Is 'A Song of Ice and Fire' YA?
Jun. 16th, 2014 11:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
glitter_n_goreCredit for this blog idea is due to fellow AW member Cyia, who made the following post last week: "Just an observation, but looking at the differences in the ages of the characters in the books [of A Song of Ice and Fire] compared to their portrayals on screen, all of the main favored characters, with the possible exception of Tyrion [. . .] would have made this one of, if not the most popular YA series ever written. The POV would just have to shift a bit. Even the biggest baddie, in the form of a psycho boy king, would have been YA territory."
Have to say, I've never thought of it that way before. But she makes a fascinating point: A Song of Ice and Fire is more densely populated with teen characters--properly defined, developed, plot-driving characters, not just stereotypes and fillers--than most of the actual category YA books I've read. Seriously.
It's hard to remember this if you come to the series through the show, because so many of the characters were aged up; HBO has fewer limitations than network television about what it can and can't show, but there are Rules about minor actors and the sorts of scenes they can legally participate in. In the books, an overwhelming majority of the POV characters--Daenerys Targaryen, Jon Snow, Theon Greyjoy, Samwell Tarly, Arya, Bran and Sansa Stark--are all under 18. That's not even counting secondary characters who don't have POV chapters but still play major roles, like Robb Stark, Joffrey Baratheon, Ygritte, the Reeds, and Margaery Tyrell, who are all teenagers. Hell, even Jaime Lannister, who is technically an adult when we meet him, spends a big chunk of his narrations in flashbacks from when he first became a knight, at age fifteen.
As it happens, roughly the same time Cyia brought this up, an article started making the rounds from Slate about how grown-ups who read YA should be ashamed of themselves because: "There’s room for pleasure, escapism, juicy plots, and satisfying endings on the shelves of the serious reader. [. . . ] But if they are substituting maudlin teen dramas for the complexity of great adult literature, then they are missing something." (Full article here.)
Back to this again, are we?
So, every few months or so an article like this surfaces to scold the general populace for enjoying things that someone's decided are unworthy of being enjoyed. I still don't know why this is important. Since the Slate article has already been roundly debunked by a number of bloggers much more prolific than me, I don't even have to go there.
What I do want to ask is this: What is YA? The trouble with this question is, when you start trying to work out what YA is, you find it's a lot easier to dig up false assumptions about what YA isn't. There seem to be a lot of rules and expectations that actual YA books pretty much ignore, such as whether or not you can have gruesome violence, detailed sex scenes, foul language, etc., etc., etc. Look, either a given story calls for that kind of thing, or it doesn't, and all you need to do is pick up a handful of real live books in any category to discount any of those elements as qualifiers. Still, there are a few elements some say are required in YA that I find more compelling. But not entirely convincing.
1) Protagonists of YA fiction must be between the ages of 12 and 19. This one's a little tricky, because the reverse isn't true for adult fiction. Sometimes younger protagonists dominate the POV in books that don't get shelved as YA--books like Battle Royale or Ready Player One. (Forgive me for mostly using genre fiction in my examples here--it's just what I'm most familiar with.) But it's generally accepted that YA novels--actual, category YA novels--must also have YA protagonists, and furthermore be told through the eyes of said protagonists. No temporal distance or third-person narrations, in other words. This is the argument I've seen used most often to disqualify A Song of Ice and Fire as being YA--yes, there are several teenaged or younger POV characters, but there's also Tyrion, Davos, Eddard, Jaime, and Catelyn. (I would point out that the only POV characters in the series who have been killed off so far have been adults, but I haven't finished it yet, so I don't know if that's true anymore.) So sure--all YA novels use YA characters for their point of view. Except when they don't. The Book Thief is narrated not by Liesel but by Death, an anthropomorphic being momentarily enchanted by a particular human life during World War II. His Dark Materials shifts perspectives between two young protagonists and other characters of all ages, to fill in the gaps in the story when our intrepid heroes aren't physically there. The Hobbit--which you'll find in adult sci-fi/fantasy as well as in children's/YA, which I'll expand on in a bit--has exactly one (1) underage character in a core cast of fourteen, and it's not the protagonist/narrator. So if we're using the fact that A Song of Ice and Fire doesn't use exclusively YA characters to tell the story as a disqualifier, we'd have to disqualify a fair few other books as well.
