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kalluun-patangaroa · 5 years ago

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Suede: 'Everyone wants us to be tragic, cold and romantic'

The fans say they're too happy, but Suede have moved on. That's no bad thing, says Simon Price

The Independent on Sunday, 29 September 2002

This is a little known ANM era interview with Brett and Mat that appeared in The Independent on Brett’s 35th birthday. Since the interviewer was Simon Price, expect quality content here.

'I'm in a straitjacket that I've made for myself," he says. "I get bored of having to be this alternative poet, this sort of dark, Byronesque figure sitting in the shadows being slightly troubled..." A decade ago, that dark, Byronesque figure captivated a generation – or at least, a subset of one – with the gleeful perverseness of Suede's eponymous 1993 debut and the gothic melodrama of its 1994 successor, Dog Man Star. The pallid, black-clad lad with the cheekbones and the lustrous fringe became a figurehead for an entire youth tribe.

Ten years on, Brett Anderson gazes out of his Notting Hill window and ponders the expectations which still beset him. It's been building for a while. By 1996, the time of Suede's third album, the pop-friendly, anthem-packed Coming Up, the dark Byronesque figure was dead, replaced by a new, smiling, dancing, invigorated Brett. At that time, dissent was crushed under a wave of Britpop optimism, but their fourth, 1999's Head Music, was roundly panned by fans, mainly for being too damn happy.

Even Anderson's physical appearance is subject to critical scrutiny: there was recently an outcry among the faithful when he was seen sporting a suntan and a blond hairdo (it's now a more Pre-Raphaelite russet). A permanent tension seems to exist between the Brett Anderson that thousands of Suedeheads want him to be, and the Brett Anderson that he wants to be.

"I'm not really sure what person I want to be," he says. "It's probably the whole thing of me not being a sickly boy any more. It's been over-emphasised, because it's only a matter of tiny degree, and I don't have any intention of becoming some brainless prat who spends all his time skiing either. I do feel restricted sometimes. I feel as though a lot of the hardcore fans... are obsessed with Suede returning to Dog Man Star, to be tragic, cold, dark, poetic and romantic. And yes, Suede will always be all those things, but the last thing I want is to return to those times, personally or professionally... Around Dog Man Star, we were dark, fucked-up loonies. We were fucking insane."

Tomorrow, Suede's fifth album, New Morning, will be released. It won't do much to please the misery fetishists: the original working title was Instant Sunshine. This, explains bassist Mat Osman, Suede's other founder member and the band's designated Funny One, had a lot to do with the circumstances in which it was made. Recording began in a countryside retreat during the summer of 2000. "It was very blissful, mellow, laid back, and that comes through in the music. I think Suede have always been associated with being cold, paranoid and urban, but this has a more pastoral feel. We played a lot of football, did a lot of cycling. It was quite bizarre."

Suede? Cycling? Football? Shattered myths all over the place!This rural idyll was abandoned, however, when it became clear that the songs they'd written, which were "very songwriterly, very structured", were incompatible with Beck producer Tony Hoffer, who they had hired to expand on the dance elements they had dabbled with on Head Music. According to some reports, the entire album was scrapped, at a cost of £1m, and started from scratch.

"It's pretty much true," confirms Osman. "Except the amount of money. It didn't cost a million pounds, that's a complete lie."

"I don't think we're at our best," Anderson continues, "when we're thinking too much. Our best records are quite instinctive. I'd like to make a record that is solidly more experimental. I have no intention of Suede turning into some worthy, dull band. But this time we were trying to weld a sound to the songs, and it didn't work." With disarming humour and humility, the band will be making the aborted songs available to download by anyone who buys the album. "There's always a danger when fans hear about alternate versions, they'll think, 'Oh, Suede with the guy who did Beck, it must be amazing.' Hopefully they won't then go, 'This is a load of crap, isn't it?' because obviously it's a load of crap. That's why we didn't release it."

Suede returned to the city, moved into a studio in Hammersmith, and started again with a more traditional rock producer, Stephen Street (perhaps best known for his work with Suede's erstwhile arch-rivals Blur). "We did the album in eight weeks," says Osman, "which by Suede standards, is a blink of an eye."

