Melissa Wen: "Dear Michi Trota: Teen Angst or Worldly Perspectives?"

Dear Michi Trota: Teen Angst or Worldly Perspectives?

By

Melissa Wen

As a teenage girl fighting her way to get through her senior year of high school, I have to say that I really like reading about complex teen problems. I know that it makes no sense why I would want to read about issues so mundane and every day to me. After all, speculative fiction is all about reading to escape the issues of our world. But, because I’m constantly surrounded by questions that I can’t seem to answer like who am I and what do I want to do for the rest of my life, I tend to seek books now for more of a consolation that everything is going to be alright in the end and that I can do something if I try hard enough than for purely entertainment purposes. For example, instead of focusing on the shockingly brilliant action scenes between Spiderman and Electro during Amazing Spiderman 2, I was more concerned with the electrifying story line of Gwen going to Oxford for college and leaving her entire life with her family and Peter behind. I love reading about identity issues, acceptance of self, and the mental states of my favorite characters and wish there were more genre stories that addressed those themes and storylines. One story that we had read in class that came closest to what I really want to see in genre fiction is Supertoys Last All Summer Long. Although a somewhat tragic ending, the way that Aldiss let us see both David’s point of view and Ms. Swinton’s point of view on their inability to communicate with one another fascinated me. On the one hand, David is just an artificial toy meant to be a placeholder for a real, live boy while on the other hand we see that David appears to have genuine emotion despite his mechanical makeup. The dispute on whether a mechanical makeup resulted in a mechanical or apathetic persona can be taken as relevant to how one might view people from other backgrounds. Because a person grew up in a bad neighborhood, does that make the person from a bad neighborhood inherently bad? As well, in Pretty Boy Crossover, we see a “Pretty Boy” struggle with deciding whether he should leave his mortal world to become immortal by transplanting his soul into an electronic version of him, or keep to his livelihood and potentially die alone and forgotten. Here, we see the typical struggle that all teens experience which is peer pressure to become something that doesn’t feel right to them and whether being what everyone wants you to be is worth losing your identity. Although any of these stories can have a moral or an idea that can be manipulated into having some relation to the everyday world of the modern teen, for example Cold Equations can be perceived to show that the rules or our world can force us to make cruel decisions and that life is unfair or in 26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss that sometimes we don’t need to make sense of everything (like a mysterious abyss) in our world to feel content that everything in this world can be explained, genre stories are more relatable when we can easily see the connection to our daily lives or, in my case, the typical teen angst. So, although our world is overrun by technology, our care for the environment is atrocious, and what defines humanity are all themes that are present in our world, the typical teen doesn’t care for any of these major dilemmas in our world. Teens are self-absorbed monsters that only care for their identity in this world in their future and whether they live up to everyone’s expectations (obviously with some exceptions). Thus to feed the masses of teen angst lovers looking for how genre stories really reflect their daily lives, more personalized themes such as characters struggling with who they are and what they want to become shall be served! And because I need some pictures to illustrate what I’m talking about, enjoy this musing of Neville Longbottom that is representative of how all the masses feel right now.

 

(Neville Longbottom in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets contemplating life.)