2) YA fiction is written and marketed for an assumed target demographic of actual young adults. On the surface, this makes perfect sense. If your book is written with a young adult audience in mind, it has to be YA, right? Well, it might, and it's true in a lot of cases, but we also have books like To Kill a Mockingbird and Treasure Island which were originally written for a young audience, but are now categorized as adult fiction. The reverse can also happen--books written for an adult audience, like Lord of the Flies and Ender's Game, were rebranded in recent years and moved to the YA shelves once the market exploded. Then you have fun little anomalies like Isaac Marion's Warm Bodies and Robin McKinley's Sunshine which I've found under general fiction, sci-fi/fantasy, and YA, which amuses me to no end. And then there are older children's books like Alice in Wonderland and The Chronicles of Narnia which grab new readers in every generation to the point of being continual pop-culture phenomenons no matter what decade we're in or where they get shelved. My point being: booksellers and publishers stock the shelves in such a way that the books on said shelves will be most likely to sell. The contents of the actual books never change. Just the market. Which is all to say that although A Song of Ice and Fire is in adult sci-fi/fantasy right now, if that changes, I wouldn't be surprised. The original target demographic was the adult sci-fi/fantasy crowd; the actual, real-world audience nowadays is, well, EVERYONE. (Seriously, the doorstopper has its own display table. With action figures. Y'know--toys. Just throwing that out there.)
But none of that really bothers me. I'm not making the case for A Song of Ice and Fire to be rebranded as YA because I think it belongs there. I don't really care where it lands in the bookstore. I care about how long it'll take for Martin to finish his massive epic. I care about who will ultimately wind up on that iron throne. I care about whether or not my favorite characters will die horribly, and whether I'll have any interest in finishing the series if they do. What bothers me is the implication that YA fiction, by necessity, lacks the complexity and sophistication of adult fiction and therefore any work of recognized quality can't possibly be YA. I've heard similar implications that A Song of Ice and Fire isn't really "fantasy" because it's "better" than that, but that's another rant for another day.
What I think it all boils down to is this:
3) YA fiction is more poorly written because it speaks to an adolescent point of view. This is a really frustrating assumption that needs to die a fiery death. Almost as frustrating is when I hear defenders of YA make the argument that everyone has at some point been a teenager, and adult readers of YA enjoy returning to that time period out of nostalgia or something. Yeah, that's not why I read YA--being an actual, real-life teenager kind of sucked. Not altogether, but I would NOT want to return to that period in my life for a million bucks. All that aside, there is no reason to assume that YA books are adolescent or poorly written, especially not when you actually read a few of them. The hands-down best book I read last year was The Coldest Girl in Coldtown, a YA book about vampires, and everything I've read by Francescia Lia Block has been consistently lyrical and profoundly moving even when it's disturbing or outright horrific. I've also read my fair share of adult fiction that's repetitive, dry or lazy. Target audience and perspective do not indicate writing quality. The writing quality indicates writing quality, and it varies just as much as genre, target audience, and everything else.
Here's thing: Yes, YA fiction is basically escapist literature, but probably not in the way you're thinking. What are the most popular YA genres around right now? Easy--Paranormal romance (Twilight and all its myriad copycats), and Dystopias (The Hunger Games and all its myriad copycats*.) I've gotten the impression PNR is tapering off a bit, just looking at what circulates at the highest frequency in the library where I work. Dystopias are still pretty hot, and the movie adaptations for this year alone are an ongoing reinforcement of the type, with titles like Divergent, The Maze Runner and The Giver--and those are just the ones I know about. These books show us a mirror of our world both deconstructed and idealized at the same time--a world on the brink of collapse that's ultimately saved by the younger generation just wise enough to see the mistakes their ancestors made, and just crazy enough to actually think they can fix it. And for the most part, it works. That's where the escapism lies--not the violence and darkness in the setting and atmosphere, but the glimmer of hope that the young people living there can turn things around somehow.
With this in mind, it seems to me that A Song of Ice and Fire has more in common thematically with the YA dystopia--the dark, desolate universe under constant threat of total annihilation in which the younger generation struggles to find their place in it and clean up the mess their parents made--than its most obvious predecessor, The Lord of the Rings. Just a theory, but you know what I see most often on the holds shelf at the library? The book series people are reading more than anything else right now? Divergent, The Fault In Our Stars, The Maze Runner and A Song of Ice and Fire. One of these things is not like the others.
