a retrospective on teen dystopian books

let's reflect on and discuss the Young Adult Dystopian phase and the rise and fall of all of our favourite hunger games copycats.

00:00 young adult trend cycles
6:26 early YA dystopians
11:57 the hunger games era
15:52 the first hunger games 'copies'
18:19 YA dystopian peak
29:41 trope analysis
34:56 the downfall of YA dystopia
37:00 defending divergent..?

🌼 s o c i a l m e d i a
• twitter: @thebookleo
• instagram: @thebookleo

🌺 a b o u t m e
Hi! My name is Leonie and I am a 25 year old girl from the Netherlands who loves talking about books! From YA to non-fiction to classics, I read it all (although fantasy will always be my fave).

🌹 m u s i c
Music, art, and video by Jokabi

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[JamesTullos]

The best part of this trend was the increasingly desperate and stupid ways the authors tried to justify teenagers being key to the success or failure of entire countries.

[Tomkatos]

Sometimes a teenager just needs to read a book about a dystopia in which teenagers are the most oppressed group in society lmao. Im sure that it helps process some feelings.

[upsetstudios]

I'm still, after all these years, mad that The Hunger Games were marketed as a "silly love triangle for teenage girls" when it was *sooo* much darker and meaningful

[bokorjudit]

the "rich girl meets lower class boy who shows her the real world" is actually the full-on opposite of "manic pixie dream girl" characters haha

[giulia]

“There is something that all these books lack, that The Hunger Games has, that Twilight has”
I confidently said a love triangle. I was wrong

[jesstiara]

I think the reason why these “older” YA books are randomly getting hyped again is because the kids who were too young to read them discovered them and found them relevant

[annejia]

Another great factor is that the first twilight movie and the first hunger games book were released at a time when the younger audience of Harry Potter were just entering teenhood and the Harry Potter film series were coming to an end. those younger HP audience entering teenhood in 2008 became the force and the perfect age for the Young Adult market that peaked/rose in 2011.

[olliveen]

the comparison of the divergent factions to tiktok aesthetic niches is so real actually you're so right. divergent really excapsulates the teenage "all or nothing" need to fit in. life truly does imitate art *chefs kiss*. excellent video!

[sophiep]

Whilst you spoke about tropes and the girl having their eyes opened by the boy who can show them what the world is really like, I looked at the maze runner cover and realised that Thomas is the clueless young girl being shown the real world by his knight in shining armour Teresa Agnes.

[jasmin]

~2008 was when the global financial crisis hit, so maybe that context of teens being confronted with the fear of social decline and poverty may have had an influence in the reception of dystopian novels 🤔🤗

[sirensblood]

Living in Iran, i could bever bring myself to read dystopian novels because they hit too close to home, but now that im older i wanna try reading the hunger games, since i liked the movies so much

[TheBookLeo]

Some of you rightfully pointed out that YA has been a thing for a lot longer in other countries, so i wanted to make some corrections: In this video I take John green’s books and Twilight as the start of the YA boom, but it turns out that this is only particularily true for the Dutch publishing industry. The term Young Adult has existed since the 1960’s and was coined by the Young Adult Library Services Association in the US. One book that didn’t make the final cut of this video is 1967’s The Outsiders, which is considered one of the first american Young Adult novels. In the US, the first ‘golden age’ of young adult fiction actually happened in the 1970, followed by a second golden age in the 2010. The phenomenon of Young adult fiction didn’t reach The netherlands until the 2010’s, and I’m sure the timelines are different in other countries as well.

[gabciafangirl]

but for real I've recently reread Hunger Games as a 20 year-old, and in comparison with my 13 year-old self I was able to pick up on so many more things, like yeah it was a great book for a teenager, but it is still great after some growing up, and you can certainly pinpoint changes that you've gone through as a human, like for example acquiring the ability to recognize manipulation

[lenakataeva]

I miss the trends when they last. Now they're so quickly changing

[meghand]

16:20 Suzanne Collins was not a debut author when she published The Hunger Games! I was a huge fan of her series Gregor the Overlander as a kid — the first book of which came out in 2003.

[CarolinaGothic]

The uglies series literally shaped my life. It had me researching GMOs, monoculture, propaganda, fascism, attention economies, magnetic lift systems, green alternative energy, all when I was middle schooler in like 2007-2009. I re-read it over and over. Still enjoy the audiobooks too this day.

[veda]

I need the ya dystopian era to resurface

[moonlight_moth]

fun fact the author of Twilight Stephenie Meyer wrote a dystopian/sci-fi/post apocalyptic book called The Host in 2010 I think it was supposed to be a series but she only wrote and published the first book. It was also adapted into a movie.

[annaboettcher]

Susanne Collins has actually written another series which everyone is sleeping on. Is is called Gregor the Overlander, released in 2003, definitely geared towards younger ages rather than YA, but it is amazing and my favorite books. I try to tell everyone I know about these because they deserve to be known and loved as much as the hunger games.

[Diana-hfqv]

Can we talk about the role book covers play? Some of the book covers on this list are ICONIC, and i recognize covers to books i haven't even read. I first picked up Twilight as a kid because the cover stood out to me so much. I have noticed book covers themselves follow trends and evolve over time.