#also i used too many fucking adverbs. again. somebody put me down like a lame horse

[bimbinis]

I think you might be having your perspective distorted by survivorship bias. a lot of the cringy YA that "had heart" that we remember from the late 2000's/early 2010's (I'm assuming that's the timeframe you're referring to) was, to be blunt, the shit that was worth remembering in the first place. a lot of the forgotten, and even much of the still remembered stuff, was very cynically tailored to hit all the right buzzwords to make a teen girl buy it.

lest we forget, teen dystopia('s mainstream relevance) didn't die a peaceful death. it went out mercilessly ragged on for the growing number of new releases with increasingly ludicrous and repetitive premises of unremarkable brunettes living in a world where no one feels hunger who has to choose between two hot boys. that's to say nothing of the progression of supernatural romance. i sincerely doubt your Fourth Wings and Lightlarks have much less passion or "heart" infused into them than your Fallens and House of Night's. YA fiction was not inherently any more soulful when Harper Collins commissioned Alloy Entertainment for a teen supernatural romance they could sell and Alloy hired L. J. Smith to pump out 7 Vampire Diaries books and then booted her and hired a ghostwriter to pump out 5 more (and that was one of the earliest examples, mind you).

I'm very willing to concede the nature of the shittiness has changed over the years in a way that makes it feel like a different thing (the priorities of getting a book to go tiktok viral are clearly different from just whatever the hell was going on before that. i guess just advertising them normally on television), but I'm not convinced that it was enough to constitute a moral difference. it's not a new thing to feel that the most recent literature is worthless trash and things used to be better when you were younger, in fact people do that a lot to a lot more than literature. i think sometimes we really need to take a step back and recognize that just bc we find tiktok more aggravating than the advertising methods we found permissible in our youth does not mean our precious teen cringe was any less of a worthless slop made to make people money

a lot of YA and fantasy stuff has always been a little cringe and silly but at least it used to be cringe from the heart instead of designed in a lab to get teens on tiktok to use a certain sentence from it