It’s a sad phenomenon, watching something meaningful to you slowly deteriorate in quality.
This July will mark twelve years of my being a Wattpad user. Wattpad, if you’re not aware, is a teen-oriented website where anyone can publish their writing: no charge, no need for an agent or a publisher. Most of the writing on Wattpad is…pretty bad. I’m not exempting myself from that description. Warriors, the passion project I publish via Wattpad, has been rewritten twice, and I deleted another series, an X-Men ripoff whose name I’ve forgotten, entirely.
Wattpad’s changed in twelve years. Not for the better.
First came the ads. They started playing in between chapters. Then Wattpad introduced Premium Mode, which locked previously free features like downloading stories so you could read without an Internet connection behind a paywall. Then came Wattpad Coins. I don’t know what they’re for, but I know that I don’t want microtransactions on my creative writing website. Nowadays, because of these changes, I use Wattpad exclusively for writing. Going to the homepage to copy the above URL is the first time I went to Wattpad’s homepage in months, rather than typing “w” in my search bar and clicking the URL for my current story.
Different, but related, thread: months ago, a video showed up on my TikTok For You page, where a woman said that many of today’s readers and writers never had a Wattpad phase, and it shows. I stopped and thought it through. A lot of popular books in the 2020s feature:
- An overemphasis on romance…
- …with frequent sex scenes of dubious anatomical correctness.
- Simplistic writing…
- …that often features enough grammatical errors that you know it was minimally edited, assuming it was edited at all.
- A deluge of books about (to paraphrase another TikTok) a female main character simping over some tall, dark-haired dude with a voice like glass.
- Trigger warnings.
- Lists of tropes.
- Frequent romanticized depictions of crimes like abuse, stalking, and kidnapping.
- Male characters that make you wonder if the author’s only exposure to men has been anti-rape PSAs.
- Female characters with crippling cases of internalized misogyny.
The truth hit me like a max volume ad between Wattpad chapters. The Wattpad phase is dead, and readers everywhere are suffering for it. It also made me consider a third idea: tween/teen media is either dead or dying.
That’s another observation from TikTok that I can’t not notice once someone else pointed it out. Not long ago, teens and tweens had metaphorical spaces for them: TV channels and programming blocks like TeenNick and Disney XD, websites like ToonTown and Wattpad. Even on YouTube, a website meant for general audiences, you had YouTubers who intentionally tailored their videos for a preteen and young teen audience: your DanTDMs, your Stampylongheads, your Emma Chamberlains.
And then, ever so slowly, tween media started to dry up. Channels like Disney XD and programming blocks like TeeNick became shadows of their former selves. Bands like One Direction and 5 Seconds of Summer with tweens as their target audience broke up or modified their sound for older audiences. Game sites–Club Penguin, Poptropica, ToonTown–closed their metaphorical doors. Tween-oriented YouTubers like Stampy and DanTDM fell off.
What replaced them?
Brainrot on YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels.
TikTok.
Influencers.
Creepazoids like James Charles and the Bop House girls.
The relatively age-appropriate teen dramas of yesterday—the likes of Gossip Girl, The Vampire Diaries, Arrow—being shuffled out in favor of…whatever in the blue hell Euphoria is.
A quick pause from all this talk so I can explain a fourth idea: the dining hall rule.
Calvin University’s dining hall food, much like writing on Wattpad, is not the greatest. Because of Knollcrest and Commons’ food quality ranging from ‘so-so’ to ‘my boiled egg hatched,’ I made the dining hall rule: if it’s tolerable in the dining hall, it’s incredible when it’s homemade or cooked at a proper restaurant.
That’s the problem with the disappearance of the Wattpad phase and t[w]een-oriented media. Wattpad was the dining hall for many a wannabe writer, myself included. Anne Lamott wrote a famous essay called “S—ty First Drafts” about the importance of your writing sucking. Wattpad was the s—ty first draft platform, a place where you could shake all the dirt onto the page to get to the real gold, so to speak. Wattpad and sites like it had flaws even before these changes for the worse, but we’re seeing the consequences of writers playing hooky from the Wattpad/AO3/Fanfiction.net School of S—ty First Drafts. With no Harry Styles fanfiction from 2013 for writers to read back, wince at, and say, “OK, not doing X, Y and Z again,” a lot of what’s getting published nowadays is more poorly written, lean more on tropes as a crutch, and are more rife with amateur mistakes than books from even a few years ago.
Similarly, while few things on Nickelodeon, Disney Channel or Cartoon Network had S-tier storycrafting, they could approach issues t[w]eens faced at their level. I still remember the episode of That’s So Raven where Raven doesn’t get a job because of a racist hiring manager. I remember Miley Stewart stringing together a song about missing her late mother. I took mental notes whenever Ned Biggby whipped out the composition book containing the Declassified School Survival Guide. (Your results may vary.) Literally everything about Avatar: The Last Airbender.
The landscape of the media and the Internet for tweens and teens nowadays is the Wild West. Teen boys have porn sites working hard to get them hooked as early as possible; scam artists like Andrew Tate and Clavicular prey on their insecurities, whispering in their ears to blame women for all their problem and to buy their courses or do their ridiculous snake oil exercises to make themselves more attractive; algorithms that pick up on their being young, male, and vulnerable and fill their feeds with OnlyFans girls peddling their wares, bigoted soundbites from grifting Neanderthals, and seemingly-innocent videos that are the first stops on the alt-right pipeline. Teen girls have voices–of influencers, of creeps, of boys and girls their age slinging verbal mud from behind the safety of a social media handle–telling them they’re too fat, too skinny, too busty, not busty enough, that they need to try harder, that they’re trying too hard, they need to buy expensive clothes, get their nose done, they’re nothing without a boyfriend…
The Internet and the media landscape are not, never have been, and never will be child-friendly spaces. Even in the heyday of tween spaces, they coexisted alongside Cinemax and goatse.cx. Creeps prowled on Tumblr and in MMORPG servers. A whole documentary exposed how unsafe the sets of the shows I watched as a teenager were for the stars. These spaces, these shows, these platforms, were far from perfect, but they were there.
Something was lost the day the media shrugged and said, “Eh, they got their TikTokagram and their NetDisney and their Fortblox. They’ll be fine.”
Can it ever be found again? I’m not sure.
But I hope it does.
If for no other reason than the sooner BookTok can release its collective horniness, it might actually be useful as a place to find book recommendations.
Noah Keene graduated from Calvin University in December 2021 with a major in creative writing and a minor in Spanish. He currently resides in his hometown of Detroit, Michigan. He spends his free time reading and putting his major to good use by working on his first novel. See what he’s reading by following him on Instagram @peachykeenebooks and read his other personal writing by going to thekeenechronicles.com.
