Trading Tropes for Theme

Why can't YA Fantasy be a bit literary?

Internet wisdom dictates that you’re supposed to market your book on social media by using tropes.  Catchy phrases.  Elevator pitches.  So when I was on social media, I did what I was told.  I called my first novel a YA Fantasy Murder Mystery. I said its Lord of the Rings meets Sherlock with Jane Austin Vibes.  I called it a Wild Reimagining of Cinderella.  I splashed text on the screen that said, hopefully intriguingly, “Sword Fights and Ball Scenes.”

I guess all that is technically true.  It is a fairy tale retelling, even though my book’s fairy godmother runs an underground network of spies.  But the distillations feel weird to me.

I don’t think about stories as a set of tropes.  Not the books I read, and certainly not the books I write.  A story is plot and character development.  Theme and subtext.  The kind of stuff doesn’t fit into a 30 second TikTok.  When I write YA Fantasy I am giving absolutely zero thought to the genre’s current market and meta.  I’m aiming to create something that can sit on the shelf alongside the stories I read as a teen that shaped my worldview and stuck with me.  I would rather have a smaller fanbase for something I care about than write books as product.

So if it’s okay with you, I’d like to talk about my book the way I think about it.  Setting aside the sword fights and ballroom dancing, I’m doing something in this book with a teen audience in mind.  Or several somethings.  So lets get into it.

On Identity

First, one of the big themes in The First Whispers of Fate is Identity.

Our main protagonist is Aideen, a mixed-race teenager whose mother was an elf and father was a human. Her mother is dead (as is the case with so many YA protagonists).  This leaves Aideen caught between cultures, being raised in the world of humans and trying to understand the elven part of her heritage when she only has an uncle to tell her about it.  Things get set into motion when her father is murdered, and nobody believes it was foul play except her.  Aideen sets out to find the truth, discovers more than she bargained for, etcetera, etcetera.

All of that is plot, not theme.  Throughout all this how Aideen sees herself and how the world sees her gets all manner of untidy.  And that’s the point.

Identity is a pretty hot topic these days. Race, gender, sexuality, nationality, immigration status, social status.  These are all constantly talked about in my home country of America, as well as here in Europe.  The topic has invaded our dinner table conversations, our politics, our news feeds.  This year, it was even front and center at the Super Bowl halftime show.

And here I am, a straight white dude, wondering how I can write about any of it for a YA audience.

Who is allowed to write a story?

The conversation on who should be allowed to write certain stories is an absolute minefield.  Can a white person write about black people?  Or Latin American immigrants?  Those experiences aren’t mine, so are those characters simply off limits for me?  If a straight author writes about LGBTQ characters, are they misrepresenting a community they can never fully understand?  Are they exploiting a community for some kind of credibility?  Yet if I wrote a book populated with nothing but straight white people, that’s problematic as well.  That isn’t the world I live in.

Look, no community needs me to speak for them.  So I have no intention of doing so.  But all of us have aspects and influences that make up how we see ourselves.  How the world sees us.  Exploring that is not only really interesting, it’s important.  We need to explore those ideas, even when they’re tricky or problematic.

Actually, scratch that. We need to explore them BECAUSE they’re tricky and problematic.

This idea of identity through heritage and circumstance is a complex issue that deserves attention.  Especially for Young People in an era where political forces are making it harder and harder to talk about identity with level heads.

Stealing a Trick from SciFi

Science Fiction has this neat trick of handling sensitive topics by just inventing alien cultures.  This isn’t being sneaky, though.  It’s more clever than that.  By dealing with real world issues in a wholly fictional setting, you can set aside questions of “is this the truth?” and just explore the ideas themselves knowing it’s all fiction.  It allows the reader to accept or reject the ideas on their own merit.  Without cultural baggage.

Now, on the one hand, that’s absolutely cheating.  But when it’s well done, it helps us set aside our preconceived ideas and sink into a story that has cultural depth and makes us think.  It helps us bypass our prejudices and preconceptions and find a place of empathy.

So that’s what I’ve done, only with Fantasy instead of SciFi.

The Talavara Prophecy is set in a world populated by many of the classic fantasy races.  Humans, elves, dwarves, and all the rest.  But I’m staying loose with Tolkien’s tropes.  These fantasy races are more than flavor and lore, they’re here to provide opportunity to explore identity and culture.

Does that mean my races are some kind of stand-in for real world cultures?  No.  See, that’s the beautiful thing.  The cultures in my story don’t need to have much in common with any real world culture.  It’s the experience that matters.  The experience of facing discrimination, or being an outsider, or being an immigrant, or struggling to understand your sense of self as somebody of mixed heritage—those are universals.  Those can then be explored without the specific baggage of modern prejudices.

Fantasy as Historical Framing

Another thing I’m doing here has to do with the setting itself.  This story takes place in a world that is a distinctly American flavored brand of high fantasy.  You’ve got queens and castles and magic, but there’s more to it than that.

See, this is High Fantasy inspired by American history.  Specifically, the American History they don’t seem to want us to talk about these days.

So you’ve got The American Dream.  And neo-feudalism.

All Men are created equal and slave plantations.

Enlightenment, education, innovation, freedom, justice, absolutely.

But also the Salem Witch Trials. Oligarchs. The Trail of Tears. The Underground Railroad, the KKK, isolationism.

(All that is just in the first few books.)

I guess you could say I’ve just had some things on my mind lately.

I’d like to think I did this without being Hamfasted hamfisted.  I mean, this series started as me writing about characters from my old D&D campaign.  The other stuff just sorta came out between the lines.  So on the second draft, I leaned into it.  In book 2 coming out this summer, I lean a lot harder.

Don’t get me wrong.  The book is supposed to be a fun read.  But it can be more than that, too.  A story doesn’t have to be some major literary work to have something in there worth chewing on.