I Am Now Going to Rant...

...About our society's current movies and literature. This has been bugging me for a long time, so I'm going to rant to my blog about it. Here we go :)

     When I go to the bookstores and look at the young adult section, all I see is dark covers with either vampiric themes/people or a creepy flower or something else that's just...weird. There're very few brightly coloured covers and themes on the shelves, and one can feel overwhelmed by all the darkness. The covers that aren't black are a wonderful relief, and it's always those books that catch my eye, not the dozens of similarly themed vampire covers. And also, please don't put scantily clad people on your covers, people! Not only is that annoying, it's gross. We are kids, not adults; we don't need to be seeing and reading stuff like that!!

    Which brings us to my next point - kind of. Okay, now most of the reading population out there is between the ages of 12-25, which is a very impressionable age group. So when authors right books full of witchcraft, sex, violence, drugs, and other various nasties, what do you think the kids reading about that stuff are gonna start to think? 'Well, Stephenie Meyer put it in her book for us to read, so it must be okay!' or 'Well, J.K. Rowling thinks witchcraft is okay, so it must be!' Now I realise that that's probably not what's going through kids' head as they read those books, but it's a subtle insinuation by the author. What happened to good old hero stories with a morally-upright hero(ine) who risks his/her life for the world and his/her friends. Sure, Harry Potter has a lot of those themes, but...it also has lots of witchcraft and wizardy and unrealistic things, which makes for a kind of unrelatable hero story. Harry's not as bad as a lot of books, in my opinion, but it's not the best. Twilight on the other hand....What's it full of? Violence. Sex (at least, sexual situations and themes). Stalkers. Do you really want your 13-year-old daughter reading about that kind of stuff?? Do you want her thinking that that's how life is? That she should be waiting for her 'Edward' or 'Jacob', her mostly-perfect superhero who will fight off all the other suitors for her. Hate to tell you, but life doesn't work that way, honey! Yes, there will be a man who is perfect for you, not for everyone else too, and he will not have superpowers. I promise. The only perfect superhero is God, people; not Edward or Jacob or Harry.

     So moving on to my greatest peeve - the dumbing down of books and movies. What happened to great epics like Lord of the Rings and Pride and Prejudice? What happened to stories that don't have to have chapters that are two pages long and be so stuffed with fights and violent brawls and daring escapes that you're worn out by the end? What happened to walks in the garden that don't have to involve supernatural creatures or make-out scenes? Why do authors sometimes feel that they have to cut down their books or the slow parts so that the finicky little kids reading them can 'stay focused'? This is literature, people, not a catering company! Why can't kids have the patience to read through a book that doesn't have an unrealistic fight on every other page or a sex scene every other chapter? We are dumbing literature down, people! Why? So that the little 14-year-old drama queen won't get bored during a dialogue scene and stop reading. Wouldn't it be great if kids read those expositional dialogue scenes and actually understood them? They might do better in school if they weren't thinking about Max and the flock fighting off flying dogs in mid-air and managing to still come out without a scratch! Not only is it not educational material, it's unrealistic! Battles don't last for five minutes in real life; more often they last for five years! But we don't want to read about that; give us the guts and gore and unrealistic junk! Oh, people....C'mon! What has happened to our books? Our kids are doing so bad in English class because our books are so dumbed down that most of them couldn't tell you what half the vocabulary words mean because authors don't want to 'frighten kids off with big words'. Well, maybe if they had to read those big words more often, you wouldn't have to worry about frightening them off! If you included words like androgynous, exceptional, extemporaneous, etc., in your stories, maybe you could write stuff that had a little more depth and heft to it!  

     Okay, so I'm done ranting for now....I just needed to say all of that. Needed to let the world know my thoughts. :) Hope you enjoyed! Now go out and buy a copy of Dickens and read it!