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randomsome1 ([info]randomsome1) wrote,
@ 2008-02-10 21:50:00

Previous Entry  Add to memories!  Tell a Friend!  Next Entry
Entry tags:rant

So Tamora Pierce and Julie Holderman want to start a con specifically for authors specializing in Young Adult (henceforth YA) and children's sci-fi/fantasy. Part of their reason for doing this is how other people see them.

    Often kidlit writers are treated by members of adult F&SF cons in a manner that is patronizing at best, snubbing or scornful at worst.
I know what attitude this is. I grouched over the trainwrecked plot in a YA book to a coworker and her response was this: "What do you expect? It's young adult lit."

And I understand. I hate the YA section because if the back ad copies and hooks don't make me want to eat a kitten, the stories themselves almost invariably do.

But instead of asking why so many look at the younger kids' works with such scorn, they're taking their ball and going to play in their own damned backyard, thanks.

Seriously now. Let's think about this.

We don't have many Philip Pullmans in YA/Intermediate reader. We don't have many Lois Lowrys or Diane Wynn Joneses. What we do have--and what the average browser can readily see--are a metric assload of writers who hammer out the same damned story ten thousand times over.

Check out the SF/F section of Intermediate Reader (age group 8-12) at your local bookstore. You'll find buckets of magical school stories, interspersed with fairies and dragons and very few others. Check out the fantasy/horror part of the YA section--or, as named by a coworker of mine today, the Kiddie Sex Section. You'll find fairies, emo fucking vampires, and werewolves, with a terribly sparse spattering of sword&sorcery and almost nothing else.

This makes people scornful. It's writers who either don't care to think outside the bounds of what's been done already, or ones who aren't capable of doing so--or worse, ones who see the success of one venture and hurriedly squeeze off their imitation. It's the authors who hack out recognizable gobbets of someone else's plots or concepts, who write the same damned story four and five times over, who turn out half-assed characterization, invariably predictable plots, or wildly unbelievable dialog, or who beat the hell out of every single storyline cliché, then expect people to shell out money for it--actions that wibble between sheer authorial laziness, ineptitude, and flat-out taking advantage of the readers' inexperience.

A young reader doesn't analyze the book as they go. They don't know how. They don't get stuck on the plotholes. They don't say "Hey, you bastards, get your own imagination. I liked this the first time it was done." They may say something along the lines of "Well, this part didn't really make sense," or "It was like (fill in name of other, similar work)," but they don't know how to show their displeasure with narrative problems by penning a snarky review or refusing to buy more of that author's work. (And especially with the IR works, the buying power is frequently out of their hands anyway. When R. L. Stein killed the main character of a series halfway through one of their books, it threw me hard--and I was ten at most. But my parents kept buying Stein books for me, just because I'd liked 'em before.)

One would assume that the mentioned cranky congoers have seen this (if not also understood the implications), and have formed their opinions accordingly. It sucks if people who actually do try to write something original get pigeonholed along with mimics, metaphor-maulers, cliché-beaters, plothole-hoppers, collage artists, and bad fanficcers in disguise Clare? Paolini? I'm STILL looking at you., yeah--but that becomes a problem with the genre; one that requires a lot of cooperation to fix. Some people don't care, and won't care, and won't change. Far easier to take your ball to your own playground than it is to convince everyone involved that you should make a new game.

(Post a new comment)


[info]newageamazon
2008-02-11 11:19 am UTC (link)
I can understand them wanting a con for their lit. I can understand their aim, to a certain degree.

But at the same time, I will only support the con if they're going to hold panels like "STAR WARS WAS ONLY MEDIOCRE THE FIRST TIME" and "IF SHE'S GOT WINGS, STOP WRITING RIGHT NOW."

And I would attend a con like this...if it involved Joss Whendon bitch slapping Stephenie Meyer.

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[info]randomsome1
2008-02-11 11:30 am UTC (link)
"I'M GONNA BEAT YOU TILL SPARKLES COME OUT!"

