The intro is a bit off focus, skip to 05:50 to get more to it. Or just to the TW if you want straight to the meat. I was having a huge amount of anxiety and stress when I filmed this, and felt the need to justify myself more than needed. I was worried- I often am. Definitely, I should have cut it down. Please stop sending me very rude messages about this. I am a human person. Thank you.
Aren’t video essays supposed to be about an hour? You did fine. I loved this series as a tween as well and it is always great to take a second look at media which helped shape our worldview. Thank you!
I understand feeling that way. Making video essays is an art; you'll grow and learn every time you make an essay, and it sounds like you learned a lot while making this one! When you got into it, you had really solid observations and comparisons to other contemporary novels at the time! Also, I love your plush!
I was going to give the suggestion of maybe don't assume we've read it? I for one haven't. But I don't mean that harshly I just didn't know what you were talking about lol.
@@ZebraChanda you clicking on a video discussing a book you've never read and then getting annoyed that you don't understand what the video creator is talking about because you've never read the book is 100% a personal problem
Weirdly the main thing I remember about the series is the "Spag Bol" packets. She doesn't understand the labeling on the rations she steals and ends up eating the same thing for weeks straight.
I still get secondhand disgust from Spaghetti Bolognese IRL because of the amount of times I read about it and imagined eating it 😭😭😭 (I have read this series 5 times at least)
It's wild reading Extras because of how accurately it predicted tiktok influencer culture back in 2007. It had everything from popularity economy to rampant consumerism that was disconnected to any supply chain, and constant feeds of content from people desperate to move up the chain. Extreme aesthetics, obsession with follower counts, live streaming... etc. Scott really called his shot and hit there.
Because I met the series in 2013 or so, I always assumed Extras was a commentary on current trends and found it a bit eye roll-y and tired. That goes to show how well he predicted it But it annoys me a bit that the world of Extras is presented as what came after the authoritarian regime was destroyed, and it's an even worse deal.
As a part of the Uglies trilogy fandom in 2007-2008, we used the comments of Scott Westerfeld's blog as a forum to chat in. His every blog post about midnighters covers or whatever had 1000 comments sometimes, because we were just talking about our lives in there. I'm sorry, Scott. I have lost touch with all of those other people, now. Yasemin and Andrea and Serafina Zane, if you're out there.... i hope youre doing well.
They're out there somewhere still! I know the feeling. I hung out in some weird forums and comment sections making pals as a kid too. I pinned this because it's kind of a nice relatable old internet story and also I guess if they one day somehow see it on a similar nostalgia kick....
Omg my first intro into online forums was for the books “the clique” when I was maybe.. 11. They had a forum on the website for the books. Wow. I remember picking out my icon and little signature 🥲 good times
Everybody had a forum then. I don't really agree that this series didn't have significance. Hunger Games certainly did. It's like saying Carmilla had no significance because people talk more about Dracula.
I'm glad someone is finally talking about Uglies, sometimes i feel like I'm the only one who's ever read the books. 90% of my channel is just me acting out certain scenes from the books Uglies never made me want to SH, nor did it make my habit worse. It actually made me want to stop. In Specials, Zane asks Tally a very important question that i think about any time the urge comes back. "What is it that you're not feeling that makes you think you have to do that?" And that question sticks with Tally just as it stuck with me, and she learns to stop cutting just as I ended doing. Every time the urge comes up, I ask myself that question. Everyone has their own experience, that was mine
I thought I was the only one who read it too lol no one ever talks about it. it's been my favorite series ever since I first read it. I've re read it and listened to the audio books so many times and each time I realize some new connection to our modern world or my own past. It also never made me want to self harm, I had other things promoting that and Uglies was a safe escape from that for me. I'm so glad this series is getting some attention and I can't wait for the movie (even if they ruin it I'm just happy it will finally be a thing) lol
Scott westerfield actually wrote a whole book called ‘bogus to bubbly’ where he explains how he came up with all of the aspects of the world, from the tech to the slang (and a very detailed explanation of how the hoverboards work lol). I think it gives a lot of insight into what Scott’s intentions were. This was one of my fav series as a teenager, but I do agree with your negative points, especially about the depiction of self harm. Also, tally and shay should have ended up together change my mind 😂
I got to see him speak at the National DC book convention, I did genuinely get great tips on world building from the talk. He talked more about the uglies series which I never read even though I DEVOURED Leviathan. Westerfield honestly just strikes me as a guy who has his Favorite Thing at the moment (like hoverboards and flying whales and mechs) and then just Goes With It and honestly I respect it
There is so much valid criticism about this trilogy but I will stand by one specific element to my grave. I LOVE that this series has a protagonist who repeatedly fails at not only small goals along the way, but their literal main goal. Tally spends all of Uglies trying to not be Pretty, and ultimately fails. She spends most of Pretties desperately trying not to be Special, and fails AGAIN. I admire that on its own as a really uncommon and risky narrative structure. But on a personal level, it was also so comforting at that age (and even now) to see someone repeatedly fail and become a worse person, but who was always able to be helped to be better again. It's reassuring to think that no matter how badly I fail at my goals, or how lost I become from myself, I'll also never be a completely hopeless case.
I really appreciate your discussion of cutting, and I think your idea for a rewrite would be fantastic. Shay seems genuinely interesting, and the idea of Tally having to watch her friend that opened her eyes become a husk of herself and a cog in the very system she despised would be a great toxic girlbestfriendship horror.
I remember reading this as a kid and finding it disappointing. Why was this main character ‘special’? In the first book it seemed like she wasn’t-she just had a friend who ran off, and I liked that. But then it kept focusing on her? And like, why was she Pretty now? Why wasn’t she imprisoned by the vague shadow government for thought crimes? And then she became Special??? Why??? And the whole self harm thing UUGGH. I liked the brain lesion idea, kinda. There is a problematic theme of ‘hot people are dumb’, but that can be fixed. But the whole ‘accidentally hurting your BF by unleashing nanobots with no stop command on him because they gave you two pills and didn’t tell you’ seemed weirdly misogynistic about how it was all her fault. No one told them the cure was for ONE person: they gave them two pills, what do you think would happen!?
38:23 I don’t even remember the end of Specials, lol. I think the farthest thing I remember is how neat Diego was. Like, people having skin that flashed black with the beat of nearby music. That’s a cool sci-fi idea! I can understand now how Wakefield is more interested in sci-fi than plot 😂
it's so so so dumb that there weren't any instructions, imagine if she took them both at once, or out of order even!! seriously if they were smart enough to make nanobot pills they should have at least been smart enough to include instructions.
Honestly, I remember the first book really vividly and I still hold a lot of love for it. My mother has spent her entire life battling an incredibly intense eating disorder that has almost killed her multiple times, and has ruined every relationship in her life. So this book criticizing the beauty industry and it's affect on young women- both those who were pretty and those who were ugly- was very revolutionary to me at the time. I still live under the shade of my mother's eating disorder and I'm 30 now! I'm an adult, but her ED has shaped my life in a major ways. The first book made me feel really seen and just showed that you could choose to opt out of the beauty rat race that we're all entered into with puberty. I was raised by a woman who hated her body and so would point out all of our flaws so she wouldn't be alone in her misery, and the book helped me be like. She can be miserable, but I don't have to be, because I can be comfortable in myself. And I needed the message at the time. Then everyone became pretty in the second book and I got so annoyed I never continued the series.
I can see from your perspective why the characters becoming pretty feels like a betrayal (I felt that way too when I fist read it) but I definitely can say that the series continues with the themes you've mentioned above. The characters fight to love themselves even after being changed and abused by the system. I'm sorry you've had those experiences. While mine might not be exactly the same I certainly empathize. My mother constantly criticizes her body even today and she's in her 60s. Hope things have gotten better for you and your mom.
This is one that I read as a teen and one of the books that lead me to begin SHing, so I really thank you for talking about it and how depicting SHing in this way was really detrimental to a lot of young people. Another book that really messed up my teenage view on life was The B*tch Posse by Martha O'Connor - I had a really terrible relationship with my body and all of these books about kids my age dealing with their own self esteem issues in bad ways really didn't help. I took a lot of the SH aspects at face value and saw that it made the characters "feel better," so I started as well. SH *was* a trend in the early 2000s, and especially for sheltered kids like me who's only connection to the outside world was books and media, SHing was presented as a good option to "fix" things. The B*tch Posse took it about fifteen steps too far, but this series is one that's left lasting scars (literally) on me.
Me and a few others in the comments experienced the opposite. It seems that, for kids who aren’t already fucked up, seeing those “bad examples” wears off on them. But for kids like me who were already self harming very young, who’d never even seen it in media, it helped us decide to quit!
I'm so happy to see someone talking about this series! I feel like Scott Westerfeld set up some great environmental messages in the first book and promptly got lost in the Mary Sue of it all. There was real potential for the white flowers to tie together the mistakes of the past and present; in both cases the desire for beauty and status creates something destructive. I enjoyed seeing Tally's initial horror that the Smoke was cutting down trees and how her opinion changed as she learned about living off the land. The nature preserve where the government studies human evolution and tribal dynamics was vastly underutilized in the second book as well.
I became a tween/teenager at the very end of the 00’s, based around the messaging from adults around the issues for teens of that day had a very strong vibe of being well intentioned but extremely misguided and almost completely unquestioning of the systems in power that were causing the issues for the youths. This results of this were a bunch of moral panics about stuff like eating disorders, drugs, and self harm. As things always go with moral panics the solution that we came up with was grossly oversimplified, patronizing, and again unquestioning about the real root causes of the problems. Self harm was blamed on “just wanting attention” or “it’s part of the culture of all of those freaks over there who wear a lot of black eyeliner (satanic?)” instead of how there was a much bigger stigma around mental health and it was even more taboo to try to like go to therapy to deal with stuff than it is now. Eating disorders were blamed on the (exclusively girls) being too shallow and vain and just needing to “love themselves” more. Even though pretty much every single form of media was screaming at them to want to be that skinny at full blast. I remember seeing a lot of stuff in the same media talking about how also all of this stuff is bad in a very after school special “think of the children” way. Like I’d catch a bit of a Lifetime movie or read something in a random magazine I found somewhere about how this was a problem. Later when I got a little bit older and started looking for more stuff actually targeted to my age the messaging got even louder and the depictions a lot less sympathetic and more cruel in the name of grittyness, edgyness, and being “realistic, no nonsense, saying it how it really is. For today’s fed up rebellious youths”. Well as much grit and edge as you could get past a large teen focused publisher at the time, which could be a lot more than what you’d assume. I remember during those middle school reading groups with the books with the reading comprehension questions in the back reading just completely unhinged stuff that was trying to be relatable to people who were also 13 just a couple years before I was 13. You covered that Catholic murder girlboss book that Tonya Hurly wrote earlier so I decided to open up my old Ghostgirl books. Turns out that all of the wild stuff in the Catholic murder girlboss books were already prominent themes in her writing. The Twilight saga was probably actually one of the least unhinged things that I read in that era of my life. Then the trends changed as the surge of Teen dystopia fiction took over the YA publishing world, replacing contemporaries and paranormal fiction/romance as the biggest cash cow. Compared to a lot of the earlier YA stuff I think the dystopias were probably actually a good deal tamer than the previous books, especially once the formula got established with The Hunger Games. I guess a lot of the more relatable to the current adolescent zeitgeist issues fell by the wayside because the protagonists started having bigger problems like picking between the blond one and the brunette one, or the Spore Wars. Even though a lot of that previous stuff from YA’s Wild West days probably aged horribly and was also probably considered to be pretty offensive even back then, I kinda miss the vibe that was there before the formulas started being established and we were just throwing stuff at the wall to see what stuck. I think we need more publishers willing to let authors throw stuff at the wall, instead of just sticking to the same formula over and over again, just with thin coats of different genre paint. Never actually read Uglies though, didn’t have enough vampires and being genetically altered to have wings seemed a lot cooler to me than “you get a nose job and a pretty severe concussion, everybody gets a nose job and a severe concussion”.
As someone who grew up in central Europe and only started reading English books as a teen, I'm always fascinated by these tween/YA novels. I hope you get the views and as revenue you deserve.
@Flareontoast I am genuinely curious to hear your thoughts on tween/YA novels from your perspective. I too hope crowcaller gets the revenue and views they deserve. I am but one viewer but one recurring and I definitely appreciate the thoughtful analyses.
