Comment by hluska | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hluska | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I’m not sure that I’d call the reaction to Bergstrom a debacle. Here are a couple of quotes from the excerpt that made everyone angry:

“It’s a novel with a teenage heroine set in a dystopian future. Which novel in particular doesn’t matter because they’re all the same. Poor teenage heroine, having to go to war when all you really want is to write in your diary about how you’re in love with two different guys and can’t decide between them. These novels are cheesy, I know, and I suck them down as easily as milk.”

“They love this—the school uniform, the flash of seventeen-year-old legs.”

The first quote is a pretty direct attack at the Hunger Games. HG has a rabid following so that was risky. The second is just godawful writing. He still would have been okay but he went a little too far mocking the amount of talent needed to write YA.

Scooter Braun recently learned a lesson about screwing with media that rabid young adults identify with. It’s a bad idea, but if you’re going to do it, bring better prose. Or at least accept that the genre’s bestsellers are way better at the internet than you are.

Those quotes really don’t warrant the disproportional responses to his book nor the vitriol directed at him personally & professionally.

I think it’s time we start calling out the social media mobbing for what it really is: hateful.

Everyone will dismiss it with the "Paradox of Tolerance".

Did you actually read his interview though? If you’re going to mock your entire genre, you should at least be accurate. Otherwise, critics will rightly point out that you’re writing a genre you don’t know. When you add in that second quote, it’s even more obvious that he doesn’t know his genre.

The dude wrote some books at a team with YA was all the rage and got a film deal out of it. He made some godawful marketing and communications decisions and faced predictable consequences. I don’t feel bad for writers who can’t communicate. Nor do I feel bad for writers who aren’t capable of thinking through how their work fits within a genre they’re trying to capitalize on. Businesses that make bad marketing decisions cancel themselves and in this case, the writer made a myriad of awful business decisions. That’s capitalism.

And seriously, who would outright mock the Hunger Games without expecting some sort of disproportionate backlash? YA works in disproportionates - it’s the entire beast, right down to the growth strategy. If you’re not wise enough to understand your genre, you lose. The thought that you could dismiss that entire genre with garbage critiques and not face bizarre retribution is so insane that I can’t take it seriously.

And if you’re going to do that after you’ve signed a film deal?? I’m sorry but you deserve to be cancelled.

It's beyond my comprehension that anyone can believe that it was a reasonable response to some anodyne literary criticism. Hunger Games is rubbish. It's OK to say so. It's not OK to behave like a vicious lunatic because someone said the books and genre you like are rubbish. If you do lose your shit over it, then you are at best infantile and at worst mentally ill. The reaction might be predictable, but it's not defensible.

>If you do lose your shit over it, then you are at best infantile and at worst mentally ill.

The very sad, unfortunate thing is that a lot of these authors are indeed mentally ill. A lot of the ring-leaders of these mobs openly embrace their mental illness as a personality trait (ie: listing it in their Twitter bios).

It leads to this bizarre environment where their reactions are, medically speaking, insane (ie: the reaction of someone in bipolar mania, the reaction of someone suffering from paranoia or extreme anxiety.) But there are so many insane reactions, that it becomes normalized.

And then people who don't struggle with mental illness start to mimic the insane behavior, because hey, everyone else is doing it! And it's now the best way to get internet points, collect followers, and get some profitable attention to your own books.

>And seriously, who would outright mock the Hunger Games without expecting some sort of disproportionate backlash?

I believe you're having some selective memory issues. This was back in 2015, when "Hunger Games" was starting to lose steam. And many feminists on twitter were lampooning it for focusing on romance, and having a flimsy love triangle, when the life-or-death situation of the book wouldn't realistically allow for that.

Mocking the "Hunger Games" and any book with a love triangle was totally in vogue.

>He made some godawful marketing and communications decisions and faced predictable consequences.

It's funny, because I've seen dozens of YA authors sneer at "Fifty Shades of Grey." Call it toxic, poorly written, laugh at it, mock it, insist it was dangerous to even publish it.

Yet I've never seen the Fifty Shades of Grey fanbase, or any Romance genre authors, talk about threatening, stalking, and publicly heckling those authors who criticize the work.

You call it "predictable consequences." I call it "hateful, disturbing, potentially dangerous behavior that reeks of censorship."

What could possibly be wrong with mocking the Hunger Games?

I think it's worth clarifying two things:

1) This excerpt is written from the POV of a snarky, troubled 17-year-old girl. Very different from the author himself saying these things.

2) I can excuse 14-year-old fangirls losing their minds over the Hunger Games and lashing out at anyone who criticizes it.

I can not excuse 35-year-old adults encouraging their huge following to harass the author and cheering on the idea of burning his books.

I find those quotes absolutely normal, what's wrong with them?

You should maybe start off with his interview with Publisher’s Weekly. He said a couple of things about the YA genre that just aren’t true. The biggest one was that he seems to think it doesn’t take a lot of brains to write YA whereas his book is somehow special.

That interview was the first time that anyone had taken any notice of Bergstrom. So then, everyone read his excerpt.

(Incidentally, that’s a bad flow in writing. If your press insults an entire genre, your excerpt better be damned flawless. This goes 100x if you’re talking YA.)

The first paragraph delivers a really traditional out of touch old dude description of the Hunger Games. That’s treading on dangerous territory because you’re dealing with a universe that young people have become deeply invested in.

The second quote violates one of the genre’s rules about writing women.

So, you’ve got a writer who signed a big contract and a film deal. His introduction to his genre’s fans was an absolute disaster. So, the genre’s fans did what they always do and made a huge mess.

Some might call it disproportionate but then they don’t understand the genre either. YA is about disproportionate reactions. That’s essentially marketing.

All of that should make everyone seriously question whether this is a Paramount growth hack. Heaven knows Paramount wouldn’t be the first company to try to create controversy when they own rights to a book.

>YA is about disproportionate reactions. That’s essentially marketing.

I think you are entirely missing the point of these comments, which is: the "disproportionate reactions" of the YA community are hateful, bizarre, mob-like, and often dip into censorship.

You're also stating that the "genre's fans" are to blame. As the comments above clearly state, the criticism in this thread is toward the professional authors who take part in these mobs. Not the "young people."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com