I have a prejudice when it comes to reading (and writing) YA fiction: I hate stereotypes. Probably most of you reading this will immediately agree that you hate them–we’re taught that a stereotype is a bad thing, after all–but the YA world is full of them, because they’re very hard to avoid. Especially when you’re writing a book that takes place in a school environment. High school naturally lends itself to exactly the kind of stereotyping and labeling I abhor (and always have, even when I was a teen myself), and if you’re going to write a YA set in the contemporary world with a hero or heroine who goes to school, then it’s hard to avoid the stereotypes. It’s a rare high school kid who doesn’t have a tidy label to slap on the various cliques at school–the jocks, the cheerleaders, the nerds, the losers, etc.

I freely admit that it’s hard to avoid using labels and stereotypes when writing about kids in a high school setting. But I still hate them. It’s one of the big reasons I chose to have Dana’s entire adventure in the Faeriewalker series take place over her summer break–it let me avoid dealing with high school stereotypes by not having her in school at all. I’ve done the same with my upcoming YA novel, Replica, by setting it in a dystopian world and doing away with high school altogether.

I’ve managed to avoid writing about high school cliques and the labels that are attached to its members, but it’s much harder to avoid when reading YA fiction. If a significant portion of a book takes place in high school, then chances are there will be some amount of labeling going on, and if I want to keep reading the book, I have to overcome my own personal prejudice. For whatever reason, the ones I find most bothersome are the stereotypes about the popular crowd. If you’re reading YA and the captain of the football team appears on the page, there’s a very high chance he’s going to act like a bully. And the head cheerleader is going to be bitchy and cruel. (There are plenty of other tropes out there, but for some reason, these two push my buttons in all the wrong ways.)

I went to an all-girls high school myself, and we had neither a captain of the football team nor any cheerleaders, so my reaction to their automatic-villain status in YA has nothing to do with personal experience. It’s a gut-level reaction to judging a person based entirely on a label. It feels to me as if the author is taking the easy way out. Rather than creating a well-rounded, well-thought-out villain, the author is reaching into a basket of cliches and pulling out Generic Villain #1.

This doesn’t mean I’ve never enjoyed a YA where one or more of the popular kids are villains. I pretty much always have at least somewhat of a knee-jerk reaction when the character is first introduced (the same kind of reaction I have to the generic Russian villains in old thriller novels, or the generic military villain in an sci fi movie), but if other aspects of the story are good enough, I can get over that reaction. But I almost always like the book more if that character surprises me and doesn’t act according to the stereotype. I refuse to name books I’ve read that inspired a lasting negative reaction, so don’t ask, but I will name one that gave me a pleasant surprise: Anna Dressed in Blood by Kendare Blake. When the hero, Cas, goes to his new school looking for what he calls the “queen bee,” I had my usual knee-jerk reaction of tensing up, assuming he was going to meet her and she was going to be the stereotypical mean popular girl. Instead, she turned out to be one of my favorite characters in the book. (If you haven’t read it, run out and get it now–it’s that good.)

I guess what it comes down to is I don’t want to know whether someone’s a hero or a villain based solely on his or her label. When I’m reading, I want to be surprised. I don’t want to see a cheerleader come on stage, assume she’s a villain, and be right. That’s my personal preference. (As a side note, I know it’s harder to take a character who would naturally have a stereotype associated with her  and make her different from the stereotype. You have to know the character a lot better, make her more three-dimensional, and sometimes that’s not right for the story you want to tell. I’m talking here about what I personally prefer in a book, not about the “right” or “wrong” way to write one.)

In this post, I’ve been talking specifically about the popular kids in YA, but there are a lot of “automatic” villain tropes out there. I’ve already mentioned the Russian in the old thriller novel and the military in a sci fi movie. What are some others you can think of? People who you know are going to be villains the moment they appear on the screen or page just because of who they are? (A couple more, just to get the juices flowing: the defense lawyer or the reporter in a cop show.)