Well that struck a chord...!
Heartstopper on Netflix.
A British coming-of-age romance series developed for Netflix based on the Webtoon comic and graphic novel of the same name by Alice Oseman.
Starring Kit Connor and Joe Locke, it tells the story of Charlie Spring, a gay high schooler who falls in love with someone he sits next to in his new form, Nick Nelson, while also exploring the lives of Charlie and Nick’s friends, Tao, Elle and Isaac.
Ugly smiley tears.
It isn’t every day that you watch something and it makes you think “I want to blog about that”. That just happened to me with Heartstopper. I wanted to share my reaction. This show managed to hit me right in the feels. It was so refreshingly sweet, sincere and heartfelt. I rode an emotional rollercoaster from scene to screen, episode to episode and it all came to an end far too soon in one single binge-watched night.
While it wasn’t perfect, one thing I did notice was some of my own reactions to some of the scenes in the show. Let’s call it ‘gay panic’. I was constantly waiting for a shoe to drop. For something to go wrong. My worst fears for the characters to materialise on the screen. Only to be met with an uplifting and hopeful tonic.
Then I realised…
I felt ‘gay panic’ because I lived my life that way. Fearful. Expecting the worst. Assuming every gesture from anybody was some sort of trap.
It made me mourn lots of tiny choices I didn’t make as a young person and I felt joy that LGBTQ+ kids (and all kids) have this as an example. It made me happy-sad. The best and worst kind of sad.
If life isn’t even a little scary – are you doing it right?
Well done Netflix.
