You're looking for answers...

Back in the days before people realized Cassandra Cla(i)re was a plagiarizing fraud and her Big Name Fan self-creation still held its pristine shape, I think everyone knew that she drew from certain well-known sources. I recall knowing that she would draw certain lines from popular media (BtVS is one I remember) and would assign new context to those lines, recycling them for use to further a plot about entirely different characters. To be honest, I don't think many people in fandom have a problem with that particular kind of intertextual borrowing at all. Of course, I think anyone who knows CC's story there might be a bit trigger-shy to straight lift dialogue anymore which is probably for the creative-best of everyone involved. Even still, how many times have you seen a particularly moving quote from a show plastered over gifs from a different show which then get copied and recycled again by someone who was completely unfamiliar with the original context? It's quite a lot. And I don't think it, in and of itself, is a bad thing in transformative fan media which is making comment on the present pop culture canon at large.

That said, I find that when I am in a mode where I am writing and creating a lot, I have something like Primary Source Fandoms and Reference Material Fandoms. There are those fandoms I write content for, and then there are things which I enjoy and think about a lot which seem less accessible in some way, less like there is a lot to say about them in traditional fannish ways.

The first four series of the UK version of Skins is an example of one of those latter types. I watched it when I was 18 or 19 for the first time. At the time, I was still teenager enough to relate to it on the level that I think it was intended to be taken in. Over time, the series has held up as a spectacle which contains varying degrees of horror as a teacher, as a grown up, and as a person who has been through more things than I had been at the start.

Skins is the repeated story of British college students during their last two years of education. It involves them doing a lot of terrible, ill-advised, illegal, shitty things over and over and over and picking up the pieces. It feels very real at times, but it feels exaggerated beyond what any reasonable person could ever survive without at the very least facing very long-lasting repercussions for it more than some of the characters do.

Sometimes I wonder what, exactly, the intent behind the series was. I completely lost interest at the conclusion of Effy's story because I wasn't invested in starting over again with a whole new cast after the emotional investment I had in the first two generations. Freddie's murder was stomach-turning and unfair enough to make me drop it. I did eventually watch Skins Fire, but I never got around to watching the last two concluding specials.

It feels, on the one hand, like another teenage soapy drama about people being terrible to each other for the cathartic intensity and release it gives the audience. However, there are times when it seems to reach and to speak beyond its own level, particularly in the characters of Effy and Tony. I feel like that in order to do this justice, I would have to make multiple posts, but I just felt impressed upon to take note of how strange and compelling I find them.

I would definitely not be the first person to point out the almost incestuous affection they seem to have for one another that is, in fact, textually acknowledged. However, I oten think that this is the outcome rather than the cause of how messed up they both are. One of the things that stands out to me with Effy, Tony, Cassie, and Michelle, off the top of my head, is a theme that has troubled me ever since I read the first Mists of Avalon book as a young teen and tried to begin reading the second one.

There is a certain critical commentary on the parents in Skins. It is not that they are false characters or idiots for the sake of being idiots as many parents are in teen-fiction. Rather, it seems like there is this pervasive theme of parents who are too wrapped up in their own lives, their own interests, their own sex and love lives, and so on, to even be fully aware of their children's problems.

Cassie's parents flaunt their sexual love for each other in front of their children in a way that is passively abusive in the name of their sort of free-love, artistic lifestyle. One can see their influence on Cassie's aesthetic and also their devastating obliviousness to her mental health. Michelle is probably the most well-adjusted of all the Skins characters in the end, and yet her mother has married a man who is only ten years older than she is who is devastatingly immature and her daughter is fully aware that there is a sexual motivation behind it. Then, Effy and Tony's parents carry on with a third degree of this which they try to hide from their children but not very effectively in the first generation before their eventual divorce int he second. It shows that all of these things impact kids, even when they're big Grown Up teenagers, and I find it haunting beyond words. Parents should still be able to be their own people, but while a person has dependent children there is a certain necessary dampening of one's own flame, least where one's children's best interests are concerned.

Effy and Tony are the strangest examples of this, and the way in which they are written feels like it wants to grasp out toward Shakespearean tragedy or mythological implications. They are both the product of a middle class, typical home, and yet their souls are too dark for containment. They only understand each other, and they belong together in a way that neither of them can say for their romantic interests. I don't even really know what to do with what the text of the show, any fandomy thoughts aside, was trying to DO with this.

It is haunting to see the way their relationship is presented. In a way, they are the healthiest when they are together, and yet their sacredness to each other is something they hardly learn to share at all. Even the slightest bit of it is a painful metamorphosis for them that terrifies and nearly kills them both.

I'm not even sure what the point of this post is except to put a pin in this topic that feels almost too heavy for casual words.