While I totally understand the pushback on how YA fantasy characters predominantly read as VERY mature for their ages, and think there should be far more space in the market for characters who view and interact with the world in a myriad of ways, it also makes me a bit sad...

As a teen I gravitated towards YA in general and YA fantasy in particular because characters in contemporary novels did not have lives that resembled mine

They were enmeshed in family and school dramas, following a very predictable course, and that wasn't my experience at ALL

By sixteen, I'd been working part-time for four years, dropped out of school for a semester due to a serious, months-long illness, and bought both a car and a laptop to better equip myself to juggle school and work simultaneously once I went back

My parents fed me and put a roof over my head and beyond that I was an almost entirely self-sufficient entity. We'd been a lot poorer when I was little, so if I wanted or needed something, I worked for it and I paid for it

I also called all the shots in my own life--my parents got married young and neither went to college. I was smart and determined and could convince them of pretty much anything. They often came to *me* for advice, and being pretty headstrong and proud at that point, I'd give it

Nothing about my life or family dynamics felt like what I saw in contemporary novels for teens

But I understood YA fantasy heroines, who were, for better or for worse making their own way in the world and just doing their best to keep it together with minimal outside help

I think--and I say this with the utmost gentleness--some of the debate about whether YA fantasy characters read as too old may come from a place of privilege as well? Remaining innocent, sheltered and nurtured into your late teens is a privilege many young people do not have

And while I do think that there's something wrong with a market that almost exclusively acquires stories about hyper-mature, self-sufficient teen characters in an attempt to cater to adult readers of a children's category, I think those stories themselves are important and needed

The problem is when they become the entirety of a specific category and genre, because of trends and marketability

And that's the stunted root of *so many issues* in publishing

A reluctance to publish a broad spectrum of stories and experiences, because This One Trend or Story was a cash cow, therefore we all others should look like it

The dollar is the bottom line rather than the best interests of readers and the cultivation of a robust, diverse catalog of kidlit

That mindset of money first and always buries stories and authors, and entire swaths of human experience, and can consign whole genres to stagnation

I think that's the trouble with YA fantasy at present--we're constantly told that the market is saturated, but the truth is, the market is stagnant

The most interesting stories from fresh, unheard voices either go unacquired or get little support because they don't fit the mold

And then, if one of those stories does break out against the odds, the response isn't "let's take more creative risks!"

It's "let's find more of that exact thing"

Anyway, I love you, publishing, and I'm in this for the long haul, but I think you'd actually find it MORE profitable to stop treating the field of literature as a zero sum game, and rather as an art form and a great, varied, beloved repository of human thought and expression

We're not making bricks worth twenty dollars a pop

We're building empathy, understanding, expression and history, a story at a time

Dollar signs are nothing compared to those intangible returns, but we need a broad and beautiful spectrum of stories to get the job done