I remember SpagBol. I also remember the orange juice vodka skydiving scene. My main association with this book is I had a friend called Shay, so I called her shay-la and she called me genie-wa. I messed up and burned that friendship, and I wish I could apologize.
Literally do not apologize for the time between videos. I love long deep dives. My fav UA-camr only releases like 2 videos a year but they're always killer. You do you.
Edited since I've watched the video now: if you're insterested in the high-concept theme of "mandated plastic surgery makes everyone conventionally attractive, but has secret brain surgery that makes people compliant and conformist" but you don't like the "self-harm stops brain damage," "our unlikeable protagonist uses the Secret TM to fix her own brain," or "nanobots ex machina save the day and fix all the brainwashing for everyone" then I'd recommend the classic Twilight Zone episode "Number 12 Looks Just Like You" (season 5 episode 17, by Charles Beaumont and John Tomerlin). When I first started reading "Uglies," I thought it was an adaptation of "Number 12 Looks Just Like You" - that's how close the concept is. Then I got to the first hoverboard scene and I realized it was substantially less interesting.
I was in highschool around this era, and it's weird that I so rarely hear people acknowledge that cutting/self harm genuinely was a trend at the time. And that doesn't devalue the mental and emotional distress that leads to such behaviors, but when a cultural attitude leads you to believe that this particular coping mechanism is how to deal with that distress, you're naturally going to see a lot more of it. There were times in my own friend groups where cutting was something we told each other about in the same "kinda bummed" tone you might confess that you'd forgotten your homework again. It was bizarrely routine in certain social circles, and I'm glad that the imagery and rhetoric that glorified it seems to be so much less common now.
I had very much the same sort of experience. It was just.... 'going around', as I think I say it's not like cutting is a natural behaviour - you learn it somewhere and also learn it as worth trying. A huge amount of kids at my school tried it including my friends and it was treated as like... Oh no! This is a symptom of being Truly Sad, not a deeply troubling issue that needs to be addressed
I have referenced the hover boards from this series at least monthly, if not weekly maybe since I read this series in 8th grade. I want one. So. Bad. Also- I don't remember which part in the book made me do this, but I EMAILED SCOTT WESTERFELD and told him the scene made me throw the book across the room, that it was so emotional. It was a very dramatic email. I was, in my defense, an 8th grader. But HE WROTE BACK and it was a fairly personalized message. He told me he hopped my book survived the throw and told me that I should keep an eye on shelves bc maybeeeee there was a 4th book coming out soon. Looking back on it as an adult it was probably just good marketing, and may have been an assistant or even someone on a literal marketing team responding but. It felt really, really cool in the moment.
Hi, just in case I´ll tell that there actually is a fourth book. Its a different story with a different protagonist but it is in the same world after the trilogy took place.
Dude those hoverboards rocked my world as a kid, the rollercoaster part?? I have also brought them up several times as an adult it’s the only part of the books I actually remember lol
I think, if this series would be released today, both girls would have ended up together and all of the romantic tension just would have been struggles between the two to realize that they are actually in love with each other.
@@cryingwatercolourswell if you’ve seen the movie you’ll see that there was no chemistry between David and Tally but Shay and Tally seem like “best friends” like all lesbians teen couples. Tbh it wouldn’t be wrong to call it queer baiting in the film. My boyfriend thought they were endgame and was genuinely confused when her and David got together.
@@AlexanderJasperJay yeah my bf was immediately joking they were queer and a few mins later I said the same thing 😆 but we’re both bi so I wasn’t rlly sure if it was just us wanting to see something that wasn’t there (queer rep) since it wasn’t confirmed
@@PieNumber4yeah! i never forgot that, it was so weird. I don't know is it's a translation issue, but the version i read was like "the sunrise sky is the color of cat VOMIT" and at that point I never had a cat, I didn't know what color was their vomit like and I was just stuck with this imagery in my head for weeks. and the first time I had a cat and he vomited i remembered this line😂
The cultural impact of Uglies is that it was too mainstream to convince friends to read bc they all had 10,000 other bestsellers in their to read pile, but obscure enough that if I give into the constant temptation (a good DECADE since my last readthrough!) to call things "bubbly" no one will know why. And the author had a pretty good "how to write/world encyclopedia" book! That one I think about adding to my collection, it was a good time.
Thank you for including a section about SH and the effects media portrayal of it have on adolescents. I used to be a cutter, and I learned how to do it from a YA book I read. I was very troubled as a young teenager and SH'ed as an outlet. Even now, as a much healthier adult, sometimes I get the urge to SH when my emotions get overwhelming.
Thank you for pointing out that SH doesn’t just go away. I’m 30 now and every once in a while I get the urge to do something to myself when I feel overwhelmed. It’s actually somewhat addictive, which is why people will sometimes mention they’ve been SH-free for x number of years.
MESS as Uglies is, Scott Westerfeld's next series the dieselpunk alternate history Leviathan Trilogy was a really fun read and I have a lot of affection for it
I was obsessed with it and the artist behind the illustrations. I remember spending hours in Keith Thompson's art blog and he was one of the inspirations for me to pursue a career in art
GOD I loved Leviathen and all the art on those books 😭 Did you know that Scott sold the adaptation rights to Netflix and now we’re getting a Leviathan anime?
I remember reading this when I was 13 and HATED this series and what they did to Shay’s character. Hated the main character, who just seemed like a selfish girl who ended up “having it all” at the expense of her friend.
Yeah honestly I also always didn't like tally and Shay was just SO shafted it's almost astonishing. From lead narrative foil to off screen girl rival. So rude
Literally, I bought and read all the books, but it was very much a love-hate relationship. I thought the concept was cool, but Tally annoyed me and it was frustrating seeing Shay go from being the best character in the first book to what they did with her in the rest of the series. I think I kept reading in hopes that Tally and Shay would somehow put a stop to the government-mandated surgeries and everyone would go back to aging naturally, but nope.
These books gave me so many insecurities as a preteen because it never explained (if I remember rightly) WHAT happened in the operation, like HOW these people became pretty. I was so scared I would never become truly pretty because I would never get the operation and I wanted to DESPERATELY know what exactly made these people pretty.
It’s wild hearing about this book series again, I remember specifically liking because everything seems to just constantly go wrong, and as a kid that was kind of a fresh experience! I had only really read that happening in the Series of Unfortunate Events, which was one of my first experiences with existentialism lol. Thank you for talking about this series, I loved hearing about it as an adult!!
True honestly! Sometimes it is fun to read something like that. I think it's why I like watching cheap thriller shows: everything just goes so bad and you can't stop watching. I adored a series of unfortunate events as a kid so much, but god did it also give me nonstop anxiety
oof yeah soue was so influential to me bc i felt like there was something deeply wrong with the world but most stories offered to tweens/younger kids end well or are incredibly simple
This is a great breakdown of the Uglies series! I loved the books as a tween, except for how 'cool' it made SH sound. 'Extras' was my favorite in the series as well! It's wild it showed influencer culture years before that became a thing. I enjoyed Tally's character downfall from reluctant rebel to byproduct of the 'Specials' system. Tally ends the series believing humanity - not consumerism - needs to be kept in check. The ending feels like a tragedy. Even with her main character exceptionalism, Tally never knows what she wants. Her values/motivations change wildly each book. Dr. Cable's conditioning has a lasting effect on her even after Specials. Tally panics at the idea of being be un-Special, especially when other characters confront her with how dangerous that mentality is later on. It's interesting to read as an adult now, when 'humans are Earth's disease' is finally being seen as a dangerous belief. A series rewrite would be great. Westerfield could explore how dangerous the 'humans are the disease' and 'people are sheeple' mindsets are.
I remember reading the first book and liking Shay better than Tali. Then getting really uncomfortable with Shay starting a cutting cult and putting down the book. I already had friends that I was trying to convince that that cutting was bad and it pisses me off that this book made a super group for it.
I haven’t thought about this series in quite some time, and now I’m wondering if I might have quit a certain terrible habit if it wasn’t being glamorized to me in those books. (I remember the characters saying that pain makes your mind fast and sharp. Yikes.)
read the first book, also loved Shay, got to the second book when the cutting cult happened and was like oh fuck I gotta get outta here. that was over a decade ago now but holy crap the cutting scene was so triggering to preteen me who had some really bad coping mechanisms. still have the uglies and pretties books on my childhood bookshelf lmao.
I'm used to watching her videos about these terrible books that I've never heard of being torn apart. To see her doing a video on a series that I LOVED as a teenager (I even presented a book report on it in class) had me scared 💀 I put it on my "watch later" list and built up the courage to watch it. I just finished and I am relieved to say that she did not tear this series to pieces.
I read Uglies and really enjoyed it, so I started looking for more books by the same author. The Leviathan trilogy was criminally underrated (was, because it's been a long time since I read them but I remember them extremely fondly and still reference them all the time). I'm looking forward to listening to your review. In hindsight, the Uglies series really messed me up when I was young and impressionable
i remember reading leviathan and being very excited and happy that a female character was crossdressing as a boy and wanted to work on airships even though they were only for men. i remember feeling so seen as a little tomboy, and then the romance kicked in. i was absolutely devastated. i didn't expect her to be a lesbian because i never got my hopes very high, but i thought it might at least just let her be a character with her own story and arc without a fucking boy. i put the book down and never finished reading it because i was so upset. i stopped checking out books from the school library after that and asked to go to the public library so i could try to find adult books that were more interesting to me. ya fiction really fucked over young lgbt kids.
@@soupstoreclothing Honestly so valid!! When I was younger, I HATED reading about romance especially from a female characters perspective! I always thought it really took away from the story. In hindsight, I was just a closeted ace bisexual lol. The romance felt so forced in those books, when it's so clear her one true love was bioengineered aerodynamics.
Thank you, this series was one of the first I read in middle school when I first got into reading as a hobby, I remember it fondly but haven't thought of it in a long time. So excited for your critique, love your way of speaking and your points of view!
I read these books in middle school and surprisingly Extra’s is the one that I remember the most clearly. Really resonated with the main character of that one
I remember reading this series in my early teens and enjoying it a lot, especially the first book and Extras. (I guess I had a high tolerance for survival hoverboarding stories.) I did /not/ remember the SH being associated with Shay’s gang breaking out of their brainwashing, only Tally being horrified by their actions and me in turn being horrified by her being turned into a Cutter, so hoo boy is that a big old yikes. Weirdly enough, hearing you describe the plot synopsis now, I couldn’t help but think that Tally and Shay should 100% have got together - they had the most interesting character dynamic of the series, even if poor Shay got massively sidelined. Based on how much I liked Uglies, I read Westerfeld’s Midnighters series and, eventually, Leviathan. I remember nothing at all about Midnighters, but Leviathan was a decent steampunk series. Cool setup and settings, cool ideas, but it was just missing some spark to bring it all together for me.
The main thing I remember about the Midnighters series is that I was really annoyed at the ending, specifically for the main couple. Like, she got trapped in the midnight world so it was this weird existential horror where she would see him essentially rapidly age from her perspective while he would only be able to see her an hour a night for the rest of his life?
Crow I just wanted to say that the way you talked about cutting being a trend really resonated with me. When I self harmed I would cut, and I geniunely do believe it was a "learned" behavior. I really appreciate that view on the idea.
YEEES!!! Clicked on this immediately upon seeing it. “Uglies” was my favorite series, but no one else ever read it so I couldn’t talk about it. Can’t wait to watch this!
Oh wow, I am in the middle of moving and was about to throw away these books actually ... the weird mix of nostalgia and not quite remembering much beside the basic premise and hover-boarding (and a secret third thing) felt exactly as you described. I grew up identifying as queer and never really had a huge realization like others might describe. It was thankfully a natural self-discovery through puberty eased by casually-but-explicitly accepting parents. When I read these books I was still at the very beginning of this journey - surely identifying more with the active male protagonists who "got the girl" in the end, but also longing for strong female relationships. Only while watching your video it kinda clicks for me why with this book in particular I also remember the energy I felt between Tally and Shay as much as I do, even though their dynamic doesn't nearly develop as much as it felt to me. Whether romantic or thematic or both, I agree it should've been the emotional core of the story, it just makes so much sense ... sorry for the rambling, I rarely write comments ever, but somehow your discussion really hit for me.
