Adam Lanza Fan Art

[matsushima]

Mass casualty events speak to the emotional reality of being a teenager. When we’re teenagers, our feelings are so big and the reality of our lives are often so small in comparison. The violence of a school shooting gives teen angst the gravitas it feels like it deserves: It offers catharsis. And when a school shooting is “just” a story, a piece of modern folklore, why not use it?

In other words, the extreme nature of these events mirrors the intensity of adolescent emotions, providing a framework for understanding and expressing overwhelming feelings that may seem disproportionate to everyday experiences.

-Katherine Dee, Adam Lanza Fan Art

Content notes: gun violence (school shootings), transphobia (t-slur), bully apologia

Comments

[matsushima]

There were so many things in this article that I wanted to talk about; I had a hard time choosing the pull quote for this post.

Here are a couple other things I'm still thinking about:

I think back to L.I. saying her classmates made her like that—made her like what, though? The status of “victim” when you’re bullied in school is complicated. Kids are vicious, but then we’re fooling ourselves if we believe that all bullying is wholly undeserved, some random tragedy of the cosmos. What is too painful for many of us to face is that bullying is a social corrective, and the bullies who take it too far are themselves punished.

This part made me want to take the author's hand and say, "you didn't deserve for someone to throw a slushy at you out of a moving car." Teenagers are deeply unlikable and deserving of love. This sat uncomfortably with me because L.I. was bullied for, among other things, being "a t----y." Bullying is a "social corrective," I guess, but what is the underlying "transgression" that deserves ostracism, harassment, or outright violence? It wasn't the dangerously homophobic students at my high school who were bullied. It was the gay kids.

This is what it practically, actually looks like for everything to be a fandom. Everything is fandom because everything, and therefore, everyone is media. And the only way to truly live in a world first consumed by media, and next, consumed by capitalism, is fandom.

[chasing_silver]

I don't believe I deserved getting rocks and mud thrown at me and being chased while I was trying to walk my dog. I was 11. I didn't do anything wrong except be undiagnosed neurodiverse. If that's a social corrective, fuck that shit.

[matsushima]

That part of this seemed so out of place to me. Ostracism can be a tool of social correction - that's the moral of the "Nazi bar" story (you have to kick out the first Nazi who comes to your bar even if he doesn't start shit or, before you know it, it's a Nazi bar) - but to say that "we're fooling ourselves if we believe that all bullying is wholly undeserved" was so out of pocket that it really threw me off.

It surprised me that Dee doesn't try to unpack, at all, what's being "corrected" in her story or L.I.'s; she only says that she was "unlikable." Maybe she feels some deep shame about an actually terrible thing she did as a teenager and she feels like she "deserved it" but to then apply that with a broad brush to all bullied children/teens???

I was an undiagnosed (thus, untreated & unaccommodated) neurodivergent queer kid. I didn't deserve to be humiliated in front of my peers for it.