When I was in high school, I was too busy with activities to care much about listening to advice. (That was a problem all on its own, but that’s a discussion for another day.) But there was one phrase – apparently to be taken as “helpful advice” – that struck fear into my heart each time I heard it.
[blocktext align=”center”]Relax, Feliza – these are the best days of your life![/blocktext]
This was a phrase I didn’t hear often from the people at the high school I attended. We were all college-track students, achievers by nature for the most part, and our teachers, at least, figured our own golden ages were yet to come. I heard this most often from people outside my academic setting, people who didn’t worry about scholarships and other pleb teenager concerns.
High school, quite frankly, totally sucked, and thinking that those years were supposed to be the pinnacle of my existence terrified me.
I’m happy to report that no, high school did not end up being the greatest years of my life. (Grad school was pretty fulfilling.) But when many people think about a “golden age,” it’s usually the teen years, for whatever reason, and this month, we’re going to talk about the gilding we tend to add to things as years pass by.
When we think about things we loved in earlier days, the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia slip on. We forget that Princess Leia’s role was mainly as a romantic interest; we politely ignore that whole thing with Spike and Buffy, or the way Firefly‘s half-Chinese post-apocalypse was weirdly devoid of ethnically Chinese people, or various other problems in the Whedonverse; and as a fandom, we blindly accept the lack of women, people of color, and LGBTQ characters in movies, television, books, comics, and more of our favorite entertainment.
As we take a look at some of our favorite throwbacks this month, we’ll explore how things stay the same — and how things should start to change.
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Feliza Casano doesn’t remember anything being wrong with Inuyasha, which probably isn’t true at all. She edits and writes for all sections of the site. In her approximate 2.3 hours of free time each month, she loves watching anime, reading science fiction, and working on her novels-in-progress. Keep up with her antics at felizacasano.com and follow her on Twitter @FelizaCasano.
