ashtray-girl:i’ve only recently started to notice this, b...
i’ve only recently started to notice this, but i’m getting more and more annoyed at the way in which most american booktubers talk abt books.
first of all, they all seem to talk abt the same books and they mainly focus on YA’s latest releases.
that’s not bad in and of itself, i do like a good YA novel once in a while, but it does become tiresome when that’s literally the only genre they seem to be interested in.
i also find it ironic how 95% of the stuff they read it’s written by american or english authors, but they think their reading is “diverse” bc they occasionally consume some YA with LGBT and/or POC characters.
(i actually find that loads of “diverse” YA is just fake and full of performative bullshit that gets shoehorned in to make you, the reader, feel like the author is indeed as Woke as you are and therefore Safe for you to consume, but that’s another story.)
and then there’s this whole obsession with books as an aesthetic… white IKEA shelves with fairy lights and rows upon rows of immaculate books in order of colour… i swear i’ve watched more than a dozen of these ppl and their backgrounds ALL LOOK THE SAME. which wouldn’t be so bad if their content wasn’t also basically interchangeable.
like… the impression i have is that most american booktubers don’t actually talk abt books and stories but abt Things To Consume and it just transpires in the way they keep reviewing the same stuff over and over again, for years, without apparently never feeling any desire to evolve in their taste, or even just to be a bit more adventurous!
and i’m not even gonna touch upon the moralistic undertones that they often use to talk abt charaters’ development and their relationship with each other, with Purity Juice just leaking all over and making everything so DULL and unenjoyable, like you’re watching an ethics & morality lecture and not just the umpteenth review on the umpteenth YA fantasy dystopian shitshow.
