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View submission: Where Is All the Sad Boy Literature?
I think you are hitting the head on the nail. Sad boy literature generally works on a context of adventure. Harry Potter has a few books where he's just moping and being an insuferable teenager dealing with large traumas and insane levels of pressure. Bridge to Terabithia is a very depressing story about a boy who struggles to make friends, finally finds someone to connect with and form a deep bond, and then have them die, leaving him alone again to process grief from a tragedy that would bring even an adult to his knees all on his own.
And we don't need the boy to be the protagonist, which opens us up to The Fault in Our Stars. Also we can get a protagonist that isn't the main character, giving us Thirteen Reasons Why (I don't like the mechanism it uses, but it's the story of a teenage boy understanding the challenges of girls through the loss of his crush to suicide, which he didn't before, I think it fits). And there's also The Perks of Being a Wallflower,
And then we look at men in a wider view than just "white cis men". Take "The Wilted Black Rose" a book about a young man who is dealing with inherited trauma, the complexity of the expectations he has on him as a Black Man. And yeah race is a big part of it, but also there's things that wouldn't apply to black woman. It's a story that sees both issues, and while the intersection and complexity of those issues matter, it also has things that a white man could identify with. It becomes interesting that we tend to erase the priviledged aspect of an identity. A story about a black man is only about blackness in our mind, a story about a gay man is only about the challenges of being gay. But a lot of times in these novels you see that there's the whole complexity and layers in there too, and something to connect, even if you don't fit the situation of the character fully. The point is you can connect. There's a lot of great novels where the protagonist is a black man, but I connected heavily with the challenges of being a Man presented in this book, even as I also gained insight into the plight of race in the US.
There's nothing here!