The Islander – Part 2: The Fantasy

Part 2:

I see in Ollie, my 6 years old, the fantasies of my childhood. Like Ollie, when I was a child, my fantasies were those of Disney movies, superheroes and Lego sets. I would create complex stories an scenarios to process the world around me and escape with a sense of creation and control that often feels out of reach to children. In Star Wars films, comics books, I was able to replay and deconstruct human interactions and through fantasy figure out what reality was, could, and meant to my experience as a human being.

As I got older, a different kind of fantasy entered my life.

When I watched my favorite cartoon, Batman: The Animated Series. I would follow up watching this show with playing with my toys and pretending in playgrounds that I was Batman. However, I never had any illusions that I could ever actually be Batman. I  was keenly aware even as a child that as much fun it was to pretend to be Batman, this was a fantasy that could never play out.

As I got older into my teenage year and my thoughts about my future came to the fore, I found myself watching less cartoons and got into two other shows that became my favorites, The Wonder Years and Boy Meets World. Unlike my fantasies around superheroes, I didn’t see these shows as unrealistic depictions of what my life could be like, instead I saw these fantasies as realities to pursue.



In the 1990s an explosion in teen-centric culture occurred in popular music, television shows, and films. While there were many shows like Buffy, The Vampire Slayer that addressed issues related to the high school experience with thought, and insights (albeit in a genre which included vampires, with actors who were not teenager).



Other art, like the numerous teen-sploitation films (She’s All That was great, but many were horrible) added to a distorted caricature of high school that is more dramatic, less diverse, over-sexualized, and wholly unrealistic. But my classmates and I didn’t realize that as we moved through middle school and created goals, and priorities for our high school reality, the fantasies we were consuming.

The drama, the independence, and to my male cis-gendered, heterosexual teenage mind, the sexual dynamics and expressions of masculinity that I now understand as destructive, seemed attractive, and in some ways was seductive.

This confusion set up my generation to pursue unrealistic fantasies that come into conflict with a better, more meaningful and realistic reality. Instead of caring and focusing on friends who were real, we pursued friends we thought we should have. Instead of expressing joy in what we loved to do, we pretended to like what we felt would help us fit in, and instead of embracing and celebrating diversity, we fought for a status quo to bring us predictability and comfort at the cost of our self-esteem.

This tension didn’t always end up negatively, but it had to be overcome to accomplish positivity for ourselves and our community.

Unfortunately this pursuit of unrealistic fantasies wasn't limited to my high school...