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Notes -
"Adolescence" isn't like that.
After watching it, I can give my thoughts, and it really isn't.
First let's look at what "incel" means in the world of the show (which may not reflect reality). "Incel" is portrayed as a zoomer concept that all the kids know about and the boring old adults don't get it. The kids know about it because all kids know about it, and boring old adults don't because it's a kid thing and it's just not part of their generation. It's also shown to be a generic insult, kind of like how calling someone a fag may have been used 10 years ago. Calling someone an incel doesn't make them an incel, just like calling someone a fag doesn't make him a homosexual. And in fact the protagonist explicitly rejects the label. His friends are also not suggested to be incels, though they are pushed together as common victims of bullying. One is bullied for being poor and the other is bullied for being dumb.
In the show there is no idea that there's a looming incel threat that is coming for your kids and schools. The attack is portrayed as being motivated by bullying and a personal grudge against the victim, not by ideology or misogyny. Of course being called ugly and an incel was a big part of this bullying, but no more than any other kind of relentless torment that kids put each other through.
Now let's analyze the episodes individually.
Episode 1 mostly lacks social commentary, but if anything, is anti-police by showcasing quality police brutality and abuse. The show starts off with the detectives nonchalantly executing a hardcore no-knock raid with dozens of heavily armed officers in order to pick up a kid. Even though the kid is an accused murderer, they have no reason to believe he will resist or that the family will impede the investigation. Then there's the interrogation, where the police don't have enough evidence, so they gaslight in order to fish for a confession. Fortunately the kid has a lawyer and is able to avoid most of the traps. It's true that being anti-police is somewhat blue-coded but I don't otherwise see anything too major happening in this episode.
Episode 2 is more of a commentary on school and society. The administration is shown as uncaring and incompetent. Bullying runs rampant. The detective's son is even bullied every day nobody things anything of it. The drama and storytelling is nice, because we see in the beginning that the victim's best friend is hiding something, and we find out gradually that it's because the victim was doing the bullying too. Of course murder isn't justified in this situation, but it establishes the main character as a sort of antihero that we can almost relate to. Which is the perfect time because when the detective breaks the friend he says that's the last thing he needs to close the case and throw our antihero in prison.
Episode 3 is a battle of wits between the two characters. The killer wrongly assumes that the psychologist is in cahoots with the police and fishing for a confession, but rightly understands that she is not on his side. The psychologist alternates between trying to build a rapport and asserting her authority, while the killer remains on the defensive. At the end we find out that the killer gained a liking for his nemesis, in sort of a messed up Stockholm syndrome kind of way. It is shown that the killer's mind is melted by being exposed to too much oversexualized content on Instagram. This sounds correct as whenever I make the mistake of opening FB, I get reels by creators who also do OF.
Episode 4 is hard to analyze, but it's hard to argue that there's any sort of partisan propaganda wrapped up in it.
Overall, the show is overhyped but also interesting enough, and really isn't pushing some sort of woke angle. 50% of murders are committed by a certain kind of person, yet true crime shows usually feature karens and highly intelligent men as the killers. This is because their crimes are shocking and unexpected, not because of a woke bias in reporting.
The first episode is pro police brutality. The protagonist of the first two episodes is a police officer, and the daughter corrects her parents when they ask about a complaint. The response is considered justifiable by the police and the child’s own counsel didn’t consider police brutality worthy of attention. The audience takeaway is that this action is justified — all the cool protagonists were involved, and it’s only an angry low class Dad who temporarily wants to file a complaint. Episode two is where we learn about incels and the “red pill” from the detective’s son, and that this is what caused the murder. The accomplice is also clearly depicted as being incel adherent, hence his obsession with looks and asking the detective about whether he got girls.
