#3am heathers essay yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

[secretmellowblog]

I just listened to Heathers for the first time and my first coherent response to it (aka the reason it had me crying at 2am) was that the media circuses around the deaths of the high school students reminded me so strongly about how the U.S media covers mass shootings at schools. There's always widespread coverage of all the gory details of the tragedy followed by platitudes about "mental health" and "bullying" and vague promises of "making the world better" in some nebulous way-- all while praising the dead children for their "sacrifice." In Heathers, most of the people spreading these kinds of empty platitudes are the adults. The adults don't protect the children when they're alive and only acknowledge them when they're dead. And then the adults dehumanize the dead children and treat them as props-- as pathetic angels who sacrificed their lives to teach them saccharine generic moral lessons.

So there's no acknowledgement that the victims never wanted to be "sacrifices"-- and no one actually attempts to address the real reasons the deaths happened, or make any concrete changes that will prevent similar tragedies in the future. It's all hollow and the empty platitudes aren't an attempt to effect change but an attempt to maintain the status quo. The dead kids are all made into "necessary sacrifices that make us reflect on the value of life <3 and we need to talk more about mental health and bullying and being nice <333 " because it's easier to retroactively make children into martyrs than it is to accept that all the deaths could've been prevented. J.D.'s rage-induced decision at the end of the musical is to massacre the entire school, because he notices that adult society only cares about 'protecting' schoolkids when they're dead and they can talk about how their deaths "Really Teach Them Lessons." But JD's plan would have failed even if he had "succeeded," because adult society wouldn't care about the death of an entire school any more than it cared about the death of one girl. If he'd succeeded the result would've been....mass death, media coverage, empty hollow platitudes, adults ranting on about how "they've Really Learned Something," and then no meaningful change. This is just my first knee-jerk reaction to the musical but yeah. Whatever its flaws, I really think it captures something of the Rage you feel as a kid when you see adults sanctimoniously going on about how "the Deaths of Children In Schools Have Taught Us Important Lessons" while refusing to actually do things that would protect the still-living children around them.