When Suede bring out a new album, Brett invariably confesses that its predecessor was made in a drug haze, but this time around they're totally clean, honest guv. "Yeah," he smiles, "I know. It sounds like bullshit but it's actually true this time... There were a lot of drugs around during the making of Head Music. And indeed all of the albums. But not this one, and that is the truth." If anything, New Morning sounds as though it was made under the influence of love. The single, "Positivity", and the standout track, "Obsessions", are both hymns to an unnamed female, the latter song listing random attributes in a "Lady Is A Tramp" style: "It's the way you don't read Camus, or Bret Easton Ellis/ Yeah, the TCP you use, it stings when we kiss..."

"There's always a real person at the heart of my songs," says Anderson, "but you do start making things up about them. It always turns into a fantasy thing. Most of my songs are inspired by women. That's the way I am." Does the specific person usually recognise that it's them? "It's one of those vicious things where loads of people assume it's about them," Osman interjects. "Including people I've never met," Brett shudders.

Elsewhere, on tracks like "Beautiful Loser", "Street Life" and "Lonely Girls", Brett returns to a favourite theme: depicting the lives of an imagined community of bohemian outsiders, the same characters which populated "Trash" and even "The Drowners".

"I don't try and consciously create a blueprint for people's lives. But I was a lot more conscious back then of speaking to an alternative community of people which I was sure populated the world. I always think of the Suede community as being this international society of suburbanites and loners..." "This kind of mongrel nation," continues Osman, "which only exists at the gigs and on the net, who live in these forgotten half-arsed pathetic towns." If that mongrel nation will always haunt Brett with the Ghost of Anderson Past, a living reminder of the old days has recently popped up again. Bernard Butler, the former guitarist who departed acrimoniously in 1994, has been making surprising overtures to the effect that he'd like to work with Anderson again in the future. What do Suede make of that? "It's been... very, very strange and very unlikely," says Osman. "He seems to have done the same thing with David (McAlmont) too, where they fell out and made up, so he's obviously had a change of heart about something. The one thing I didn't like was when he seemed to write off everything we'd done, which was a shame, because we did make some great records. I think it's cool that he actually seems... kind of proud of it now, whereas I don't think he did before. But what he's actually doing... I'm not quite sure." Meanwhile, Anderson taps his teeth with his knuckle, and says absolutely nothing.

'New Morning' is released tomorrow on Epic records

(x)

#suede #press #the independent #2002 #anm

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sarasmallmanwrites · 5 years ago

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A-Level Playing Field

Nobody wanted my opinion on this, but it’s hard growing up poor.

1988. It’s that damp kind of evening outside, clouded by condensation on the single glazed windows, and the smoke from my Nan’s Benson and Hedges. We’ve just had tea – this is North, of course – and everything is accompanied by slices of springy bread heavily lacquered in ‘soft spread’. The gold foiled butter is, usually, saved for my grandad, who works at a fibreglass factory. It’s a very long way away (actually 3.7 miles) and he leaves on his bike every evening with three rounds of tinned ham sandwiches in his bag. Tonight, my mum is out until half nine, working in the care home in the next town, picking me up at ten-ish, depending on how fast she walks. My mum is 27. Five years out of a loveless marriage, living in a council house, she has no qualifications but is working for her City and Guilds and her English ‘O-Level’, GCSEs haven’t hit our vocabulary yet, and won’t until my second cousin Mark does his two years later.

Tonight is Thursday. Nan goes out on a Thursday, which means she will leave the house at half seven in a haze of Vitapoint, Elnett and Lily of the Valley, to play Bingo at the local club. I am being looked after by Alan, my mum’s younger brother, living at home, working in the Mill that overlooks the town below like a stern Victorian overseer. He’s always grumpy, stuck in a town that has no opportunities, and no visible exit. The eighties have been cruel to young, working-class men. The vehement cry of ‘get the fuck out’ hasn’t reached our town but will do in eight years time, on a wave of Britpop, New Labour, cigarettes, and alcohol.

My uncle looks to the television for nightly escape. Thursday is Blackadder, it’s Not The Nine O’Clock News, it’s Comic Strip, it’s A Bit of Fry and Laurie, it’s Red Dwarf, it’s shipwrecked and comatose, and me engrossed on the couch, not sipping mango juice, but milky tea (the North!), as my uncle laughs his head off in between cigarettes. My mum returns, smelling like TCP and the outside, with salty, vinegary chips, and we eat them as we walk the newly tarmacked paths under the orange street lights. I ask her what a goldfish shoal is. She tells me to shush.