I'm older, and I read The Giver as a teen; it actually came out in 1993. Very much ahead of the trend in YA (and YA at all), though of course dystopian "utopias" in general were nothing new at that point. (I also loved Gathering Blue.) (And no book has ever captured that as succinctly for me as The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas, Le Guin, 1973.) I've never gotten around to reading Uglies or Divergent, though when all the books I want are on hold at the library with weeks-long waitlists sometimes I pick up some of the old series to read in the meantime, so perhaps I will eventually. Finally got Fourth Wing from the library and ah, so tropey. But with dragons!
I loved this series at a kid beofre i developed criticism skills. One part that always stuck out to me was when the main character looked at old world magazines and was shocked at how "anorexic" the models looked. It made me feel better dreaming of a future where strict body weight stardards werent so common and helped me fight back against my own body image issues. Other than that though the book is a bit of a blur
so funny - i have zero memory of that scene, but the thing i remember most from the series is the pretties casually downing packets of "calorie burner" pills so they never gained any weight (and my tween self desperately wishing they were real). bit of a mixed message on body image standards i guess lol.
Yeah I remember there being a very big plotline of Tally and her boyfriend?? starving themselves to be able to think more clearly while also criticizing or at least commenting on the way old world anorexics were weird or something like that (my memory of it is a bit hazy). It was definitely strange messaging wither way!
@@abigailcrosbie8688they had tracking bracelets on that they were trying to lose enough weight to slip out of, but it would make sense if that was something promoted, though i do genuinely believe scott westerfield didn't intend to promote any of the behaviours he was writing
Scott Westerfeld, (Btw it's FELD not FEILD, there's no I) is a really intersting author, I read a lot of his books in Middle school, So Yesterday and Leviathan (His best series IMO) are still on my shelf to this day, Uglies never resonated with me much but i'm always excited to see you talk about any series!
Odd openings/not stereotypical openings make it feel more personal/real. I listen to these like podcasts or listening to a friend talk about what interests them. I love your content and just listening to people talk about crazy bullshit that exists
I love this series but I absolutely agree that it would’ve been better if they had focused more on Tally and Shay’s friendship instead of love interest. Tally is only 16 in all of these books and it feels weird that they have her sleeping in the same bed as Zane at one point and living with him. I feel like she should’ve at least aged up a year in each book of the trilogy. Along with cutting, it also does the same things with starving yourself. in pretties, by not eating zane and tally are able to gain clarity, free themselves, and zane mostly got rid of the things that were eating his brain by starving them. These books absolutely glorified cutting and starving yourself
Uglies was my favorite book series as a teen and I remember my takeaway from Tally's decision at the end of Specials was that she was ending the cycle of letting herself be artificially changed, even if it meant staying as what was effectively a monster. She finally decided to accept herself fully and wholly. I likely won't reread the series, especially with the reminders of how many uninteresting bits are in it. Based on this video I doubt I could interpret the same message from the work now as an adult, but it's remained something that's really resonated with me as I've grown older. I really wanted to listen to a video essay on Uglies today while working, and I'm glad you made this. Thank you.
I remember very little about this series aside from the ending being disappointing, the graphic surgery descriptions (specifically the skin-exfoliating killer sunburn stuff), and my favorite; the scene towards the end of the first book where David (I think that’s his name?) tells Tally she’s beautiful and she throws her spy necklace thing into the fire. In hindsight I kinda wish the first book had ended there and the necklace hadn’t activated and sent in the feds to raid The Smoke, like, let this teen girl feel like she’s worthy of love just the way she is and reject the thing she’d been seeking the entire time. Also, I fucking LOVED the Leviathan trilogy as a teen too, especially the illustrations! I think that one would make an interesting video.
Literally the only thing I remember about reading this in middle school is my disappointment in how dull the rebel plot thing was and thinking the best friend character getting eye rhinestones when they were Pretty-fied (that somehow told time like a binary clock???) was actually Really Cool.
Read this series after high school because my gf had the books and i was bored. i wasnt quite in my "critical thinking era" yet and just inhaled them because dystopia is a favorite genre. I remember very little of the original trilogy, but Extras was an incredible left turn into weird for me. it was like only tangetially related to the main series, and i think i remember there were aliens???? anyhow, nice video, really scratched my nostalgia itch and helped me look at the series more critically!
My main experience with Scott westerfield was skimming these books and then later reading a book called peeps I didn’t realize was also by him. Peeps was, weird, especially when I remember I found it in my middle school library. It has a cool premise around sexually transmitted parasites that turn people feral that I ended up feeling let down by. A lot of the details are vague now, but I remember it being weirdly horny, while also no sex allowed (pretty typical in retrospect) and that the premise takes a weird turn with like vampires instead of parasites which just felt less original. Some of the chapters started with descriptions of various parasites around the world and eventually those became my favorite part, and the only real tie left to the premise. I vividly remember a scene of the main character walking down the street and talking about how New York put glass in their concrete to make it sparkle, and how beautiful it looked with his enhanced eyes. It was a good passage, but gods did this book go off the rails. There’s a bunch of other half remembered things I don’t know are real or my brain made up. Like the lady going around spreading this dessert to build a vampire army to save the world and slept with our main protagonist out of spontaneous horniness. It wasn’t until years later I learned it was the same author as uglies
I still remember a lot of real world parasite fun facts from reading that book as a kid! The description of pulling a worm out of the bottom of someone's foot (slowly, so it doesn't break off halfway) still haunts me 🤢 I also remember the sequel to that book being somehow even more unhinged lol
thank you for your discussion of the s/h topics in these books. i picked up the book series for a dollar apiece about 2 years ago, and as i was early in recovery from s/h it definitely made recovery harder. it was essentially re-triggering the “want” to s/h. i think that your explanation of intent vs how it came off was really well done, and i commend you :] i don’t normally write comments so i apologise if i sound stilted or weird haha
You don't come off stilted DW! I appreciate the comment, it was a weird book series to return to because I did enjoy them but always felt they were off. Coming to do a video review meant I had to talk about the SH and uh, well, no one likes doing that. But also it has to be done and I don't think you can even feel fondly nostalgic for it without that uncomfortable subjet. So I'm kind of glad to address it, but phew.
I think this series is highly underrated, i read it in jr high or early high school for the first time and honestly I don't think there's been a month since where I haven't thought about Tally and the Pretties and everything to do with that world! Honestly I think this series and The Giver really shaped me as not only a writer but also as a person! I think it's such a great idea and something I could actually see happening at some point given the craze of social media beauty! Even Extras, when the main character has her camera that follows her around and is trying to basically go viral. Love this series, never seen anything from this channel but I will ALWAYS click on an Uglies video!
Wow the cutting stuff hits hard as an ex self cutter and bulimic person. Even though I’m “recovered” now I still get those impulses or urges to selfharm and it’s basically a constant battle…because doing those things actually made me feel so sort of relieve and calmness and I still crave that sensation
I remember Westerfeld's Midnighters series more than this one. Similarly, I didn't care much at all for the protagonist, but thankfully Midnighters changes POV regularly and the math-based magic system was really cool.
Scott Westerfield is so strange to me because after writing a series I absolutely hated (Uglies), he went on to write one of my favorite book series of all time: the Leviathan trilogy. It's a completely different genre than Uglies and so much more engaging. Its basically alternate history WW1 with steampunk weapons and giant monsters. It also helps that one of the two main characters is a girl who spends most of her time disguised as a boy, which spoke to me a lot as a trans egg back in middle school, plus she has romantic interactions with both girls and boys, which was some of the first bi rep I experienced as a kid. Also the illustrations are stunning.
I was OBSESSED with Uglies when it came out. I remember making my friends read the series and we would talk like pretties. I hated Extras. As a teenager I thought the books were such a deep social commentary. (haha!) But now i can just accept it as entertainment. I was wary about this video, but needn't have been (obviously, you're always thoughtful and thorough) Thank you for spotlighting the harmful messaging around self harm.
18:45 I was not expecting to run into this topic here. Just recently, one of the parties here in France said that part of their programm was to make uniforms in public schools mandatory at least up to middle school or something (can't remember the details) - the purpose being to stop the rich kids from bullying the poor kids for their clothing. They really think that'll change something, huh. My parents I mean. Is the school going to pay for every single one of the new clothes when the kid's uniform gets cut up because the family can't afford it? Or will the family pay for the new shirts every time it happens? You think kids need some kind of physical reference to bully others? My mother remembers a time when I apparently told her I'd been mocked for my shoes in first grade - but I don't remember that at all. I remember getting bullied the whole year for my stims, and because I was out of touch and 'weird'. Anything beyond that wouldn't have stuck, and guess what - uniforms wouldn't have changed a thing. So no, that's not a good argument to convince me this is going to work (context: she did actually try to use this even though it is unrelated to poverty). People don't need visual reference to bully others. It's not about the clothes - it's about kids being told that money is important, and if you don't have money, it's your own fault and is shameful. The poor kid who wears the same uniform as the others, if poor enough for that to be noticeable by others at all, will be poor in other ways: when they'll throw their birthday party, it'll be a lot more modest than other kids. When they get their first phone, it's gonna be the cheapest on the market. When they tell about their summer holidays, their parents won't have taken them to the beach halfway across the country, because they couldn't just stop work for enough time to do that AND visit family. Good fucking luck with your uniforms if they get implemented. Nice thought, but I know so many kids who felt smothered by their school - who felt like they couldn't express themselves. Well, guess fucking what, they'll have even less of a way of doing so now. Fuckign great. I dunno. Maybe I'm wrong, but it just sounds unnecessarily controlling in a way that won't even help that much. I hope it doesn't come to pass.
I do like the fact that he takes his main characters on these journeys of being something else, even evil. This is rarely portrayed as much of these are all about super happy endings...that said, book sounds confusing and probably shallow.
on one hand when I read these books i didn't feel like they were only hoverboard action sequences... on the other looking back on them the bit about Tally and Shay riding the roller coaster on their hoverboards is what I remember most
Yeah, i think about uglies a lot because of how it affected me. The SH portrayal was incredibly careless - thanks for taking the time to talk about how the Intended theme wasn't quite what many people, myself included, took away from it for a long time.
I remember finding this series kinda dumb and I really only finished reading because I don't really like stopping after I start adn was like "wel, it isn't super good but I have them all might as well read" Nowadays looking back I still think it is kinda dumb, but I do appreciate that the MC wasn't "not like other girls" like most dystopian MCs are, she was exactly like other girls and worked as an introduction to the world, while her friend ended up showing her how being in this society was a bad idea and she slowly changed her ideals, this (especially after the dystopian boom) is a pretty unique way of doing it instead of just being the "only person with a brain" in the entire society that just happens to be the MC
This series gave me existential dread, because Tally's body and mjnd was constantly altered. It was kind of like the ship of theseus but a peeson, plus the spirit semse of self aka the brain and thoughts and opinions was altered too. Terrifying stuff to think about at 13
Honestly every time I hear about "instagram face" or other various things usually involving surgical practices that people will complain make a lot of people look similar I always think of Uglies and I'm like "oh......I'm so glad I get to see something like that play out irl......"
As a teen with a then undiagnosed dissociative disorder, this series almost made me start cutting. A part of me realized how foggy I always was and wanted to be clear-headed. Fortunately, my disorder did what it's good at and made me forget this series even existed before I could start.
I LOVED these books when I read them in 6th grade, tried to talk my friends into reading them and they weren't interested. Then when they read them a year later they loved them and I got a major "I told you so!" moment lol Honestly the thing that confuses me most is why years later I can still remember the last line of book 2 "Face it Tally, you're special."
Even with all their flaws, these books will always hold a special place in my heart because they're what got me started reading dystopian fiction which is my favorite genre, so I'm super excited to hear there are more now and I 100% will be reading those!
I really enjoy your reviews! I never really was big into teen fiction (I red half of the red queen and that's about it), but I love to learn about a subclass of fiction that otherwise would have been a mystery to me! Thank you for treating these series with a level of dignity that many video essays that talk about teen fiction don't really, it sounds like there's allot of artistic merit inside these stories that are otherwise passed off as just chasing market trends.
