#questionable writing choices
I could write a hell of an essay about love interests in YA and how they are described, but it wouldn’t have a point because I honestly don’t know WHY it’s like this
okay so my brain felt very tired at the thought of digging up specific examples so this isn’t going to include them BUT
Recent YA love interests are…the first word coming to my brain is “sexless,” but this transcends the sexual. Many of them are completely featureless outside of a couple specific non-details that serve to tell us that this is supposed to be the love interest.
When a character in a YA book is supposed to be The Love Interest, you can tell because he will immediately be described using one of the following:
- The curve of [his] muscle[s]
- The [ripple/flex/curve] of muscle under [adjective, usually tanned] skin
- muscle curv[ing] underneath [clothing]
I want to scream and cry. Both Cold the Night, Fast the WolvesandChildren of Blood and Bone had one of these exact phrases in the very SENTENCE where the narrator meets the Love Interest. These are far from being the only ones.
Both of those books also barely physically described the Hot Boy outside of his muscles curving, which seems to be more and more common.
What gets me is that this doesn’t read as attraction. “Muscle” and “curve” feel like code words that let me know that This Is The Hot Boy. I don’t know what people are getting out of these books. I, the reader, am doing so fucking much of the work in imagining this boy as hot that I might as well just ditch the book and make up a guy in my head.
“Muscle” being the one (1) and only trait that is attractive in male characters is so fucking weird. Every single YA author writes like they’re not actually attracted to men, they’re just imagining what it might be like based on advertisements and TV.
Hell, the way muscle is described makes it seem so abstract. Do you not know that muscle is soft when it isn’t flexed? Do you not know that everyone has muscles???
I don’t believe that the POV character is actually attracted to the guy when I read shit like this. Attraction involves noticing, being aware of the physicality of a person and the details of them. Any given “curve of muscle” description is totally interchangeable with any other, if you swap hair and eye colors here and there, and it’s so…the opposite of what being attracted to a human is like.
I think it must have been Ella Enchanted that includes the line “I loved the hairs on the nape of his neck” (the protagonist talking about the love interest) and honestly…that. That actually authentically reads as attraction, and not a low-effort attempt to “code” the character as hot
Isn’t that intentional, though?
Musclesare universal, after all.
I thought the blank-slate-ness of the typical YA love interest was specifically cultivated so the reader can more easily insert their own preferences into their mental image of the character. Sort of like how early Disney princes were basically a piece of cardboard wearing tights and a sword.
