Your ‘cool-girl’ Can Die in a Fire.
By Edie Stewart 9G2
Your ‘cool-girl’ Can Die in a Fire.
This is a message from teen girls to geeky male YA writers. Stop making us read your boring fantasy women. We don’t want any more of your cool-girl crap. Actual cool girls are great but your trope you labelled cool is definitely not.
Growing up I never felt as though I properly related to any of the books I read. First of all, most of the characters were men, and I often felt no emotional attachment to the few women in the stories.
Now that I’m older, I realise that this is because all these women were based on a singular, quite boring trope. The cool girl. This woman must be stunningly beautiful without trying, and without knowing it. She is always fun, carefree and can eat and drink whatever she wants while still maintaining the figure of a model. Most importantly, she never has her own actual problems, she's only there to be the love interest and to help the main character find himself.
Take Lydia Demarek from the Brotherband series for example (whose name I could only find, by the way when I searched up “main character’s girlfriend, Brotherband”). The description on Lydia's wikiHow page literally reads “She is a hunter, so she has strong hands and a lean slim figure. Her skin is olive coloured, her eyes are hazel and she has high cheekbones which hint to a Temujai ancestry. Her hair is black and is said to be glossy. Lydia is very beautiful”. Lydia is one of the main characters in the series for four books, and all her character is, is beautiful and good at hunting. This is typical of female representation that teens my age had growing up and I think I speak for all of us when I say that we’re tired of it. We. Are. Done.
These tropes aren't only a problem because they’re unrealistic, they also set a standard for girls. They set out rules. The cool-girl trope teaches us that not every girl is allowed to go on adventures, not all of us are allowed to be the main character. Only the pretty ones are allowed to go, only the ones that are naturally skilled (cough, cough Mulan 2020), only the skinny ones, only the ones that will do what they're told. According to your trope, the only girls that are welcome are the ones who aren't like all the others. Apparently, all the ‘others’ are bad.
It’s so obvious that books like these are written for men by men, but even if women weren’t the target audience in books like ‘The Brotherband’, the fact remains that the writing is just lazy. This stereotyped female character in YA fiction is a blatant sign of bad writing. These girls have no flaws, no personality, and are frankly just boring. Don’t know how to write a female character? Can’t be bothered creating an original character? Here’s an easy cheat.
Lydia Denmark, Mare Barrow and Sarah Smith from the novel Fledgling are all stunningly beautiful girls with unique special powers that make them somehow different from the rest. They are normally outcast or bullied by a group of bitchy mean girly girls but are then rescued in some way by a man and accepted into his comparatively fun and interesting world. These cool girls are all so similar and we are sick of it. Boys as well as girls.
If only cool girls are allowed to join a magical society or go on adventures around the world then that means an ordinary girl has to change everything about herself or be left behind. She has to stop being the ‘feminine-girly-girl-other’ and become ‘the special one’. The one who is just like another one of the guys, the one who is not actually a girl, but instead is an exception to the rule. In order to be represented in YA literature as a woman, you have to reject your womanhood, you have to become a man with tits.
We are not saying that women can’t enjoy beer or hunting or being masculine. We are just rejecting your simple stereotype that denies the complexity of being a woman.
It’s time for you YA authors to stop acting like little boys hanging ‘no girls allowed!’ on their treehouses. Society is changing from a time when one’s role as a woman was to be the pretty object or the mother. These archaic tropes are still stuck in the bitter past. Books shouldn’t be written as though men are the only ones reading them, women shouldn’t be written as though being stunning and loving baseball is all they are. Your ex-fanbase, both male and female, is sick of your bull. Do better.