The Popularity-Conscious Nerds of All School Districts

So. High school. I must confess I was happier in high school than in college, and much more than in middle school. Everyone was just chill, in high school—and this is me, it's not like I was particularly mainstream. Middle school was more of the cliques and BS, but since a middle-school kid is not a human being, but a hideous pupa, we shall be charitable. College was a never-ending nightmare where the other students would shout you down if you challenged a sub-competent professor's BS. And there were all those Two Minutes' Hates...

Anyway, the experience I had in high school was drastically different from the one depicted in movies and TV. I'll go point by point.

• Jocks/cheerleaders. So in media they're always cruel bullies, and the school administrators never nail them, because apparently being able to win football games trumps the laws against assault. In my school, the football players and cheerleaders were some of the nicest people you could meet.


• "Popular" people. This whole concept: what the Samuel Langhorn Hell? What, do high school kids have access to Rasmussen polls, or some damn thing?


• Goths/Punks. For some reason they, especially Goths, are always little vegan/peacenik Susie Soapboxes in fiction, when real Goths' politics are all over the damn map, and Punks are usually Libertarians bordering on Anarchists. May actually not have applied at my school, since nearly all of them were Native American (Navajos and Hopis, respectively). Nobody gave them any crap, either—though some of the Hopis were probably racial separatists (you ever hear native punk?).


• Band nerds, general nerds, geeks. So they're some kind of oppressed underclass in shows, sometimes with literally reduced human rights. Never happened at my school. The only people who suffered in this stereotypical way—I was one of them for a while—were the asshats who intentionally tried to make reality fit the fictional model. That is, people who set out to make "jocks" and cheerleaders mistreat them, by being a-holes to them, in some twisted form of victim mentality. My sophomore year I realized that if you just shut up and be nice to people, they're nice to you—and the caste system is revealed as an illusion (seriously, it was like a little girl brought me a rice pudding under a mango tree).

There are two reasons for this portrayal. One is, the writers really were picked on in school—this seems to be the case for Butch Hartman and Joss Whedon. Only, as I said, you usually bring that crap on yourself; I know I did. Do you really think Joss Whedon—who apparently grew up in a real World According to Garp—didn't do anything to irritate his schoolmates? If his behavior, mannerisms, and beliefs were anything like they are now, his schoolmates should be sainted that he left their hands alive. And those of you whose experience of high school mirrors this nonsense: I'll bet your life it was mostly your fault, or else your school was "urine-soaked, med-diluting nursing home" level dysfunctional.

The other reason for this horse-hockey, which may seem far-fetched, is that the writers are doing this intentionally. Think carefully about the paradigm being presented in high-school movies: oppressed, inherently more-virtuous nerds, being victimized by evil heartless popular people. They invariably throw off the yoke of jock oppression; sometimes there's even systemic reforms of the school.

If that sounds familiar, it should. You probably thought you hated "teen movies" because they're shallow, vapid, and use one of about four plots with little variation (and that, largely limited to the presence or absence of a monster). You were probably right, but I hope that you also hated them, on some subconscious level, for being creeping incipient Marxism.

Note: What distinguishes an underdog story from this Marxist thing is that an underdog story is about reform of an abuse, the besting of one oppressor/oppressive group by one underdog/underdog group. When it's implied, or outright stated ("high school's like that" type-lines) that such oppression is systemic, that is, when it is presented as "jocks vs. nerds"—class against class—instead of "this jerk gets his comeuppance from his victims", you have created a class-war paradigm.