Why's it all so DARK?

[GraysonMoran]

And medieval and gay?

Maybe it's just my karma, but my crawl around the more successful of the blog written novels of the day seems to come up with mostly these dark SF/F dystopias and a LOT of them have big dollops of gay sex.   

What's the deal?    I realize that the gay market, because it's focused, can drive media and venues.  Maybe you remember the twilight of the "art repretoire" movie theater, before DVD's, when half the stuff on was either tough gay documentaries or gay soft porn.

But are dark fantasy pessimists that much of a force in reading?   Or in online reading? 

Maybe I've come up with a distorted sample.   Or maybe there's some explanation like fantasy geeks being more apt to sit home reading on their computer screen.

Or maybe I'm miffed because I've had trouble selling SKY SEEDS because they take it as "YA" due to most of the characters being teens, then freak out because of the violence and sex and drugs.   (Meanwhile, "Jumper" is a movie.)   Then I look at this stuff and it's just crawling with non-PTA-endorsed stuff for kids.

Well....

hell. 

[Team 2012]

At least you've got normal sex and violence and pot and shit, Grayson.   We popped out a chapter of MAYAN CALENDAR GIRLS in a couple of forums and they went berserk on us, whole streets full of villagers with torches and pitchforks and flails.  You'd think they'd never read about a girl having consensual sex with a dolphin before.   

The hilarious thing was,  several said that inter-species sex is okay if it's aliens.  So you can screw a demon or angel or martian or slimebug and it's just good clean fun, but having it on with a dolphin is sick, sick, sick.

[Richard]

This is what I get for walking in on the middle of a conversation...

[Team 2012]

Could have been worse.  You could have walked in on a girl boinking a dolphin.   As in the now-infamous chapter itself.   (We toned this down quite a bit.  It originally included actual insertion/suction and had two graphics that were pretty, well...graphic)

SLEEPS WITH THE FISHES

[vjchambers]

Don't you think most published YA is dark these days?

Most of 'em are about vampires. Then you got Hunger Games, about a fight to the death between six kids, the Uglies Trilogy, about a dystopian future society where kids are being forced to have their brains and faces altered when they turn sixteen, and--my most recent read--The Forest of Hands and Teeth, about the zombie apocalypse (with a love triangle, of course.)

It's a dark, dark place for teens these days. After all, being an adolescent is a special kind of hell, I think.