How Heartstopper Fundamentally Changed My Storytelling

HEARTSTOPPER SPOILERS!!!!

I didn’t attend prom in my senior year of high school, because I didn’t care for it and knew I’d be miserable the entire time there. And plus, it was a disaster anyway, I think the venue double booked or something, and since the student body of my Deaf school was significantly smaller, they gave the smaller room to them. And so people just spent time outside. And then it rained. Meanwhile, as I was one of the two students who stayed in the dorm, they ordered an entire freaking pizza for me as the cafeteria was closed. It was very nice. I was just munching on my pizza- (free pizza! take that, $75 prom and surely $100 tuxedo or something). I had Heartstopper by Alice Osemen (2022) recommended to me, so I decided to give it a try.

I blazed through it, and was intensely screaming at the characters. Once it was done, I wanted more! I immediately binged the comics. I personally had a rule to not rewatch anything for six months after the initial viewing, which I don’t follow anymore. But Heartstopper was testing me. I was pretty good about this for the other shows… but I relented for Heartstopper. Just this once. Actually, I’ll watch it for a third time. Fourth time… fifth…sixth… and so on. I must have watched it 30+ times.

The one thing I really craved from Heartstopper was the emotional connections the characters had with each other. Not necessarily in the romantic sense, but like… I wanted that kind of connection where people support each other’s emotions. I consider my senior year the lowest point of my life. I am not going into details of my personal life at the moment because frankly, this is public and none of y’all business. What I will say is I had no safe outlet at the time; I couldn’t exactly walk around outside on my own, around campus or something. The school was lenient in a lot of places, but also stringent in a lot of places. Some of those parts they are stringent about directly compromise how I decompress. I also had severe anxiety at the time, and had a reputation of a shut-in.

Every time I watched Heartstopper, I’d notice more and more details. Like Charlie’s ED showing up in small subtle ways, such as avoiding food or not eating a lot. I’ve read the comics so I did know what was going to happen. But to see those foreshadows… god, it makes my writer brain so happy. I also really liked it even when Nick agreed to a date behind Charlie’s back, that character apologized to both of them, and explained why they did it. Charlie understood, and accepted the apology. No excessive drama… no “proving he is straight”... none of that.

Now, my definition is ‘a form of expression’. I consider writing, drawing, painting, sculpting, art. So is engineering, mathematics, cooking, and so on. It’s a broad definition. I have been told ‘you do not understand art’ during my youth. Maybe I do not understand this specific form of expression, but I very much understand MY art. Which generally falls under video editing and writing.

When it comes to art, I noticed two distinct approaches. Creation and refinement. In context of writing stories, some people prefer the first draft as they like to translate their thoughts into words on pages. As for me, I like to refine things that are already there. I have such a hard time creating the first draft, but I can endlessly revise it over and over and over again.

I remember I was writing a story, I only had one chapter I successfully wrote the first draft of. I had much more plotted, but they have not been written. I constantly revised that chapter for four years, never writing beyond it. It was a kickass first chapter, but… the rest of the story is… not there. I think it’s also why I like to video edit; I get to refine the videos that are already there. What is not in realms of my skills is using cameras, setting up lights, all that set life, because it is not refinement, it is creation.

I had one world in my head that I had since I was around… I want to say… 9? I’ve been building on the same world, up to my first year of college, maybe a bit of the second year. It had kingdoms, it had the big bad, it had a tyrannical evil organization, it had time travelling shenanigans. There are so much to say about my world, but the point is, this world was very much a politics-lite story, and very much focused on the systems. I just used characters as a vehicle for plots. I need this to happen, and so character does xyz to make that happen. I almost did not care about those characters beyond their plot relevance.

My point I’m trying to make is that the show Heartstopper was a radical way for me. It was a new approach to storytelling. I was always concerned with how the drama appears, and I figured; the higher stakes, the better. Nope. It doesn’t have to be that way. You get to know the characters; and I discovered that I liked character exploration a lot. Sure, kingdoms and magic systems and all that is cool, but they don’t really provide a lot of interpretations. With character-driven stories, where you deeply explore various sides to one character, you can look at them in multiple ways. You also get to play with perspective and how certain people view people differently.

I have always felt if it wasn’t for film, I would have been into psychology. But that seems like a complex major and I am not academically inclined at all. But the point is, I loved to explore the mind and thought process. I remember watching closely in Heartstopper to see if I could catch their acting ‘slipping’. My favorite scene of all time in Season 1 of heartstopper: Nick going ‘what? what’s wrong?’ to Charlie. I really wanted that so bad…

IN COLLEGE! I was reunited with my lifelong best friend, hell yeah! We made some new friends. I tried so hard to not be a shut-in, and it was a lot, it drained so much energy from me, and it unfortunately led to some conflicts because I wanted to hang out with them, but I did not care for the activity itself. But… I was happy. One of the deepest thing I really really appreciated was when the new friend group went to a Red Wings game. I couldn’t due to a class conflict (and the class ended 3 minutes prior to the bus leaving, bruh). Anyway, they had a group selfie and one of them was holding up a picture of me. I was like… I will cherish this forever. I cried a bit. It meant a lot to me. We don’t hang as much anymore (college being busy and all that), but we are still on very good terms with each other and I feel like I can approach those friends about anything. We also still try to hang out as a group occasionally.

Now, to tie this in to my story… I think the biggest benefit is a much more healthier frame of reference. Sometimes I’d be chatting with my friends, and I’d tell stories about my boarding school, and what happened and stuff like that. They’d go… um… that’s not okay? And I’m just like huh? And they’d explain to me why, and I was like oh, that’s so true. It happened so often, and combined with me paying attention much more to other people, I started to realize something cruical. Trauma, at least in my form, is not one big event. Rather, it is made from a thousand small cuts. In other words, tiny details… And since art is a form of expression, I decided to try to explore those tiny details, how they accumulate over time, how they can break or make something. And it also allows for a natural ‘snowball’ effect.

My epic fantasy world quickly fell to the wayside, as a new story universe composed entirely of small details began to develop. It is quite rewarding to see when the small details had massive ramifications later on. I love my characters in this story, but that’s a whole other blog post on it’s own. Anyway, the point is, a small lie told by the protagonist in Chapter 1 due to social awkwardness had a domino effect that eventually led the protagonist to being hospitalized. One of my favorite happy accidents.. plot wise.