This series was part of my thesis on ya dystopian literature and I'm keen to see you think on it. If you want to ruin your day with some terrible ya with surgery, I'd recommend unwind dystology by Neal shusterman. Man that author is terrible about indigenous Americans
I remember really liking it when it was pretty new as a 12 year old but from what I vaguely recall, yeah I can see where it would be problematic, and I'm sure I'd be shocked if I read it now.
@rachelppython Neal felt the need to tie Indigenous Americans to casinos, and come up with both a new slur and a term deemed acceptable about the connection, it's wild
It's been well over a decade since I read Unwind (only the first book), but I mostly remember being impacted by some of the surgery scenes (and how I liked the social commentary in it better than most of the dystopian YA from around that time). But I just looked up the indigenous Americans and casino thing and damn... Yikes! I hadn't looked into the other books in this series because that first one was intense enough, but also, definitely Yikes! Thanks for letting me know.
There was an explosion of popular YA fiction in the early 2000s but as an old head it’s hardly the infancy of the genre. Garth Nix, Dianna Wynne Jones, Lois Lowry, Tamora Pierce et al were holding the YA fort over 10 years before the uglies series. The giver was published in 1993.
I still don't know how I got the giver thing wrong. Like I know that! But I think with YA, we're talking two different things. YA as an age genre is old! But YA as a marketing term, a serious contender in publishing, really showed up around the early big successes of hunger games onwards. The YA dominion, not the young adult age group... YA as genre is what I meant
@@Crowcaller I think you are right about that, I don’t remember my local library having a “YA” section until the early 2000s, and a lot of these books would just go to a part of the library that was vaguely for teens and preteens.
Wikipedia tells me the term was actually in use in certain library associations and the like in the 60s, but it took a long time to really see a great deal of YA books come out that had widespread popular appeal. The giver did not sell like the hunger games, which to me is a shame, but it is what it is.
Yeah, it's sort of an idea of YA referring to multiple distinct things. It was usually treated as a type of children's fiction until it started to really grow in sales and power, and taken I think more seriously as a moneymaker for publishers. That YA could inspire such big fandoms, which really (though fandom is much older) I think became mainstream around late 2000s
Uglies read young and simple, but I kind of liked the concept. And then it shot itself in the foot with the following 2 books. This wasn't a concept where you could have your cake and eat it too (making points about how the characters have value despite being normal, imperfect human beings...but then still ultimately making the characters the prettiest and specialest ever).
not gonna lie this entire series had a chokehold on me as a kid. i still think of spagbol sometimes… i loved the way tali’s perspective changed with each surgery and societal expectation. but it absolutely should’ve centered the friendship, you’re so right! *tw* i ended up cutting semi regularly years later after trauma. i wonder if this series’ presentation of it being a way to think clearly influenced me? def a brutal oversight on the authors part
All i can remember frim this book series was that I liked saying 'sad making ', 'happy making ', and something about a bubble? Cant wait to see if i imaged all that or if it was a canon book thingy.
Man you awakened a memory, I completely forgot about Leviathan but I loved that one as a kid. Probably won't be as good to me as an adult but I might reread that
One thing I like in adaptations is the potential to go a different direction that might not have overarchingly gone well in the original. Definitely hope the film adaptations addresses some of this stuff. And I have to agree the idea of Tally and Shay being foils in the way that you suggest is an engaging and interesting direction.
I found your channel about a week or so ago and I've been blowing through your videos during my insomniatic episodes, I enjoy both the 'main stream' books and the lesser known ones you cover, so whatever books you decide to cover, know that you have fans who will watch 🥰
i have asked several people who were also into reading ya dystopian fiction back in the late aughts early 10’s and almost no one remembers Uglies!! I read every one of these books and remember almost nothing lol. This scratches a major itch. Thank you
Oh Scott. Ohhhh Scott. i have SUCH a... mm. Relationship, as it were. With Scott Westerfeld. i have. So. Many. /Feelings/. About his books. When i was younger, i ate it all up. Uglies, Peeps, Midnighters, even that crappy Succession series. (Midnighters is blessed) i loved it all so much, it gave me so much, especially because i was a (at the time) person who had, for a few years already before even reading it, SH. It... gave me validation? It also gave me shame, of course, but. It as so good - but. *But*. Yea. It was also... Very. Not. Good. i read the 'sequel' series, the Impostors series, and... it was kind of whiplash? It... really wasn't anything like the original series. It kind of, idk, rewrites how Uglies' main characters just are and it's... not good. It's not good. Worse than Uglies.
I was really worried going into this review, as this series was very special to me in late high school, but honestly this was a very fair review, and I agree.
i dont read let alone random english language series about specific topics with dystopian, urban fantasy settings, or whatever other funky world the author chose so i love this content because it makes me discover a whole new world of books ive never known until now, and i probably never would have?? and its interesting to see that most people subscribed to Crow do know them, and have loved them i get to know the books and how its received, its so fun
As someone whose first introduction to ya dystopia was a 7th grade English unit on it (we did group book clubs focusing on different books, Uglies was one of them alongside Cinder, the Selection, the Giver, Enders Game?, and perhaps one more time has taken from me (I know it wasn't Hunger Games, might've been Divergent)), yes, it definitely showed up in English classes for writing essays on. Uglies really felt very different from the rest of the genre at the time (around 2017-18), and though the Selection and the Lunar Chronicles were the ones that had a chokehold on me, Uglies still comes to mind sometimes, mainly SpagBol and the scene where she threw the necklace in the fire from Uglies, as well as the tracker chip put in her tooth and the idea of them fusing it to her jaw freaking me out.
Honestly, I remember being so disappointed by how Pretties turned out that I never even read Specials. It definitely seemed like the story wanted to be set in the Smoke, in this "we split away from society because we disagree with it" thing. And the second you make Tally and Shay Pretty, you lose that, lose their friendship, and lose their character development. You can't have a good friendship when you literally get your past together brainwashed away at the end of every book. Honestly, if they hadn't destroyed the Smoke in Uglies, or not completely, had the people on the run, studying the brain lesions, and trying to cure their old friends that became pretty before them, it would've been a much better story, and it'd have more justification for the "hoverboard in the woods" sequences.
these books were what got me into reading! i even *accidentally* forgot to return specials to the library when i was in middle school. their original covers were so cool to me, especially the girls lipgloss on the specials cover
You know, I think that if I was the one wo wrote these books, I would have made each book about a different main character at a different life stage. Like that you explore more of the worldbuilding, you set more ideas around the stereotypes, and you get to avoid the "special girl" syndrome. The first tome could stay similar, teenagers who start in the system but eventually escape, until they get inevitably caught at the end. Then on the second tome you have a young adult, and they don't think much about all of it, even when they find clues that something is wrong. Then for the third one, you have an adult who finds hidden instructions signed by their hand when they were younger, that leads to them getting cured and having the tools to fight back. And then we can have a fourth book centered around a group that tries to fight against the system, and maybe you find in it characters from the precedent books, or maybe they're referenced in some capacity. And that's your book focused on fixing things. Also, for the self-harm, I wonder if the goal was to say "Even if it seems to do something to make you feel better, in the end it's bad for you", which failed to get transmitted. Because yeah, you could say "the self-harm did nothing", but from what I know of self-harm, at the time it happens it feels like it does something to relieve you of the pain, even for a moment. So kids who self-harm won't buy into the "it did absolutely nothing", because it does something to them. Unfortunately, it may be hard to transmit efficiently the idea of "you may feel better but it's causing you more harm than anything" in a novel, so like. May have been better to just not include that. Or at the very least use a form of self-harm that isn't as easy and usual, like, idk, they break each other bones with a hammer or something.
I realised 50 minutes into this video that I had read this entire series as a teen. I definitely came away thinking it was cool and not really picking up on the more sociological themes. Edit: I'm pretty sure its because the netflix trailer looked so different from my internal teenage ideas of it that I essentially overwrote my own memories of the name of the books.
So I graduated in 2007, and YA dystopia may not have been as big as it was later, but there was still plenty of it around. In my memory, I don't remember book series having any sort of rockstar status until Harry Potter came around, and you started seeing book companies start vying to produce the next big series. Some pre-Hunger Games YA dystopias I remember enjoying (besides The Giver- that one was required reading when I was far too young to appreciate it, and I still haven't gone back to try reading it again...): The Bar Code Tattoo (2004)- I don't actually remember if I read this, I DO remember picking it up and considering it almost every time I was in a book store for about 5 years Welcome to the Ark (1996)- I remember really enjoying this; I don't remember what it was about. The White Mountain (1967)- Technically listed for children, but I remember being hugely impacted by this book after picking it up from the elementary school library... I have no idea if I read the rest of the series. City of Ember (2003)- for some reason I thought this had come out more recently! I remember it being very good, but I think it also may edge more into children's lit as opposed to YA (though that line is often blurry at best). Epic (2004)- I don't remember if I finished this one. I remember really liking the cover and reading at least the first part. Some other books from the beginning of the YA Dystopia Craze that I vaguely remember: Gone (2008): I remember seeing this series in bookstores, but I never read them. The Adoration of Jenna Fox (2008)- I vaguely remember enjoying this one.
We actually read the first book for our Sophomore English Class. Everyone was so confused with the plot and the teacher tried to justify an age gap. Meanwhile, I was picturing the pretties as handsome Squidwards and casually shipping Shay and Tally, because why not? It was a pretty weird unit. I get what the author was trying to do, but it just ended up weird and there were points where it went to Men Writing Women territory (at least to me).
![NETFLIX MISSED THE WHOLE POINT?? // [book versus movie: Uglies]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/83OwGCkvUv0/mqdefault.jpg)
The intro is a bit off focus, skip to 05:50 to get more to it. Or just to the TW if you want straight to the meat.
I was having a huge amount of anxiety and stress when I filmed this, and felt the need to justify myself more than needed. I was worried- I often am. Definitely, I should have cut it down.
Please stop sending me very rude messages about this. I am a human person. Thank you.
Aren’t video essays supposed to be about an hour? You did fine. I loved this series as a tween as well and it is always great to take a second look at media which helped shape our worldview. Thank you!
I understand feeling that way. Making video essays is an art; you'll grow and learn every time you make an essay, and it sounds like you learned a lot while making this one!
When you got into it, you had really solid observations and comparisons to other contemporary novels at the time!
Also, I love your plush!
I was going to give the suggestion of maybe don't assume we've read it? I for one haven't. But I don't mean that harshly I just didn't know what you were talking about lol.
@@ZebraChanda you clicking on a video discussing a book you've never read and then getting annoyed that you don't understand what the video creator is talking about because you've never read the book is 100% a personal problem
@XxsHeLbY97xX I thought she would explain the book like most people do but you are right
I think the biggest impact Uglies had on me was the desire to have tattoos that I could animate or change
I wanted - and still do - the cosmetic appearance of a Special.
I thought Shay's eyes with clocks in them were pretty sick
Weirdly the main thing I remember about the series is the "Spag Bol" packets. She doesn't understand the labeling on the rations she steals and ends up eating the same thing for weeks straight.
Omg me too I think of it everytime I see spaghetti Bolognese
That is literally one of the ONLY things I remember about this book, I guess it made a strong impression on me lol
SO GLAD THIS WAS A UNIVERSAL RESPONSE TO THESE BOOKS
I still get secondhand disgust from Spaghetti Bolognese IRL because of the amount of times I read about it and imagined eating it 😭😭😭 (I have read this series 5 times at least)
omg same lol, for some reason that stuck so hard.
It's wild reading Extras because of how accurately it predicted tiktok influencer culture back in 2007. It had everything from popularity economy to rampant consumerism that was disconnected to any supply chain, and constant feeds of content from people desperate to move up the chain. Extreme aesthetics, obsession with follower counts, live streaming... etc. Scott really called his shot and hit there.
I remember thinking the same thing about twitch and vine
Because I met the series in 2013 or so, I always assumed Extras was a commentary on current trends and found it a bit eye roll-y and tired. That goes to show how well he predicted it
But it annoys me a bit that the world of Extras is presented as what came after the authoritarian regime was destroyed, and it's an even worse deal.
I remember when I read Extras as a kid that I couldn't imagine living in such a world, and now that basically is our world.
