We All Deserve Sympathy

If I’m committing to still writing stories about people going through high school, I need to keep a few things in mind. The first, which I’ve talked about a fair bit over the years, is how to frame everything from the dialogue to the sexuality. My dialogue sits firmly in the camp of “what we wish we could have said,” with some conversations between tenth graders being almost obscene in their maturity. Adam and Megan in Consequences occasionally had conversations with reserved maturity that would put some of my coworkers to shame, even if they were wrapped in themes of immaturity. I may break away from this style from time to time, but it’s obvious when I do.

The sexuality, as I have also talked about, is framed as the desire for desire. Both out of the joy of connection and the desire to distance myself from readers that are a little too eager to read stories not about hormonal thoughts and desires but rather, teenage bodies in particular, I prefer to sexualize events and connections more. I’m very happy with this, and its effects – I won’t reveal more than this, but I once got an email from a reader who confessed they read high school stories for other reasons in the past and since reading my stuff, internalized a few problems from tat approach and so, changed their approach. I hope this person is doing well.

One aspect I’ve never talked about framing is the empathy of certain characters, and it came up recently in the most roundabout way. Given I write about high school culture, the last thing I need to do is be completely out of touch with said culture. It’s very apparent when you write about something, from the outside, with this disdained “I don’t get it and I don’t want to” voice – keep that sentiment in mind, it’s going to pop up a lot in this blog. I sometimes see fellow writers of high school erotica that clearly think high school is just stupid. They’ll write a character that bravely doesn’t do social media, and makes fun of everyone else who does, and frame this character as “the only sane one” or something. They’ll misunderstand trans people then make fun of them for existing as a trans person – and if trans people are still unusual to your social bubble and you’re not good at writing the culture, no worries, but if you’re bothering to include them in your story (usually because you think it would be hot to have A Chick With A Dick in your story or something), try to… treat them like a human being; friendly advice of the day.

So, on a whole, approaching your group with empathy is a good idea, right? Let’s go a step further though, and return to an old friend. Let’s talk about Taylor Wise.

Taylor Wise is arguably the main female character in Mutual Benefits. She’s the uber-popular girl at her school, thanks chiefly to her looks, and the popularity she gets from those looks inform her behavior. Her behavior informs her actions, her actions reinforce her popularity… etc, etc. Standard high school dynamics. The most important thing to internalize is that she’s popular, right?

As I said before, I want to avoid the whole “I don’t get it and I don’t want to” sentiment regarding high school culture, and so, despite my luddite nature, I downloaded TikTok. Both the content and its immediacy genuinely helps me to understand effectively a Next Generation of attitudes towards school and society and being social that are, in my opinion, already blatantly outdated in the now-ironically-named Being More Social. This was all fine and dandy, but one day, I saw a very interesting video while scrolling – this one. The video is a sketch parodying the idea of “the popular kids in class doing a presentation.” In the video, the students are portrayed as reckless, goofy, cliquey, and disorganized – as high school students, no doubt popular ones, often are.

The purpose of this video is clearly to make fun of this type of person, and it works wonders. The comments on the video are a treasure trove of embittered students dragging them down, either adding on their own details (“And then they get an A because the teacher likes them”) or reaffirming how commonplace this behavior was “This is literally what happens with the popular kids at my school”). I actually kind of played into this trope, making Lexi in particular a bit more brash, annoying, and outspoken, and implying that even her own group is annoyed with that energy a lot of the time. After all, when stories like this portray a popular girl, they portray her as self-assertive, often cold towards the feelings of others, and cocksure (often in all meanings of the term). To be sure, Taylor is portrayed like this.

But herein lies the framing. Often, these stories just portray the popular girls like this, and only ever show another side of her if she decides to break away from her popular group to be with The Guy of Her Dreams, or shows another side of her that’s often completely divorced from the popular girl persona. Both of these framings subtly imply something – “no matter what, as long as she remains a Popular Girl, she’s flawed. The only cure to this flaw is to distance her from being a Popular Girl.”

I don’t think it was fully conscious on my part at the time, but I’m now quite sure I went into writing Mutual Benefits with the goal of portraying Taylor occasionally sympathetically, but never in this way. I never wanted to imply she was “more than just a Popular Girl” or that being a Popular Girl diminished how much sympathy she deserved. Heck, even in the beginning, I wrote her to be sympathetic to Quinn’s awkward inability to talk to girls. And yet, along the way, I tried to avoid the rhetoric of “see, she’s not a Popular Girl after all – she’s a human!” The entire time, she wore her popularity like a hat. The times she outsmarts Quinn, it’s not because she’s secretly as socially aware as him in the ways unpopular kids are (because as we know, Popular Girls Are Never Smart) – it’s because her popularity affords her smartness that he couldn’t have, just as the reverse is true.

I get that a lot of us were bullied by popular kids growing up – my first story was literally about an awkward kid who had been bullied growing up. Trust me, I get it. Even so, this kind of measured resentment gets us nowhere in person, let alone in stories after the fact. Even if we can’t empathize with every character no matter what, we can sympathize, and sympathy is a choice. And… we all deserve sympathy. My story was full of moments of Taylor fucking up, but also her being vulnerable, and human, and even in the right a few times when Quinn wasn’t (to my morals, anyway). Would my story have been better if she was a heartless and brainless caricature of a Popular Girl we often see in stories? Would the sex have been hotter? Would her character have been more interesting? Would the plot twists have meant as much…? Even if you don’t want to like the person, even just as a story-writing device, likeability and sympathy are kind of crucial.

I’m a bleeding heart first and foremost, and I wanted to give you all a feel-good blog so close to the holidays (Merry Christmas if you celebrate, by the way), so the most important part of all this is that Taylor is both a Popular Girl and a human being that deserves as much innate respect as anyone else I write. What should separate her from others is her behavior and actions, and not her persona on a whole. Maybe you all saw it coming a mile away, but think about how you felt about Rose from Final Answer from the first chapter to now. Or heck, Sarah from the same story. And both of these characters had moments where you couldn’t help but feel for them – maybe even during the moments where you disagreed with them. Food for thought. Above all, treat others well, despite your prejudices – something I sometimes need to remind myself. It has served my life well, I think. Happy holidays, and we’ll speak soon.