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[info]newageamazon
2008-02-11 11:35 am UTC (link)
And I'd love if when it's all over he smiled and said "I love you. So now it's not abuse."

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[info]randomsome1
2008-02-11 11:48 am UTC (link)
And I understand their aim, too. It seems like a nice overall idea. But there's so many supporters whose judgment and writing abilities I have every reason to doubt . . . :(

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[info]newageamazon
2008-02-11 11:51 am UTC (link)
Part of me is thinking that maybe, if they can separate themselves out, they can concentrate on issues specific to YA writing? And it might make it easier for people to air their grievances specifically with their genre, so it won't get too lost in the shuffle.

And sometimes even good ideas are supported by talentless morons.

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[info]randomsome1
2008-02-11 11:54 am UTC (link)
Potentially. But then again, there's that strange little habit many authors have of refusing to rock the boat by speaking critically of other authors.

Though if we're talking about fairy books, mentioning one would probably hit them all. I swear, there's only as much plot variance in YA fairy novels as there is variance in how they spelled "fairy."

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[info]threeoranges
2008-02-13 02:59 pm UTC (link)
I'm torn. Because yes, I know the impulse behind the YA convention is the legitimization of an often hackneyed and cliched genre, and that mutual reassurance is more likely to result in complacency than critical awareness.

That said, even the worst YA fiction often does provide a "bridge" across to adult fiction simply by being awful. The kid reader will read everything it can get its hands on, to the despair of its parents... and then one day it will realize, "Hang on, this is rubbish and I've read it a million times before. I want a better story."

I should know, that's how I tossed aside SWEET VALLEY HIGH in favour of JANE EYRE ;)

Mind you, I still say that the average SVH had more distinguished prose and better character insight than TWILIGHT... But anyway, I suppose what I'm saying is that one needs the "junk food YA" in order to develop a critical awareness of what constitutes a good story.

I'm seeing it now with the AGATB trilogy by Libba Bray. The last book ended disappointingly, and her LJ got bombed with a hundred distressed variants of "HOW? HOW COULD YOU DO THAT TO [CHARACTER]?" She replied with "I wanted to show that life's tough": whilst most of her fangirls rolled over and said, "OK, I understand you had to do that", a precious few have been emerging from the woodwork to admit that no, they still don't think that that plot twist was justified in terms of plot, theme, tone or overall "justice".

See? Developing critical awareness :)

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[info]randomsome1
2008-02-14 12:55 am UTC (link)
I suppose the point to your case would be how we all hate hate hate literature when we're kids. :P


I've seen some disgruntled attention toward Bray's series as of late (some of which over the ending, some over the bumpy historical detail) and it's made me giggle. But then again, the ones who've rolled over and gone with the flow are still the majority, are still lining the authors' pockets, and are thus perpetuating the entire repetitive system. Things like Twilight and Eragon are still selling, a notable percentage of the time to older readers. I've seen grandmothers start reading Twilight (because their granddaughters had it). (I suppose a telling point here is that before I redirected them, they initially started looking for it in the Romance section.)

And I think it's the perpetuation and subsequent implicit validation of these actions (as partially evidenced by the con-in-process) that's getting on my nerves.

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[info]threeoranges
2008-02-14 01:40 am UTC (link)
I suppose the point to your case would be how we all hate hate hate literature when we're kids. :P

Hee! I certainly did, and it still amazes me that youngsters of yesteryear read TREASURE ISLAND at a tender age and loved it. Of course I enjoy it... but I got round to reading it much much later ;) Stevenson's prose isn't exactly accessible, after all!

I've seen some disgruntled attention toward Bray's series as of late (some of which over the ending, some over the bumpy historical detail) and it's made me giggle.

Please point me, if you can remember where you saw these comments! Personally, I call the first book in the series a "guilty pleasure" and the other two "fodder for nitpickery". ..