How i feel about the truman show @@art-dm7su
Same with iCarly
As a part of the Uglies trilogy fandom in 2007-2008, we used the comments of Scott Westerfeld's blog as a forum to chat in. His every blog post about midnighters covers or whatever had 1000 comments sometimes, because we were just talking about our lives in there. I'm sorry, Scott. I have lost touch with all of those other people, now. Yasemin and Andrea and Serafina Zane, if you're out there.... i hope youre doing well.
They're out there somewhere still! I know the feeling. I hung out in some weird forums and comment sections making pals as a kid too. I pinned this because it's kind of a nice relatable old internet story and also I guess if they one day somehow see it on a similar nostalgia kick....
thats so sweet
Omg my first intro into online forums was for the books “the clique” when I was maybe.. 11. They had a forum on the website for the books. Wow. I remember picking out my icon and little signature 🥲 good times
Everybody had a forum then.
I don't really agree that this series didn't have significance. Hunger Games certainly did.
It's like saying Carmilla had no significance because people talk more about Dracula.
I was Tally-wa in the forums lol I was saddened when Westerfeld took down the forums.
I'm glad someone is finally talking about Uglies, sometimes i feel like I'm the only one who's ever read the books. 90% of my channel is just me acting out certain scenes from the books
Uglies never made me want to SH, nor did it make my habit worse. It actually made me want to stop.
In Specials, Zane asks Tally a very important question that i think about any time the urge comes back.
"What is it that you're not feeling that makes you think you have to do that?"
And that question sticks with Tally just as it stuck with me, and she learns to stop cutting just as I ended doing. Every time the urge comes up, I ask myself that question.
Everyone has their own experience, that was mine
I was a self-harmer in middle and high school, and I always appreciated that Scott seemed to GET why I did it. And I felt seen and understood.
Zane was one of the best characters. Change my mind.
I thought I was the only one who read it too lol no one ever talks about it. it's been my favorite series ever since I first read it. I've re read it and listened to the audio books so many times and each time I realize some new connection to our modern world or my own past. It also never made me want to self harm, I had other things promoting that and Uglies was a safe escape from that for me. I'm so glad this series is getting some attention and I can't wait for the movie (even if they ruin it I'm just happy it will finally be a thing) lol
Scott westerfield actually wrote a whole book called ‘bogus to bubbly’ where he explains how he came up with all of the aspects of the world, from the tech to the slang (and a very detailed explanation of how the hoverboards work lol). I think it gives a lot of insight into what Scott’s intentions were. This was one of my fav series as a teenager, but I do agree with your negative points, especially about the depiction of self harm. Also, tally and shay should have ended up together change my mind 😂
They should have
They 1000% should have
No. I will not change your mind.
I got to see him speak at the National DC book convention, I did genuinely get great tips on world building from the talk. He talked more about the uglies series which I never read even though I DEVOURED Leviathan. Westerfield honestly just strikes me as a guy who has his Favorite Thing at the moment (like hoverboards and flying whales and mechs) and then just Goes With It and honestly I respect it
There was literally so much romantic tension between them. There was a scene where Shay was basically seducing tally being like “just sh for me bbg”
There is so much valid criticism about this trilogy but I will stand by one specific element to my grave. I LOVE that this series has a protagonist who repeatedly fails at not only small goals along the way, but their literal main goal. Tally spends all of Uglies trying to not be Pretty, and ultimately fails. She spends most of Pretties desperately trying not to be Special, and fails AGAIN. I admire that on its own as a really uncommon and risky narrative structure. But on a personal level, it was also so comforting at that age (and even now) to see someone repeatedly fail and become a worse person, but who was always able to be helped to be better again. It's reassuring to think that no matter how badly I fail at my goals, or how lost I become from myself, I'll also never be a completely hopeless case.
"What's up, gamers?" is a perfect opening for ANY video, Crow. Feel free to use it forever
I say that all the time unironically
I really appreciate your discussion of cutting, and I think your idea for a rewrite would be fantastic. Shay seems genuinely interesting, and the idea of Tally having to watch her friend that opened her eyes become a husk of herself and a cog in the very system she despised would be a great toxic girlbestfriendship horror.
I remember reading this as a kid and finding it disappointing. Why was this main character ‘special’? In the first book it seemed like she wasn’t-she just had a friend who ran off, and I liked that. But then it kept focusing on her? And like, why was she Pretty now? Why wasn’t she imprisoned by the vague shadow government for thought crimes? And then she became Special??? Why??? And the whole self harm thing UUGGH.
I liked the brain lesion idea, kinda. There is a problematic theme of ‘hot people are dumb’, but that can be fixed. But the whole ‘accidentally hurting your BF by unleashing nanobots with no stop command on him because they gave you two pills and didn’t tell you’ seemed weirdly misogynistic about how it was all her fault. No one told them the cure was for ONE person: they gave them two pills, what do you think would happen!?
29:34 Wait she was supposed to have ACTUALLY CURED HERSELF OF PERMANENT BRAIN DAMAGE??? That’s so fking stupid!!!
38:23 I don’t even remember the end of Specials, lol. I think the farthest thing I remember is how neat Diego was. Like, people having skin that flashed black with the beat of nearby music. That’s a cool sci-fi idea!
I can understand now how Wakefield is more interested in sci-fi than plot 😂
Was that trying to be a Matrix reference?
it's so so so dumb that there weren't any instructions, imagine if she took them both at once, or out of order even!! seriously if they were smart enough to make nanobot pills they should have at least been smart enough to include instructions.
@@shanon4768Especially when you know that the people taking said pills have literal brain damage.
Honestly, I remember the first book really vividly and I still hold a lot of love for it. My mother has spent her entire life battling an incredibly intense eating disorder that has almost killed her multiple times, and has ruined every relationship in her life. So this book criticizing the beauty industry and it's affect on young women- both those who were pretty and those who were ugly- was very revolutionary to me at the time. I still live under the shade of my mother's eating disorder and I'm 30 now! I'm an adult, but her ED has shaped my life in a major ways.
The first book made me feel really seen and just showed that you could choose to opt out of the beauty rat race that we're all entered into with puberty. I was raised by a woman who hated her body and so would point out all of our flaws so she wouldn't be alone in her misery, and the book helped me be like. She can be miserable, but I don't have to be, because I can be comfortable in myself. And I needed the message at the time.
Then everyone became pretty in the second book and I got so annoyed I never continued the series.
I can see from your perspective why the characters becoming pretty feels like a betrayal (I felt that way too when I fist read it) but I definitely can say that the series continues with the themes you've mentioned above. The characters fight to love themselves even after being changed and abused by the system.
I'm sorry you've had those experiences. While mine might not be exactly the same I certainly empathize. My mother constantly criticizes her body even today and she's in her 60s. Hope things have gotten better for you and your mom.
Just cuz the mc becomes pretty doesn’t mean the critique becomes invalid
Hope you’re doing well!
This is one that I read as a teen and one of the books that lead me to begin SHing, so I really thank you for talking about it and how depicting SHing in this way was really detrimental to a lot of young people. Another book that really messed up my teenage view on life was The B*tch Posse by Martha O'Connor - I had a really terrible relationship with my body and all of these books about kids my age dealing with their own self esteem issues in bad ways really didn't help. I took a lot of the SH aspects at face value and saw that it made the characters "feel better," so I started as well. SH *was* a trend in the early 2000s, and especially for sheltered kids like me who's only connection to the outside world was books and media, SHing was presented as a good option to "fix" things. The B*tch Posse took it about fifteen steps too far, but this series is one that's left lasting scars (literally) on me.
Me and a few others in the comments experienced the opposite. It seems that, for kids who aren’t already fucked up, seeing those “bad examples” wears off on them. But for kids like me who were already self harming very young, who’d never even seen it in media, it helped us decide to quit!
@Futurebound_jpg the books and ADHD meds both contributed a lot to me stopping
I'm so happy to see someone talking about this series! I feel like Scott Westerfeld set up some great environmental messages in the first book and promptly got lost in the Mary Sue of it all. There was real potential for the white flowers to tie together the mistakes of the past and present; in both cases the desire for beauty and status creates something destructive. I enjoyed seeing Tally's initial horror that the Smoke was cutting down trees and how her opinion changed as she learned about living off the land. The nature preserve where the government studies human evolution and tribal dynamics was vastly underutilized in the second book as well.
I became a tween/teenager at the very end of the 00’s, based around the messaging from adults around the issues for teens of that day had a very strong vibe of being well intentioned but extremely misguided and almost completely unquestioning of the systems in power that were causing the issues for the youths. This results of this were a bunch of moral panics about stuff like eating disorders, drugs, and self harm. As things always go with moral panics the solution that we came up with was grossly oversimplified, patronizing, and again unquestioning about the real root causes of the problems. Self harm was blamed on “just wanting attention” or “it’s part of the culture of all of those freaks over there who wear a lot of black eyeliner (satanic?)” instead of how there was a much bigger stigma around mental health and it was even more taboo to try to like go to therapy to deal with stuff than it is now. Eating disorders were blamed on the (exclusively girls) being too shallow and vain and just needing to “love themselves” more. Even though pretty much every single form of media was screaming at them to want to be that skinny at full blast.
I remember seeing a lot of stuff in the same media talking about how also all of this stuff is bad in a very after school special “think of the children” way. Like I’d catch a bit of a Lifetime movie or read something in a random magazine I found somewhere about how this was a problem. Later when I got a little bit older and started looking for more stuff actually targeted to my age the messaging got even louder and the depictions a lot less sympathetic and more cruel in the name of grittyness, edgyness, and being “realistic, no nonsense, saying it how it really is. For today’s fed up rebellious youths”. Well as much grit and edge as you could get past a large teen focused publisher at the time, which could be a lot more than what you’d assume. I remember during those middle school reading groups with the books with the reading comprehension questions in the back reading just completely unhinged stuff that was trying to be relatable to people who were also 13 just a couple years before I was 13. You covered that Catholic murder girlboss book that Tonya Hurly wrote earlier so I decided to open up my old Ghostgirl books. Turns out that all of the wild stuff in the Catholic murder girlboss books were already prominent themes in her writing. The Twilight saga was probably actually one of the least unhinged things that I read in that era of my life. Then the trends changed as the surge of Teen dystopia fiction took over the YA publishing world, replacing contemporaries and paranormal fiction/romance as the biggest cash cow. Compared to a lot of the earlier YA stuff I think the dystopias were probably actually a good deal tamer than the previous books, especially once the formula got established with The Hunger Games. I guess a lot of the more relatable to the current adolescent zeitgeist issues fell by the wayside because the protagonists started having bigger problems like picking between the blond one and the brunette one, or the Spore Wars. Even though a lot of that previous stuff from YA’s Wild West days probably aged horribly and was also probably considered to be pretty offensive even back then, I kinda miss the vibe that was there before the formulas started being established and we were just throwing stuff at the wall to see what stuck. I think we need more publishers willing to let authors throw stuff at the wall, instead of just sticking to the same formula over and over again, just with thin coats of different genre paint.
Never actually read Uglies though, didn’t have enough vampires and being genetically altered to have wings seemed a lot cooler to me than “you get a nose job and a pretty severe concussion, everybody gets a nose job and a severe concussion”.
As someone who grew up in central Europe and only started reading English books as a teen, I'm always fascinated by these tween/YA novels. I hope you get the views and as revenue you deserve.
@Flareontoast I am genuinely curious to hear your thoughts on tween/YA novels from your perspective.
I too hope crowcaller gets the revenue and views they deserve. I am but one viewer but one recurring and I definitely appreciate the thoughtful analyses.
I remember SpagBol. I also remember the orange juice vodka skydiving scene.
My main association with this book is I had a friend called Shay, so I called her shay-la and she called me genie-wa. I messed up and burned that friendship, and I wish I could apologize.
Literally do not apologize for the time between videos. I love long deep dives. My fav UA-camr only releases like 2 videos a year but they're always killer. You do you.
This! Two of my all time favorite UA-camrs are lucky if they release one a year lmao but those videos are so long and good I don’t care
Edited since I've watched the video now:
if you're insterested in the high-concept theme of "mandated plastic surgery makes everyone conventionally attractive, but has secret brain surgery that makes people compliant and conformist" but you don't like the "self-harm stops brain damage," "our unlikeable protagonist uses the Secret TM to fix her own brain," or "nanobots ex machina save the day and fix all the brainwashing for everyone" then I'd recommend the classic Twilight Zone episode "Number 12 Looks Just Like You" (season 5 episode 17, by Charles Beaumont and John Tomerlin).
