The world of YA fantasy/adventure is freakishly vast, and growing every single day. We've got ancient wars, dimension hopping, bloody revolutions, and a little bit of everything else imaginable. The amazing thing about YA is it is famous for changing, breaking, and abolishing the 'rules' of genre. It is an open canvas, and the possibilities are truly endless when you find yourself with an idea.
But there's one thing that all of these novels have to start with. You need yourself one hell of a main character. And not only that, you need someone who people are going to want to follow through the pages, someone whose fate matters to your audience. Readers want to take this journey with an MC they can connect to, even if the story takes place worlds apart from our own. This isn't always easily achieved, but a relatable character makes every bit of difference.
Let's face it, Katniss Everdeen is never going to know what it's like to binge watch all six seasons of LOST while eating the whole pint of Ben & Jerry's by herself. And I tried to shoot an arrow once and my grandpa found it in the woods two months later. On paper, we don't have that much in common. A lot of MC's in this genre are expert swordsmen or hunters or assassins. They have skill sets that your average teen is never going to need in the good old earth modern.
While these talents make characters awesome and super badass, how do we connect with them? How does a teen who spends their days sitting in a stale high school relate to an MC who chases royal princes and storms into battle and saves the world?
It's easy to forget that these heroes are still kids. A lot of them are sixteen or seventeen years old, and they're going to have those universal problems that many of their readers are facing. Katniss is socially awkward and sucks at walking in heels. Alina Starkov is unsure of herself and just may trust a little to easily. Cassie Sullivan is wickedly sarcastic and can be way hard on herself. They are flawed in ways that go beyond the world they live in, making mistakes and struggling with decisions and trying to understand what love is that what it's not. And even though these flaws are real and even problematic at times, they don't define the character. A person can be clumsy and anxious and brave and strong all at the same time. Not only does that make them relatable, it also makes them someone worth looking up to.
A perfect character, especially in YA, is impossible to relate to because perfect people do not exist. (Shocking, am I right?) Give us a character that's insecure and afraid, and let us go with them as they grow through that and even past it. Let's watch a love story unfold between two people who don't quite know what they're doing, and let's root for them to make it. We want quirky and awkward and angst and we want to know these characters as if they were sitting in that stale high school right along with us.
Also, the same applies to that love interest. Perfect boys are not a thing. Let's erase the very idea of perfect boys. Bring on Gale and his war torn heart. Seriously, bring him to me. I'll take him.