I have never seen a piece of media that is so clearly a psy-op. The series is designed to (1) make children afraid of ever coming across something online about incels or the red pill by introducing a strong terror response, for instance (a) imagining themself as the boy and having your father watch as the police inspect your penis [this is the director’s intent, hence the focus on the father’s face], (b) making the boy utterly humiliated and demeaned, for instance his peeing himself and crying and then being thrown in jail after being humiliated by a woman, (c) making you think you can be an accomplice also thrown in jail, hence the plot line of the body who was beaten by the black girl [the only time the “authority-coded” characters cry and sympathize is for the black girl]; (2) make women afraid of boys who look or behave like the boy protagonist, by associating the boy with all sorts of evils and shock and humiliation; [3] artificially raise the status of minorities, for instance the black police officer and the south Asian teachers, whereas there’s an ugly white police officer who is intentionally depicted as an ugly older incel
It’s really not about “bullying is bad” at all. That’s what episode three was about. Episode three is about raising the possibility that this is the case, and then the director shooting down the notion psychologically via (1) depicting the boy as aggressive and manipulative and violent, (2) making us unsympathetic to the boy and instead sympathetic to the dominant detective, (3) showing the detective denying any sympathy to the boy at the end and then breaking down, signaling to the viewer to sympathize with the woman and not the boy.
What I just can’t wrap my head around is —
is it a foreign country somehow spending, like, billions of dollars in espionage and subterfuge to get this show made and shown to the youth? Why would anyone show this to their own children?
is it a domestically made psy-op in order to, like, “subjugate” white people in the UK further? Did the government think they were getting too uppity because of the grooming gangs?
Like there is nothing organic about the directorial decisions at all.
Because it reinforces more or less every destructive cultural lie told over the past 100 years. The audience for this is parents (typically mothers) who are very concerned about what media their children consume, yet are too stupid or otherwise high on Morality to figure out that this is what they need to be defending their sons from.
It occurs to me that the anti-Adolescence is a media that:
This series is not designed to be informative about any issue, though, it really seems designed to introduce terror and humiliation when specific cues are presented. These cues are the white child protagonist and a few buzzwords, but the show doesn’t even focus on the buzzwords, so it’s really only the white child. Just as someone who has spent a little more time than the average person reading about how specific cues can be manipulated to generate emotional reactions, modified through reactivation and reconsolidation, the directorial choices only make sense when you imagine an evil director who wants to inspire bad feelings about specific cues. Because it lines up too accurately.
For instance —
the hiding of the boy’s face in the car, so that you don’t relate to him on his isolated journey back
the emotionless bureaucratic faces of the police that strike down any sympathy to the boy; the bureaucratic language intentionally designed to train the viewer to treat the boy in a dehumanized way
the white woman chosen for the minimum possible amount of emotional expression on her face, even worse than that Star Wars actress of yore
the third episode which begins in a way that you could plausibly feel sympathy, and then reconsolidates that into terror and fear at him and some disgust
the questioning designed to humiliate him, in other words, to demean his status in the eyes of the viewer
showing a random encounter of a white student bullying a black student (the nephew of the cop or something), and then having a white woman cry over an African girl, for no other reason to instill a sense of a racial villain
the use of childhood photos to make the viewer think it’s real
the music (described as “tense and oppressive” in the subtitles)
Here’s what I mean. Imagine you like your friend Joe. I can get you to dislike him a bit more, maybe a lot more, by presenting a series of cues about Joe and then right afterward elaborating upon the ways in which Joe is unlikable. I can show you Joe’s face, and then I can play ominous music and talk about murder — this alone would move the needle if done repeatedly. I can go further, and have a sequence of clips of Joe mentioning why he is likable, and then right after each sequence I can show you someone in a higher status position showing no empathy to him and then talking about him like he is dehumanized. I can show you clips of him dehumanized, for instance him pissing himself, needing his father to put on pants for him, being stripped in front of him, being asked whether he’s gay — intuitively you know, bullies will create rumors like this because bullies are looking for the best way to reduce your status — and if I do this in the right sequence and with right power, everyone will like Joe less, scientifically, it will be measurable. You don’t realize how strong the effect is: there are studies which show it can be used to reduce cravings in alcoholics by reconsolidating the cues of alcohol to cues of disgust. It’s strong.
Someone involved in this movie was specifically interested in psychologically manipulating the viewer, to decrease positive valence associated with white male children and even white males generally, and increase it for minorities and women. Cue by cue, this is really what the movie is about, and the actual incel etc stuff takes up only a small fraction of the screen time, and wasn’t the intended cue manipulation by the director.