When I first started reading "Uglies," I thought it was an adaptation of "Number 12 Looks Just Like You" - that's how close the concept is. Then I got to the first hoverboard scene and I realized it was substantially less interesting.
I don't but I do love that episode of the twilight zone! Absolutely one of my favs
@Crowcaller that episode is actually based on a short story by Beaumont! It's called The Beautiful People
I thought the same thing when I first read uglies! Love that ep of the twilight zone
Ohhh my gosh I was waiting for the Twilight Zone comment! I thought of that episode immediately when I saw this video.
I was in highschool around this era, and it's weird that I so rarely hear people acknowledge that cutting/self harm genuinely was a trend at the time. And that doesn't devalue the mental and emotional distress that leads to such behaviors, but when a cultural attitude leads you to believe that this particular coping mechanism is how to deal with that distress, you're naturally going to see a lot more of it. There were times in my own friend groups where cutting was something we told each other about in the same "kinda bummed" tone you might confess that you'd forgotten your homework again. It was bizarrely routine in certain social circles, and I'm glad that the imagery and rhetoric that glorified it seems to be so much less common now.
I had very much the same sort of experience. It was just.... 'going around', as I think I say it's not like cutting is a natural behaviour - you learn it somewhere and also learn it as worth trying. A huge amount of kids at my school tried it including my friends and it was treated as like... Oh no! This is a symptom of being Truly Sad, not a deeply troubling issue that needs to be addressed
I have referenced the hover boards from this series at least monthly, if not weekly maybe since I read this series in 8th grade. I want one. So. Bad.
Also- I don't remember which part in the book made me do this, but I EMAILED SCOTT WESTERFELD and told him the scene made me throw the book across the room, that it was so emotional. It was a very dramatic email. I was, in my defense, an 8th grader. But HE WROTE BACK and it was a fairly personalized message. He told me he hopped my book survived the throw and told me that I should keep an eye on shelves bc maybeeeee there was a 4th book coming out soon. Looking back on it as an adult it was probably just good marketing, and may have been an assistant or even someone on a literal marketing team responding but. It felt really, really cool in the moment.
Hi, just in case I´ll tell that there actually is a fourth book. Its a different story with a different protagonist but it is in the same world after the trilogy took place.
Dude those hoverboards rocked my world as a kid, the rollercoaster part?? I have also brought them up several times as an adult it’s the only part of the books I actually remember lol
Wait in the dedication for one of the books be mentions people throwing books lol
I think, if this series would be released today, both girls would have ended up together and all of the romantic tension just would have been struggles between the two to realize that they are actually in love with each other.
Still a better love story than Night and its Moon
If they didnt they'd be accused of queerbaiting.
@@kellylyons1038well now this film is out- i’m curious if they’ve been accused of that yet
@@cryingwatercolourswell if you’ve seen the movie you’ll see that there was no chemistry between David and Tally but Shay and Tally seem like “best friends” like all lesbians teen couples. Tbh it wouldn’t be wrong to call it queer baiting in the film. My boyfriend thought they were endgame and was genuinely confused when her and David got together.
@@AlexanderJasperJay yeah my bf was immediately joking they were queer and a few mins later I said the same thing 😆 but we’re both bi so I wasn’t rlly sure if it was just us wanting to see something that wasn’t there (queer rep) since it wasn’t confirmed
On the subject of odd openings, the introductory line to Uglies always made me laugh - how is it not parody?
Wasn't it something like a cat-food colored sunrise?
@@PieNumber4yeah! i never forgot that, it was so weird.
I don't know is it's a translation issue, but the version i read was like "the sunrise sky is the color of cat VOMIT" and at that point I never had a cat, I didn't know what color was their vomit like and I was just stuck with this imagery in my head for weeks.
and the first time I had a cat and he vomited i remembered this line😂
@@blue_lynch, OH WOW, which translation even was this?
@@anteater-muravyed i believe it was a fan translation to portuguese (brazil)
but it could also be the official, its just that I read in a site
No, it’s not a translation issue, that’s how it was in English too
The cultural impact of Uglies is that it was too mainstream to convince friends to read bc they all had 10,000 other bestsellers in their to read pile, but obscure enough that if I give into the constant temptation (a good DECADE since my last readthrough!) to call things "bubbly" no one will know why. And the author had a pretty good "how to write/world encyclopedia" book! That one I think about adding to my collection, it was a good time.
Its crowing time as opener ?! Hello murder of crows!? Hello crow-nies?
murder of crows goes hard ngl
Crownies is fun lol
"KA-KAW let's talk about a book."
my favorite part was when crow caller said “it’s crowin’ time” and crowed all over the place
If she's the crow caller, does that make us the crows?
Thank you for including a section about SH and the effects media portrayal of it have on adolescents. I used to be a cutter, and I learned how to do it from a YA book I read. I was very troubled as a young teenager and SH'ed as an outlet. Even now, as a much healthier adult, sometimes I get the urge to SH when my emotions get overwhelming.
Thank you for pointing out that SH doesn’t just go away. I’m 30 now and every once in a while I get the urge to do something to myself when I feel overwhelmed. It’s actually somewhat addictive, which is why people will sometimes mention they’ve been SH-free for x number of years.
I thought i was over it until a couple days ago 😞 im glad i didnt read these books, though its not like they would have given me the idea anyway.
MESS as Uglies is, Scott Westerfeld's next series the dieselpunk alternate history Leviathan Trilogy was a really fun read and I have a lot of affection for it
I was obsessed with it and the artist behind the illustrations. I remember spending hours in Keith Thompson's art blog and he was one of the inspirations for me to pursue a career in art
GOD I loved Leviathen and all the art on those books 😭 Did you know that Scott sold the adaptation rights to Netflix and now we’re getting a Leviathan anime?
I remember reading this when I was 13 and HATED this series and what they did to Shay’s character. Hated the main character, who just seemed like a selfish girl who ended up “having it all” at the expense of her friend.
Yeah honestly I also always didn't like tally and Shay was just SO shafted it's almost astonishing. From lead narrative foil to off screen girl rival. So rude
@@CrowcallerMISSY NOOOO
Literally, I bought and read all the books, but it was very much a love-hate relationship. I thought the concept was cool, but Tally annoyed me and it was frustrating seeing Shay go from being the best character in the first book to what they did with her in the rest of the series. I think I kept reading in hopes that Tally and Shay would somehow put a stop to the government-mandated surgeries and everyone would go back to aging naturally, but nope.
These books gave me so many insecurities as a preteen because it never explained (if I remember rightly) WHAT happened in the operation, like HOW these people became pretty. I was so scared I would never become truly pretty because I would never get the operation and I wanted to DESPERATELY know what exactly made these people pretty.
@@caitlingillthey do talk about it. It isn't pretty.
as always thank you crow for delving into my personal ya book history to exorcise its many, many forgotten demons
It’s wild hearing about this book series again, I remember specifically liking because everything seems to just constantly go wrong, and as a kid that was kind of a fresh experience! I had only really read that happening in the Series of Unfortunate Events, which was one of my first experiences with existentialism lol. Thank you for talking about this series, I loved hearing about it as an adult!!
True honestly! Sometimes it is fun to read something like that. I think it's why I like watching cheap thriller shows: everything just goes so bad and you can't stop watching. I adored a series of unfortunate events as a kid so much, but god did it also give me nonstop anxiety
oof yeah soue was so influential to me bc i felt like there was something deeply wrong with the world but most stories offered to tweens/younger kids end well or are incredibly simple
This is a great breakdown of the Uglies series! I loved the books as a tween, except for how 'cool' it made SH sound.
'Extras' was my favorite in the series as well! It's wild it showed influencer culture years before that became a thing.
I enjoyed Tally's character downfall from reluctant rebel to byproduct of the 'Specials' system. Tally ends the series believing humanity - not consumerism - needs to be kept in check. The ending feels like a tragedy. Even with her main character exceptionalism, Tally never knows what she wants. Her values/motivations change wildly each book. Dr. Cable's conditioning has a lasting effect on her even after Specials. Tally panics at the idea of being be un-Special, especially when other characters confront her with how dangerous that mentality is later on. It's interesting to read as an adult now, when 'humans are Earth's disease' is finally being seen as a dangerous belief.
A series rewrite would be great. Westerfield could explore how dangerous the 'humans are the disease' and 'people are sheeple' mindsets are.
I remember reading the first book and liking Shay better than Tali. Then getting really uncomfortable with Shay starting a cutting cult and putting down the book. I already had friends that I was trying to convince that that cutting was bad and it pisses me off that this book made a super group for it.
I haven’t thought about this series in quite some time, and now I’m wondering if I might have quit a certain terrible habit if it wasn’t being glamorized to me in those books. (I remember the characters saying that pain makes your mind fast and sharp. Yikes.)
read the first book, also loved Shay, got to the second book when the cutting cult happened and was like oh fuck I gotta get outta here. that was over a decade ago now but holy crap the cutting scene was so triggering to preteen me who had some really bad coping mechanisms. still have the uglies and pretties books on my childhood bookshelf lmao.
I've been waiting for you to do this series. I'm honestly nervous to watch, it's a comfort read and holds a special place in my heart 😂
Same here! For sentimental reasons, I'm gonna have to sit this one out, but based on the comments, some really solid points are being made.
I'm used to watching her videos about these terrible books that I've never heard of being torn apart. To see her doing a video on a series that I LOVED as a teenager (I even presented a book report on it in class) had me scared 💀 I put it on my "watch later" list and built up the courage to watch it. I just finished and I am relieved to say that she did not tear this series to pieces.
I read Uglies and really enjoyed it, so I started looking for more books by the same author. The Leviathan trilogy was criminally underrated (was, because it's been a long time since I read them but I remember them extremely fondly and still reference them all the time). I'm looking forward to listening to your review. In hindsight, the Uglies series really messed me up when I was young and impressionable
I remember reading Peeps, which is basically "what if vampirism was caused by parasites?"
The Leviathan series is SO underrated. I read Uglies and then Leviathan and I was OBSESSED
i remember reading leviathan and being very excited and happy that a female character was crossdressing as a boy and wanted to work on airships even though they were only for men. i remember feeling so seen as a little tomboy, and then the romance kicked in. i was absolutely devastated. i didn't expect her to be a lesbian because i never got my hopes very high, but i thought it might at least just let her be a character with her own story and arc without a fucking boy. i put the book down and never finished reading it because i was so upset. i stopped checking out books from the school library after that and asked to go to the public library so i could try to find adult books that were more interesting to me. ya fiction really fucked over young lgbt kids.
Leviathan and Midnighters are the best.
@@soupstoreclothing Honestly so valid!! When I was younger, I HATED reading about romance especially from a female characters perspective! I always thought it really took away from the story. In hindsight, I was just a closeted ace bisexual lol. The romance felt so forced in those books, when it's so clear her one true love was bioengineered aerodynamics.
Thank you, this series was one of the first I read in middle school when I first got into reading as a hobby, I remember it fondly but haven't thought of it in a long time. So excited for your critique, love your way of speaking and your points of view!
Uglies was also a series that got me into reading!
I read these books in middle school and surprisingly Extra’s is the one that I remember the most clearly. Really resonated with the main character of that one
I remember reading this series in my early teens and enjoying it a lot, especially the first book and Extras. (I guess I had a high tolerance for survival hoverboarding stories.) I did /not/ remember the SH being associated with Shay’s gang breaking out of their brainwashing, only Tally being horrified by their actions and me in turn being horrified by her being turned into a Cutter, so hoo boy is that a big old yikes. Weirdly enough, hearing you describe the plot synopsis now, I couldn’t help but think that Tally and Shay should 100% have got together - they had the most interesting character dynamic of the series, even if poor Shay got massively sidelined.
Based on how much I liked Uglies, I read Westerfeld’s Midnighters series and, eventually, Leviathan. I remember nothing at all about Midnighters, but Leviathan was a decent steampunk series. Cool setup and settings, cool ideas, but it was just missing some spark to bring it all together for me.
The main thing I remember about the Midnighters series is that I was really annoyed at the ending, specifically for the main couple. Like, she got trapped in the midnight world so it was this weird existential horror where she would see him essentially rapidly age from her perspective while he would only be able to see her an hour a night for the rest of his life?
