But Netflix’s popular adaptation of Heartstopper shifts the focus, prioritizing the depiction of celebration over that of repression-and it’s not the only recent, widely accessible project to do so. These works tend to treat coming out as the core emotional conflict, portraying the experience as an internal crisis rife with secret keeping and anxiety. Mainstream coming-of-age stories about LGBTQ teenagers don’t normally look like Charlie’s. “He is sure of himself, so we’re not coming in via the usual route of the queer coming-out story,” Walters said. And her 15-year-old protagonist, Charlie, was openly gay, which meant the plot didn’t begin with the character agonizing over his sexuality. Their dialogue felt realistic as a young-adult novelist who published her first book while in college, Oseman had a knack for adolescent language, online and off. The characters-a pair of teen boys falling in love-were adorably expressive, all wide eyes and furtive glances captured in fine strokes. There was something about the way the author, Alice Oseman, had illustrated the story that gave him “butterflies,” he told me over Zoom. When the producer Patrick Walters first read the romance comic Heartstopper, he knew it had to be a TV show.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |