Been a while since I’ve written anything here, eh? Maybe it’s because I don’t have much to say at the moment. My life has lacked interest in recent weeks. Aside from a jaunt down to California to go to a friend’s wedding, not much has happened. The wedding ended up being great, though. The bride is the warlock in my D&D campaign, and it was an honor to be invited. We actually met through D&D. She and I had several mutual friends who played in the D&D campaign I ran during the pandemic, and now I consider her one of my closest friends. For the wedding, she and her husband rented out an entire campground in Carmel Valley for the weekend to do a sort of adult summer camp. Since the groom was Scottish, there were many people in kilts, and copious amounts of alcohol consumption. I definitely indulged in quite a quantity of liquid enjoyment myself. It was a good thing that I had a bed in a cabin, because it meant I could just pass out after the drinks ’n’ dancing were finished.
But I’m back in Seattle now. In recent weeks, I’ve been deep in the novel mines, working on a couple of different projects, a vampire horror novel and a secondary world supernatural adventure fantasy. I’ve liked switching between projects in the past. If I’m bored of one book, I can always switch to another. This especially helps when I get stuck on a particular part. Short fiction is also a great way to change it up. This spring, I wrote about ten or so short stories, and it’s a lot of fun to have a finished manuscript after just a couple days or a week. And if you write 1,000 words a day, eventually you’ll end up with a lot of manuscripts…
At the same time I’m working on these new projects, I’ve been querying a contemporary YA fantasy. In order to understand the market, I’ve been reading a lot of YA fantasy series as well. This leads me to reading a bunch of what I would consider “young adult romantasy slop”. It’s enjoyable slop, I suppose, but that doesn’t change the fact that most of these books follow the same recipe:
1. We begin with a teenage female protagonist that has no real distinguishing characteristics save for being ravishingly beautiful, although no one acknowledges that beauty.
2. She encounters a much older supernatural male character, often a member of a royal family who falls madly in love with her, because apparently what ancient vampire/fae/wizard/necromancer/whatever gentlemen crave is a nubile teenage girl with no distinguishing characteristics.
3. The teenage girl awakens to supernatural powers. Often she is revealed to be of magical lineage herself.
4. A second love interest falls for the teenage girl. Often this is a childhood friend who reveals supernatural powers as well.
5. The older supernatural man forms a mystic unbreakable bond with the teenage girl. Angst ensues.
6. After a final confrontation with some kind of world-dominating evil, the teenage girl’s powers save the world. But for some reason, the supernatural pedophile – sorry, hottie – cannot be with the teenage girl. Their romance will play out over the course of the next several volumes of the series.
Is Twilight to blame for this formula? Because these books all follow the same arc. That’s fair: I guess you gotta follow what’s popular. I get the idea of having a POV character with no real personality: she can become a reader surrogate figure, although I would much rather read about interesting people with strong motivation who set out to achieve their goals in a compelling way. But maybe I’m just a weirdo that way.
I also wonder what these books say about the desires of teenage girls. If these books are supposed to be a sort of wish-fulfillment, does this mean that millions of teenage girls secretly desire for a powerful older man to get obsessed with them to the point of insanity? Part of me gets it. I mean, considering what absolute degenerates teenage boys are, the idea of dating someone with more experience or maturity can be appealing. But if these girls want someone at their level of maturity, why don’t they just date other girls? Even if you’re only a 1 or a 2 on the Kinsey scale, surely girls your own age must be so much more appealing than older creeps?
Maybe I’m trying to use too much logic. As someone on both the autism and asexuality spectra, I sometimes feel like an alien anthropologist studying the mating behaviors of some lower species of hominid. But seriously! Use your brains for once! Do not listen to your ovaries! They can only lead you astray!
I guess I don’t get the desire that people have to spray their genetic material all over each other. This is why asexuality is the most powerful orientation, I suppose. But is sex really so good that humans will abandon of all the higher functionality of their cerebral cortex just to rub against something moist and warm? What exactly am I missing?
~ Ian (listening to Unicorn by GUNSHIP)