I’ve been feeling insane about this for a good ten years because I remember that the books that I read as a kid all had stories where the protagonist was completely normal and they found an object or a book and learning to read the book or use the magical object was what made them into the cool hero, and then part way during my childhood suddenly all the new books had heroes that were the hero because they were born the hero, and they were just temporarily uncool because they didn’t know that they were born special.
And I know that these things are trends that come and go, but I’m 30 years old now and the “you can only be born special, you can’t work to achieve great things” narrative just WILL. NOT. DIE. as a trend in YA lit.
Can we PLEASE go back to “find a weird book in the library and accidentally become an all powerful wizard because you can read aloud” being the dominant narrative of youth fiction?