But then again, the ones who've rolled over and gone with the flow are still the majority, are still lining the authors' pockets, and are thus perpetuating the entire repetitive system. Things like Twilight and Eragon are still selling, a notable percentage of the time to older readers. I've seen grandmothers start reading Twilight (because their granddaughters had it). (I suppose a telling point here is that before I redirected them, they initially started looking for it in the Romance section.)

And I think it's the perpetuation and subsequent implicit validation of these actions (as partially evidenced by the con-in-process) that's getting on my nerves.


Well, ultimately, are we going to censor children's literature for crapness? We can't: if someone publishes it and children read it for pleasure, that's validation enough. The whole SHADOWMANCER debacle shows that when something is sold to the public under false pretences (in that case, a botched pro-Christian tract posing as a new "Harry Potter-esque" magic world) it'll sell fast enough at the beginning, but the kids will soon smell a rat and stop buying.

I'm as mystified as you are by the fact that kids read TWILIGHT and enjoy it, but Mayer must be doing something right. Beats me what it is, but she's tapped a popular vein somewhere and whilst we can only sigh at the general lack of taste, we can't stop people liking what they like.

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[info]randomsome1
2008-02-14 02:09 am UTC (link)
Well, of course censorship is bad across the board. But I can't help but wonder how many authors are looking at what's selling/sold and planning their books off of that (with either an "I can do that!" or "I can do better than that!" mentality). And when things that are clunkily-written, poorly done, and/or hideously derivative get on the bestseller lists and stay there (indicative of their actually selling well as opposed to the publisher hoping they sell well) . . . Yeah, still frustrated.

There's gotta be a point where the fun aspect stops outweighing the brainmelt. I just don't know what that point is (besides possibly militant cult-recruiting works). Does it need to stop being written? No, write what you like. Just don't harbor delusions of how great it is, don't get bent out of shape when people look at it funny, and don't stuff your head in the sand when they vocalize their feelings.

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[info]randomsome1
2008-02-14 08:38 am UTC (link)
And of course, excusing bad art just because someone likes it & on the off chance that the consumer'll learn to look for something better doesn't quite work as a defense. No to censorship. Yes to quality control. All it takes is some honest, caring, heavy-duty editors & publishers who'll sit down, force the author to take responsibility for the shit that's about to hit the market instead of just thinking about the cash-in, and say "This? Seriously, no. No. Seriously."


Pic related. :P

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[info]threeoranges
2008-02-14 03:28 pm UTC (link)
Srsly?

Much as I in principle agree with "quality control", in practice how would this operate? I hate TWILIGHT, but it has correct grammar, punctuation and many readers actually enjoy the prose (to the extent of putting quotes on LJ icons!) How would "quality control" operate in her case? Regulation of the character of Edward so he's less of a control freak? Regulation of the character of Bella so she's less of a wimp?

And if this regulation were to operate, would the series be nearly as popular?

I'm reminded of Marge forcing "Itchy and Scratchy" to deliver wholesome messages about co-operation and friendship. Remember how the kids reacted?

In the end, the publishers will publish whatever will sell, but, beyond ensuring that the language is correct and that the stories are internally consistent, the editors should not interfere. They should raise the issues of character flaws/problematic messages by all means, but if the authors insist on the problems being left as they are, the editors should respect that. In the end, the stories are the author's babies, and if the publishers are buying they'd do well to preserve the integrity of those stories instead of trying to force them into some politically-correct/superficially-populist mould.

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[info]randomsome1
2008-02-15 09:31 am UTC (link)
Theoretically, it'd be less a regulation and more a forcing of authorial awareness so we don't have giant storyline problems like "Why would anyone in their right mind want to stick around in high school forever? The sheer volume of identity theft necessary for these vampires to exist--how would this work? Why does no one ask questions? Why does Bella have almost no characterization besides her clumsiness and practically no physical description? Have you noticed that Bella is incapable of doing anything on her own without having something terrible happen, which necessitates rescue by a male--and if so, have you given thought to the socio/sexual implications? If a guy did this and this and this to you, would you still think he was good or would it pique a nerve and make you question him? Aside from his mistreatment of Bella, does Edward have ANY personality flaws? WTF was up with this sentence, and this one, and this one? Don't you think Bella's reaction to physical contact with Edward is hideously unrealistic?"