I decided that weekend that I wanted to be funny. I mean I could make people laugh when I did my Cilla Black impression, so surely that was a start, and thank to Carry On films I was brilliant at ‘Infamy, Infamy!’, I knew this because my grandad (the cleverest man I knew) had told me so. Even though I was only in Junior One, I knew that you had to be taught how to be funny, that there was definitely some kind of class that you would have to take to learn it, because I had never really been a natural at anything; apart from whistling, which I did with gusto in shrill, high- pitched tones wherever I could.

I read a lot, especially the paper – particularly the Daily Mirror, which probably explains why I am always heavily weighted to the left, and not just because of my ineptitude in heels – and found out that Hugh Laurie, who is obviously the funniest man I have ever encountered, went to Cambridge and was in something called ‘The Footlights’. Then was it, I decided. I was going to go to Cambridge and join ‘The Footlights’ and be funny like Victoria Wood and Dawn French. I imagine ‘The Footlights’ to be a rag-tag theatrical group living on their wits, humour, and more importantly, Pot Noodles. I tell my Grandad that I want to go to Cambridge. He tells me not to be daft.

Now, when I think about it, wanting to go to Cambridge was not a preposterous idea for any child at the age of seven; you are at the start of your education journey. There is plenty of time to get better at things, to practice, to be coached, to improve yourself; but for a working-class girl, who would eventually be the first member of her family to go to university, I might as well have said that I wanted to fly to Mars on fairy wings. But, children who attend private schools are told from the age of four that Oxford or Cambridge are the end goals for their education, with any of the higher-performing Russell Group universities being something that they could settle for, at a push. I didn’t even know what a Russell Group University was until about three years ago, and why would I? For me, in my small artsy primary school with forty children across four year groups, a dismissive attitude towards formal English education, and a liberal fancy for devoting the whole of the summer term to the end of year show, this was not something that was even thought about. Oxford and Cambridge were places printed on the back of books, they weren’t places that you went to university. In fact, most of my primary school teachers hadn’t even been to university but received their qualifications at the local teacher training college; the only exception is a brown jumpered gentleman with a penchant for using cupboards as a disciplinary technique.

We’ll skip forward a few years later, and high school is a vigorous mixing bowl of talents, it takes until at least year nine before anyone even notices who I am amongst the squall of kids churning about in KS3. Dinner is pink sausage meat wrapped in a translucent puff pastry duvet, a treat even on the hottest days when the fat sticks to your lips; and the terms pass in a haze of cheap cider (the kind that tastes like sick), the floral pout of Cherry Lypsyl, and Chris Evans on the Radio One Breakfast Show; who is hastily snoozed every morning before I smell the lukewarm coffee my mum has left by my bed before she goes to work. At this point my mum is a newly qualified nurse at the hospice two towns over, her fingers raw from hand sanitiser, but with rolls of antiseptic scented micropore tape that I use for a cacophony of projects. She is on nights right now, spooning gravelly granules of instant coffee into a mug, blurry from sleep, I am cobbling together a mask out of old Cornflake packets, stuck together with nursing supplies and painted with nail varnish that went past its best around the same time as the Thompson Twins. It is 1995, and the country feels like it is on the cusp of something. I don’t know what, but I’m looking forward to the Year 2000 because I will be fully grown. Well, nineteen.

But what about Oxbridge? Well, for starters, if you attend a state school you have to be so immediately impressive to your teachers that they discuss you in the staffroom. It’s not enough to be good at one particular thing, you have to excel across the board. You have to be so amazingly shiny, that even the most jaded teacher in the school cannot fail to be dazzled by your brightness. For state school kids, Oxbridge is not something that they suggest to the average 10 A*-C kids, it’s not something that they even dangle in front of 10 A*-B kids who are pretty good. At state school, you have to be exceptional for your teachers to even consider you as a candidate, and then you have to achieve enough A*s in your GCSEs that you might as well open a Planetarium. Even then, all they can really do is say ‘I think you could go to Oxford or Cambridge, you know’, or flag you up to the local authority careers service as ‘potential Oxbridge’. There is no Oxford Fast Track programme in state schools, even for exceptional kids.

