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The series was the talk of town before BookTok was a thought in anyone\u2019s mind.\u00a0The book also had the most sexual material out of anything I was reading at the time. Black leather-clad, demon-fighting teenagers were making out all over the page. If I was reading it in class, I\u2019d check over my shoulder to see if anyone could see what was happening on the page.\u00a0But in each of the books, when anything major happened, it focused on the feelings and emotions rather than the physical material. It also walked around the actual wording to a point where sensory details skirted around the act happening on the page. Then, a few paragraphs later, the scene would \u201cfade to black.\u201d The writing is more ambiguous as to what is going on, but the actions are still occurring. The material was different from what took up page space, but the writing was still ambiguous as to the actual actions taking place. Most scenes still didn\u2019t progress very far.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Jump forward to the Goodreads Choice Awards 2015 through 2019, and Sarah J. Maas books dominate the \u201cYoung Adult Fantasy\u201d section. The books, notably and notoriously, portray much more sexual material than the other two authors\u2019 series.\u00a0They do not cut away and do not mince words.\u00a0In the book that won the award in 2016, A Court of Mist and Fury<\/em>, readers on TikTok have the exact chapter that the two characters sleep together memorized. The sexual material is not just an afterthought of the series, but an integral part that makes them as popular as they are.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n In fiction YA books, the romantic material has changed as well. The most popular 2010s YA romance fiction authors I can remember were Sarah Dessen or Jenny Han. Neither of whom had obvious explicit material in their books for more than what was regular for the time (fade to black and the like). But popular fiction romance now that is being read by teen audiences from authors such as Colleen Hoover\u2014a name nobody can stop talking about, both good or bad\u2014is much more obvious and upfront about sex between the love interests.\u00a0There is a question of whether certain books\u2014such as Colleen Hoover, who was not initially marketed as YA\u2014belong in the YA category because of their material. It is relevant that most people now agree that Sarah J. Maas\u2019 previously mentioned books should have been released as \u201cNew Adult\u201d instead.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n I think it is besides the point. Whether these books change marketing now, they have already been made popular by a large majority of a female teen audience. A female teen audience that publishers know have buying power and are, according to readers on TikTok, more than okay with the material.\u00a0Sexual material in the YA genre and it\u2019s growing nature, isn\u2019t necessarily good or bad. It all depends, in my opinion, on the way such material is being presented to an intensely impressionable audience.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/orgs.emerson.edu\/undergraduate-students-publishing\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/14\/2024\/04\/image-1.png\")