Or is it?
Just something to think about.
*Let's leave Battle Royale out of this for now--it's a great piece of work, but reached a much narrower audience, and didn't spark the global phenomenon that The Hunger Games did.
(Cross-posted to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rhoda_rants.)
Have to say, I've never thought of it that way before. But she makes a fascinating point: A Song of Ice and Fire is more densely populated with teen characters--properly defined, developed, plot-driving characters, not just stereotypes and fillers--than most of the actual category YA books I've read. Seriously.
It's hard to remember this if you come to the series through the show, because so many of the characters were aged up; HBO has fewer limitations than network television about what it can and can't show, but there are Rules about minor actors and the sorts of scenes they can legally participate in. In the books, an overwhelming majority of the POV characters--Daenerys Targaryen, Jon Snow, Theon Greyjoy, Samwell Tarly, Arya, Bran and Sansa Stark--are all under 18. That's not even counting secondary characters who don't have POV chapters but still play major roles, like Robb Stark, Joffrey Baratheon, Ygritte, the Reeds, and Margaery Tyrell, who are all teenagers. Hell, even Jaime Lannister, who is technically an adult when we meet him, spends a big chunk of his narrations in flashbacks from when he first became a knight, at age fifteen.
As it happens, roughly the same time Cyia brought this up, an article started making the rounds from Slate about how grown-ups who read YA should be ashamed of themselves because: "There’s room for pleasure, escapism, juicy plots, and satisfying endings on the shelves of the serious reader. [. . . ] But if they are substituting maudlin teen dramas for the complexity of great adult literature, then they are missing something." (Full article here.)
Back to this again, are we?
So, every few months or so an article like this surfaces to scold the general populace for enjoying things that someone's decided are unworthy of being enjoyed. I still don't know why this is important. Since the Slate article has already been roundly debunked by a number of bloggers much more prolific than me, I don't even have to go there.
What I do want to ask is this: What is YA? The trouble with this question is, when you start trying to work out what YA is, you find it's a lot easier to dig up false assumptions about what YA isn't. There seem to be a lot of rules and expectations that actual YA books pretty much ignore, such as whether or not you can have gruesome violence, detailed sex scenes, foul language, etc., etc., etc. Look, either a given story calls for that kind of thing, or it doesn't, and all you need to do is pick up a handful of real live books in any category to discount any of those elements as qualifiers. Still, there are a few elements some say are required in YA that I find more compelling. But not entirely convincing.
1) Protagonists of YA fiction must be between the ages of 12 and 19. This one's a little tricky, because the reverse isn't true for adult fiction. Sometimes younger protagonists dominate the POV in books that don't get shelved as YA--books like Battle Royale or Ready Player One. (Forgive me for mostly using genre fiction in my examples here--it's just what I'm most familiar with.) But it's generally accepted that YA novels--actual, category YA novels--must also have YA protagonists, and furthermore be told through the eyes of said protagonists. No temporal distance or third-person narrations, in other words. This is the argument I've seen used most often to disqualify A Song of Ice and Fire as being YA--yes, there are several teenaged or younger POV characters, but there's also Tyrion, Davos, Eddard, Jaime, and Catelyn. (I would point out that the only POV characters in the series who have been killed off so far have been adults, but I haven't finished it yet, so I don't know if that's true anymore.) So sure--all YA novels use YA characters for their point of view. Except when they don't. The Book Thief is narrated not by Liesel but by Death, an anthropomorphic being momentarily enchanted by a particular human life during World War II. His Dark Materials shifts perspectives between two young protagonists and other characters of all ages, to fill in the gaps in the story when our intrepid heroes aren't physically there. The Hobbit--which you'll find in adult sci-fi/fantasy as well as in children's/YA, which I'll expand on in a bit--has exactly one (1) underage character in a core cast of fourteen, and it's not the protagonist/narrator. So if we're using the fact that A Song of Ice and Fire doesn't use exclusively YA characters to tell the story as a disqualifier, we'd have to disqualify a fair few other books as well.
