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Notes -
"Adolescence"
As I was giving my brother a lift on Saturday, he asked me if I watched anything new recently. He told me that there's a new netflix series that everybody's talking about, about a murder in a high school, and that in typical netflix fashion there's been a race shift. However since the character in question is a murderer, the shift has been in a direction opposite from the often memed one.
Later that day, my wife told me that everybody's talking about a new series, and it's about a teenage boy getting radicalized by the far right. I acknowledged nearing about it, and she gently mocked me, saying that she can hear from the tone of my voice that I instinctively recoil at the premise.
Yesterday, I saw my high school geography teacher, now the headmaster of said high school, recommending the show on facebook. This was my final cue that it in fact reached some critical mass of normie recognition. I started reading up on it, saw that it was an UK production, and that gave context to the tidbits that I heard while jumping channels in the car on the weekend, with people on the (Polish) radio talking about violence against women in England.
I won't paste the whole synopsis from Wikipedia, but the tl;dr is that it's about a 13 year old who gets radicalized by The Manosphere, asks out a classmate who had her topless photos revenge-posted about someone else earlier (thinking that she'd be easy), she rebuffs him, later insinuates that he's an incel, the boy get cyberbullied, eventually he finds a kindred radical, and stabs the girl. The plot proper is in the aftermath of this, with various authorities questioning the 13-year old Jamie, and parents wondering how it all went wrong. In the end, Jamie decides to plead guilty.
I tried to find something about the inspiration for the series, to corroborate my brother's info, and it turns out it was inspired by three cases of stabbing. The only one named by showrunners is the case of Brianna Ghey, a 16 year old transgirl stabbed by two 15 year olds, white girl and white boy. Possible speculation about the other two cases include Ava White (12 year old stabbed by a 14 year old "not named for legal reasons" 🤔) and Elliane Andam (15, black girl stabbed by 17 year old Hassan Sentamu). The filming started in July 2024, so Axel Rudakubana's spree couldn't have been an inspiration.
So, my first, second, etc. thoughts on all of this were unbecoming of this forum.
My nth thought can be summed as: the absolute audacity of them.
Yes, knife crime, and other violent crime, and crime in general is on the rise in the UK youth. But the unacknowledged elephant in the room is that the current UK teens are a dramatically different cohort from teens. The optimistic take would be that the "adults in the room" are recognizing the problem, and are laundering it as a white issue to make it more palatable for left-lib sensibilities. But I don't believe it. This is another in the long list of wild swerves trying to address anything but the root of the problem. Knife bans! Pointless knives, as suggested by Idris Elba! Illegal memes! Starmer would rather release hundreds of actual violent criminals to have more place in prisons for the "white supremacists".
Cf. "stop asian hate", where assaults perpetrated by other demographics were also presented as if it were the whites' fault. We get the usual kvetching about radicalization, Andrew Tate (ignoring the fact that he fake-converted to Islam, which suggests that his core viewer demographic probably isn't white British nor white American) and whatnot. Are white boys in the UK actually radicalizing? I don't know, probably not, the first pass suggests that in every place that isn't South Korea the boys/young men stay roughly where they were politically, while the world shifts from under them. But if they are, that's a reasonable reaction to the world that tries to scapegoat them for things outside of their control and treats them only with suspicion.
(Yes, I am aware that the perps ih Ghey's case were in fact white. But even there, the girl perp was probably the main instigator of the murder, a far cry from the fictionalized version.)
P.S. (From the synopsis: "Katie used this form of encoded language to accuse Jamie of being an incel". At age 13? I sure hope he was.)
I haven't watched it, but is this your brain on partisanship? Incel violence isn't right coded, and manosphere also isn't beyond the fact that it rejects feminism. Numberically it may be true that underclasses commit the most stabbings, but people don't care about those. On the other hand there are high profile incel cases such as Elliot Rodger that people know about.
Also for this kind of thing, the perp/hero is also supposed to be sympathetic to the audience. If it's a gangbanger or jihadist who doesn't look like you, then the killer just becomes a flat boring character that nobody will care about. Anyways incel violence is categorically different from thug or secretarian violence.
If you really wanted a partisan story, adapting this more directly would do the job. Two seemingly ordinary white kids are actually sadistic, cold blood killers and they murder a trans just for fun. The killers are just plain evil and they kill someone at the top of the liberal victim hierarchy.
That's the motte; "man bad" is the bailey. If you have the power to fight in the bailey, why retreat to the motte?
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