In a recent social media fracas, one lady proclaimed that if you gave kids a level playing field then poor kids would always triumph because they were more resilient - all those Crispy Pancakes, surely? But for children from a working-class background, we’re not even on the playing field yet; we have to borrow trainers with non-marking soles, scrape around for a quid for the bus. By the time we get to the playing field, we have already been running around for half the day trying to get there, we miss the warm-up because we were late and, honestly, by this point, we’re just knackered because we’ve had to work so much harder just to get there in the first place.

The warm-up is a given to those whose parents have been able to pay for their education – they even get complimentary orange slices for afterwards, just for extra pep and vigour. There are Oxbridge prep classes, extracurricular activities slanted towards the Oxbridge admissions interviews, and chances to take unpaid internships during the summer using family connections. It’s not just that though... it’s little things like knowing it’s pronounced ��Barkshire’, not Berkshire, it’s when you use a napkin, it’s spending a week skiing at Courchevel. It’s olives.

In 1998, I don’t know any of these things and, even if I did, my accent with its flat vowels and its Lancashire intonation would give me away in a heartbeat, because I sound like I’ve fallen off a pit pony on my way back t’mill. Things change quickly though. My mum has a baby. A screaming, mewling little boy born during The Simpsons on a Friday evening in October. Now there is absolutely no money for luxuries, and when our TV gets nicked, we end up using the small portable from upstairs. My Nan lends me money here and there to get to college, but it only covers the bus fare, and the small endowment that I receive - supposedly to cover driving lessons - gets swallowed up with everyday things that seventeen-year olds shouldn’t have to pay for. I’m working for 4 hours a week in Woolies too, £3.10 p/h to stand around the toy department in a slippery polyester blouse the colour of synthetic mint ice cream, before skulking off to the bookshop to spend that money on things for college. Nothing fancy but, by this point, I am well on my way to being a ‘Funny Girl’, studying a raft of ‘arty-farty’ A-Levels and English thrown in for good measure. The Cambridge Footlights hardly crosses my mind anymore, because Oxford and Cambridge are reserved for the kids doing the hard sciences, maths, law, politics, things that you need a calculator for. You don’t get into Oxford with A-Levels in Theatre Studies, Media, and Performing Arts, despite what they tell you about diversity.

Oxford or Cambridge do not offer a typical British university experience, and how can teachers who have never passed through the rigorous and exhausting Oxbridge admissions procedure be expected to offer any kind of advantage to their gifted and talented students? If you are a working-class parent relying on underfunded, underpaid and overworked FE lecturers to help coach your child through this, then you are immediately on the backfoot compared to a child whose parents can afford private tutors, admissions booklets, and interview coaches. This is no reflection on sixth form teachers in FE establishments across the country, who do all they can to nurture the kids with Oxbridge potential, but when some classes haven’t received new textbooks for two years, where students are encouraged to photocopy their own materials to save costs, you can see where the class difference begins to draw attention to itself without the need for neon yellow highlighters.

My UCAS book arrived in September; an impressive, thinly papered tome with a glossy black and white cover, University Colleges and Admission Services stamped across it in orange. It smells like a cross between the Argos catalogue and a phone book, which I feel is rather apt given that it contains the codes of institutions and courses that will break me out of this godforsaken town: a cypher that I etch out on the application form in black biro.

London

Southampton

Buckinghamshire

Preston

Liverpool

Manchester.

I don’t want to go to any of the bottom three, of course, far too close to where I came from to be relevant. My second cousin Mark’s stint at Sheffield Hallam seemed to be an excuse for his mum to visit his ‘digs’ once a month with catering sized tins of Nescafe, and I would be lying if I said I wasn’t quite looking forward to edging the lid off with a knife and stabbing through that ridged foil. My mum writes a cheque out in her secondary modern handwriting, crossing her fingers that they won’t cash it until after payday.

The discrepancies between low-income working-class families and those with a better income also show here too - this can be something as simple as slow internet connection, not having a working laptop and doing work on smartphones, access to transport, costs for travel to visit universities. Things like this are not included when factoring in costs for students from low income. How can you visit all the different university campuses, with all the travel costs and maybe even overnight accommodation, when your parents can barely afford to keep the lights on? There was only one institution that I wanted to go to. London Institute, a glamourous collection of art colleges that included the London College of Fashion, Central St Martins, and, more importantly for me, The London College of Printing. The competition was fierce, but I was shortlisted for an interview in the capital with a former editor of the Daily Mirror. My house was showered in happy expletives that day. Even in 1999, tickets from Wigan to London were over £50 for a pre-booked return. My mum cashed in all of her Clubcard points for the ticket. But, just for me, because she hadn’t bought enough milk to cover the cost of two tickets. However, I must have impressed Tony Delano in that office in Clerkenwell, because he gave me an amazingly lowball offer meaning that my A-level results became a terribly graded self-fulfilling prophecy.

