Here’s something that occurred to me while watching Willow, which improved marginally since the last time I wrote about it (but still had some pretty incredible errors in judgment, stylewise): it was never meant for me.
It’s pretty revolutionary for any cis white man to realize that he’s not the point in any given conversation, so props: me, but I’ll also say that if Willow isn’t for me, then there’s some fairly revolutionary thinking happening within the Disney hegemony. Imagine taking as written that the “legacy” audience of a “legacy” property is not actually the audience you’re going after with a legacyquel! We’d have gotten a better Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, if anyone had done the math on that in 2013.
Willow, the series, is a YA show, and makes no bones about it. (The errors in judgment I mentioned above? They’re largely about creating what I’ll ignorantly call a Bridgertonian vibe throughout, via pop music and milquetoast contemporary banter. I have not watched Bridgerton.) Willow’s kind of a great YA show, actually, or at least it was, until its finale, which sucked the bag. Per my earlier comments, the weirdest thing about Willow is that it’s … about Willow. Which it kind of isn’t. At all. Not even the finale! The finale of Willow really seemed for a while like Willow wouldn’t be in it!
But as a youth-targeted action adventure show about some young people (three girls, two of whom are in love with each other, two of whom are frenemies who become deeply bonded) going on a quest and working out their various crushes and enmities therein, Willow succeeds utterly. It’s dumb, but it’s earnest; and earnest gets a long way with me, these days. Willow succeeds where it needs to — the crushes are crushy, and the enmities easily give way to greater realizations about perspective and personal desire.
Again, I really have no idea if this was intentional or just a clumsy accident, but it felt somewhat novel when I realized that i wasn’t really the audience for this show, and realized almost immediately thereafter that if it did find its audience, Willow might mean as much to them as the movie, Willow, did to me at roughly the same age. I think Willow-as-YA is for girls 12-14, whereas Willow-as-fantasy was, at least initially, for boys 10-12. Maybe part of the fascinating thing that happened is that the gender divide never really worked out, and girls found Willow-as-fantasy, and now Willow-as-YA answers them. Again, it could be a whole-ass accident, but it’s an interesting one, if so.
I think about YA as a formal structure a lot right now, not least because I’m revamping one of my older story ideas into something that I think would make a good novel for young people, probably also aiming at girls and genderqueer persons, aged 12-14. I’ve been thinking about it since I read The Gilded Ones last spring, and that on the back of Binti a couple of years ago (if you haven’t read Binti, it’s essential). Most of my interest right now is because I think, as a mode or a framework, YA is perhaps less pliant than I’d long (ignorantly) suspected; but now as I delve into it, I start to wonder if the formalism isn’t the point: getting a lot of potential distractions out of the way so that the medium can deliver its true purpose straight to the vein, with its true purpose being Identity and Aspiration. These things seem to be about figuring out who you are and why that’s important, and making doing those things seem wildly, wildly exciting. What else would we want to tell our tweens, besides “shining for who you truly are is fucking great?” It makes me happy just thinking about it.
The notion of “shining” brings me to The Virgin’s Promise — which, I know, titlewise, ick — but is a fucking marvel of attempting to do something I have been interested in since college, which is to genuinely analyze women-led genre stories for how they map to The Hero With A Thousand Faces, while simultaneously allowing for genuine, longstanding tropes that seem particular to woman-identifying protagonists in heroic stories. I learned more reading that book than I did reading about Saving the Cat, anyway.
Back to the premise that started this post. We’re neck-, nay eyeballs-, deep in a realm of zombie IP marching across every screen on the planet. What’s always seemed so weird about it, to me, is the inherent limitations of the scope of catering to people my age: we are going to die! Some of us, sooner than others! It never really occurred to me till just now that using identifiable IP branding to grease entry into a content universe might not actually be about serving existing fandoms so much as it is about lowering the bar to entry for the generation behind us. These conglomerates need them to pick up that torch and keep spending that money.
Which, in turn, paints a lot of corporate decisions in an entirely different light. Who is your audience, if not the youngest physical person with liquid cash that you can find? How is that not the best return on your investment? How is every major brand not YA-first, adults second (if at all)? Are existing fandoms even the point? Should they be?
ITEMS!:
ITEM!: Jesus, Poker Face is good. Steve Yedlin achieved some stuff in the pilot that made my jaw drop. I ordered a shit-ton of Banacek off the back of this, just to keep the mystery-of-the-week vibe going.
ITEM!: Jesus, Doom Patrol getting cancelled is sad; or it would be, if it weren’t an actual miracle that they ever made this show at all, let alone let it run for four whole-ass seasons. CLIFF AND JANE 4 LIFE
ITEM!: Wait, what? Avatar 2 is the 4th-highest-grossing film of all time (as of this writing)? Did y’all idiots learn the lesson this time?
ITEM!: The best thing to come out of the DC slate announcement was Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow. That is a fantastic comic, one of the best things I read last year. I can’t imagine making a movie out of it. Good luck, and much love, to the person who’s about to try.