Crow I just wanted to say that the way you talked about cutting being a trend really resonated with me. When I self harmed I would cut, and I geniunely do believe it was a "learned" behavior. I really appreciate that view on the idea.
YEEES!!! Clicked on this immediately upon seeing it. “Uglies” was my favorite series, but no one else ever read it so I couldn’t talk about it. Can’t wait to watch this!
It’s honestly insane how many ya series are three books and one related prequel/extra novel/short story collection
Oh wow, I am in the middle of moving and was about to throw away these books actually ... the weird mix of nostalgia and not quite remembering much beside the basic premise and hover-boarding (and a secret third thing) felt exactly as you described.
I grew up identifying as queer and never really had a huge realization like others might describe. It was thankfully a natural self-discovery through puberty eased by casually-but-explicitly accepting parents. When I read these books I was still at the very beginning of this journey - surely identifying more with the active male protagonists who "got the girl" in the end, but also longing for strong female relationships. Only while watching your video it kinda clicks for me why with this book in particular I also remember the energy I felt between Tally and Shay as much as I do, even though their dynamic doesn't nearly develop as much as it felt to me. Whether romantic or thematic or both, I agree it should've been the emotional core of the story, it just makes so much sense ...
sorry for the rambling, I rarely write comments ever, but somehow your discussion really hit for me.
I'm older, and I read The Giver as a teen; it actually came out in 1993. Very much ahead of the trend in YA (and YA at all), though of course dystopian "utopias" in general were nothing new at that point. (I also loved Gathering Blue.) (And no book has ever captured that as succinctly for me as The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas, Le Guin, 1973.)
I've never gotten around to reading Uglies or Divergent, though when all the books I want are on hold at the library with weeks-long waitlists sometimes I pick up some of the old series to read in the meantime, so perhaps I will eventually. Finally got Fourth Wing from the library and ah, so tropey. But with dragons!
I loved this series at a kid beofre i developed criticism skills. One part that always stuck out to me was when the main character looked at old world magazines and was shocked at how "anorexic" the models looked. It made me feel better dreaming of a future where strict body weight stardards werent so common and helped me fight back against my own body image issues. Other than that though the book is a bit of a blur
so funny - i have zero memory of that scene, but the thing i remember most from the series is the pretties casually downing packets of "calorie burner" pills so they never gained any weight (and my tween self desperately wishing they were real). bit of a mixed message on body image standards i guess lol.
Yeah I remember there being a very big plotline of Tally and her boyfriend?? starving themselves to be able to think more clearly while also criticizing or at least commenting on the way old world anorexics were weird or something like that (my memory of it is a bit hazy). It was definitely strange messaging wither way!
@@abigailcrosbie8688they had tracking bracelets on that they were trying to lose enough weight to slip out of, but it would make sense if that was something promoted, though i do genuinely believe scott westerfield didn't intend to promote any of the behaviours he was writing
Scott Westerfeld, (Btw it's FELD not FEILD, there's no I) is a really intersting author, I read a lot of his books in Middle school, So Yesterday and Leviathan (His best series IMO) are still on my shelf to this day, Uglies never resonated with me much but i'm always excited to see you talk about any series!
Odd openings/not stereotypical openings make it feel more personal/real. I listen to these like podcasts or listening to a friend talk about what interests them. I love your content and just listening to people talk about crazy bullshit that exists
I love this series but I absolutely agree that it would’ve been better if they had focused more on Tally and Shay’s friendship instead of love interest. Tally is only 16 in all of these books and it feels weird that they have her sleeping in the same bed as Zane at one point and living with him. I feel like she should’ve at least aged up a year in each book of the trilogy.
Along with cutting, it also does the same things with starving yourself. in pretties, by not eating zane and tally are able to gain clarity, free themselves, and zane mostly got rid of the things that were eating his brain by starving them. These books absolutely glorified cutting and starving yourself
Uglies was my favorite book series as a teen and I remember my takeaway from Tally's decision at the end of Specials was that she was ending the cycle of letting herself be artificially changed, even if it meant staying as what was effectively a monster. She finally decided to accept herself fully and wholly. I likely won't reread the series, especially with the reminders of how many uninteresting bits are in it. Based on this video I doubt I could interpret the same message from the work now as an adult, but it's remained something that's really resonated with me as I've grown older. I really wanted to listen to a video essay on Uglies today while working, and I'm glad you made this. Thank you.
Ahhhh I'm so glad this video popped up in my recommended and led me to your channel!!!
I remember very little about this series aside from the ending being disappointing, the graphic surgery descriptions (specifically the skin-exfoliating killer sunburn stuff), and my favorite; the scene towards the end of the first book where David (I think that’s his name?) tells Tally she’s beautiful and she throws her spy necklace thing into the fire. In hindsight I kinda wish the first book had ended there and the necklace hadn’t activated and sent in the feds to raid The Smoke, like, let this teen girl feel like she’s worthy of love just the way she is and reject the thing she’d been seeking the entire time. Also, I fucking LOVED the Leviathan trilogy as a teen too, especially the illustrations! I think that one would make an interesting video.
Literally the only thing I remember about reading this in middle school is my disappointment in how dull the rebel plot thing was and thinking the best friend character getting eye rhinestones when they were Pretty-fied (that somehow told time like a binary clock???) was actually Really Cool.
Read this series after high school because my gf had the books and i was bored. i wasnt quite in my "critical thinking era" yet and just inhaled them because dystopia is a favorite genre.
I remember very little of the original trilogy, but Extras was an incredible left turn into weird for me. it was like only tangetially related to the main series, and i think i remember there were aliens????
anyhow, nice video, really scratched my nostalgia itch and helped me look at the series more critically!
Not aliens but genetically modified people they were making able to more easily live in space. The main character thinks they are aliens at first.
My main experience with Scott westerfield was skimming these books and then later reading a book called peeps I didn’t realize was also by him.
Peeps was, weird, especially when I remember I found it in my middle school library. It has a cool premise around sexually transmitted parasites that turn people feral that I ended up feeling let down by.
A lot of the details are vague now, but I remember it being weirdly horny, while also no sex allowed (pretty typical in retrospect) and that the premise takes a weird turn with like vampires instead of parasites which just felt less original. Some of the chapters started with descriptions of various parasites around the world and eventually those became my favorite part, and the only real tie left to the premise.
I vividly remember a scene of the main character walking down the street and talking about how New York put glass in their concrete to make it sparkle, and how beautiful it looked with his enhanced eyes. It was a good passage, but gods did this book go off the rails. There’s a bunch of other half remembered things I don’t know are real or my brain made up. Like the lady going around spreading this dessert to build a vampire army to save the world and slept with our main protagonist out of spontaneous horniness.
It wasn’t until years later I learned it was the same author as uglies
I still remember a lot of real world parasite fun facts from reading that book as a kid! The description of pulling a worm out of the bottom of someone's foot (slowly, so it doesn't break off halfway) still haunts me 🤢
I also remember the sequel to that book being somehow even more unhinged lol
thank you for your discussion of the s/h topics in these books. i picked up the book series for a dollar apiece about 2 years ago, and as i was early in recovery from s/h it definitely made recovery harder. it was essentially re-triggering the “want” to s/h. i think that your explanation of intent vs how it came off was really well done, and i commend you :] i don’t normally write comments so i apologise if i sound stilted or weird haha
You don't come off stilted DW! I appreciate the comment, it was a weird book series to return to because I did enjoy them but always felt they were off. Coming to do a video review meant I had to talk about the SH and uh, well, no one likes doing that. But also it has to be done and I don't think you can even feel fondly nostalgic for it without that uncomfortable subjet. So I'm kind of glad to address it, but phew.
I think this series is highly underrated, i read it in jr high or early high school for the first time and honestly I don't think there's been a month since where I haven't thought about Tally and the Pretties and everything to do with that world! Honestly I think this series and The Giver really shaped me as not only a writer but also as a person! I think it's such a great idea and something I could actually see happening at some point given the craze of social media beauty! Even Extras, when the main character has her camera that follows her around and is trying to basically go viral. Love this series, never seen anything from this channel but I will ALWAYS click on an Uglies video!
Wow the cutting stuff hits hard as an ex self cutter and bulimic person. Even though I’m “recovered” now I still get those impulses or urges to selfharm and it’s basically a constant battle…because doing those things actually made me feel so sort of relieve and calmness and I still crave that sensation
Wow this is the first time I hear this.. hope you're doing better 😅
what’s up gamers is the perfect opening. i usually greet my discord friend group with that 10/10 i recommend
I remember Westerfeld's Midnighters series more than this one. Similarly, I didn't care much at all for the protagonist, but thankfully Midnighters changes POV regularly and the math-based magic system was really cool.
Not me kicking my little tootsies and giggling every time crow posts a video
I always wanted to know what this series was about. Thank you so much for looking into it!
Scott Westerfield is so strange to me because after writing a series I absolutely hated (Uglies), he went on to write one of my favorite book series of all time: the Leviathan trilogy. It's a completely different genre than Uglies and so much more engaging. Its basically alternate history WW1 with steampunk weapons and giant monsters.
It also helps that one of the two main characters is a girl who spends most of her time disguised as a boy, which spoke to me a lot as a trans egg back in middle school, plus she has romantic interactions with both girls and boys, which was some of the first bi rep I experienced as a kid. Also the illustrations are stunning.
I was OBSESSED with Uglies when it came out. I remember making my friends read the series and we would talk like pretties. I hated Extras. As a teenager I thought the books were such a deep social commentary. (haha!) But now i can just accept it as entertainment. I was wary about this video, but needn't have been (obviously, you're always thoughtful and thorough) Thank you for spotlighting the harmful messaging around self harm.
You always do videos on those semi niche books I’d hope there a million videos covering and I appreciate you so much for it
18:45 I was not expecting to run into this topic here. Just recently, one of the parties here in France said that part of their programm was to make uniforms in public schools mandatory at least up to middle school or something (can't remember the details) - the purpose being to stop the rich kids from bullying the poor kids for their clothing.
They really think that'll change something, huh. My parents I mean. Is the school going to pay for every single one of the new clothes when the kid's uniform gets cut up because the family can't afford it? Or will the family pay for the new shirts every time it happens? You think kids need some kind of physical reference to bully others? My mother remembers a time when I apparently told her I'd been mocked for my shoes in first grade - but I don't remember that at all. I remember getting bullied the whole year for my stims, and because I was out of touch and 'weird'. Anything beyond that wouldn't have stuck, and guess what - uniforms wouldn't have changed a thing. So no, that's not a good argument to convince me this is going to work (context: she did actually try to use this even though it is unrelated to poverty).
People don't need visual reference to bully others. It's not about the clothes - it's about kids being told that money is important, and if you don't have money, it's your own fault and is shameful. The poor kid who wears the same uniform as the others, if poor enough for that to be noticeable by others at all, will be poor in other ways: when they'll throw their birthday party, it'll be a lot more modest than other kids. When they get their first phone, it's gonna be the cheapest on the market. When they tell about their summer holidays, their parents won't have taken them to the beach halfway across the country, because they couldn't just stop work for enough time to do that AND visit family.
Good fucking luck with your uniforms if they get implemented. Nice thought, but I know so many kids who felt smothered by their school - who felt like they couldn't express themselves. Well, guess fucking what, they'll have even less of a way of doing so now. Fuckign great.
I dunno. Maybe I'm wrong, but it just sounds unnecessarily controlling in a way that won't even help that much. I hope it doesn't come to pass.
Control is the point.
I do like the fact that he takes his main characters on these journeys of being something else, even evil. This is rarely portrayed as much of these are all about super happy endings...that said, book sounds confusing and probably shallow.
on one hand when I read these books i didn't feel like they were only hoverboard action sequences... on the other looking back on them the bit about Tally and Shay riding the roller coaster on their hoverboards is what I remember most
Yeah, i think about uglies a lot because of how it affected me. The SH portrayal was incredibly careless - thanks for taking the time to talk about how the Intended theme wasn't quite what many people, myself included, took away from it for a long time.
