Like So Totally, Like, Annoying!

[mrissa]

I am not a fan of censorship. You all probably know this by now. But if no one ever in the world ever ever ever wrote another story in cutesy ditzy teenage girl voice, I swear we would still have at least enough of those stories. At least.

Take Mike Resnick's story in Janis Ian's Stars anthology. (Do I have to say "please" here, or will you take the pleading for granted?) It starts out, "He's GORGEOUS! I mean, it's as if Morvich and Casabella and that old guy, Michael something, you know, the one who painted some big ceiling, as if they all got together and said, what's the most beautiful thing we can paint, the most beautiful thing in all the galaxy?"

If you read that and thought, "I hate the narrator and find her unbelievable and could not possibly care about anything she does ever," you are not alone. Later, the reader who is unwary enough to continue is treated to the gem, "He wasn't there today. I came home and cried and counted 51 ways to kill myself, but then I cracked a nail and had to go to the beautician to get the acrylic fixed." Oh, HA! Ha HA! Mike Resnick, you are so much with the funny!

Teenage dialect is hard to get right. You can't just decide to be optimally shallow and edit out a random half of your own knowledge and have a believable teenage narrator. Doesn't work that way. Go back and try again.

GRRRRR.

I am also probably being cranky to feel that there are far fewer "thick-headed shallow male teenager" stereotype POVs, and that people who write dizzy, shallow teenage girl narrators are likely to overlap significantly with the people who assumed I was dizzy and shallow for seven years just because I was a teenage girl. That is probably not fair of me.

GRRRRRRR.

Comments

[mkille.livejournal.com]

I am also probably being cranky to feel that there are far fewer "thick-headed shallow male teenager" stereotype POVs

I'm not the biggest reader ever, but I don't think I've ever come across a story written from that POV. I'm wracking my brain trying to think what that would be like, and I keep coming up with Flowers for Algernon-type things, which would be so completely different. I think it wouldn't give authors a chance to think themselves clever with the verbiage, since if there is one thing "thick-headed shallow male teenager" stereotypes are *not*, it's noticeably verbal.

thick-headed shallow male teenagers

[merriehaskell.livejournal.com]

All I can come up with is Johnny Rico in Starship Troopers.

Re: thick-headed shallow male teenagers

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Ummm. I'm not sure I'd have described Johnny Rico as thick-headed and shallow; certainly not deliberately so.

Re: thick-headed shallow male teenagers

[mkille.livejournal.com]

I haven't actually read the book; is it written from his POV?

[stillsostrange.livejournal.com]

Anything that ever had a farm boy hero who needed to be jettisoned from an airlock as soon as possible...

Though the examples in my head are mostly high fantasy, and ones where the author doesn't even try to come up with a teenage culture or slang. If you mean more sf or modern sorts of teenagers, I'm also drawing a blank.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

I was thinking more sf or modern, yes. High fantasy is usually full of enough other questionable anthropology that the plausibility of hero denseness doesn't figure into it, for me.

(Not that I don't enjoy high fantasy; just usually not for its keen insights into the human condition.)

[timprov.livejournal.com]

There's the terrible-sounding YA which was getting so much press at Minicon, I don't remember the name of it, though.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

I might be able to figure it out, given a month/year range for when it would have been getting press. But I know "I don't remember the name of it" isn't quite the same crisis for other people as it is for me.

[timprov.livejournal.com]

It's not a crisis for me; besides, mrissa will know what I'm talking about, and probably remember the title.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

No, but I'll recognize it on sight.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

must...suppress...librarian compulsions...let people...figure stuff out...on their own...

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Crabbe and Goyle, in the Harry Potter books - though of course they're far from lead characters and they don't seem to have anything beyone thick-headedness.

Maybe some of the characters in Louis Sachar's Holes, as well, and those do have more hidden depths.

Or would Zane Gray's laconic cowboys, all 6 feet tall, broad-shouldered, slim-hipped, and not terribly articulate, qualify?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I don't think anybody was claiming that there aren't thick-headed teenaged male characters. Just that they aren't usually main/point-of-view characters.