My Life Revolves Around Him...

and I might die if he doesn't reciprocate or if he does but then he leaves me.

Sounding familiar?

I've done my share of deriding this situation in YA books.  That I wouldn't want my daughters to emulate that as a role model.

Re-reading my journals looking for whatever thoughts I put to paper following 9/11 made me absolutely cringe.

Every single entry is a laundry list of the random things that went on in relation to boys.  Me reading too much into situations, me trying to contrive ways of being noticed by the latest crush, etcetera.

And I realized something.

I was that YA heroine whose life revolved around a boy.

And that scared me.  There are times my journal entries haven't changed that much since those days.  Recent times.

But then there are the gems of journal entries where I'm actually looking outside myself.

I don't know where those are but surely they must exist, right?  I can't still be stuck as a teenager in an adult's body?

Maybe in some ways I do still have that sixteen year old inside me.  But I know I've changed and grown.  For one thing I no longer diagram movements of the boys I'm crushing on.  (Seriously, I diagrammed.  No lie.)  For another, my journal entries aren't nearly as epic as they used to be.  (I've had journal entries that went on for pages and pages.)

Re-reading my journals shows that in some ways I have changed and grown yet in some I haven't really.  I do still use my journal to (over)analyze (to death) when I'm worried/wondering if a boy likes me.  But then I also really use my journal to let out all my frustrations and worries and such.  Reading through some of them is like reading a roadmap to major decisions.

So, deride the trope as I may have in the past, I guess I need to be a bit more understanding.  Because I'm more Bella Swan than I realized, care to admit, or am comfortable with.

What about you?

Oh, my, how convenient!

Seriously, stupid conveniences bother me in reading and in television/movie viewing.

I was watching a tv show the other day.  I won't say which so as to not overtly spoil anything.  But there was a character whose estranged spouse conveniently showed up just to make this character's life more miserable/complicated and to complicate and effect the character's relationships with other characters.

Really?

I feel like this is a trope seen a lot and I'm a little tired of it.  I'm tired of the characters just having up and left their lives without resolution on that past.  There are so many ways the past can complicate the presence that we don't need a character who everyone thinks is single and then all of the sudden we find out they're really not.

Perhaps it's a symptom of the popularity through the years of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre.  Perhaps.  It also may just be a symptom of the lax views of marriage and family that are running rampant in today's world.  In a world where divorce is easy to obtain and more and more seems to be the first answer rather than a last resort after a couple has tried all they can to repair the marriage, picking up and leaving may seem like the common answer to make a character relatable.

I don't know if it's true, but I do know that relationships can be so complicated without this easy answer for character development.

The Painfully Oblivious Parent

You know the kind.  Oblivious to the point of being absurd.  Bella's dad in the Twilight books is one.  The dad in Josephine Angelini's Starcrossed (a book which I far prefer to Twilight and a lot of other YA paranormal romance books that I've read lately) is another.  (Though in his defense, because I really did enjoy the book, he's nowhere near as densely oblivious as Bella's dad.)  But the one that takes the cake for me is Eliot's mom in "E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial."  (Yes, it's a movie, but the trope is the same.)

I'm tired of seeing this.  Yes, kids do great jobs at hiding things from their parents.  (Though I was never one.  My mom's always been one of my closest friends.)  But these parents and others like them are so dense and oblivious I groan when I read them.  I realize it's a method of getting the parents' noses out of the kids' business so that the kids can be off doing their thing and conquering the world on their own.  But in my mind it sometimes borders on the inane.

A solution is the parent who knows but can't do anything.  Percy Jackson's mom comes to mind.  She can't see any of the baddies her son has to face.  He has to move away from home for his and her safety.  But whenever they happen to have an interaction, she's 100% supportive even though she might be terrified out of her mind underneath her calm facade.

I'd like to see more YA where the parents are aware of the situation but can't do anything, as with Percy's mom, or are aware to the point of becoming a source of conflict that can deepen the internal and/or external arc.  (I'm thinking of the mom in Sophie Jordan's Firelight here.)

What think you?