(courtesy IMP Awards)
If you were fortunate to grow up as an integral member of a mainstream social group, then you will be well acquainted with how good it is to feel like you truly belong somewhere.
But if, like many of the characters in Alice Oseman’s wondrously good Heartstopper graphic novels, you have always been on the outer, consigned to the bleak and unfriendly margins, you will be well acquainted with how lonely it can be to live your life on the outside perpetually looking in.
With a childhood marked by rampant bullying and deliberate social exclusion, this reviewer is well aware of how soul crushing this can be, as I suspect many of the viewers of the adaptation of the series, now streaming its second season on Netflix, will be.
Which is one big reason why the sheer existence of the streaming series is so important and so welcome because it presents a world where, in the critically important teenage years, a whole rainbow of queer characters find a social group to call their own, a family that sustains them when the world around them grows cruel and rancorous and they need a safe harbour to lick their wounds and heal.
Clearly put, season two of Netflix takes the group we met in season one, when the two central characters, Nick Nelson (Kit Connor) and Charlie Spring (Joe Locke) got together as unexpected boyfriends, and gives them even more of a collective identity, as well as letting many of the supporting characters find their uniquely appealing voices.
For anyone of a certain queer age looking on, there is something restorative about seeing formative teenagers get to be their teenage selves largely free of the rancour and condemnation that were common parlance for anyone older than about 30, and to be supported and loved by their peers and even many of the adults around them.
It’s such a shift from just a decade or two ago that one of the teachers, Mr Farouk (Nima Taleghani), is drawn to longingly admit, and with a melancholy that many older queer people will recognise, that he was never able to have his “gay teenager” phase, partly due he says, to only coming out in his late twenties but you suspect also because the option simply wasn’t there for many people older than the characters the series. (He is given a tentatively sweet embryonic romance with fellow teacher Mr Ajayi, played by Fisayo Akinade and it is ALL the feels for those of us who feel we missed out by not having what Charlie, Nick et. al all have.)
Heartstopper has been accused of creating too perfect a bubble of queerness, of being unrealistic about how inclusive even our more enlightened wider Western society is, and portraying a world that simply doesn’t exist, but honestly, if even part of this is true, and I suspect it is for many young LGBTQIA+ people who walk the streets far less self-consciously than this reviewer’s generation ever dared do, then it is a gift to know that things have changed this much for the better.
In season two of the show, Nick and Charlie are working out what it is means to be a couple, and while they encounter some obstacles to doing that with Nick’s older brother David (Jack Barton) being an unwelcome bullying presence and Charlie’s mum Jane (Georgina Rich) seeing Nick as an unlikable distraction for Charlie from his schoolwork, they are largely able to not only cement what they found in season one when Nick realised he was bi and fell in love with sweetly adorable Charlie who’d been out for a while (and horribly bullied for it, sadly) but move to the point where their relationship can withstand some dark stuff.
Being Heartstopper the darkness doesn’t linger too long – this is not to diminish how substantive and emotionally weighty the show can be but simply to point out that it dwells more on the light than the dark and for those of us who have lived it, that’s very welcome indeed – but as Charlie grapples with the lingering effects of his trauma-induced eating disorder and whispers of still present bullying, they come to grips with the fact that love isn’t just snogging and staring doe-eyed at someone but it grants strength and solidarity and support.
The thing with Heartstopper is that it emphasises how good things can get as a queer person, that they do, in the words of a major campaign, get better, and that’s a message many queer people in their younger years desperately need to hear.
Seeing how supportive and loving Nick and Charlie are for each other and their friends Tara & Darcy (Corrina Brown and Kizzy Edgell respectively), Elle (Yasmin Finney) and Tao (William Gao) who spend much of the season flirtatiously and nervously romantically, afraid to disrupt their BFF relationship, and book adoring Isaac (Tobie Donovan) who’s happily given more screen time, is good for the soul.
This tight group of friends are there for each other at home and abroad – a number of the second season’s episodes take place on a school excursion to Paris giving the kids a chance to find themselves still further in the reality-evacuated surrounds of a holiday – and with the others in their orbit like straight ally Imogen (Rhea Norwoood) and new bisexual student Sahar (Leila Khan), they make a formidable emotional and even physical fortress against the worst the world can throw at them.
This means that when in the closet Ben (Sebastian Croft) and ill-thinking bully Harry (Cormac Hyde-Corrin) try to manipulate or make life difficult for anyone in our group that it closes ranks and beautifully and heartwarmingly looks after its own.
They’re also there for each other when they’re wandering through the Louvre or getting the school hall ready for the Year 11 Prom, and its the constancy and inclusivity of their love for one another that fires up Heartstopper as something wondrously special.
Each of the characters, including Isaac who may or may not have something in the offing with the nervously sweet and equally library-comfortable James (Bradley Riches), encounters challenges, many of them related to growing up and figuring out how to live life – for instance Elle, an artistically talented trans woman gets a chance to go to a queer-friendly arts college for her final year of school and Tao struggles with losing her to a future that’s not intimately connected to his own (hello adulthood!) – and Heartstopper gives these situations their emotionally impactful due and doesn’t try to pretend at any stage that friendship and support can magically make life’s pain points go away.
What it does do as it shows its beloved characters getting to know themselves, each other and life as a whole is demonstrate the power of unconditional collective love and support and how much that can transform individual lives and people as a whole as they finally find a home to belong to.
There are many moments in the second season of Heartstopper where you will sigh with the sheer loveliness of how good it is to have someone’s arms around you, romantic, friendship or otherwise, and that even as you watch everyone grapple with what they need to do to take further steps forward in life, how it changes everything to have your people have your back.
It doesn’t magically make everything better but it does make a massive difference to how you weather the storm and if nothing else Heartstopper is a love song, illustrated with magical artwork on screen that shows nervousness, love, and electrically-charged romantic connection vividly and with playful wonder, to how we need to find our people, to be wrapped up, surrounded and protected by them, and how that can make all the difference in the world.