why lightlark is the divergent of ya fantasy

and why we, as consumers, have to do better

I. FOREWORD

After spending some time on the writing/book side of Twitter, you’ll notice the same discourse make the rounds every few months: specifically, on the problem with marketing books solely via tropes.

Despite the occasional jab at the booktok audience, the blue bird app primarily targets the authors that attempt to appeal to said audience. However, as it is wont to do, it leaves no room for nuance; taking something that is a problem on every level from the publisher to the consumer and distilling it down to “authors being cringe”.

Now, I am an aspiring writer. I would like to get published someday. But before that, I am a reader, and it isn’t hard to see that this shift towards AO3 tag marketing is highly reductive on all sides.

Most authors can’t be blamed for advertising their books as a collection as tropes, because this kind of marketing works. We, as consumers, allow it to work.

If I took a shot every time I saw a fantasy book recommended solely on the basis of being enemies to lovers, I would already be dead of liver poisoning. I’ve seen books like The Poppy War being advertised as academic rivals to lovers, and for the longest time, I thought The Cruel Prince was completely romance-centric for how little I saw of the rest of it.

I see book pitches centering things like masquerade balls and dagger to throat scenes, stripped of all context, raised as if their very presence is an indicator of quality.

Novels like Lightlark were not spawned from nothing. If readers talk solely about tropes, then the natural progression from there is to write a book that has nothing else to offer.

The publishing industry does not necessarily have any interest in selling you interesting, quality books. It is a business above all else, and if tropes are what we consistently buy, then that’s what they’re going to sell.

II. THE PRECURSOR

First though, I’d like to take a minute to talk about a fallen behemoth of a genre—one that once packed nearly every shelf in the fiction section of my middle school library, but now, like the remnants of a dead empire, leaves most of its citizens to lie dusty and forgotten.

I am, of course, referring to YA dystopian.

It’s hard to pin down the exact point that its success began to decline, but few novels better embody the genre’s flaws better than the Divergent trilogy.

It is YA dystopia at its most YA dystopia: a chemical concoction that boils the genre down to its lowest common denominator. In theory, it has everything that a dystopian story should have, with an authoritarian government to take down and plenty of conspiracies to uncover. But, like distilled water, there are no minerals of creativity to be found within Divergent’s pages. It is an empty husk of a novel, relying on familiar imagery and tropes without ever understanding why they worked in the original.

In contrast, despite spending several years being panned as just as trope-y and generic as the rest, people have been revisiting The Hunger Games trilogy to find that it stands head and shoulders above many of its contemporaries.

This is because The Hunger Games is a story first, and a YA dystopia second. It is greater than the sum of its parts. Divergent, as well as many other YA dystopias of the time, was instead created by ripping symbols and character archetypes from the text they were originally made for, then repackaging them into something easily digestible and even more easily marketable.

Lightlark has done the same for YA fantasy.

III. THE CHECKLIST

Imagine, if you will, an author that chanced upon the tvtropes page for YA high fantasy, and then mistook that for a novel outline. Lightlark is the dollar store knock-off of whatever that author managed to cook up.

I would recommend this review if you want a comprehensive breakdown of every problem with Lightlark, but what I want do is to zero in on the plot.

Many other people have brought up the fact that the plot is, well, rather incomprehensible. It’s riddled with more holes than a slice of swiss cheese, it doesn’t make sense, etc. All of this is because Lightlark is not a story. It is a collection of scenes and moments placed in a sequential order, chemically engineered to best appeal to its horny booktok audience.

Alex Aster herself said that the book was ripped apart and put back together more than once in order to give readers what they wanted, which brings up two equally terrifying possibilities. Either the original version was so bad and so unsalvageable that this was genuinely the best they could do, or they made changes to include as many marketable moments as possible in a single book.

Personally, I’m leaning more towards the latter.

Aster has also stated numerous times that this was a decade-long labor of love. Maybe that’s what it once used to be, but that version has since been lost to time. And, at least for me, it’s difficult to see the passion in a book when it reads like the most concentrated form of mass-produced corporate schlock.

If there was one word I would use to describe Lightlark other than “bad” or “generic”, it would be “comfortable.”

That isn’t to say that there isn’t anything viscerally uncomfortable in the actual contents of the novel (Grimshaw 🤢), but beyond searching for plotholes, reading Lightlark never requires you to actually think about anything.

The worldbuilding is nonsensical but simple on a surface level, the plot is thin and watery, and by virtue of being ripped straight from the pages of an SJM novel, the characters are already familiar to any reader vaguely familiar with the genre.

This makes it more marketable, but is an absolute tragedy for its quality.

IV. THE TIKTOK ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM COMPLEX

Lightlark’s existence is not a disease so much as a symptom, one for a problem that isn’t going to be fixed by complaining about trope marketing.

That problem, as I see it, is a rampant rise in anti-intellectualism and a refusal to leave comfort zones.

I recently met someone in my university’s SFF Society who said they didn’t want to critically engage with media because they were worried they might find flaws that would dampen their enjoyment of it. A decidedly odd take, considering they were in a club dedicated to media analysis.

This refusal to engage further is present every time someone claims classics are worthless because they are written exclusively by white men, which at once erases all classics written by POC and women, as well as those that may be written by white men but still have something valuable to say (George Orwell and Mikhail Bulgakov come to mind).

It’s present when someone says a novel is problematic because the main character does bad things, seemingly forgetting that the protagonist is simply the person the story is about, not necessarily the good guy.

It’s present when readers complain that high fantasy and science fiction are impossible to read because they don’t understand 100% of what’s going on from the very start, but at the same time also claim to hate exposition.

It’s present when adults won’t read anything but YA, then ask for “spice” despite those books supposedly being for and about teenagers.

Classics are pretentious, non-American films are snobbish, and saying anything else automatically makes you a pretentious snob. The curtains are blue because the author liked the color blue, and every one of your English teachers was just making up bullshit when talking about things like “literary criticism” and “rhetorical devices.”

That isn’t to say that it’s bad to have comfort media. There’s nothing wrong with reading ten of the same kind of book, or just turning your brain off and enjoying a big dumb action movie for the fast-moving pictures and bright lights. The issue arises when you don’t consume anything else.

V. PUTTING YOUR MONEY WHERE YOUR MOUTH IS

So, what do we do about it?

Well, as stated previously, publishing is a business, and the only language it speaks is the one you lay out with dollar bills.

Novels like Lightlark will always exist, but it is on the part of the consumer to be a little more selective of what we get onto the NYT Bestseller List. Seek out books by marginalized authors, indie books, books completely different from what you usually read whether it be genre or topic.

And most importantly, engage critically with what you consume. When it comes to truly great books, figuring out the themes and picking up on foreshadowing and deeper meaning is half the fun, and when it comes to bad ones, that engagement is what allows you to put into words exactly what’s off about them.

Being a media snob is fun, sometimes. And by supporting those books that big publishers won’t, we give their creators something to stand on so they can keep creating.

We’ll start getting good books when we start actively seeking them out, and we’ll stop getting trope marketing when we finally stop falling for it.