I finally read Heartstopper

and help, I’m jealous of these unimpeachable British teens

Mild spoiler warning for Heartstopper #1 and Heartstopper #2 by Alice Oseman.

Well, okay, let’s call a spade a spade: a lot of you are here because I (so boldly!) announced that my first Substack was going to be about Fitz and the Fool—the beloved pair of roommates/colleagues/besties/anything-but-lovers from Robin Hobb’s Farseer trilogy. Well, I lied. I’m still writing that essay but it’s Big and Hard and right now I want to talk about something Small and Sweet. I want to talk about Alice Oseman’s Heartstopper. 

Avoidance 

That last sentence might’ve rung a bell if you’ve watched my magnum opus on Captive Prince. (Sorry I haven’t been able to shut up about it recently—I continue to be deeply mortified by self-promotion, even when it’s relevant to the topic at hand.) 

At the beginning of my Captive Prince essay, I talked about how Heartstopper has become the 2022 standard for unimpeachable queer media, and how its very wholesomeness is precisely why I avoided reading it for so long. 

Like a lot of queer millennials, I look at the influx of queer stories that have clawed their way into the mainstream over the past few years with a kind of bittersweet “it’s-about-damn-time”-ness. On the one hand, I’m thrilled that even the most rural, unsupported, and isolated young people can boot up Netflix and see stories like theirs told with depth, understanding, and compassion. That just wasn’t a thing when I was growing up. (There’s still a long way to go, of course, beginning with the fact that the most accessible queer stories overwhelmingly center cis white men, but that’s a topic for another newsletter.) 

But I know I’m not alone in looking at this new age of queer media and feeling a sort of grief for my younger self, who not only didn’t have access to these stories, but didn’t know enough about myself to understand how desperately I needed them. Heartstopper, specifically, was the thing I needed—or at least something like it. If I’d had access to it when I was 16, Heartstopper would have functioned for me like a handbook of possibilities that I’m just now, at 32, beginning to wrap my head around. 

The Heart Principle by Helen Hoang

But maybe my initial avoidance of Heartstopper wasn’t just about its wholesome, teen-centered queerness. Helen Hoang’s The Heart Principle is a straight adult romance that I’ve been keeping at arm’s length, even though I’m interested in it. Anna and Quan are in the midst of a tentative-but-promising courtship when tragedy strikes, and Anna is thrust into the role of caregiver for her sick father. What keeps me away from the book isn’t its frank discussions of grief—that’s actually what resonates with me. What keeps me away is the fact that Anna has a (flawed-but-nevertheless-extant) support system to help her navigate it. 

A Lady for a Duke by Alexis Hall

I similarly struggled with Alexis Hall’s A Lady for a Duke. When Viola makes the difficult decision to use her own presumed death as an opportunity to begin living openly as a woman, she loses her best friend, the Duke of Gracewood, in the process. She watches on, heartbroken, as he struggles to manage his grief for her. But through all this, she has the unquestioning support of her golden retriever brother, sharp-tongued sister-in-law, and precocious young nephew. Funny and vibrant and loving, their family dynamic is my favorite thing about the book. But reading it really, really hurt.  

Once I finally started reading Heartstopper, I realized it wasn’t just the representation of happy teenage queerness that I was jealous of. I was jealous that these kids were brave enough and hopeful enough to let other people help them through it.

(Ugh, the line between “personal essay” and “unpaid therapy session” sure is blurry.)

The books

Heartstopper #1 by Alice Oseman

Heartstopper #1 tells the story of the burgeoning friendship between Charlie, one of the very few out gay boys at his all-boys school, and Nick, a rugby lad whose popularity has more to do with his unflappable good-naturedness than his jock status. They have a happy, easygoing friendship, but privately Charlie is struggling to manage his expectations, sensing that their friendship might be developing into something more but not wanting to get his heart broken by an ostensibly straight boy. And Nick, who’s only ever liked girls until now, is struggling to understand his developing feelings for Charlie.

Nick’s struggle to wrap his head around his sexuality continues in Heartstopper #2. But by the end of the book, he’s settled on a label—bisexual—and he’s finally worked up the courage to come out to his mom. 

So Nick sits down with her at their kitchen table and explains through tears, “I—I still like girls, but... I like guys too, I think… And Charlie, we’re—we’re going out. I wanted you to know.” Nick’s mom takes the space of a single panel to appear surprised, then crosses to her son’s side of the table, envelopes him in a hug, and says, “Thank you for telling me that.” 

Nick and his mom in Heartstopper #2 by Alice Oseman

Confronting loss 

It was wrong-headed of me to think that my millennial-ness was a significant factor in my urge to avoid the wholesomeness of Heartstopper. While I do think the ‘90s and ‘00s were a uniquely difficult time to grow up queer, it’d be out-of-touch for me to assume the support Nick got from his mom is a common experience for queer kids today, even if it’s perhaps marginally more common than when I was growing up. 

Even young people with the most loving and progressive support systems, I expect, will feel some loss while reading Heartstopper—some vague sense of shoulda-woulda-coulda. Maybe, like me, they’ll see their own poor behavior reflected in a character handling a sensitive situation better than they did. Or maybe the how-to-be-a-good-ally roadmap that Heartstopper lovingly lays out will illuminate the ways their own parents and teachers failed them.

It’s impossible for anyone of any age, I think, to read these books without confronting loss—without acknowledging these pages contain something they wanted for themselves but never got. 

Again with hope 

Anyone who’s even passingly familiar with my content has probably picked up on the fact that I prefer my genre fiction a bit on the darker side. The reasons for that are subjective and complicated but, upon examination, always seem to circle back to hope.

I think a lot about hope, and I’ve talked about it plenty too. In the darker stories I gravitate toward, hope is a last resort. There’s something inherently subversive about knowing just how bad things can be and still insisting they could get better. 

There’s an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in which Cordelia makes a wish to Anya, a vengeance demon, that plunges the gang into a grim alternate reality where vampires rule Sunnydale. In one of the wildest and most frightening subversions of the series, Cordelia—the wish-maker and the only person who knows they’re living in a dark reality of her own making—is murdered. It’s ultimately Giles who saves the day, in a desperate fit of grit and obstinate hope.

He’s about to smash the amulet that he suspects-but-isn’t-sure will break the spell and fix their world when Anya taunts, “How do you know the other world is any better than this one?”

Giles answers, “Because it has to be.”

Heartstopper’s hope, in some ways, is even braver than Giles’s. If I were feeling cynical, I’d say that Heartstopper-hope can seem treacly and naive. But heedless of my eye-rolling, Heartstopper insists, smiling and open, “This is how things ought to be.” And once it’s ground away my cynicism with its enduring earnestness, I realize the reason it’s painful to read is because I’m convinced that its hope will be crushed, and I want to protect it. I don’t want what happened to me to happen to it too.

I’m used to reading stories whose darkness serves to throw the relative light of my own life into stark relief. Dark stories are a way for me to reassure myself, “Hey, things aren’t so bad after all.” But Heartstopper is a funhouse mirror; it is the light, and the darkness is in me. 

So what’s the point of fostering Heartstopper-hope in my own dark, tired heart? I’ll be wildly lucky if I ever come close to cultivating a support system like Charlie and Nick have, but I can spend my life trying to build one and being part of other people’s. When someone trusts me with something huge, I can be the one to say, “Thank you for telling me that.”