So it’s book 5 of Heartstopper, and Nick and Charlie, after a painfully long time for the readers (although less for the characters) are prepared, have motive and opportunity… and from coy first kisses way back in book 1 are going to have …
Well, what are they going to have, and what do the readers have to read into text and image?
Conversations around sex and young adult literature seem to me to centre around two questions: Do the characters have to have sex? and How appropriate is the depiction of what they do? Since Alice Oseman’s style allows the (pretty inescapable) sex to take place, she is caught needing to decide on what to show. And it is “pretty inescapable,” in that the kissing that takes up the physical side of Nick and Charlie’s relationship from Ch 3 of Book 1 only starts to build much later – but build it does.
This has attracted a number of critical responses, summed up (and to a large extent demolished) in vlogs like this from Obviously Queer and elsewhere. [Heartstopper] “is unapologetically showing queer love being wholesome innocent and slow.” If this is not the case in other teen product or even in real life, the slowness of the developing relationship is charming, and leaves emotional room for the and finally of Book 5. This is a key scene, taking place some days before the excerpt below, and note that the reader is left to fill in at least some of the blanks.
It is clear from the conversations between characters that the blanks are to do with penetrative sex, and that after a very long period of awkward relationship development (the line “Why are we like this?” is a refrain in a number of scenes), we are seeing-yet-not-seeing something incredibly intimate, decorated with giggles and whispers, with trainers and trousers discarded, so with the condoms and lube Nick has bought in Oxford being brought out from his suitcase we have little room to doubt what’s going to happen. “Okay, let’s go” may sound more like the start of a rollercoaster ride than a key point in their relationship, but Oseman is entitled to depict these two star-crossed lovers as having fun.
And this might be where the reader gets a shock: is it acceptable to see this as fun?
Of course it is. They may have taken what seems to me to be a very long time getting there, and Nick and Charlie, one of the satellite texts in the Heartstopper canon, suggests it was a bit nerve-wracking for the young characters to start, but maybe when we think of what is acceptable to be shown, we see Oseman’s skill at changing narratives. This is not about the mechanics (or geography, if you prefer the metaphor) of sex, or the metaphysics of love and sex, but simply about fun.
Is it right to depict sex as fun instead of guilt ridden (or even a liberation from guilt)? How does the adult gatekeeper react to this sidestepping of traditional attitudes and narratives? The argument about Lyra and Will in Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass (no time to talk about the do-they-or-don’t-they? or the Bowdlerisation of the US edition) suggests to me a deeply concerning attitide from adult readers: brought up on the post- D H Lawrence bonk fest, it is almost as if adults need to see the sex and then disapprove of it. Oseman is telling is This is Not Our World, even if once it was.
nicktomjoe 