Why YA needs heroines beyond Katniss Everdeen

At YALC, the only all-female panel sat on the podium possessing, in the words of chair Sarra Manning, “more X chromosomes, more oestrogen, more boobs and prettier hair” than any other panel during the country’s first YA (young adult) literature convention. Nestled within the heaving space of Comic-Con, Manning could have spoken for the whole giant exhibition centre.

I often find myself listening to panels of women discussing our place in the world, and although it’s nearly always uplifting to be surrounded by engaged, sparky women determined to change things, the talk often touches on victimhood or prejudice.

Not here, though. In YA fiction women have a level of representation far greater, and far wider, than in the rest of the media.

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The panel consisted of authors Tanya Byrne, creator of Heart-Shaped Bruise and its modern anti-heroine Emily, Isobel Harrop, the 19-year-old whose teenage memoirs have been published as The Isobel Journal, Julie Mayhew, who wrote about mother-daughter relationships in Red Ink and Holly Smale, the former model who has turned her experiences into the award-winning Geek Girl series.

Interestingly, all of them commented on that most starry of YA heroines: Katniss Everdeen, from Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy, who will be seared upon the minds of many as Jennifer Lawrence, after the blockbuster film adaptations. Katniss exemplified many of the traits that the authors on the panel wanted to reject: strength, bravery, toughness.

“Why does a female character have to be strong? Why does weakness, or liking boys, stop a character from being feminist?” Harrop asked. Harrop, proud of her feminist beliefs and still a teen herself, believes that male characters are never put under the same level of scrutiny as female ones.

Smale stressed the need to “represent the unattractive qualities too”; the whining, the neediness, the strops that can emerge from an adolescent girl. “To be seen as feminist sometimes you have to create one type of girl, who is tough and hard like a man. To me, feminism is showing how great all shades of girl is.”

Meanwhile, Byrne and Mayhew neatly showed why YA is a more inspiring place to grow up in than the shiny, plastic perfection of magazines and advertisements. “You can’t create heroines that are perfect, because there is such a pressure on girls to be perfect” explained Byrne. “We are not helping if we write heroines who are perfect.”

Byrne added: “I try never to use physical attributes to describe my characters – I’d rather a reader know that a character was stubborn than thin.”

Here were the creators of characters who don’t exist in a dystopian world – those dubbed feminist by default because of their survival instincts – but heroines who simply live in reality, learning and growing like the teen readers who absorb them.

Here is a feminist world, written for young, bright women. But there is still work to be done: “More boys need to see these characters”, Harrop urged, “wouldn’t it be nice if that was the representation of women that they learned from? YA is female dominated, and the girls who read it are very smart. It needs to expand to the wider media.”

If YALC has anything to do with it, it may yet.