{"id":6362,"date":"2012-06-04T19:21:45","date_gmt":"2012-06-05T00:21:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.starshipnivan.com\/blog\/?p=6362"},"modified":"2012-06-05T01:23:16","modified_gmt":"2012-06-05T06:23:16","slug":"aint-evolvin-the-cookie-cutter-self-discovery-quest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/?p=6362","title":{"rendered":"Ain\u2019t Evolvin\u2019: The Cookie Cutter Self-Discovery Quest"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been an addicted bookworm ever since I taught myself to read at the age of four. My parents never restricted my book access, leaving me to roam untrammeled through full-bore fiction and non-fiction from the get-go. My fairy tales and myths were unexpurgated; so was my country\u2019s painful history, unfolding right before my eyes. Whenever I dipped into \u201cage-appropriate\u201d books, I detested the didacticism, the insipidity, the contrived dilemmas. Even with my limited life experience, I knew watery gruel when I tasted it.<\/p>\n

So I hardly ever read Young Adult (YA) works, even when I was YA myself. From time to time I try again, only to confirm that my allergy appears to be permanent. This puts me in several quandaries: SF\/F, one of my mainstay genres, has an enormous YA component \u2013 in fact, can be considered YA almost in its entirety in terms of its proclivities; the YA domain is a major venue for women writers and a major showcase for women protagonists. Yet I constantly run into bumps, even when authors try hard\u2026 sometimes, especially when authors try hard.<\/p>\n

One of these bumps is magic, which I find tiresome with few and ever fewer exceptions. Most fantasy magic is paper-thin, incoherent and shifts arbitrarily to fit plot points and generate dei ex machina (two better-than-average recent fantasies, Sherwood Smith\u2019s The Banner of the Damned<\/em> and Elizabeth Bear\u2019s Range of Ghosts<\/em> would have been far better works without magic, in my opinion). Another is the persistent neoteny I discussed in a previous essay<\/a>. Within that category, a near-constant irritant is the \u201cfinding one\u2019s self\u201d theme endemic in Anglophone YA fiction. Which brings us once again to cultural parochialism, lack of imagination, possibly market niche cynicism\u2026 plus that dreaded term: agency.<\/p>\n

\u201cFinding one\u2019s self\u201d appears as a near-default trope for a culture obsessed with youth\u2019s trappings (Flat bellies! Hard muscles! Perky breasts and perkier penises!) that still believes in the libertarian myth of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps: the idea that you can become rich, famous and powerful provided you\u2019re Chosen and that everyone has a near-infinity of choices for everything, from their breakfast cereal to their identity. So in a standard YA \u2013 and not just YA \u2013 story arc the protagonist must find himself (I use the male pronoun deliberately, since this narrative is essentially defined by masculine\/masculinized parameters), usually through a conflict that ticks off the ersatz-mythic checklist points of the Campbel\/lite quest.<\/p>\n

Reading bits of contemporary YA SF\/F (a few pages at a time is the most I can manage before breaking out in hives) it hit me why \u201cpersonal growth\u201d quests are omnipresent in them: most of the stories are products of cookie cutters. The characters are not individualized enough to register as fully dimensional people, so the canned conflicts are meant to give them some substance as well as move the standardized plot along (including the almost-mandatory assembly of the quest team, a direct import from RPG games). There is no personality delineation beyond occasional resort to verbal tricks for quick recognition, which is one reason why almost all the recent SF\/F YA works I read form a single lumpy blur in my memory banks.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Mind you, Homer used such tricks: \u201cgray-eyed Athena\u201d, \u201chorse-fighting Hector\u201d. However, these occurred in a long oral epic in which they served as memory aids to both bard and audience. Furthermore, Homer did not confine his characterizations to these shortcuts. We know what Hector felt when he took leave of Andromache and Astyanax. We know what Achilles felt when Priam was begging him for Hector\u2019s body. Homer (or whoever wrote the Iliad) did not have to write those passages, they\u2019re not critical to the forward motion of the epic. But by doing so, the bard made us care \u2013 and Andromache, trying not to weep as she watches her husband\u2019s jaunty helmet plume dwindle in the distance, brands herself in our memory.<\/p>\n

The default setting of semi-infinite flexibility also plays a role in the boilerplate depictions of what constitutes self discovery. An occasional critique I get for my fiction is that my protagonists are usually fully formed when my stories start and don\u2019t \u201cevolve\u201d to satisfy the growth-through-adversity mandate. Sort of like Antigone and Odysseus, who also appear fully formed, even though their actions are shaped by the sum of their external and internal circumstances. Yet I doubt either would be considered a dull thud: they have urgent lives to manage beyond just \u201cgrowing into their full potential\u201d.<\/p>\n

