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did Choose Your Own Adventure Books make Xers cynical, or just realistic?

| | comments (3)

Over at FlickFilosopher.com, we’re having quite a spirited discussion about the ending of the new Stephen King/Frank Darabont movie The Mist, and whether it’s too random and too cynical. In the comments section, I wondered whether the ultimate message of the movie might be:

Life is a series of random events over which we have little control, so the best plan is do the best you can based on the information you have, and to take what action you can, as long as you don’t expect lollipops and ponies at the end of a rainbow as the result of 100 percent of your actions...

And then yesterday, when I was putting together my post about Gen Xer author Heather McElhatton and her new Choose Your Own Adventure-style book for adults, I came across this quote from her in the Associated Press story I linked to, in which she says that her book is:

...just like life -- it’s just all sort of a crapshoot... It’s not your fault if things don’t work out...

Which is almost enough to explain the attitude of The Mist, too. And which may be an excellent distillation of the so-what, do-what-you-gotta-and-expect-the-worst attitude of Gen X on the whole. (McElhatton says she loved the CYOA books as a kid, like we all did.)

So my question is: Did the randomness of the Choose Your Own Adventure books train us to feel this way?

(Frank Darabont, by the way, is a Boomer, but he was born in 1959, which is almost on the Xer cusp, so he’s young enough to have been influenced, if at a slightly later age, by the same things that influenced us Xers at slightly more tender ages. Stephen King, born in 1947, is unquestionably a Boomer, and, interestingly, that ending of The Mist that seems to speak so powerfully to me if an invention of Darabont, who adapted King’s novella for the screen. King’s ending is, I’m told, infinitely less pessimistic.)

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3 Comments

Well, infinitely less pessimistic, yes -- but then, King's story didn't really *have* an ending. It just...stops. I read the CYOA books like crazy as a kid, and they may have indeed added to my blossoming cynicism. And also, occasionally, question how well I'd do in a crisis situation: I mean, I wandered away from the Cave of Time in the middle of the night with no food and no shelter and froze to death -- what did I *think* was going to happen? But those books also cheated like you wouldn't believe -- if you heard a noise and decided to investigate it, it'd turn out to be nothing; but if you ignored it, it ended up being a spider monster who'd eat your head off.
I never really got into the concept of a "choose-your-own-adventure" storybook. The one example I read seemed unimaginative and seemed as entertaining in retrospect as a computer template. And wouldn't anyone inclined in this direction ultimately find more satisfaction creating their own stories instead of settling for someone else's? Maybe that's just me.
I was only into the CYOA books for a short while, probably when I was around 11 or 12 years old. They're entertaining to a point, and then you start to want fiction that's actually structured in such a way as to tell a particular story.

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I'm MaryAnn Johanson, writer and editor, and this is my scratch pad, idea-jotter-downer, portfolio and resume, and general hang-out blog.

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