This is a blogification of a Twitter thread that got popular, for those who prefer this format. The original thread is presented here in its entirety.
YA authors, I’m begging you, please stop writing romances that are just didactic exemplars of what a correct relationship looks like, and please, please stop calling out books purely because the characters and relationships are not perfect exemplars of correct behavior.
I’ve read so many relationships recently that are just “everyone always does the right thing.” Everyone sits down and calmly discusses their problems. Everyone has informed conversations about consent. Everyone is open-minded and accepting of everyone’s identities and needs.
No one is ever selfish or irrational or jealous or judgmental. No one ever discovers that they have incompatible emotional needs or that they want different things out of the relationship and can’t just talk it out.
But like…this is not a relationship that exists in real life.
What can anyone possibly take away from such a book other than “yep, you suck, you didn’t do the exact right thing like the characters did, guess you’re problematic now”? How does it help anyone to model a relationship that only works if no one ever goes off script?
It’s the YA version of one of those Christian evangelism scripts that convert someone in five minutes. Anyone who tries to use the script in real life immediately runs into the problem that the other person doesn’t know they’re supposed to follow the script.
Unfortunately a lot of authors write these didacticized relationships because readers demand and enforce it and will call out the presence of non-idealized behavior in a book–regardless of context–as tantamount to endorsing and promoting that behavior.
Remember that thinkpiece last year calling out Lilo and Stitch because Lilo, a traumatized six-year-old, misbehaved and lashed out instead of acting like an angelic waif from a Victorian morality tale? And that made her “abusive” and meant the movie was endorsing misbehavior?
In real life, no kid needs a movie about a perfect child who always does the right thing and/or a trite morality tale of perfectly commensurate consequences and lesson-learning. Lots of kids need a movie about still being worthy of love no matter how many times you screw up.
That’s the value of imperfect relationships in books: This is what we really experience, and so this is what we need to see modeled. I yelled at my partner and stormed off. I’m jealous of my partner’s friends. I need more sexual attention than my partner can give. Now what?
Example: My French anarchist WIP explores the question “What do you do when someone you love dearly begins believing something that is abhorrent to you?” Some of you may find this question slightly relevant in the Year of Our Lord 2021.
Show us relationships where people screw up and show us what results and how they fix it, or maybe how they don’t fix it. That’s what teens need to read. They don’t need a relationship that reads like a Tumblr advice post come to life. If they want that, there’s Tumblr.