My native culture has undergone more than its share of upheavals, and the ensuing hardship and instability make it less able to luxuriate in choices; by both tradition and necessity, it also demands that its members make many crucial life decisions early \u2013 and often the choices are constrained so strongly that they appear almost preordained. These constraints, incidentally, also hold for such domains as contemporary research science. For someone with my cultural background and professional experiences, the concept of fiction protagonists spending endless sequels rolling dice for their D&D designations appears neither organic nor compelling.<\/p>\n

Not surprisingly, this brings us to agency \u2013 women characters\u2019 agency in particular. Agency \u2013 aka women as more than decorative or useful furniture \u2013 has been a perennial issue in speculative fiction, especially in the grittygrotty pornokitch subgenre cave<\/a>. On parallel lines, people have observed that the still-too-sparse SF\/F women protagonists are deemed fully worthy only if they \u201ckick ass\u201d (with video game prototypes like Lara Croft leading the way). However, the problem is more systemic than that: characters of all ages get shoehorned into the Procrustean bunkbed of the teenage self-discovery quest. This is simply more obvious for women because, with the exception of the occasional magical crone, most SF\/F hardly ever shows women past the age of \u201cpeak attractiveness\u201d \u2013 which for the US has been relentlessly shifting to the younger and thinner end of the spectrum, except for the obligatory pneumatic breasts.<\/p>\n

In almost all SF\/F YA works we rarely if ever see full adults, especially women, doing the nuanced, shaded things adults do: work at things they care for and often are good at; love, hate and everything in between; create and preserve and sometimes destroy; grow old and experienced, if not always wise; but above all, go through the myriad small struggles and pleasures that constitute a full life. The artificiality and interchangeability of the standard conflicts makes most YA books as individualized (and as nutritional) as movie theater popcorn \u2013 in large part because their readers\u2019 cortices register that nothing really crucial is at stake, no matter how many djinn or dark-magic wizards are involved.<\/p>\n

To put it simply, heroes in both real life and non-popcorn fiction often have little choice (and to be crystal-clear, \u201cheroes\u201d include non-male people \u2013 once again I use the term deliberately because \u201cheroine\u201d has very different connotations). What makes non-messianic people heroes is when in unusual circumstances they surpass their usual selves. Heroes feel fear, doubt, guilt, grief for their actions; what they don\u2019t do is navel-gaze, because they\u2019re busy with far more substantive struggles. Give me an artisan with a thickened waist whose arthritis is hobbling her but who retains the passion to push against formidable obstacles while still appreciating her wine. I\u2019ll take her over all the homogenized teenager Chosen Ones of YA SF\/F.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
\n
\nWar for the Country<\/strong><\/p>\n

By Viktor\u00eda Theodh\u00f3rou \u2013 Poet, resistance fighter<\/p>\n

A soft mat she found and sat down, upon the leaves.
\nA song emerges from the flute of her throat,
\nsoftly, so her dozing companions don\u2019t awaken,
\njust so it accompanies their dreams.
\nHer hands don\u2019t stay still, she takes up thread and needle
\nto darn their wool socks with the hand grenade
\nshe always carries at her waist, with it she lies and rises.
\nThe grenade inside the sock, round and oblivious
\nto its fire, thinks it\u2019s a wooden egg,
\nthat the country was freed and the war ended
\nand Katia is not a partisan in the snow-covered woods \u2013
\nthat she sits by the window behind the white lilacs
\nand sews the socks of her beloved, who came home whole.<\/p>\n

Images: 1st, Tree of Books<\/em>, by Vlad Gerasimov<\/a>; 2nd, Hector and Andromache<\/em>, Giorgio de Chirico; 3rd, magical crones: Fin Raziel in Willow<\/em> (Patricia Hayes), The Oracle in The Matrix<\/em> (Gloria Foster)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been an addicted bookworm ever since I taught myself to read at the age of four. My parents never restricted my book access, leaving me to roam untrammeled through full-bore fiction and non-fiction from the get-go. My fairy tales and myths were unexpurgated; so was my country\u2019s painful history, unfolding right before my eyes. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,12,13,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6362","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biology-and-culture","category-history","category-science-fiction","category-writing-and-literature"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6362","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6362"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6362\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starshipnivan.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}