Oxford is different from usual universities in that there are colleges, thirty-nine in total. You might have seen them on University Challenge – Balliol, Trinity, Emmanuel, Brasenose – or from reading the Wikipedia pages of any of our last three Prime Ministers, including the incumbent Boris Johnson, who graduated with a 2:1 in 1987. That’s the other thing – you don’t study something at Oxford, you read it – you don’t start your studies, you matriculate, for which you need a robe. Now, I have been told by helpful and obstinate alumni via social media that Matriculation Robes are £25, ex-hire. However, I have also been told by a current Oxford student that the robe cost is £50 minimum, and no-one would dare wear a secondhand robe as ‘everyone would know’. It’s immediately singling yourself out as a Weasley in a room filled with Malfoys.

The accommodation costs are comparable to London prices; however, this does not cover the Christmas break, which means everything needs to be packed up and stored. Not only do you pay for the storage, but you pay for the boxes too. Much to my disappointment, no-one nips out for a Pot Noodle either, students are expected to dine ‘in hall�� (again, more cost!) where you can choose between an informal and a formal sitting – where your gown is required. I imagine for a working-class kid attending Oxford or Cambridge is very much like cosplaying on a Harry Potter set, but without the magic of a bottomless purse. There are balls too at the end of each term, formal affairs with ticket prices over £50. Again, said the former alumni, you don’t have to go! It’s not obligatory!

But let me tell you a harsh reality. Nothing ostracises a poor kid more than not being able to join in because they can’t afford it. Nothing. And we might have great friends who would all chip in and pay for our ticket, or lend us the money, but there is something very working-class about not wanting people to know that we can’t afford it. Surely we should not be asking these young adults who have studied and worked against all odds, to have a second class university experience because they know their parents won’t be able to help. You can’t even get a job to supplement your income either; the majority of colleges stipulate this, and as someone who had to work two term-time jobs at a much less prestigious university to live (even with the glorious student overdrafts of pre-austerity Britain), this really hit home at how much I would have struggled financially if I had gone to either of these institutions.

Recently my daughter applied for university. We get in the car and visit a university each week, driving miles up and down and across the country. We fight over choices and analyse each course based on employability, and whether or not she would like it. The process is completed in clicks and feels much more clinical than twenty years earlier, but rather than heading into unchartered waters, I have a map. It might be old and tattered, but I have a much better idea of where we are going now. My daughter believes that the meritocracy is a lie, and she tells me this in sharp, pointed tones as we receive her A-level results on a rainy Thursday morning. She goes to University in September and spends the autumn sending me videos of the Minster, or tutorials on how to swear in Japanese. She is only the second person in our family to continue on to higher education. I don’t just mean in her generation. I mean in total. We are the exception, not the rule.

One of the first questions someone at Oxford was asked by a fellow student last year was ‘private or state’, she replied ‘private’ and was met with a smile. There was no need to ask who the state school entrant was, as she queried the partridge and asparagus served for dinner – ‘this chicken is tough. Is that grass?’- and arrived for the formal sitting with her gown covering a denim skirt and shimmery top underneath. Private school teaches these things, no desperate faux pas for Isobel or Jeremy, whereas state schools do not have the resources or the knowledge to run classes on etiquette for the small number of their students that make it through the intense application procedures. This is not saying that low-income children should be discouraged – not at all – instead, it is saying that there is something inherently wrong with the system. At private school, you are disappointed if you don’t get into Oxbridge, whereas the state school child who gets in is an extraordinary anomaly talked about for years in hushed tones of reverence by the faculty.

And this is the issue with saying that children are on a level playing field, that everyone is measured on their own merit; because it is not true. For children on very low incomes, the odds are unfairly stacked against them, and the issues such as 2020’s disastrous A-Level results just add more bricks to an already near-insurmountable wall.

