For me if I had to pick a good contender it would be the UK version of The Office.
I know many tend to debate how Ricky Gervais really fell off and how he repugnantly acts like a whiny centrist edgelord but me personally IMO I actually don’t think he was ever funny not even a little.
His big break through television was just so painful to sit through it’s so charismatically boring the characters are completely generic at best (notably Tim) or straight up insufferably unlikable at worst (especially the protagonist David FUCKING Brent) and most importantly the humour is just embarrassing.
Always seemed like The Thick Of It but without the nuisance tongue in cheek and charming satire.
Dune.
It’s Y/A trash that had the benefit of coming out a long time ago and so being ensconced in scifi culture.
I’ll give that it is interesting for its world, its one unique aspect, but the actual plot - chosen-one special boy’s dad dies and so he immediately becomes the married leader of a group of locals and stages an insurrection against the antagonist in revenge - is so worn out you can barely turn the pages.
But I’m sure back when it came out, all the adolescents were drooling over the piles of teenage wish fulfillment.
Y/A wasn’t even a genre when it was written
And there is so much to that series of books in terms of complex topics that are dealt with in subtle ways that I don’t understand how they think it is Y/A.
To be clear, I only read the first book because I was not interested in reading more (read: actively annoyed that nothing interesting happened).
As for YA, that’s easy. It falls over the tropes (which, to be fair, it could have been early/first in). This post had been a favorite of mine for years, the “Protagonist” section is 2 for 3. Where it does somewhat lean out of the genre is its world, which is not just thinly-veiled school or the like.
As for what we actually see in the first book, though, we get an often-told YA story that happens to occur in an exceptionally well-thought out world.
Frank Herbert wrote the second book because, just like you, the entire point of the first book flew over a lot of people heads.
Ah. Shame I left it already wanting my time back for the first book
Oh, I have no doubt there’s some Seinfeld is Unfunny effect going on.
But unfortunately I read it in ~2020 after three decades of reading books, so every plot beat was played out for me beforehand by decades of imitators who iterated on it. Unfortunately, being first doesn’t make me care about your plot.
This makes me think about The Belgariad. It seemed like a tired rehash of old tropes at first…but those tropes weren’t so tired when the author wrote it. I enjoyed it quite a bit more with that in mind.
Huh, that’s a new one to me. Given its age I could definitely see it being full of tools used later by other authors. Yeah, the Seinfeld is Unfunny effect is no joke.
Dune has an examination of the chosen one trope. You can pull a lot of meaning out it, but it certainly does more than unabashedly say it’s a good thing.
Regarding the Fremen, idea of a chosen one in-universe only exists because it was seeded as a self-serving belief by a foreign religious group messing with their culture. It isn’t a “real” prophecy, but one seeded so that it can be potentially “fulfilled” by someone in the know in-universe. The fremen follow Paul into war with fanatic zeal. This examines how damaging religious influence is.
The Kwisatz Haderach angle is another “prophecy” except it is being actively worked to be fulfilled in-universe using non-mystical means. Paul realizes how terrible it is to be this type of chosen one and rather than fulfill it he abandons it, and not in the cool “rebel taking down the system” way, but in the “overwhelmed by the weight of it”, way. He becomes broken and all for nothing since his son just completes the path he was on anyway, and it leads to a lot of (nessesary?) evil at his command.