I remember finding this series kinda dumb and I really only finished reading because I don't really like stopping after I start adn was like "wel, it isn't super good but I have them all might as well read"
Nowadays looking back I still think it is kinda dumb, but I do appreciate that the MC wasn't "not like other girls" like most dystopian MCs are, she was exactly like other girls and worked as an introduction to the world, while her friend ended up showing her how being in this society was a bad idea and she slowly changed her ideals, this (especially after the dystopian boom) is a pretty unique way of doing it instead of just being the "only person with a brain" in the entire society that just happens to be the MC
This series gave me existential dread, because Tally's body and mjnd was constantly altered. It was kind of like the ship of theseus but a peeson, plus the spirit semse of self aka the brain and thoughts and opinions was altered too. Terrifying stuff to think about at 13
Honestly every time I hear about "instagram face" or other various things usually involving surgical practices that people will complain make a lot of people look similar I always think of Uglies and I'm like "oh......I'm so glad I get to see something like that play out irl......"
reading this at 8 ngl it helped me accept my inevitable coming “ugly phase” it wasn’t a big deal when i looked weird growing bc i knew id even out
As a teen with a then undiagnosed dissociative disorder, this series almost made me start cutting. A part of me realized how foggy I always was and wanted to be clear-headed. Fortunately, my disorder did what it's good at and made me forget this series even existed before I could start.
I LOVED these books when I read them in 6th grade, tried to talk my friends into reading them and they weren't interested. Then when they read them a year later they loved them and I got a major "I told you so!" moment lol Honestly the thing that confuses me most is why years later I can still remember the last line of book 2 "Face it Tally, you're special."
Even with all their flaws, these books will always hold a special place in my heart because they're what got me started reading dystopian fiction which is my favorite genre, so I'm super excited to hear there are more now and I 100% will be reading those!
Finally something I read as a teen!
Edit: oh, I feel called out by the intro lmao. Note that I love your reviews of obscure books, too!
I really enjoy your reviews! I never really was big into teen fiction (I red half of the red queen and that's about it), but I love to learn about a subclass of fiction that otherwise would have been a mystery to me! Thank you for treating these series with a level of dignity that many video essays that talk about teen fiction don't really, it sounds like there's allot of artistic merit inside these stories that are otherwise passed off as just chasing market trends.
This series was part of my thesis on ya dystopian literature and I'm keen to see you think on it.
If you want to ruin your day with some terrible ya with surgery, I'd recommend unwind dystology by Neal shusterman. Man that author is terrible about indigenous Americans
BRO I literally just started that book today, thank you for the heads up because YIKESSSSS
@a19523 a pleasure. There are cool and interesting things in unwind and it's worth studying but yeah... definitely rough when it comes to race
I remember really liking it when it was pretty new as a 12 year old but from what I vaguely recall, yeah I can see where it would be problematic, and I'm sure I'd be shocked if I read it now.
@rachelppython Neal felt the need to tie Indigenous Americans to casinos, and come up with both a new slur and a term deemed acceptable about the connection, it's wild
It's been well over a decade since I read Unwind (only the first book), but I mostly remember being impacted by some of the surgery scenes (and how I liked the social commentary in it better than most of the dystopian YA from around that time).
But I just looked up the indigenous Americans and casino thing and damn... Yikes!
I hadn't looked into the other books in this series because that first one was intense enough, but also, definitely Yikes! Thanks for letting me know.
There was an explosion of popular YA fiction in the early 2000s but as an old head it’s hardly the infancy of the genre. Garth Nix, Dianna Wynne Jones, Lois Lowry, Tamora Pierce et al were holding the YA fort over 10 years before the uglies series. The giver was published in 1993.
I still don't know how I got the giver thing wrong. Like I know that! But I think with YA, we're talking two different things. YA as an age genre is old! But YA as a marketing term, a serious contender in publishing, really showed up around the early big successes of hunger games onwards. The YA dominion, not the young adult age group... YA as genre is what I meant
@@Crowcaller I think you are right about that, I don’t remember my local library having a “YA” section until the early 2000s, and a lot of these books would just go to a part of the library that was vaguely for teens and preteens.
Wikipedia tells me the term was actually in use in certain library associations and the like in the 60s, but it took a long time to really see a great deal of YA books come out that had widespread popular appeal. The giver did not sell like the hunger games, which to me is a shame, but it is what it is.
Yeah, it's sort of an idea of YA referring to multiple distinct things. It was usually treated as a type of children's fiction until it started to really grow in sales and power, and taken I think more seriously as a moneymaker for publishers. That YA could inspire such big fandoms, which really (though fandom is much older) I think became mainstream around late 2000s
Uglies read young and simple, but I kind of liked the concept. And then it shot itself in the foot with the following 2 books. This wasn't a concept where you could have your cake and eat it too (making points about how the characters have value despite being normal, imperfect human beings...but then still ultimately making the characters the prettiest and specialest ever).
Omg we're doing a series I've actually read, this is gonna be so fun
not gonna lie this entire series had a chokehold on me as a kid. i still think of spagbol sometimes… i loved the way tali’s perspective changed with each surgery and societal expectation. but it absolutely should’ve centered the friendship, you’re so right!
*tw*
i ended up cutting semi regularly years later after trauma. i wonder if this series’ presentation of it being a way to think clearly influenced me? def a brutal oversight on the authors part
I think Tali becoming a pretty felt a lot like when Eragon became an elf and both transformations felt like such a betrayal to the story themes.
All i can remember frim this book series was that I liked saying 'sad making ', 'happy making ', and something about a bubble?
Cant wait to see if i imaged all that or if it was a canon book thingy.
Man you awakened a memory, I completely forgot about Leviathan but I loved that one as a kid. Probably won't be as good to me as an adult but I might reread that
One thing I like in adaptations is the potential to go a different direction that might not have overarchingly gone well in the original. Definitely hope the film adaptations addresses some of this stuff. And I have to agree the idea of Tally and Shay being foils in the way that you suggest is an engaging and interesting direction.
I found your channel about a week or so ago and I've been blowing through your videos during my insomniatic episodes, I enjoy both the 'main stream' books and the lesser known ones you cover, so whatever books you decide to cover, know that you have fans who will watch 🥰
i have asked several people who were also into reading ya dystopian fiction back in the late aughts early 10’s and almost no one remembers Uglies!! I read every one of these books and remember almost nothing lol. This scratches a major itch. Thank you
Oh Scott. Ohhhh Scott. i have SUCH a... mm. Relationship, as it were. With Scott Westerfeld. i have. So. Many. /Feelings/. About his books. When i was younger, i ate it all up. Uglies, Peeps, Midnighters, even that crappy Succession series. (Midnighters is blessed)
i loved it all so much, it gave me so much, especially because i was a (at the time) person who had, for a few years already before even reading it, SH. It... gave me validation? It also gave me shame, of course, but. It as so good - but. *But*. Yea. It was also... Very. Not. Good.
i read the 'sequel' series, the Impostors series, and... it was kind of whiplash? It... really wasn't anything like the original series. It kind of, idk, rewrites how Uglies' main characters just are and it's... not good. It's not good. Worse than Uglies.
I was really worried going into this review, as this series was very special to me in late high school, but honestly this was a very fair review, and I agree.
scott was really into those hoverboards, huh?
i dont read let alone random english language series about specific topics with dystopian, urban fantasy settings, or whatever other funky world the author chose
so i love this content because it makes me discover a whole new world of books ive never known until now, and i probably never would have?? and its interesting to see that most people subscribed to Crow do know them, and have loved them
i get to know the books and how its received, its so fun
I've been waiting for this!!!
As someone whose first introduction to ya dystopia was a 7th grade English unit on it (we did group book clubs focusing on different books, Uglies was one of them alongside Cinder, the Selection, the Giver, Enders Game?, and perhaps one more time has taken from me (I know it wasn't Hunger Games, might've been Divergent)), yes, it definitely showed up in English classes for writing essays on.
Uglies really felt very different from the rest of the genre at the time (around 2017-18), and though the Selection and the Lunar Chronicles were the ones that had a chokehold on me, Uglies still comes to mind sometimes, mainly SpagBol and the scene where she threw the necklace in the fire from Uglies, as well as the tracker chip put in her tooth and the idea of them fusing it to her jaw freaking me out.
Honestly, I remember being so disappointed by how Pretties turned out that I never even read Specials. It definitely seemed like the story wanted to be set in the Smoke, in this "we split away from society because we disagree with it" thing. And the second you make Tally and Shay Pretty, you lose that, lose their friendship, and lose their character development. You can't have a good friendship when you literally get your past together brainwashed away at the end of every book. Honestly, if they hadn't destroyed the Smoke in Uglies, or not completely, had the people on the run, studying the brain lesions, and trying to cure their old friends that became pretty before them, it would've been a much better story, and it'd have more justification for the "hoverboard in the woods" sequences.
Leviathan was sick and I never made the connection.
Thanks for mentioning something offhand I need to go back and read again
these books were what got me into reading! i even *accidentally* forgot to return specials to the library when i was in middle school. their original covers were so cool to me, especially the girls lipgloss on the specials cover
You know, I think that if I was the one wo wrote these books, I would have made each book about a different main character at a different life stage. Like that you explore more of the worldbuilding, you set more ideas around the stereotypes, and you get to avoid the "special girl" syndrome.
The first tome could stay similar, teenagers who start in the system but eventually escape, until they get inevitably caught at the end. Then on the second tome you have a young adult, and they don't think much about all of it, even when they find clues that something is wrong. Then for the third one, you have an adult who finds hidden instructions signed by their hand when they were younger, that leads to them getting cured and having the tools to fight back. And then we can have a fourth book centered around a group that tries to fight against the system, and maybe you find in it characters from the precedent books, or maybe they're referenced in some capacity. And that's your book focused on fixing things.
Also, for the self-harm, I wonder if the goal was to say "Even if it seems to do something to make you feel better, in the end it's bad for you", which failed to get transmitted. Because yeah, you could say "the self-harm did nothing", but from what I know of self-harm, at the time it happens it feels like it does something to relieve you of the pain, even for a moment. So kids who self-harm won't buy into the "it did absolutely nothing", because it does something to them. Unfortunately, it may be hard to transmit efficiently the idea of "you may feel better but it's causing you more harm than anything" in a novel, so like. May have been better to just not include that. Or at the very least use a form of self-harm that isn't as easy and usual, like, idk, they break each other bones with a hammer or something.
I realised 50 minutes into this video that I had read this entire series as a teen. I definitely came away thinking it was cool and not really picking up on the more sociological themes.
Edit: I'm pretty sure its because the netflix trailer looked so different from my internal teenage ideas of it that I essentially overwrote my own memories of the name of the books.
Hey Crow, how did you find the movie? (If you've had time and energy to watch it of course)
I'm working on a review of it!!
@@Crowcaller Nice! I'll be patiently waiting for it then!
So I graduated in 2007, and YA dystopia may not have been as big as it was later, but there was still plenty of it around. In my memory, I don't remember book series having any sort of rockstar status until Harry Potter came around, and you started seeing book companies start vying to produce the next big series.
Some pre-Hunger Games YA dystopias I remember enjoying (besides The Giver- that one was required reading when I was far too young to appreciate it, and I still haven't gone back to try reading it again...):
The Bar Code Tattoo (2004)- I don't actually remember if I read this, I DO remember picking it up and considering it almost every time I was in a book store for about 5 years
Welcome to the Ark (1996)- I remember really enjoying this; I don't remember what it was about.
The White Mountain (1967)- Technically listed for children, but I remember being hugely impacted by this book after picking it up from the elementary school library... I have no idea if I read the rest of the series.
City of Ember (2003)- for some reason I thought this had come out more recently! I remember it being very good, but I think it also may edge more into children's lit as opposed to YA (though that line is often blurry at best).
Epic (2004)- I don't remember if I finished this one. I remember really liking the cover and reading at least the first part.
Some other books from the beginning of the YA Dystopia Craze that I vaguely remember:
Gone (2008): I remember seeing this series in bookstores, but I never read them.
The Adoration of Jenna Fox (2008)- I vaguely remember enjoying this one.
We actually read the first book for our Sophomore English Class. Everyone was so confused with the plot and the teacher tried to justify an age gap. Meanwhile, I was picturing the pretties as handsome Squidwards and casually shipping Shay and Tally, because why not?
It was a pretty weird unit. I get what the author was trying to do, but it just ended up weird and there were points where it went to Men Writing Women territory (at least to me).
I havent been able to remember anything about uglies since i finished it. I enjoyed it... But .. supersoldiers and surgery is all i remember