HEARTSTOPPER | Meet (1.01) | Chapter 1-6

When you find a fic on your favourite ship, with an amazing plot and all the tropes you like.

It’s November 8 2016. Election Day. And you didn’t vote. You knew that trump is evil “but Hillary is just as bad”, you said. You hate both of them, so you refused to vote. “Neither deserves to win”, you said and by the way, it’s rigged anyway, right? You refuse to play that game and you feel quite good about it. You’re a rebel. It’s your kind of protest against the corrupt system!  

You come home from work, with a smile on your face. It looks like your protest works: Some of your friends also didn’t vote or wrote in the name of a third candidate. You feel really good. Maybe you and your friends are enough to change the system! And if not, well, you’ve seen presidents change before and it never had too many consequences in your life. 

You sit down in front of your tv, reach for the remote and your phone buzzes. It’s a text from one of your friends, the weird one who begged you to vote for Hillary - and your smile falls off your face “It looks like Trump will probably win. I’m so scared. My sister is crying.” 

You suddenly remember that your friend’s sister is trans. 

You turn on the tv and you can’t believe your eyes. The third candidate one of your other friends voted for is at 4%! That’s great, isn’t it? But wait.. Hillary is currently behind Trump? By 6%? Oh. You didn’t expect that. 

 Another text. A co-worker. “Two people called in sick. I think it’s because they’re scared to go outside in case Trump wins..” 

One of your co-workers is black, one is Muslim. 

You stare at the tv and you can’t believe what you hear. “Trump won.” It was a head-at-head race and Hillary almost won - but only almost. You can’t believe it. None of your friends were going to vote for him! 

You want to go outside to think about something else - but you stop as you hear your neighbor crying on the phone. “I’m so scared i’ll lose the custody right when our marriage gets annulled”. 

You suddenly remember that your neighbors are a gay couple with a cute little daughter. 

But Hillary would’ve been just as bad, right? 

Heartstopper is different because it takes pleasure seriously

Since I watched Heartstopper, I've been trying to figure out what about it made it feel so different from other stories similar to it. When you just describe the plot of it, it sounds like something straight (har har) out of Glee or Sex Education or Elite or SKAM or Skins or Degrassi, or...you get my point.

But it felt so different to me, and I realized yesterday what it was. Hearstopper takes the pleasures of queer romance and eroticism as seriously as it takes the pains of it. By which I mean, it gives an incredible amount of screen time to the excitement of it, the thrill of it, the visceral good feelings of it. Pleasure drives Heartstopper, in a way that is still incredibly unusual in mainstream queer media.

In most other stories like this, the pain and the angst and the ambivalence and the negative social ramifications of the premise take up like 90-95% of the screen time. The pleasure aspect typically exists as minimally as possible to catalyze all the negative or difficult parts that are the 'real' story. And while Heartstopper doesn't shy away from those things, it gives a roughly equal amount of narrative and screen time to the two leads getting a lot of pleasure out of their relationship, too. The amount of time the show invests in showing Nick and Charlie enjoying each other romantically -- throughout the story, not just at the very end -- is just absolutely decadent (and I mean that 100% positively).

The first kiss is a perfect example. In any other TV version of this story, the boys would have kissed that first time for less than 2 seconds, and then IMMEDIATELY been interrupted by the other boys. Instead, Heartstopper lets them kiss once, take a breath, and then have a second, very extended kiss enhanced by animated embellishments designed to emphasize just how incredibly enjoyable this is for them...before finally disrupting it again with Plot™.

And the amazing thing is, from a pure narrative standpoint, you don't need the second kiss. It's completely unnecessary to the plot. You could completely eliminate it and the plot would hold together exactly the same. The second kiss is there exclusively to emphasize the intense pleasure of this experience for them. That's all it does.

Heartstopper is serious about foregrounding pleasure, and how important pleasure is in all of this. Which frankly, is a thing you usually only ever see in romance novels and fanfic.

***

One of the reasons I was hesitant to watch this show initially is because I have limited tolerance for coming out stories that are so focused on the unappealing parts of the experience. It's not that those things don't MATTER. But there is such a cultural allergy to making the pleasures of the experience a serious focus, particularly (yes I'm going to say it) the sexual pleasures of it.

Hearstopper, blissfully, refuses to shy away from pleasure, and from making it important.

It's not just that my tolerance for queer pain in media is limited (although admittedly that's true). I also grow so weary of popular culture treating queerness as mostly a political identity upon which we simply moralize about tolerance, and engage in self congratulatory yarns about ~being yourself~ and loving yourself. It's not that I think any of those things is BAD. But a) I've seen that story many times before and b) there's an ENORMOUS piece of this experience that we're still mostly skirting around the edges of because we're still very chickenshit about it, to be perfectly frank.

We, as a culture, are still scared as fuck to really say, very bluntly: queerness feels fucking good.

In the midst of this, Heartstopper does something wondrous. It says to the audience, in no uncertain terms: Queerness feels fucking good...so, let's spend some time actually talking about THAT for a while.

everyone at hogwarts knows about harrys gay dads but some people hear about these two older gay men and for the first time in their lives feel seen. some people, like a certain fruity slytherin kid.

basically draco would have been much less of a twat if he had a positive gay influence in his life, or at the very least someone to tell him he doesnt have to listen to his dad

not to be yearning on main but i love fic writers. they do this shit for themselves AND for me. FOR FREE. not for you tho. its just them and me and i press that kudos every chapter even though i've already left one there. its the principle of the matter

Okay so I may have named a star DRARRY so now we can seriously say that it’s written in the stars.

Going to Breakfast

James: Wherewolf?

Sirius: *looks around*

Sirius: *points at Remus*

Sirius: Therewolf

Remus:

James & Sirius: *giggles*

Remus: I will kill you both

I find it incredible that just within 8 episodes, there are so many hints to Charlie’s struggle with food. And it’s something so subtle that most likely the only ppl who would notice are fans of the comics or ppl who have had that same experience as Charlie. Every time he’s anxious about something, we get a moment of dialogue where he says no to food: like the popcorn at the cinema, or the pizza where he’s confiding in Tori, & the numerous references to spending lunch in the art room so that ppl won’t notice that he’s not eating. I think it’s such good writing just like the comics