Because if Meyer was able to clear shit like that up, I might be able to get through the book.

This isn't about being PC or populist or elitist, it's about noticing that the tree in the foreground of your landscape painting is 2-D and casting a shadow in three different directions. The inconsistencies you mention fixing are still all over the works in the section. This is about no one noticing or caring to fix the giant clunkers in Eragon, like Eragon's being a teen master woodsman who steals giant chunks of fresh meat for traveling, who is able to become a super master swordsman in practically no time, & who has a family too poor for fresh meat even though they tuck into it pretty regularly. It's about no one picking up on how if Clary in Clare's City of Bones is under a spell that makes her forget magical things as she sees them so they're invisible to her, and the spell's coming and going so she sporadically can & can't see things, then she shouldn't be able to constantly remember what should've just been erased. It's about no one pointing out Bray's historical inaccuracies before her books went to print.

And maybe, in part, it's that some of these authors and publishers don't care enough to want to put out a work as close to perfect as they can possibly make it. There's preservation of artistic integrity and there's excusing sloppiness. What I frequently see is the latter.

Sure, give me crazy characters! Give me FUBARed relationships, murder and sex and drugs and a big pile of teen angst. Write it all and write it well, and don't go pretending it's something it's not. But writing it well requires awareness; not a group of writers hiding their collective heads in the sand.

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[info]threeoranges
2008-02-16 03:16 pm UTC (link)
As I said before, I'd agree up to a point, and that point is the OBJECTIVELY wrong stuff. Fix the spelling mistakes, the erroneous grammar, the internal inconsistencies and the bits where Libba gets her history (and geography - there's no such place as "Pall Mall Square" in London, it's just "Pall Mall"!) just plain wrong.

But when one goes into issues such as "isn't Edward too perfect?" one is switching from the objective to the subjective. He may be "too perfect" for OUR taste, but clearly thousands of girls like him just as he is. It may get on our nerves that Bella has next-to-no physical description, but the author may justify it as a device allowing the (presumably female) reader to place herself in Bella's shoes more easily. Bella's "too passive"? Well yes, but again thousands of female readers have no problem with that!

And it gets trickier - clearly Bray's girls in AGATB are far too modern in their attitudes and self-awareness, but if we were to demand strict fidelity to the Victorian era, what we'd have would be a number of sexually-ignorant upper-class girls, and who'd want to read about them? Younger kids maybe, but Bray's going for the YA market, and with that market she has to address the issue of sexuality. If the adult reader is aware that they have to "suspend disbelief" on this point, really, what's the problem?

So, like I said, "quality control" could - and should - only extend so far.

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[info]randomsome1
2008-02-17 12:21 am UTC (link)
From there we get into the circular logic of "It's good if they buy it; they buy it, so it's good." But this still doesn't make it all the way around how poor research and slipshod/2-D characterization and no physical description of characters are indicative of poor writing, which is the point I was going for above.

Should I excuse it if people buy it? I don't think so--if I excuse it in myself, I'll never improve.

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[info]threeoranges
2008-02-17 03:08 am UTC (link)
You seem to think that publishers should subject every plot to rigorous analysis, including how well it conforms to current politically-correct concepts, and that they should dismiss everything which fails to meet these standards. Well, failure to meet them may be indicative of poor writing to you, but it would seem that there are thousands of TWILIGHT readers undisturbed by that failure. Clearly they're responding to something in the story that goes beyond reason and intellectual debate... and that passion provoked in the reader seems to be what creates a bestseller.

