Young adult literature and revolutionary LARPers
How a budding genre of fiction influenced our culture
As a bookish child of the millennial generation, I loved going to Borders and Barnes and Noble growing up. I have vague memories of going to both book stores as a younger kid and reading picture books while sitting in their kids’ reading areas. But my memories of browsing both stores as a pre-teen and teenager are much stronger. There was something special about entering the stacks loaded with books targeted towards kids around my age during a period when my emotions were generally running high, and I felt misunderstood by most adults in my life.
Though I enjoyed young adult fiction of many different flavors, there was one particular theme that I encountered in some books that appealed to me. From the Harry Potter and The Hunger Games series to moderately well known books like Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies and Meg Rosoff’s How I Live Now, books about brave teenagers fighting against authoritarian regimes caught my attention. Perhaps it was because I realized that my primary obligation at that age, resume stuffing to get into a prestigious college, was too removed from any kind of deeper, more existential struggle, and the human psyche can’t tolerate such a frivolous focus for too long.
I realize this admission makes me sound incredibly privileged in the grand scheme of things, and I was fortunate in many ways growing up. But even though my childhood featured more material abundance than most American kids enjoy, I think it was typical in many ways of the childhoods of members of our chattering class. As Haidt and Lukianoff argue in The Coddling of the American Mind, many of us who are under 35 or so endured great pressure to check off all the right boxes during our high school days and didn’t get to experience an adolescence with periods of self-discovery and challenges helping us mature.
To me, one of the clearest indicators of adolescent struggles continuing to affect millennials’ psyches (at least among the chattering class) is the hand-wringing about the SATs in elite college admissions right now. Sure, part of it could be colleges expecting that the Students for Fair Admissions group will win at least one of their cases and preparing to continue practicing racial preferences in an unauditable way. But the emotions and false claims about the exam run awfully high even so. I was fortunate enough to test well, so I wasn’t as stressed going into the SATs as many of my classmates. But even I remember struggling to sleep the night before and my heart pounding as I walked into the testing center. I have one friend who, though she’s very bright and did well on her ACTs, had a panic attack when she took the SAT and had to cancel her score.
So if adolescent struggles are still warping millennials’ perceptions of the world, could the comforts that generation turned to in adolescence also be affecting their thinking? My answer is an emphatic yes. I certainly wasn’t the only young person who enjoyed living vicariously through brave characters who were subverting the tyrannical authority they lived under; the books I mentioned in the second paragraph all sold very well, and most were made into movies. It’s easy to find examples comparing Trump to villains from these books. But given that most millennials are now in their 30s and thus starting to wield more political and cultural power, what challenges might thinking about the world in terms of a struggle against a fictional despot pose?
The first challenge is how to live healthily in a liberal democracy while viewing the President as a horrifically evil fictional character. I personally oppose Trump, voted against him both times, and was relieved to see him lose in 2020. That said, I think the tenor of some of the opposition to him was unproductive and possibly worked against the health of our country. Some of my issues with the “Resistance” movement could stem from an honest disagreement with its proponents about how bad things really are. I think we still live in a mostly functional liberal democracy with institutions that can generally check a would-be autocrat’s power (especially if the would-be autocrat is as incompetent as Trump), while they probably think our liberal democracy is already finished. However, I think that the young adult fiction fans among them might be swayed into further catastrophizing while they continue to view Trump as Voldemort/President Snow from The Hunger Games. Even if you think our checks and balances have mostly failed, and non-governmental entities like the press aren’t up to exposing the president’s flaws, there’s still a big difference between an unpopular incompetent leader and one of the most iconic fictional villains. And if you’re mistaking the former for the latter, you may very well overreact to the threat he poses.
The second challenge is the cognitive dissonance experienced by millennials who simultaneously compare our political situation to the time under Voldemort’s return while also relying extensively on institutions Rowling painted in a negative light in her work. One of the main plotlines in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is that the mainstream press and the wizarding government refuse to take Voldemort’s initial return seriously and even dismiss Harry as an overexcited, sensitive child who doesn’t know what he’s talking about. J.K. Rowling also showed a flawed press and government earlier in the series, before Voldemort completed his return. But despite Rowling emphasizing the untrustworthiness of the press and government bureaucrats (she even includes a storyline where Harry resorts to publishing his story about Voldemort’s return in a newspaper run by a man most wizards considered crazy), so many left-leaning millennials place their trust in publications like the New York Times and government bureaucrats like Anthony Fauci. I don’t have much direct evidence of this cognitive dissonance, but I experienced it a bit myself before my views started to shift. I remember following the Mueller investigation and trusting that he’d find evidence of criminal collusion between Trump and Russian assets while avoiding thinking too hard about why I’d trust some government employees to do the right thing and not others. I remember wondering why Republicans trusted Fox News so much while placing my own trust in the New York Times rather blindly. I’m now a bit embarrassed at my credulity, but I wonder if some of my peers would rather avoid thinking too hard about these contradictions than own up to their own mistakes.
To avoid ending on a note of doom and criticism, I’d like to mention one hope I have for the future. I think many millennials (myself included) relied on the framings from these books because they hadn’t had much life experience. But I’ve noticed that as I’ve matured and experienced life more deeply, I’ve fallen away from putting the real world into boxes from fiction I read as a teenager. My hope is that many of my peers are experiencing the same growth, and though our political discourse may remain fractious, it’ll at least feature more mature framings of complex issues.