Thread by @SuperHumanFoods, i watched a video about why youtuber-made movies almost always suck and [...]

i watched a video about why youtuber-made movies almost always suck and fully had a revelation about why i dislike high school themed media so much

it's exactly what the video creator said: this shit is always horrifically out of touch

like... the breakfast club is a legit movie for sure, but there was never a point i felt able to relate to it, and i was a high schooler in the early 2000s

so when people are making john hughes redux films but now with smartphones and selfies... big yike

i always assumed the dissonance came from american media not syncing up with canadian high school culture, and i think that's still true

but i think it's also that the rigid-cliques-at-designated-lunch-tables trope might come from adult interpretation of adolescent experiences

+ the creation/inclusion of archetypes for media readability for a non-teen audience, of course

but there's a common problem with adults writing content centred around adolescent protagonists and that's perspective

specifically, the way an author's own experiences inform their perspective of something they're no longer a part of

i've talked about my fixation on human behaviour before and it's important here because, years ago, it's what made me realize something huge about high school

and that's this:

1) adolescence is alienating, and pretty much everyone in high school considers their own friend group the outlier- this is why you get famous people who were apparently well-liked talking about being the "weirdo" and "outcast" and their classmates going uh what

2) virtually fucking no one engages in the labour of introspection and empathy necessary to realize that, which means that most people, even people who were popular and acknowledge that, approach high school narratives from an us v. them perspective

even your king shits of graduating classes past create narratives that embellish their exploits and popularity to distinguish themselves from their peers because subconsciously, they're aware that the flat facts of who dated and went to parties stop mattering once you grow up

i, objectively, was an unpopular person whose social circle was a venn diagram of gifted and learning disordered kids and therefore extremely weird

but my own unpopularity was... pretty much entirely because i was a terrible communicator and upset and alienated people constantly

they weren't bad people for not liking me or inviting me to things- hell, a couple of times people went out of their way to try, purely out of the goodness of their hearts, but my paranoia and adolescent self-obsession made me really fucking hard to like

and i think that's the disconnect we see in most high school media- people don't realize that, aside from legitimate othering as a result of prejudice, people not liking you was not just them being terrible people who won't give a poor nerd a chance

that shows up everywhere in high school media from television to fucking fanfiction: us v. them, the misunderstood outsiders v. the misunderstanding insiders

but nobody seems to feel like they were the insider- the house we were all staring in at was fucking empty the whole time

high school isn't some fucking diplomacy and resource management game, it's a bunch of sweaty, kinda paranoid adolescents eyeing the other lunch tables suspiciously because media insists they must be experiencing school in some entirely different and less shitty and boring way

my friends and i weren't the true geniuses of our high school for eating our lunch in the stairwell and having deep conversations about fanfiction and anime, we were just one of many groups of self-righteous adolescent idiots trying to navigate that reality without assistance

while elements of what i've said might not ring true for high schoolers now because it's been more than a decade since i graduated, the core of it is timeless, and that's the issue:

high school isn't exciting. it's repetitive, monotonous, and there are no real heroes or villains

high school is time tables and text books and putting off memorizing things you don't care about to do things you actually do, all shot through with an undercurrent of sourceless fear and anger and impatience you have no real way to express without clinging to an emnity or crush

it's boring, and even media about it that tries to make it interesting ends up being boring, because watching a bunch of 20 - 30 year olds pretend to be super hot teenagers always feels like an overdone dramatic re-enactment of what it was actually like to be a teen

that's not to say you can't do narratives about adolescents properly or that no one has but imo the core characteristic of good works about teens is that they're not about normal high school lives- a murder mystery set in a high school is still a murder mystery first and foremost

more social or psychological works dealing with bullying or traumatic home lives are ultimately not really about normal high school lives either, because those narratives are founded upon the principle that this person's life or these people's lives are not recognized as the norm

ultimately, i think the only way you could really do a timeless perspective of high school life without straying deeply into Hello My Fellow Teens territory would be, say, a high school counselor navigating common conflicts seen in contrast with their own, adult problems

and there's actually a really easy way to make that current and relatable, and that's by invoking the way we're navigating our changing relationships with inclusivity and "wokeness" from a generational perspective while being mindful to not dismiss the experiences of the young