#opinion #exams #growinguppoor #lowincome #councilestate #councilestatekids #alevels #nineties #Oxbridge

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unproduciblesmackdown · 5 years ago

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i'm here for your Jare and Lana Thoughts

hmm i’m not good at like, coming up with concrete ideas/hcs, or at recalling anything, but yeah they should get to be friends

i mean we don’t know that alana has Any friends, and really even pre-act 2, evan is not an amazing friend to jared, and even if things were better re: that relationship, it’s not really ideal to for jared to have one single friend anyways.......and, again, evan’s not exactly the perfect friend and like, even though i think anyone taking any real note of the material realizes that jared and evan’s relationship being not very close or great at this juncture is a two-way street, it’s easily arguable that evan’s a worse friend to jared in canon than jared is to him. so like, if jared’s gonna have One Friend lol tbh it would be great if he and alana could become friends and like, have someone to hang out with and just have a chill time being Not Alone for once and not having to feel like they have to be maintaining this perfect performance at all times or be dropped

really like it’s a great concept to just imagine them getting to spend time together doing totally unremarkable average Hanging Out stuff.......do homework together sometimes instead of alone in their respective bedrooms, spend time together on the weekend and play video games / watch a movie, just do some chill shit that gives them the chance to have conversations and share interests and personal info and just like, get used to feeling more relaxed in this person’s presence and like this is a real friendship......maybe they spend time together in canon doing tcp stuff ever but we were never shown it, and that’s a bit of a transition from being mostly strangers (distant acquaintances) to being Sort Of friends / at least being more familiar with each other......and maybe they can become closer After the tcp heyday, like, presumably in the timeskip-and-beyond part of things.....like, yeah there's the issue of everything that happened re: tcp and how jared knows more about the inside story while maybe alana just suspects, and natch i don't think jared would be willing to share that Inside Story if only because we all know that he and evan are mutually protecting each other forever, but also i don't think that like, thoroughly discussing the tcp stuff is absolutely crucial to jared and alana getting to be friends. for one thing, they probably can't have gotten That close during tcp, since by act 2 jared is apparently not super involved, and for another thing i think by the finale times both alana and jared might Both just be wanting to pretty much like, move on from all the tcp stuff.

also like, really i don't remember if jared's Extracurriculars like model u.n. was from pre-bway content and/or if it was from "cherrypicking anything worthwhile from the novel" content lol, but also stuff like being a camp counselor can't be completely effortless, and as someone who isn't too close to his parents and for whomst, at least at one point, theoretically, his car insurance being paid was tied to him doing stuff his mom wants him to do e.g. Be Nice To Evan, i get the idea that maybe jared does some academic / extracurricular stuff at least partially with the motivation of staying in the good graces of his parents and other adults / being Approved of via those routes of like, performing well at various Set Tasks like "get good grades" "be in model u.n." "be nice to evan, theoretically, according to jared himself" and etc........anyways this is a really roundabout way to get to "alana might be engaged in like, structured / approved Tasks as a means to being supported, not in the exact same way as jared is but with enough of a parallel that he Understands it".....like, i think yeah we can deduce that alana is kind of Studious or at least cares about her academic performance, but people like, forget that she's Not just doing everything for her college applications, and that most of what the focus is on is alana doing Extracurricular stuff that's more involved with / focused on Local Community than just like, school......she's talking about what she did over the summer, which is sure inherently Not stuff for school, and tcp is only partly about the school, and isn't Academic.......alana probably sees Community Involvement as a means to support / connection / positive attention, which is a bit different from jared who like, yeah might be kinda on that wavelength in Disappear thru Ywbf, but also it might be mostly "oh i can be in this group with evan and alana"......jared mostly seems to regard Attention From Anyone Else as something potentially negative, even though of course he doesn't want to Not get any attention, so on the one hand he's trying to get ahead of that Potential Negative Attention by trying to establish his own Role as [i'm the jokes boy] and be able to Deflect attention away from himself, or at least from whatever aspects of himself he doesn't want to have anyone focus on / question, and he seems to have an even more Defensive approach re: adults (i.e. "literally nothing i tell my parents is true") and it's easy to imagine that he sees it as like, as long as he Does This Checklist of Tasks He's Supposed To Do, e.g. "get decent grades" / "do some extracurriculars (i'm just remembering model u.n. was from Prior Versions Of The Show b/c it was related to that perjury thing and being the ambassador of luxembourg)" / etc and Adults Will Leave Him Alone Entirely Maybe........alana of course doesn't really wanna be left alone, but also she's more focused on her Peers than adults as well, ppl mischaracterizing her as like, only caring about grades & Rules & generally being a killjoy.........but natch if she Is trying to get good grades and Is involving herself in a lot of projects academic or extracurricular or unaffiliated with school at all, and there's gonna be more Work involved in that, and probably hanging out with her will involve doing work Parallel to each other, or at least, alana doing work while you do whatever.......and i think jared would Get that and wouldn't be like, "why are you boring" lol......out here down to bond with evan over basically a writing project......having Computer Skills which he presumably honed / hones on his own time.........this is a mess but im basically getting to "jared wouldn't think alana is boring or anything and would understand pursuing Something through the routes of Projects and Commitments and Approved Activities" look i'm phrasing everything terribly but if i don't just get shit down i'll never answer this ask