2) YA fiction is written and marketed for an assumed target demographic of actual young adults. On the surface, this makes perfect sense. If your book is written with a young adult audience in mind, it has to be YA, right? Well, it might, and it's true in a lot of cases, but we also have books like To Kill a Mockingbird and Treasure Island which were originally written for a young audience, but are now categorized as adult fiction. The reverse can also happen--books written for an adult audience, like Lord of the Flies and Ender's Game, were rebranded in recent years and moved to the YA shelves once the market exploded. Then you have fun little anomalies like Isaac Marion's Warm Bodies and Robin McKinley's Sunshine which I've found under general fiction, sci-fi/fantasy, and YA, which amuses me to no end. And then there are older children's books like Alice in Wonderland and The Chronicles of Narnia which grab new readers in every generation to the point of being continual pop-culture phenomenons no matter what decade we're in or where they get shelved. My point being: booksellers and publishers stock the shelves in such a way that the books on said shelves will be most likely to sell. The contents of the actual books never change. Just the market. Which is all to say that although A Song of Ice and Fire is in adult sci-fi/fantasy right now, if that changes, I wouldn't be surprised. The original target demographic was the adult sci-fi/fantasy crowd; the actual, real-world audience nowadays is, well, EVERYONE. (Seriously, the doorstopper has its own display table. With action figures. Y'know--toys. Just throwing that out there.)
But none of that really bothers me. I'm not making the case for A Song of Ice and Fire to be rebranded as YA because I think it belongs there. I don't really care where it lands in the bookstore. I care about how long it'll take for Martin to finish his massive epic. I care about who will ultimately wind up on that iron throne. I care about whether or not my favorite characters will die horribly, and whether I'll have any interest in finishing the series if they do. What bothers me is the implication that YA fiction, by necessity, lacks the complexity and sophistication of adult fiction and therefore any work of recognized quality can't possibly be YA. I've heard similar implications that A Song of Ice and Fire isn't really "fantasy" because it's "better" than that, but that's another rant for another day.
What I think it all boils down to is this:
3) YA fiction is more poorly written because it speaks to an adolescent point of view. This is a really frustrating assumption that needs to die a fiery death. Almost as frustrating is when I hear defenders of YA make the argument that everyone has at some point been a teenager, and adult readers of YA enjoy returning to that time period out of nostalgia or something. Yeah, that's not why I read YA--being an actual, real-life teenager kind of sucked. Not altogether, but I would NOT want to return to that period in my life for a million bucks. All that aside, there is no reason to assume that YA books are adolescent or poorly written, especially not when you actually read a few of them. The hands-down best book I read last year was The Coldest Girl in Coldtown, a YA book about vampires, and everything I've read by Francescia Lia Block has been consistently lyrical and profoundly moving even when it's disturbing or outright horrific. I've also read my fair share of adult fiction that's repetitive, dry or lazy. Target audience and perspective do not indicate writing quality. The writing quality indicates writing quality, and it varies just as much as genre, target audience, and everything else.
Here's thing: Yes, YA fiction is basically escapist literature, but probably not in the way you're thinking. What are the most popular YA genres around right now? Easy--Paranormal romance (Twilight and all its myriad copycats), and Dystopias (The Hunger Games and all its myriad copycats*.) I've gotten the impression PNR is tapering off a bit, just looking at what circulates at the highest frequency in the library where I work. Dystopias are still pretty hot, and the movie adaptations for this year alone are an ongoing reinforcement of the type, with titles like Divergent, The Maze Runner and The Giver--and those are just the ones I know about. These books show us a mirror of our world both deconstructed and idealized at the same time--a world on the brink of collapse that's ultimately saved by the younger generation just wise enough to see the mistakes their ancestors made, and just crazy enough to actually think they can fix it. And for the most part, it works. That's where the escapism lies--not the violence and darkness in the setting and atmosphere, but the glimmer of hope that the young people living there can turn things around somehow.
With this in mind, it seems to me that A Song of Ice and Fire has more in common thematically with the YA dystopia--the dark, desolate universe under constant threat of total annihilation in which the younger generation struggles to find their place in it and clean up the mess their parents made--than its most obvious predecessor, The Lord of the Rings. Just a theory, but you know what I see most often on the holds shelf at the library? The book series people are reading more than anything else right now? Divergent, The Fault In Our Stars, The Maze Runner and A Song of Ice and Fire. One of these things is not like the others.
Or is it?
Just something to think about.
*Let's leave Battle Royale out of this for now--it's a great piece of work, but reached a much narrower audience, and didn't spark the global phenomenon that The Hunger Games did.
(Cross-posted to
rhoda_rants.)