides of the coin always leads to a more well-rounded  and balanced opinion on the matter.

As you can see, I lean much more towards the “this weak female shit’s gotta stop” side of the argument but it’s all within its own perspective.  Not every female is strong-willed.  Not everyone’s going to see a pet name the same way.  I’d like to think that everyone would notice the signs of stalking universally but I guess even that can vary from person to person.  I know in arguments like this, especially on the more feminist side, it’s an all or nothing type of thing but that’s not how I like to work.  I understand there are different strokes for different folks and with something like that, it can’t be blanketed.  It’s different for someone that’s been in a situation where they’ve been powerless and taken advantage of.  I have, Hence something like the elbow to the spine.  But I still don’t have it in me to try and force my minds eye onto other people about something like this.

It doesn’t mean I like to see weak female protags in YA romance falling for their overbearing stalkers any more.  I’m just not going to turn into a rabid snarling feminist about it either.  They’re called extremes for a reason.