meanwhile i think alana would think jared is funny, which is nice b/c despite jared trying to be Humorous evan doesn't act very interested or like he's like "jared you're hilarious and i love that about you" lmao like. obviously people interpret jared's Attitude as like omg so uncaring he has no feelings he also has no problems b/c he Takes Nothing Seriously (which obviously. Humor / demeanor doesn't necessarily reflect taking whatever "seriously" or not.) and maybe evan's misinterpreting it too, but even if he Knows better re: how jared really feels about things, he's not exactly trying to engage with him about it any other way, so.......anyways alana thought connor's terrible joke from probably a while back is funny so. she'd probably Genuinely be like "haha good one jared" and jared would get to be like :o :o :o whoa i made a joke and someone reacted......natch jared's also just trying to like, Provoke evan into paying attention to him sometimes with his Humour / being able to comment on Real Shit without giving away his Real Feelings but like, probably not the ideal form of communication, and jared's out here @ connor like "it was a joke" so he'd probably be fine if any other students like, reacted to his jokes as jokes.........and alana could. also she might Joke sometimes in return lol

there Is that bit of an issue where yeah alana having a tendency to just Take The Lead on things where jared has a tendency to just like, back off if he isn't expressly given space in the first place or if he's pushed back, and this isn't Ideal obviously but like, he and alana don't have to interact via Working On Projects Together alone, especially not tcp, and it'd be an inherently different dynamic if they were interacting solely due to being Friends / wanting to hang out for no especial reason vs interacting to work on something together........and i don't think alana would Want a friendship to be the same as "someone she works on a project with" like, as far as we know in canon, alana only has Acquaintances and jared ends up losing his one friend, so i think if alana and jared become closer later on / start this new Actual Friendship between themselves, alana wouldn't want it to feel the same as like, being involved in tcp together (and neither would jared), and i also don't think jared would necessarily want it to feel like his friendship with evan, which natch wasn't going great, particularly not in those final months l o l .......even though both of them being Friendless would probably make them somewhat eager to make One Friend, they both got burned by their attempts to Get Closer To People (or A Person in jared's case lol) ("everyone needed it for something" like okayyy if you say so, guess we Are just forgetting about alana and jared's existence), and they might not exactly be raring to go about [Obtaining Friendship] the same way again. and since they both had a pretty Transactional approach to getting positive attention (i.e. jared helping evan out and doing shit for him, alana doing the same and presumably doing the bulk of the tcp work when evan ingeniously held jared at arm's length instead of having him more involved but then kind of peaced out of the project himself) it'd probably be nice for alana to have someone who seems to like being around her without it being due to any of the work she does / has done, whereas jared probably doesn't wanna be The Guy Who Helps Out and is only talked to for that purpose..............and them both having a friend who they Didn't make / keep via their respective wtaw-type approaches to things is probably gonna be encouraging re: the fact that yknow, they don't have to put on that certain Performance of what they think people might want from them / people might find Acceptable from them........and of course if they spend more time together they'll get more used to the other / learn about them, and probably ~Learn About Themselves~ since they're finally getting to like, Not be putting on a performance for someone / feeling like they have to play some specific role to be liked or whatever

and like, alana isn't just all Boring and incapable of having fun or comprehending what that is........i like soph's hc that she loves karaoke, jared could tag along and be the audience lol and it's just like, hey we can just have fun together doing shit for fun and not like, feeling like you're having to prove your worth to the other person all the time, just having some confidence that the other person likes you for who you are and they can relax and actually enjoy it

