performances, performances
be the child! (children are smart)
“People love to think that they would be in the revolution,” I told a friend earlier this spring over lunch, hovering my fork over my baked mac and cheese in a hotel lobby-combination-free student study space. My words were about a swath of things: grad school, religion, activism, local and transnational political life, day-to-day relationships. I was explaining why I had left the spaces I left, and stuck around where I was sticking around, how I had chosen and choose my friends, and how I think the best thing to be is self-aware about our performances. “Everyone wants to be a part of something.” So they’ll make stuff up to have shit to do. To believe that at the end of the day, you’d run into the fire to save another person. That at the end of the day, you’d be at the frontlines of the Cause. That you’d, Avengers-style, have people to go get shawarma with after the big battle or something. That you’d belong to something greater. That you wouldn’t be alone.
“We grew up on Harry Potter and The Hunger Games,” reads the description of an infamously mocked Spotify playlist made by a Gen Z user, “and they think we’ll just sit quiet?” Or something like that. The playlist is called “be the revolution” or something like that. It was made by an American post-2016. And the Internet laughed at OP (original poster), and at OP’s conflation of mainstream YA fantasy with radicalism, and it’s true, that the conflation of glamorized liberal independence packaged as leftist revolt is hilarious, also in ignorance of other radical theoretical and philosophical texts of the revolution. But it’s also true that growing up voraciously absorbing stories, however sanitized, however kiddish, however unrealistic, about characters your age on a quest with the responsibility of defeating, and the power to defeat, a Big Bad that is threatening to destroy the world, grabs ahold of you. It certainly did of me. Roald Dahl’s Matilda is lauded for this reason. As the child reader, it makes you believe things are possible. That possibility empowers you into the adulthood you, in part, make for yourself.
The allure, and the delight, of children’s and teen media, and of fandom culture that spans generations, is the vicarious inclusion via spectatorship that acts as participation. Basically, in witnessing your favorite characters in their found family, finding love and friendship while facing the Big Bad, you feel like you’re a part of it too. This is why nonrepresentational media is porous. On the one hand, it is true that at a young age, children are aware of and learning where they appear to be welcome and where they are not. At the same time, with each lovingly sketched piece of fan art, each fan edit of “if the Seven of the Prophecy were on Instagram,” each fan playlist and headcanon imagining personality tics and funny conversations between the events of the books and behind the scenes (those infamous “incorrect quotes” trends that crossed over between fandoms—like, recontextualizing a Brooklyn 99 quote as something Piper McLean from Heroes of Olympus would totally say), we were participating in the imagined community of our desires. When people got up in arms about Leah Sava Jeffries playing Annabeth Chase in the Disney+ series (and about Aryan Simhadri playing Grover, and Walker Scobell keeping his blond hair and natural eye color rather than dying his hair black and wearing green contacts), two factors were and are indeed at play. On the one hand, as the “woke-ism” accusers would have it, executive producers and showrunners do indeed see that it is a commercially viable tactic to racially reinterpret the canon, whatever that canon may be, however (in)accurately or fantastically or whatever. They do it because it will make them attention and money. That is how it works.
On the other hand, the material doesn’t emerge out of nowhere. “I grew up with these books,” people say, all over the Internet. All kinds of people. Nine-year-old me related as much to Annabeth Chase as anyone else did, as a brainy girl with a stubborn streak who hated being underestimated. It’s revealing who popular culture has belonged to all along—the many, many whos, among the people of color and queer and marginalized kids who grew up in the U.S., and among audiences worldwide. When a character, or a world, is purported as the universal standard, that is precisely what happens. She comes to signify many things to many people, who are saying, “hey, my interpretation exists, too.” Is that not what you wanted, angry mob? Oh, suddenly it’s particular? You can’t take it back now.
And there’s also this notion that if you haven’t properly detached from your childish attachments and successfully dismissed them as fantasy, and the “Real” conditions around you as reality, then you’re stunted and haven’t properly grown up. You’ve Peter Panned it, so to speak, refusing to grow up. But I’d argue, I’d point at all the fantasies animating how people enter quote-unquote “real-life” politics, justify their day-to-day decisions, the denials of desire that only fester those denied desires into more immature attachments. You’re just recreating the fantasy in your head in your refusal to admit what it is you want. What is it you want? Principles and values, or to be part of a club? No answer? Why, because it’s embarrassing? What’s so embarrassing about it? Who’s the child now?
This does become a difficult question in the face of unmonitored illicit content on the Internet. Non-canon compliant can mean a lot of things. And especially now, with how increasingly overstimulated children’s media is getting, the degrees of separation between something inane and benign, and mildly inappropriate, to something graphic and dangerous are dubious indeed. As kids, we used to send each other jumpscares of Jeff the Killer (don’t look him up), or those chain mail emails that declared you were going to die on Monday if you didn’t forward the message to at least ten other people. And these are just the benign examples. There were, and are, worse things.
I’ve been saying lately that I’m quite proud to have grown up a child of the Internet, and of public school(s, plural), and of the worlds my parents knew my siblings and I had to learn how to live in. Not that protection wasn’t a concern, or that everything was perfect. Not that everything was perfectly prepared and executed. It was the hope that, when things happened, whatever they were, we might be able to learn how to talk about them. And we did, through hard-earned trust. And we still do.
I don’t really have an answer for that perennial question except that I don’t think we get anywhere if we’re afraid of what lies in our unconscious.