make your counselor a marginalized person navigating the issue of a student actively working to sabotage another student's school life out of a sense of moral righteousness for an ignorant misstep made towards a marginalized student and you're confronting a very real problem

adolescents operate in extremes and purpose is stabilizing- this kind of well-meaning overreaction to things that were problematic but not earth-shaking is a genuine issue because it amplifies problems instead of allowing them to resolve

and alienating a student for saying something gross out of ignorance doesn't fix that problem at all- instead, it creates a discourse where there shouldn't be one because the accepted thing should've been "hey, that's a bad thing to say and this is why" responded to with "sorry"

set that against the counselor slowly coming to terms that their own partner is doing something similar to them by cutting out people from their mutual social circles for perceived missteps on behalf of the protagonist and you have genuinely crunchy intergenerational resonance

a good high school movie should acknowledge that high school is surreal purely because no one present has even the slightest perspective necessary to know what is or is not a life-altering experience unless they've already experienced something traumatic

which means that an adolescent going all white knight for their black or queer friend is problematic but understandable whereas an adult doing that is symptomatic of a deep-seated unwillingness to surrender the spotlight and acknowledge other people's perspectives as valid

this is especially relevant right now because a lot of radicalization tactics actively rely on this overreaction occurring- they have a vested interest in escalating the backlash against people for ignorant behaviour because that leaves that person alienated and angry

that's why far-right groups prey on adolescents: because adults generally know that educating someone for saying something shitty is more productive than going scorched earth on them socially, but adolescents don't- in fact, something like moral outrage is deeply attractive

that's because being "in the right" gives you a feeling of stability and superiority over another person

conversations about why something is wrong are often uncomfortable, whereas riding into battle against a clear foe situates you as the hero of your own story in a clean way

so confronting that reality is more important than ever- there's an argument to be made, in fact, that the perpetuation of villainous high school archetypes might actually contribute to the alienation and subsequent radicalization of teens

the current culture surrounding high school makes it very easy to declare someone a regina george or some other token bully and just be done with it without any further thought, and that's not great

i was bullied so badly in middle school i eventually hauled off and punched her

and in retrospect, i find myself wondering a lot what was going on in her life that made her behave that way towards me

there's a part of me that has some suspicions that she was from a lower socioeconomic background and had already been written off as a "bad kid"

part of the reason i suspect this is because after i punched her, i got suspended for one day... and she got suspended for three

at the time i wrote this off as just and fair, but now i'm like

wait, if the teachers knew she was consistently harassing me, why didn't they intervene to prevent something like this escalation for happening at all?

she wasn't some mastermind sweet talking the staff

they just either wouldn't or couldn't interfere, and what the ended up resulting in was years of "violence is never the answer" going out the window in a second for me once it became obvious that punching her literally was the most efficient resolution to the situation

i went on to get into minor scuffles with other students- sometimes even seniors- for the rest of my time in high school, and it worked fabulously for keeping people off my fucking back

because, consistently, someone would start shit and the faculty would never step in

this is what i mean when i say adolescents are- or at least were in the early 2000s- navigating the social aspects of the school system entirely unassisted

i got assigned a session with the guidance counselor once and i remember vividly how utterly at a loss she seemed

i hope to god this has changed since i was a teenager, but my memories of adolescence are largely defined by a feeling that every adult around me had no idea what to do with me, let alone help me

and that meant i never talked to adults about what i was experiencing at all

which i'd guess is exactly how predatory far-right groups are getting their claws into adolescents without anyone knowing- because they're the only ones actually reaching out to them and presenting them with a narrative that makes them feel like they're not just a hopeless loser

that whole "reach out to your fellow teens" campaign that emerged in response to rising awareness of school shootings was hot garbage for that exact reason- alienated teens validation and comfort from people with answers, and other teens don't fucking have answers

it was a goddamn legendary cop-out of responsibility that falls squarely on us as adults- it's our job to address the problems we pass on to the generations that succeed us, not mock them for stumbling under the weight of our generational baggage

i want to believe that things have changed, but honestly, i think the only thing that has is probably that teens are more aware of the issue now

which is good, but not a solution, because it still puts the burden of resolution on people who don't have skills needed to fix this

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