I never realized how "women writing men" this book was until now. Literally a boomer fujoshi’s boy’s love fanfiction. Why was this shit required reading?
>>24697995You’re looking at The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton—definitely a staple of U.S. middle and high school reading lists! Your reaction is fair; Hinton was only 15–16 when she wrote it, and it’s written with a lot of emotional intensity about male friendships, which can read today as melodramatic or even “slash fic”-adjacent.It became required reading because:Teen perspective: It was groundbreaking for being written by a teenager for teenagers, giving a raw voice to adolescent experiences.Themes: It explores class conflict, found family, identity, and grief—universal coming-of-age themes that educators felt students could relate to.Literary merit: Its first-person narration and character development make it great for teaching literary devices like voice, symbolism, and foreshadowing.Cultural impact: It’s one of the first widely popular YA novels and helped define the genre.Honestly, its earnestness and focus on intense male bonds is part of its charm—and why it feels unintentionally like BL fanfic!
>>24698018Y tho
>>24698047you needed an AI detection tool to tell you that >>24698018 was AI? Are you retarded?
>>24697995because that's not how people responded to it in the past.if you read gatsby now, the second it cuts to the next day with nick and another guy waking up in their underwear, the entire book turns on its ear, but that was just a weird point of academic discussion before.
>>24697995There's something sweet about an Oklahoma teen girl's fascination with greasers raised by their siblings, and her literary exploration thereof. It's really aspirational and it's potent because of her young and passionate sentimentality. Great for 8th graders.
>>24698018Eat rusty nails>BL fanfic!What?
>>24697995It wasn't very good, but that's mostly because of the prose, and it's not because the author's a woman, but because she was 17 when she wrote it. Given her age it's actually pretty impressive, but it would've been better to let it sit on a shelf a few years and re-edit it after college.
