the amount of brain rot happening in the notes……idk why i’m surprised that there’s an antivaxxer contingent on tumblr

many such cases

UTTER CLOWNERY

🤡🤡

re: people who study literature or write literary works who hate literature…………

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/12/us/luigi-mangione-gunman-united-healthcare-shooting.html

fr instead of being a STEM student, this man should have been sitting in the quad of a nice little liberal arts school writing a term paper for his 20th century modernist literature class

out of curiosity, i read the summaries on amazon for the two books pictured here:

and the thing is that like……….from the sound of these summaries NEITHER of these books strictly HAS to be YA. when i think of YA, i tend to think of some sort of coming-of-age story or a bildungsroman about the trials and tribulations of growing up. neither of these books sound like they really address these themes (or they do in a more roundabout way) and yet they are being marketed as YA, presumably to reach a wider audience but also probably just bc the protagonists are most likely in the 17-21 age range.

i guess my question becomes, “is YA mostly just an excuse to have younger protagonists and more restrictions on explicit content rather than an attempt to tell stories that reflect the concerns of teenagers?”

because, at least with these two books as examples, they seem like stories that could, if not dubbed YA, have some fairly explicit content (sexual and otherwise) and kind of suggest it, yet by being “YA,” there is an implicit promise that they are “safe” somehow

the thing is that for all its supposed faults, i would take this brand of 90s utopian globalism over whatever the fuck we’ve been doing for the last 10 years in a heartbeat

i think the point i’m trying to make here is that i don’t think something like this would be considered as politically charged in the late 90s/early 2000s as it is today, though i personally was a child then which could be skewing my perception. i think i consider this to be something along the lines of a DK eyewitness book, which were big during that time period:

ok bc everyone is getting up on their soapbox in the notes, this isn’t just about “diverse books.” this is also about a children's media environment in which education about other cultures (or even about the world in general) was not politicized in the same way as today. as some in the notes are saying, in the 90s and early 2000s, you could easily find books like the above in conservative-leaning households and areas and most would not bat an eye about it. nowadays, media that depicts other cultures or scientifically accurate information (for instance, about health or vaccines) is always almost immediately decried as being "woke" or "biased".

i do think a lot of the above is due to the consequences of internet media and information bubbles as well as the stranglehold conservative media has had over certain segments of the population for a long time now. i also think a lot of it is due to the breakdown of consensus reality as a result of the internet, but that's another can of worms.

again, I AM NOT DENYING THAT DIVERSE BOOKS (which are probably more thoughtful now than they were in the 90s) CONTINUE TO EXIST. my point is that the information landscape around them has shifted, which also has downstream effects as to how they are perceived by the culture at large and also to a certain extent how publishers present and market the books themselves.

it's kind of telling to me how many people in the notes think this is referring to "own voices"/books that are specifically focused on diverse representation within an american context when i think what distinguishes these kinds of dk books is the fact that they provide information about cultures outside of the united states. obviously it is still through a western (british) lens which is othering and problematic in some ways but the outlook is still more global. one thing about the "own voices" movement is that most (not all! but most) of those books are stories that are still based in the united states and/or in american culture even if the protagonists are not white, cis, straight, abled, etc. obviously those stories are important but there is indeed a difference from what i'm talking about here.

THIS RIGHT HERE IS WHAT I AM TALKING ABOUT. THIS SPECIFIC VIBE DOES NOT EXIST ANYMORE. NOW PLEASE SHUT UP.

this is what’s so crazy to me when people try to moralize about gothic literature. like all of you people complaining about porn brained-ness in bronte novels are making the EXACT SAME ARGUMENTS that old misogynist victorian white men were when the books were first published!!!!!!