naturally i like the idea that alana and jared become friends (or better friends) in college........the rest of senior year has to be Not A Great Time and just generally more fraught than usual for them, and they could stand to have the summer before college to kinda take a breath (but also maybe feel worried about college) but then yknow once college starts they're In college and it's different from hs (and better), and it being a Different environment with Different people and a Different structure can also help them just like, get more comfortable with themselves and maybe (hopefully) feel more capable of pursuing stuff they really wanna do and just overall be having a better time than, say, in senior year of high school.....would sure be convenient if they went to the same one of course. lol. hang out all the time on campus / between classes, go to Social Occasions together, be in the same dorm / just keep hanging out at each other's, etc

also just like, on its own, i always like the idea of jared also being able to Make Friends / have decent, positive, accepting Social Interactions via joining a club / being involved in some extracurricular type shit, where he Can be comfortable like "oh i'm here to Do Some Tasks so i get to be part of this group of people just by signing up, not by everyone else deciding they want me around" and then yknow, be spending time with this group of people that way, end up hanging out at various points kind of branching off of whatever Tasks are being done, and sort of gradually realize that people Don't Dislike him and can then catch on that maybe he has some potential friends here.........it's fun to think of him doing like, tech work for theatre, and also in the midst of all these theatre people he can like, fully realize Oh I'm Gay (and maybe get to fully process what went down there re: evan and his own Heartbreak there, like the fact that it Was heartbreak).......and to add the idea of Alana Being Friends with him during college, maybe a) she can hang out over in the theatre area sometimes while he's doing whatever and work on her own stuff but also get to interact with everyone else who might be around and b) if he gets any comp tickets she can get one and c) idk she can maybe also be Directly involved in helping out sometimes......

and also anyways getting all the way to This Point in the answer before mentioning that like, of course both jared and alana are gay and maybe haven't figured this out entirely by the events of Canon but sure could during college and could be each other's Supportive Friend, naturally if one of them figures it out first the other one is like wow great i'm such an Ally of that, boy it feels really great to Know i have a gay friend actually, b/c i'm Such An Ally......and then figuring it out for themself as well lmao like aha. hope they don't think i'm copying them lol...........also the one Jared And Alana "Dating" idea i permit is that maybe back in the day when neither of them were Aware of their own gayness they like, vibed with each other and were like "hmm is this Having A Crush?" and "dated" awkwardly for like a month or two or something (or less lol)......naturally they could've had this sort of experience with Anyone but like, the sort of underlying thing that the Affinity they mistook for "i wanna date this person" was them rly having the potential to be good friends and have a significant relationship that way. but then them having this real awkward "dating" experience probably would delay that for at least a little bit lmao like avoiding each other b/c even if it sure was just like, a not-that-dramatic mutual breakup, it's still uncomfortable and it's like "why didn't this work out at all"............but yeah the important part is they're gay and they're friends and if they are also good friends while they're figuring out the Being Gay stuff for themselves then that's just nice for them.....have this person be supportive and glad for you........

also and yknow there's the idea of "what if jared and evan start to make up in College Times and possibly kleinsen happens" and obviously being back in touch with evan would be both fraught for jared and alana even if they're in this place where it's easier to extend him some grace here, but they'd sure understand each other's misgivings and trepidation here even if they don't really lay out each and every Detail of like "yeah here's why and how i was hurt back in the day in tcp times".......and yknow, for jared it wouldn't have to be like "wow after i lost evan i've had No Friends and having him back in my life would mean i'm not completely alone anymore," which might help him take his time in contemplating / reflecting upon the situation lol. and who knows, alana might be down to accept an apology as well at least or something. but regardless of that concept Yeah jared and alana getting to be friends in college would be cool for both of them.

these are all broad sweeping concepts lmao instead of like any fun details or specific events / scenarios lol but yeah here are some Thoughts.......a real tl;dr is that it'd be nice if like, overall, both jared and alana felt like they had some more space in college to figure themselves out and feel less pressure to fit some precise role that will win them approval, and they find some Connection through each other and get to share that like, Figuring Themselves Out territory while being friends and getting some emotional support from each other, and they are gay

#deh #sorry this is kinda Especially this meandering mess lmao but hey....#had to just push through and get it out there or i wouldn't be able to answer at all lmao.......#i'm bad at [Having Ideas] [recalling ideas] [writing anything concisely].....#i mean feel free to send me asks about Whatever i love to interact but you know. they might be a mess &/or i take forever

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