Did Twitter break YA?

But it’s not teenagers, the target demographic of young adult literature, that authors and editors hear from on Twitter. There are very few teens involved in these conversations. It is adults. It is booksellers trying to keep up with their favorite authors, and librarians coming up with storytime ideas, and adult readers who understand the boundaries of social media and just want to make sure they don’t miss a new release from their favorite writers.

They're also hearing from the reader who plucks single lines out of context and declares that they're offensive, then demands that the author agree that they're offensive, then further demands that they be changed in future printings, even if the point of the line in context is that a character is saying something the reader is supposed to disagree with. They’re hearing from the person who reviews 50 books a year on Goodreads and has some strong opinions on how most bisexual representation is problematic if the couple isn’t in a sapphic or gay relationship. From the blogger whose website is only a few months old and who, despite being a person of color themselves, dimisses authors of color because they write for white people, not “authentically.”

This scrutiny and demand for perfection is infinitely higher for marginalized authors, who are often the target of the most critical segments of their own reader communities. Black authors must be perfect representations of Blackness despite the wide range of Black experiences. Queer authors must be out of the closet, in a neatly labeled box, for their queer representation to even be considered acceptable.

There is no greater example of this than the story of the #ownvoices hashtag, which was originally created by author Corinne Duyvis to allow readers to know whether a writer from a marginalized background was writing something that reflected their own experiences. The term had to be officially abandoned by We Need Diverse Books five years after its creation because of how intensely the notion of perfect representation had been weaponized—both by readers who didn’t consider representations authentic enough to earn the label, and by readers who dismissed as problematic any representation that wasn’t explicitly labeled ownvoices by its author.

Relying on Twitter to shape a culture like YA publishing inevitably leads to a moment where the most vulnerable participants in that industry will break. Either they become part of the rage machine, or the rage machine turns on them.

I doubt I'm the only Worm reader here who has seen the same dynamics play out in the Parahumans fan community. I put the blame for Ward turning into a tedious morass that's less than the sum of its parts on WB paying way too much credence to the shrieking of the most deranged narcissists on YA twitter.