Cowed by the culture cops
Online mobs are attacking the authors of young adult fiction for daring to imagine lives different from their own, said journalist Jesse Singal in Now publishers are canceling releases and new voices are being silenced.
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F YOU’RE LOOKING for a case study in toxic internet culture, look no further than the online world of young adult fiction. That might seem surprising: After all, we’re talking about boy wizards and sexy vampires and mawkish coming-of-age tales here, right?
Here’s the short version: In recent years, young adult, or Y.A., fiction has come into its own as a genre, reliably producing a small number of megahits that have turned their authors into millionaires. During that same period, it has begun to grapple with some difficult questions about diversity and representation.
Y.A. fiction, like many other areas of publishing, has a bit of a diversity problem, despite being a liberal-minded industry centered in New York City. But while the motivation behind the movement for more diverse voices is commendable, the manifestation of this impulse on social media has been nothing short of cannibalistic. The Twitter community surrounding the genre—one in which authors, editors, agents, adult readers, and reviewers outnumber youthful readers—has become a cesspool of toxicity. “Y.A. Twitter,” as it’s called, is a mess.
“Young adult books are being targeted in intense social media callouts, draggings, and pile-ons—sometimes before anybody’s even read them,” Kat Rosenfield wrote in New York magazine’s Vulture.com in 2017. Y.A. Twitter features frequent over-the-top claims that various people in the community are “abusing” one another, with the term often used in a deeply watered-down sense.
“The scandals that loom so large on Twitter don’t necessarily interest consumers; instead, the tempest of these controversies remains confined to a handful of internet teapots where a few angry voices can seem thunderously loud,” Rosenfeld wrote. “Still, some publishing professionals imagine that the outrage will eventually become powerful enough to rattle the industry.”
The worriers were prescient. In 2019, books are not only getting excoriated by online critics who haven’t read them. They’re getting unpublished entirely.
Such an incident unfolded last winter with a book called Blood Heir. Amélie Wen Zhao, a woman of Chinese descent who was born in Paris and raised in Beijing, had won herself an enviable three-book deal for an me. EXPLAIN IT RIGHT THE FUQ NOW,” accusing the author of “internalized racism and anti-blackness.” The logic appears to be that because our world has racism, it’s unacceptable to imagine a world that does not.
Perhaps most inflammatory was the claim that a character in the book assisted Ana and then conveniently died, in a manner redolent of the “Magical Negro”—an American cinematic trope, famously criticized by Spike Lee in
2001, in which a black character exists solely for the purpose of helping out, or granting folksy wisdom to, a white protagonist.
During these pre-release blowups, hardly anyone has read the book in question. At this point, a forthcoming novel has usually been seen only by those who have received advance copies from the publisher. So it was here: Early reviewers began spreading the rumor that Blood Heir treated a black character horribly. Yet the character in question—described Anastasia- tinged adventure: “In the Cyrilian by the author as having “tawny” and Empire,” went the publication materials, “bronze” skin and eyes that are a “startling “Affinites are reviled and enslaved. Their aquamarine”—doesn’t actually seem to have varied abilities to control the world around been meant to be coded as black. them are unnatural—dangerous. And
Anastacya Mikhailov, the crown princess, The vagueness of the charges didn’t matter. might be the most monstrous of them all. Zhao posted an apologetic tweet announcHer deadly Affinity to blood is her curse ing that Blood Heir wouldn’t be published.
T and the reason she has lived her life hidden
HE NEXT CANCELLATION occurred behind palace walls.” The adventure kicks not long after. It centered on Kosoko off when Ana’s father is murdered and she is Jackson, whose website until recently framed, forcing her to flee. described him as “a vocal champion of
The first book was due out in June. In diversity in Y.A. literature, the author of January, though, there emerged a vague Y.A. novels featuring African-American Twitter-centered whisper campaign against queer protagonists, and a sensitivity reader Zhao. A main allegation was that she had for Big Five Publishers.” Jackson is black taken to capturing screenshots of other and gay—this matters here, a lot—and people’s mean tweets about her, presumably was preparing for the release of his debut in order to someday enact revenge—though young adult novel, A Place for Wolves, an no one provided any evidence she had actuadventure-romance between two young ally done this. men set against the backdrop of the Kosovo
War. The book was slated for release on It was open season from there: People
March 26. picked over the limited information about the book to find something, anything, to Jackson had amassed some enthusiastic justify being angry. L.L. McKinney, a Y.A. blurbs from established names in Y.A. ficauthor who had recently published her own tion, and he seemed poised for a successful debut novel and who tends to be an active debut, in part because Wolves was going participant in these pile-ons, noted that to be a so-called #ownvoices release— some of the publicity material described #ownvoices being a hashtag coined by the Blood Heir’s fictional world as one in Y.A. author Corinne Duyvis to “highlight which “oppression is blind to skin color.” books that are written by an author that
She tweeted: “...someone explain this to shares a marginalized identity with the