Courage in the face of darkness

The ripe old smell of humans. You survive. Oh, you might have spent a million years evolving into clouds of gas and another million as downloads, but you always revert to the same basic shape. The fundamental human. End of the universe and here you are. Indomitable, that's the word. Indomitable! 
- The Doctor (Doctor Who, Utopia)

So while ago, I came across this article. It states that the current YA literature is growing increasingly dark. This is true. But the author of this article doesn’t like it – oh no, she can’t even buy a decent book for her daughter anymore.

I don’t understand this at all. Do we really want to read something that doesn’t deal with the dark things of life? What kind of book would that be, and how would we benefit from it? Of course, it doesn’t all have to misery and danger. To quote Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy and Firefly (among things):

"Make it dark, make it grim, make it tough, but then, for the love of God, tell a joke." 
— Joss Whedon

The Harry Potter books are an excellent example of this. Come to think of it, all the YA books that I’ve enjoyed the most deal with dark themes: His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman, The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins and Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi prominently among them.

Paolo Bacigalupi is also one of the contributors of this excellent discussion about the dark side of young adult fiction: craving truth-telling. He, as well as the other contributors, make some excellent points that absolutely pwn the aforementioned Meghan Cox Gurdon, who feels that “Contemporary fiction for teens is rife with explicit abuse, violence and depravity.”

I, too, believe that the darkness of YA fiction is not something to tut at. I wouldn’t have it any other way. Meghan Cox Gurdon seems to believe that it is about abuse, violence and depravity. I disagree. If I may meditate upon the core theme, the undertow if you will, of the dark stories, it is probably this: hope.

“We want to hold on to our individuality, our humanity, our ability to love and connect to others, […] but in today’s global communications network we can’t avoid facing overwhelming obstacles. The more we understand how small and powerless we really are against the immense forces that control our existence, the more we yearn to feel meaningful. And so we read again and again about the child of dystopia who makes us feel hope for humankind.”

– Lisa Rowe Fraustino, The comfort of darkness 

Yes, there is darkness in the books of today. Our world is a dark and frightening place, full of small and gigantic dangers. We need to address depression and suicide. We need to acknowledge death. We need to fantasize about the world of tomorrow, because we are headed into a very uncertain future indeed, and books like Exodus by Julie Bertagna give us an idea of what we might become, but also that even then it might not be too late to rise up and be a hero for many. These stories teach us how to make a stand against the darkness. If the characters we love can summon the courage to do this, then perhaps so can we. This may sound like an optimistic cliché, but it is not. It may be the most important lesson we have to learn, and we have to be reminded of it again and again. Human kind is largely defined by what it believes about itself. We shape our future, we shape our own destinies; we become that which we put our faith in. So if we can learn to make a stand – against injustice, against poverty, against climate change and the abuse of our planet – we will become, in the words of the amazing 10^th Doctor, “brilliant”.