The Maze Runner: Girls, Boys, and YA

The debate of gender and YA lit isn't anything new. Here is an essay I read about it recently, for example,and I don't even think that one mentions John Green. However, it's really hard for me to take a firm stance on either side of this debate, because it is true that, for the most part, I don't get much out of YA, aside from the fun of reviewing it. I've personally never been into reading romance and "girly" things, and I do love bittersweet endings, even though I certainly don't think that all YA is happy endings and rainbows. But yeah, read what you want. You've got lots of bloggers and vloggers to discuss/fangirl with, just don't discredit those of us who prefer other things as snobs.

Disclaimer aside. Now, The Maze Runner.

I believe I first started seeing The Maze Runner on advertisements on Facebook around 2010 (aka at the height of Hunger Games fervor), saying you should read it if you liked The Hunger Games. Naturally, I avoided it for a while until I sort of ran out of things and picked it up, in the fall of 2011. This was the time where I was just reading to read, so I didn't get much out of it. I remembering finding the writing bland and, in some places, I really wanted to rearrange the sentences. I enjoyed the second one more when I read it in a few months, but I think I was more in the mood for it then. All of which is to stay, I'm not the one to critique it because I barely remember the plot. I also haven't seen the movie. If you want an actual feminist reading, try this or this.

What sparked this post is a line from the movie review in Entertainment Weekly: "Don't let that YA tag put you off, though. There isn't a dying heroine or hunky vampire to be found anywhere in this better-than-average adaptation of the James Dashner bestseller."

Now, I am not a fan of dying heroines and hunky vampires, and this pissed me off. [Though after some squinting, I realized that the dying heroine is just a reference to The Fault in Our Stars, which isn't even a trend. Wimpy heroines, on the other hand...]

"But I can't see!"

Yes, The Maze Runner was published in 2009, which in publishing terms means that it had nothing to do with The Hunger Games (2008, different publisher) and the ensuing dystopian craze (and despite my misgivings, I don't think it was rushed out without a copyedit...it was just a poor one). It was just there at the right time, rather than an actual response to it. However, it was marketed as a response to it, despite not having much in common. Namely, one that is more boy-friendly.

So, the YA with "serious" themes and no love story and excessive sentimentality (not that there aren't sad parts) is worthy of consideration, while the rest are just for teen girl fantasies. [I want to be clear that I'm not personally attacking the reviewer, but this is just something we see far, far too often when YA is discussed. I'm probably also to blame here.]

Because whatever you think of the quality of YA, it at least often tells the stories of young women (and often written by women). They might be wimpy and terrible role models and lack spark of life, but they're girls. And, as is well documented, girls will read books featuring any protagonist but boys will stay away from books about girls. But it's not just about that...The Maze Runner features just one girl (which admittedly is a main part of the plot) who, if I remember correctly, spends most of the book unconscious and, like Thomas, is gifted with abilities to magically help solve the story. There is an additional (manipulative) female character in the second book, and apparently a third in the last, which I never read. All three are potential love interests. Meanwhile, the boys insult each other with made-up curse words. Yeah, it's also not my kind of book.

[And I say this as someone who rarely engages in a feminist critique as the primary critique of a work, disagree with several of them, and have I mentioned recently how much I love Lord of the Rings?]

This of course would be more of a problem if The Maze Runner was more popular than it actually is. I'm really not specifically targeting Maze, but rather the culture it exists in, as sparked by that movie review. I want to believe that there is good YA, and I think there is, but they're also the ones not explicitly written to be YA as we currently know the term. They're just books which feature adolescents. But when you have media specifically creating the image of "YA for boys," I have a problem. Because I just want to read (and write) books that don't have to conform to expectations of a particular genre/age group, and they're getting harder and harder to find which discourages me, and a lot of that is down to stigma and bad marketing decisions.

Does this make sense? I don't know. I still believe James Dashner needs a better copyediter, though.

EDIT: This is all sorts of offensive, because it literally says that the movie has more mass appeal because it's about boys. (Naturally, that's probably true, but it doesn't have to be. A lot of my problem has to do with the way things are marketed, rather than what they actually contain or even our culture.)