Another case in point: when Roald Dahl came on the scene, parents deplored him for appealing to kids' baser instincts - but kids still wanted to read his stuff, probably because it was FUN. Ever read THE TWITS? A story which clearly states that if you're ugly it's because you have a nasty nature. A message, I'd argue, that's even more pernicious to young children than anything TWILIGHT has to offer.

Would it make sense to ban THE TWITS, or rewrite it so that kids get the good wholesome message not to judge by appearances?

If anyone tried, it would be "Marge meets Itchy and Scratchy" all over again.

So again I would just like to state that kids should be allowed to read what they wish, even if it offends our grown-up sensibilities. Let them grow up at their own pace - eventually they'll work out what's satisfying fare and what's junk food. I did!

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[info]randomsome1
2008-02-17 09:54 am UTC (link)
Sorry, you're interrogating my text from the wrong perspective off base. I think nothing of the sort and was pretty sure I'd made that clear.

I was also pretty sure I'd clarified that sub-par and/or ripoff-type writing (which the kids' SF/F section has a ton of [BTW, the Twilight series is coincidentally NOT a part of the SF/F section--it's shelved under YA genfic]) is still not good, and that I don't believe good writing is defined by sales. But I do believe I understand why some people would look down on that particular section of kids' writing, and that encouragement of new ideas and authorial awareness (in the form of hardcore editing) would help alleviate some of this problem.

Wholesomeness and morality don't have much to do with bad writing, good writing, fresh versus clichéd writing, or authorial awareness.

The hell'd you get on the morality bus, anyway? I've been saying that my issue with the section isn't about that and you consistently keep hopping back on.



And I seem to remember The Twits being about a pair who were just overall awful people, not that their being ugly inside made 'em ugly outside. Oh, and Dahl is in IR genfic as well.

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[info]threeoranges
2008-02-17 03:21 pm UTC (link)
Sorry, you're interrogating my text from the wrong perspective off base. I think nothing of the sort and was pretty sure I'd made that clear.

Yes, looking back over the discussion so far I see you did more or less stick to the "bad writing = shallowness/inconsistency" viewpoint, and I can't see why I misinterpreted your stance as "bad writing = unPC".

I think the reason why I deviated so spectacularly from "base" (sorry!) was that that some people clearly don't care about shallowness or inconsistency in their reading-matter, and it's more than a bit prescriptive to tell them that they should care. I mistook your stance for a moral one (iow, "if it sends disturbing messages it should be rewritten") when in fact it was based on your personal requirements for good fiction (iow, "if it has characterization I consider to be shallow, or characters behave in a manner I believe to be inconsistent, it should be rewritten"). Nonetheless, both stances have a certain amount of "laying down the law" about them, which is probably where I got confused.

"So you have no standards?" you may well ask at this point... To which I can only state that I can think of a dozen films and books where I can see the flaws in plot and character very clearly, and yet I respond with enjoyment: by contrast, I can read or watch something else, appreciate its technical perfection, and yet have no emotional attachment to the work. Of the two, I'd rather have the work which "touches" me in some way. When it comes to fiction, one person's shallow derivative tosh is another person's profound and touching journey of the soul.

How can I apply this logic to a children's fiction like GOOSEBUMPS KNOCKOFF #5425: THE CREEPING PUSTULE? Well, maybe the kid reads the book because it enjoys it! It may not be the most perfect example of horror literature out there, but at the kid's stage of development it may be just what it wants - not too scary, not too clever, just a light bit of entertainment. To demand of that story that it conform to adult standards of consistency/characterization might well result in the story losing its vitality. What used to be a flawed but enjoyable work might become technically perfect but soulless. Because editing can work that way.

So, much as I may whine that editors just don't do their job anymore (the technical flaws in CITY OF BONES being a prime example) I can think of cases where editing might have resulted in a work losing its "spark". AGATB, for instance: would I really have enjoyed it as much had the four main characters been historically-correct sheltered and cosseted Victorian schoolgirls? I don't think so. In the end they were undeniably modern girls in Victorian dress, but there was a hard, cynical truth about their interaction which I recognized and responded to. A more prescriptive editor would have insisted on "historical veracity"... and if they had, and if Bray had obeyed and rewritten it to fit more closely to historical fact, I'd probably have admired the novel's "historical veracity", read it once and never touched it again.

