Basically would it be considered "too much" to have a YA novel focus on topics such as religious tolerance and political corruptness(that's how professional I am I guess) in the future of the world. Basically two factions fighting over weather to tolerate religion or deny all others.
Near as I can tell, nothing is off limits in YA. You look at what's on the shelves and you can find drugs, suicide, teen prostitution, murder, and practically any other topic you'd care to consider. All I'd suggest with respect to your idea is not to make it too PC. The readers will get that they're being preached at.
Well I might be a bit biased as one faction will be very against other religions and the other will be extremely unilateralist. Possibly very upsetting to people, almost considerable "devil's deed" or some other nonsense.
Well, if you paint the religious people as caricatures - just a bunch of closed-minded, intolerant people - I think you run the risk of having a more shallow work. And depending on how you do it, people may try to draw comparison to some real religion and assume you're making a comment about it.
a yes,the dillema of how to strike such a delicate issue without bursting any arteries... why not go from the sort of veiw that was postulated at the end of one of the planet of the apes movies? (i forget specifically which one it was) basically,this particular one ended in the chapel,with the various factions in a gun battle of a sort,everyone of them looking as superiority posturing as the other for one reason or so...and the main character (forgot his name too) that was played by charleton heston,is the outsider observer of the situation...recognizing there was no end to the situation,and that everyone was dead anyways...he detonated the nuclear warhead in the chapel..turning the entire earth into a barren ball of dust feilds and radiation i beleive that is a good way to depict various veiws of intolerance,and people vying for superiority against each other,without necciscarily inflaming with toxicity (forgive my spelling).. if your book is perhaps in the near or far future,you could most assuridly have a variety of non or semi-human postulations that could be used to represent these factions a good example of how this sort of thing can be done with grace,and become a legend,is the 1968 film "night of the living dead" (not sure if that was the right title,ive seen so many zombie movies its hard for me to remember the specifics of each "dead + something title_)
You see but I also wanna take people away from this closed mindedness, and I was actually thinking of using a religion similar to Christianity and Fundamentalism.
Nowadays, that's a bit PC and cliche, in my view. Christians are about the only group you can bash and get away with it from the PC crowd, so it doesn't exactly take courage in writing. I'm guessing the image you have in your head of those particular people is already more a caricature than reality. That doesn't bode well, in my view. I think you'd make a stronger statement if you took a more realistic approach to things. But to get back to your original question, it certainly isn't "too much" for a YA audience.
Politically-correct. What I said above is the case in the U.S. Not sure about elsewhere. The bigotry against Christians from some quarters is just as bad as the bigotry coming from some fundamentalist Christians. Maybe worse, because it generally goes unchallenged. I'm not religious, but I don't like to see intolerance toward any people as a group, and you see it quite a bit from people who are considered politically-correct here. I think as long as it is clear you aren't trying to characterize all members of a religion as bad somehow, you'll probably be OK. That goes for any religion, or really for any large group of people. But if the only people in your story who resemble Christians are all bad guys, I think that would be pretty transparent. Others may have a different view
>.> we seem to be at an impasse..i suggest you cast everyone in the novel as they were with an equal stance,you know,of fighting continuously with no solution..and use your narritive talent to cast dismay on the lack of cooperation that is needed to advance humanity
interesting, the setting is a utopian society founded out of our current humanity's downfall. Humans basically had to re-create all inventions and thus are in the mid-evil era again but are unified as fewer wide-spread unions.
hmm,perhaps it could be penned how it seems this dismal yet horrific conflict comes in cycles of destruction,rebirth,downfall,destruction...and how pointless it all is..thus could be the protagonist`s mission..to use some of the remaining and still functioning technology from the utopian era,to change that aspect of humanity which leads to these cycles of destruction and rebirth fueled by ignorance,stupidity,and then later naivety... my saying on this is "if man knows the future,he can change it" and thus it stands to reason if this was the subject of the book world,that this was cyclical,and because the protagonist knows the future,he can change it
I think that to do that successfully you will have to understand what you are calling closed-mindedness, otherwise you will be in serious danger of falling into cliche (as others have pointed out). There's actually a continuum of open v. closed-mindedness, and few people, if any, are at the absolute extremes of the scale. The extreme of open-mindedness is probably extreme solipsism, and everybody who has tried to live by that has either given up or gone mad, so it seems that we need to make sure that we're not "so open minded that our brains leak out". That means that the problem isn't whether we should be open-minded or closed-minded, it's where we should be on the scale, and pretty much everybody thinks that they're somewhere around the right point. In other words, if you deal with closed-minded v. open-minded then you are dealing in caricatures. To deal with the subject properly then you need to deal with difficult shades of grey and uncertain moral issues.
oh yeah,that is so right..i love the things with shades of grey... like the videogame metro 2033,you save the human race by doing a nuclear-assisted genocide on a different and intelligent variety of humans beings basically,at the end of the game the remainig humans use soviet nuclear icbm to genocide homo novus,and thus save humanity..though it was never determined whether homo novus was hostile or not..as several times throughout the game they saved the main character from certain death
exactly...mankind will be sequestered into oblivion unless it puts aside race,nations,and prejudices and works towards a greater goal
But presumably what you are calling closed-mindedness has developed because it is advantageous from the point of view of evolution, so there must be potential dangers with open-mindedness too. For a start, it already seems that you are not open-minded about closed-mindedness!
Hi Colorthemap - I agree with everything Steerpike said regarding not making the story too black-and-white. Also, I'd like to add that when it comes to themes like religion, politics etc it's often better to use some kind of fantasy equivalent: not that you have to use magic or ancient settings or anything, as fantasy comes in all forms and is yours to invent - but this way you can focus on telling a fun story and let the readers look into the deeper level to find the theme for themselves. If it's all on the surface, it'll feel too obvious and preachy. But only you can determine what's best with what you've got. My statement is just a suggestion to consider.
