For another reason entirely, Eric Nylund basically wrote the book on Halo’s universe outside the games. And his Halo Books were good.

Then they dumped him and hired Karen Traviss to shit all over his good work with her military fetish complex.

Part of the issue imo is that there are at least two distinct definitions of 'YA" people use.

The first is content based; that YA is defined by a specific sort of prose style, plot, character approach, or focus on emotional drama and angst. And people will label any book with these qualities YA regardless of how the book itself is marketed or what its intended audience is.

The second is marketing; it’s YA because the publisher marked it as such.

And as much as YA is a marketing category and term, not all readers regard it as such and instead draw comparisons and similarities based on the content and style of the books rather than their market packaging.

I’d suggest doing things for yourself, and start brushing off people’s comments.

Life is too short to spend serious amounts of time hung up on opinions from internet strangers.

Half of us are idiots.

Half of us are trolls.

Half of us can’t do math anyway.

And the last half is just in a bad mood and taking it out on strangers on the internet.

In any case, we all have literally a million better things to do than worry ‘what will people I don’t know think of me.’

‘cylindrical chamber of blood sponges’ sounds like it would be an amazing gag line in a comedy XD