People don't read novels because of their technical merit, they read them because they perceive something touching or appealing about them. Demand the technical merit and you may end up killing that primal appeal. I'm not saying "let's have no standards at all", I'm just saying "be careful".

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[info]randomsome1
2008-03-24 12:11 am UTC (link)
Ah, I keep forgetting this.

FWIW, I believe that if a writer is actually good, they'll be able to pull everything together without making a trainwreck of things or without losing the "spark" of it all. Hence my pick-and-polish-and-pick-and-polish-and-gnaw-and-hate-and-polish with my own work.

Maybe my problem with so many of these works is that I hold others to my own standards.

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[info]shikomekidomi
2008-02-28 12:48 pm UTC (link)
Sorry but your circular logic isn't circular it is two synonyms back to back. You probably meant "If it's good they buy it, if they buy it it's good".
Which isn't really relevant to the discussion at hand, so I apologize for my uncontrollable nitpickiness.
Anyway, market forces being what they are, I suspect the operating point of YA (and plenty of adult literature) is not anything to do with quality and everything to do with how much of it they can move. One would like to think the two were connected, but that requires more faith in humanity than I possess.

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[info]randomsome1
2008-02-28 07:48 pm UTC (link)
Yeah, I dropped some iffy wording in there. Meh. :P

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(Anonymous)
2008-02-16 09:23 pm UTC (link)
Hey there! This is Issendai.

On one hand, what you're saying is true. On the other hand, what part of it couldn't be applied to the adult SF&F section? I do object to adult fans looking down on YA fans, because adult fantasy has exactly the same problems as YA--in greater volume. Paolini has two books, Terry Goodkind, Terry Brooks, Piers Anthony, and Robert Jordan together have...? Clare has one book, Mercedes Lackey, Anne McCaffrey, and Laurell K. Hamilton together have...? The fairies and dragons and emovampsex and quests and ordinary-girl-comes-down-with-a-case-of-the-speshul and farm-boy-who-becomes-KING! and arranged marriages and dubious historicals and gritty urban whatevers all come straight from the adult section. And this is sold to an audience that, as you pointed out, has more discernment, more ability to make their opinions known, and more buying power.

So it looks to me like BOTH genres need a lot of fixing--and until that happens, adult fans should stop snubbing kidlit writers for writing the same damn thing adult writers write.

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[info]randomsome1
2008-02-16 11:57 pm UTC (link)
Point. The adult shelves are pretty full of outright crazy versus the relatively short-running kids things.

(On the historical note: I have a coworker with a habit of picking up and howling over whatever alternate-historical book it is that involves an allosaur versus the Confederates.)


Maybe the thing here is that since the SF/F section for adults is so much more extensive we've got more variety to go with our longer-running crazy. For all intents and purposes, I can find a brainsaving counter for every big-named longer-running crazy in SF/F. We've got Mary Doria Russel's The Sparrow series, LeGuin's Earthsea series, Martin's exercises in fantasy-flavored intrigue-laden OMGWTFYOUKILLEDTHEM, Maguire's Wicked & associated works, Steve Alten's techno/thrillers, Charles de Lint's earlier urban fantasies, Kelley Armstrong's still-human weres and vamps (which are the only ones I can still stand, and then mostly in small doses) and Bishop's LolSue multi-leveled magical worlds . . . I can't quite do that in the SF/F section of YA or IR.



One might also argue that being entrenched in sub-par works for one's early reading years doesn't do much to foster a sense of good taste. :P Was it you who said something to the tune of "If you haven't had a good gourmet-style steak and a bottle of awesome wine, you might be happy with a big mac and wine in a box forever"?

(Reply to this) (Parent)



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