Book 23: Shade, the Changing Girl Vol. 1: Earth Girl Made Easy by Cecil Castellucci and Marley Zarcone

Last month, I saw Bo Burnham’s new film, Eighth Grade (2018). I’ve been a Bo fan for a long time, since his days on Youtube (when he was super problematic, something he has addressed himself), but I was still a little skeptical when reviews of the movie were saying that “Bo Burnham understands teenage girls.”

Like… great, another man being praised for telling a story about teenage girls, like a man would have any idea what it’s like.^[1] But I was familiar with Bo, and he has talked a lot about how he’s embraced appealing to young people, and young girls in particular, and how he takes his responsibility as an entertainer seriously because of the impressionability of his audience. So I went in with an open mind, albeit still skeptical.

You guys… Bo Burnham has read my diary.

Middle school was hard for me, the way it is hard for everybody. Kayla’s experience wasn’t exactly like mine, but the feelings of loneliness and awkwardness and desperately wanting to fit in are painfully familiar. Burnham skillfully captured the unique experience of being a 13-year-old girl at a public school in the United States.^[2]

Puberty, and that general time of being a teenager, is confusing. Your body changes, you feel new weird-ass feelings, and those feelings are intense and overwhelming. The benefit of hindsight and also reading a lot of young adult fiction and articles about child psychology has helped me reflect and understand, though I wish I knew then what I understand now.

And that’s why stories like Eighth Grade are important. They can be ways to tell young girls that they aren’t alone, that they’re absolutely right that being a teenager is hard, and that feeling whatever they’re feeling is normal and valid.^[3]

After all… Did you feel like you knew what was going on when you were a teenager?

Book 13: Batgirl: Stephanie Brown Vol. 2 by Bryan Q. Miller

The great thing about Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the way the Monster of the Week works as a metaphor for teenage (and later young adult) struggles. Some of the metaphors are… less subtle than others (Beer Bad, anyone?), but BtVS is so tightly knit that almost every episode ties into the larger thematic arc of the season it’s in—and in turn the entire series, which is a coming-of-age story. As Ian Martin says in the introduction to his BtVS reviews on Youtube, the monsters are “metaphors for her personal demons that could prevent her from growing up.”

Using a MOTW as a metaphor for characters’ personal struggles isn’t always successful. Supernatural tried it often in its first few seasons, and I never felt it was entirely successful. Sometimes it seemed like too much of a reach, and the writers had to clumsily reveal the metaphor at the end of the episode with the inevitable BM^[1] scene in the Impala. This made it feel tacked on instead of organic like it did in BtVS. Like they were saying, “By the way, this is what we were trying to say with this episode! And we’re going to the use the last five minutes of this horror show to explain it! And it might be problematic, so watch out!”

…I have a love/hate relationship with Supernatural.