To make it worse, the black actor who we are supposed to consider a dignified British person is actually not, and I don’t mean in a physiognomy-enjoyer way, I mean in real life he was jailed for a gun offense and fined for assault, and his own demographic in the UK is disproportionately responsible for stabbings. But consider also that physiognomy reactions are strong: imagine Steve Schirripa playing a math genius, or imagine an aboriginal Australian woman teaching a Chinese guy how to do math — this is the British version of this, someone from a criminal people in a position above a boy who looks like he should be singing Anglican evensongs at King’s College Cambridge. Literally inverting the entire social order of the UK, the best that the UK can produce being put into a humiliation ritual by the worst that the UK still has to deal with.
"Just as someone who has spent a little more time than the average person reading about how specific cues can be manipulated to generate emotional reactions, modified through reactivation and reconsolidation"
Can you elaborate on this. Do you have books or something on this topic.
I have long suspected that it's not good to view media, especially because how it enforces certain behaviours. For example, I think I turned into way too of a sarcastic bastard after watching shows like the blackadder in my youth. Acting like that in real world interactions didn't get me any friends
My notes are disorganized, spread out over my app and screenshots, so I’ll give you topics to plug into google scholar. When you learn something, that information goes through a reconsolidation window <8 hours, which is the memory cementing into your brain. Now, when you remember something (from the cues that point to the old memory), the old memory is “reactivated” and then shortly afterward re-enters the “reconsolidation” window. During this window, an old memory can be updated and changed, including its emotional aspects, but only if it goes through reactivation before the attempted manipulation.
memory reactivation reconsolidation craving / addiction [for its use in drug addiction and alcoholism, which can be extended outside its scope because addiction can be construed as a really strong desire or a thing just having very high positive valence]
memory reconsolidation music / affect [one study found that, after reactivating a memory, if you remember it with music then the memory takes on the vibe of whatever music you listen to. In other words, when you remember things under the influence of music, your memories may become more like the music emotionally]
Tetris effect PTSD [car accident patients at a hospital, when brought in during the reconsolidation phase of the memory, if you have them play Tetris their rate of PTSD decreases; similarly, if you have people reactivate a car accident memory and then play Tetris right after, their rate of negative flashbacks decrease]
eyewitness misinformation effect test reconsolidation [if you have eyewitnesses take a test where they relay everything they saw, and then you introduce “misinformation” afterward eg by an interviewer just telling them false information, then they are likely to revise their true information into false information. This is stronger than if they didn’t take the test. The act of taking a test actually increases the amount of misinformation grafted and updated into the old, true information]
reactivation reconsolidation fear / phobia [the new paradigm of treating phobias is that reactivation must occur for the memory to have longterm change through exposure. For instance, if you’re afraid of mice, you would briefly recall past fearful memories for 8 minutes, wait a few minutes, then “exposure” yourself to the mice. This updates previous memories, whereas an exposure session without the memory reactivation has less longterm extinction (or none at all)]
a recent study trending online, “improving mental health by training the suppression of unwanted thoughts”. https://x.com/AdamMGrant/status/1888968823929471032 . In this study, the Cue of an unwanted thought is focused on for a couple minutes, and then a person “trains” himself to ignore any thoughts that come afterward. This is reactivating (focusing on cue intensely), and then updating the old memory through reconsolidation manipulation (focusing on quieting the mind).
There’s a case I read of a child who saw a snake at a park and had no emotional reaction, but injured her hand on a car door an hour afterward. She became phobic of snakes. This is because the memory of the snake was meshed with the injury during the snake’s reconsolidation window, amplified by the evolutionary “potency” of snakes which make them particularly sensitive to this phenomenon (speculated).
Alcohol after learning can help retain information, and thus is speculated to occur because it blocks out the learning of “new” information which can cause interference with the pre-alcohol information; in other words, the pre-alcohol reconsolidation is protected against any post-alcohol memory interference because we learn less when drunk.
Perhaps one more tangential topic: giving yourself a test is often better for learning than reading / elaborating, but when you know very little of the material, it’s actually worse because you could “train” yourself to provide the wrong answer when seeing the cue. When studying, if you don’t know the answer, it’s better to not answer the question than guess, it would seem
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It's a show aimed at adults and not children. I'd expect a 14 year old child wouldn't understand and just snooze through the show.
Possibly. If the aim is to normalize police brutality, indifference to your society collapsing, and anarcho-tyranny, then it kind of works.
Unfortunately that's just a reflection of reality in 2025 UK.
The detective was looking for a motive for the killer when he had no evidence they weren't on good terms. The motive was a personal grudge, not incel ideology.
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