Young Adult Literature Became the Playground, and Battleground, for Adults
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That being said, I don't see much connection between the G/PG blockbuster related adult readers and the coming-of-age book auditors.
Autor also conflates conservative anti-lgbt movement with pretty much anyone who reads youth adult literature which makes even less sense. The calls to remove books with lgbt content from libraries are purely political and have zero to do with what books are read by adults.
And you do not see how logical conclusion from that is that author simply dislikes YA literature? And adults too, since there is so much disgust about them, gasp, existing and enjoying entertainment.
Author literally claims it is predatory for an adult to read YA books.
Yes, when you make up negative claims about groups, purely out of nowhere, with zero argument or evidence they are true, then it is reasonable to assume you simply do not like them. Otherwise you would give them basic respect and checked up some date before making stuff up.
Marketers built a profile of the buyer they want to target in their minds - a glorified stereotype. The buyers themselves didn't identify with the label.
But the marketers then demanded products tailored to this stereotype. And of course, many authors caught on, and were willing to move towards the marketers caricature of what they had in common, in order to get access.
So there's no co-option here. People are just fighting over a marketer-created niche. The niche is a bad fit to reality (in more ways than the audience hardly being young adults) but it's got enough money behind it that it's not easy to challenge it.
But generally speaking, I think that if a book gets popular with the "wrong" audience, then it's the industry that needs to look into their assumptions, not the audience.
I do not think so. Bookshelves are full of linear books with familiar fairytale structure and binary good vs evil. Easy satisfying end also pretty much given in a random book.
Anyways, of the two points, I find the latter one boring and tired, and so I'd prefer to talk about the first one. The author states:
> My husband and I spent several years putting on pleasant faces when talk over cocktails drifted to “Which Hogwarts house would you belong to?” It all felt so juvenile and regressive. And I believe it was.
I was unable to escape this feeling at the time when Harry Potter was sweeping through the world. I'd just finished Lord of the Rings and, while I picked up a Harry Potter book, I just found it tough to get into. Then I watched the same thing happen with series like Eragon, Wheel of Time, Twilight, Song of Fire and Ice, Hunger Games and more (might have the order mixed up). I've read at least a single book from all those series (except Twilight) and while I've gone back and re-read Lord of the Rings 4 times since, I've never felt compelled to read those series, or watch the movie/TV adaptations.
I've spent actually a not insignificant amount of time wondering why those books never clicked with me, while watching them become sweeping, generation-defining cultura phenomena. It's bothered me, because I've been left out of a lot of "which Hogwarts house are you" type of conversations. But the thing that's really strange is that I kept waiting for everyone to outgrow those books and move on. On the one hand, I understand mass appeal, and I understand not understanding mass appeal. Not everything is truly for everyone, and it never bothered me that those books missed me, but what bothered me was that we never let go of them as a culture. I still know people who call other people "muggles", for instance, even though we're all well into our 30s by now.
There are a lot of things I liked in my youth that I look back fondly on now, but realize they aren't for me as an adult. Music, movies, TV, books (I had my own YA novel preferences), that, at some point, I just walked away from. Some of them were quite good, some of them were of broad appeal, but eventually, I outgrew them. What confuses me so much is society's inability to outgrow a lot of these recent YA novels. The same way I'm confused about how Taylor Swift is still so popular with her original demographic.
There used to be a certain strategy that if you paid attention to, many media companies (especially Disney) would employ: They'd release some media series, say, Star Wars. Then they'd wait until the people who originally were kids/young adults got older, had their own kids, and they'd re-release the property, or release sequels/prequels, etc. (Star Wars being a good example because they've done this 3 time now, with the originals in the 80s, prequels in the early 00s, and the latest batch in the 2020s). You could see clear generational gaps between surges in popularity. But that seems to have just gone away now.
All in all, it's not a real problem. I'm still just as tired of these media properties as I was a few years after they came out, but it's not like it really affects my life. It's just really strange to see the level of persistence, and I can't find any historical comparisons.
And what people do is seek out the media that help reinforce those beliefs. They look for talk shows that are like their politics, and stories about heroes that are like them in some way.
And so, for every long-lived franchise there is a subtle interplay between the fan demographic and the kind of story that they believe in so wholly that they will dwell on it and seek out every last piece of merchandise.
With Star Wars, most analysis views it as an accidental Rorschach blot: it addresses multiple political beliefs in a way that lets you read into the story the things you want to see. This is an extremely delicate balance, hence every Star Wars sequel(even when the original trilogy was in its theatrical run) has been a source of enormous fan controversy.
Harry Potter has a more obviously polarizing context: Harry does not seriously address the everyday issues of the wizarding world, they're just a backdrop to the elite power struggle he's thrust into. Topics like house elf slavery or mudblood discrimination are simply dropped on the floor, rather than being addressed with satire like in a Terry Pratchett novel. And so HP appeals in the sense of normalizing society as a fixed form, with unsolvable problems and nobly entitled actors within it; the longstanding HP fan, you may notice, does not self-describe as a muggle.
It's an interesting thing to do, to go through and do this analysis by belief, to determine why cops like the Punisher or why battle royale games became so popular in the 2010's. I don't think it's actually that new a phenomenon, it just becomes more obvious after you get older and realize that some people never stop being fans.
In this way HP is more realistic for the adult world (and what most adult people can do) than all the preaching stories.
Not every character needs to be a always fully good and flawless God.
No one said they did.
The issue isn't that the characters don't fix every single possible problem. The issue is that the author doesn't seem to be aware that some things are problems.
FWIW for me one of those things is Lord of the Rings. Po-faced and boring in comparison to Harry Potter (and I'm in my 50s)
Harry Potter, on the other hand, I read and then watched just a few years ago in my 30s, and I found it very entertaining.
Everyone has their own preferences.
Why is it weird? People liking what they encountered in their youth was normal. Generation that grew up on Beatles kept liking Beatles while their kids moved on something else. Generation that grew up on Jazz, kept liking Jazz while their kids moved on. And people who liked westerns as a young adults kept watching westerns as adults.
It is "outgrowing" only if you are moving into something more valuable in some sense. It is outgrowing only if maturity somehow precludes enjoyment of that thing. What happens with these however is that maturity is not preventing enjoyment at all, so people stay.
Also, Wheel of Time or Song of Fire and Ice were meant for adults. They are literature written with mature adults as audience.
Because, in a way jazz (and the Beatles) wasn't, Taylor Swift was music engineered for young adults. Her songs wrote about being in highschool, she has an album titled 19.