The Gen Z Tendency of Coming-Of-Age During an Apocalypse by Shayla Trautsch

Every generation has their staple coming-of-age movies; a perfect reflection of the assumed anxieties of youth, and in turn, the anxieties of the parents. My Gen X parents grew up with Stand By Me (1986) and The Breakfast Club (1985). Stand By Me is about a group of kids that go looking for the dead body of a stranger they heard died near their homes, simply out of curiosity. It’s about young boys learning about the darkness of the world and in each other's lives and coping with it by standing together. For parents, this might reflect the anxieties of the futility of shielding your kid from the world. The Breakfast Club is also a movie about setting aside differences and standing together, challenging cliques and systemic conflicts. It’s about prioritizing big pictures.

My generation, Gen Z, grew up with coming-of-age stories born out of mass futility, apocalypses, and end-of-the-world bucket lists. We have TV shows like Daybreak (2019) about high schoolers finding their place in the world in a zombie apocalypse, and manga series like Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead (2018) which follows a young man being taken advantage of by his employer and finding agency again in yet another zombie hellscape. It’s just us in a sea of impossibility, and the escapism is dressed up as total ruin and reform, our own personal dangerous sandbox.

Spontaneous (2020) came out during the peak of the pandemic when I was a high school junior. It's about a high school senior class that literally spontaneously combusts. Very graphically, like blood-filled water balloons. It started with one student and was treated like an isolated incident before it started happening to more students of the same graduation class. That senior class, or who remained, were then quarantined and heavily researched, locked away from their families and treated like guinea pigs. It’s about grief and coping with sudden unforeseen trauma. This horror comedy shows the fragility of the coming-of-age experience in the face of pure unadulterated existentialism. There’s always going to be some sort of unforeseen interruption: love, tragedy, death, indulgence, etc. At the end of the day, everything must resume, even if there’s nothing to go back to. What’s particularly interesting about this movie is that it takes away the idea of having faith in the future. Furthermore, that faith is redirected to living out of spite, out of the feeling of being owed something that could be stripped away from you at any minute. It challenges the “grass is always greener on the other side” and laces it with “this grass is dead under my feet, but it's still my damn grass."

The F***-it List (2020) is very similar in its takeaway philosophy, combating the idea that at some point of growing up, it's too late to live for yourself. While Spontaneous centers on aiming to live long-term and keeping working towards goals even if you believe you could die any second, The F***-it List centers on living-it-up in the present, but still circling back to ground yourself in building a life you can be proud of. It follows a high school senior guy who never really went to parties and prioritizes studying and grades over establishing interpersonal relationships and having fun. While his parents were proud of their son being accepted by several high-end colleges, he felt aimless and driven only by expectations. He becomes an unwilling participant in a senior class prank that goes horribly and blows up the entire school. While no one got hurt, he took the sole blame for the incident and everything he had worked for up to that point was suddenly gone. He ends up having a melt-down and posts a “f***-it list” for himself on social media while he was drunk and it goes viral. There’s more to it than that, but ultimately this movie plays off of the fear of long-haul ambition being for nothing. It challenges the narrative of what people need to do to be successful, and most importantly, to be happy. It emphasizes the materialism of systemic accomplishments, and while it doesn’t completely strip away their value, it does argue that there’s far more to life than “winning.” He thought his world was ending, and that’s what allowed him to fearlessly and shamelessly branch out. All or nothing. Even though the movie focuses on throwing caution to the wind, it still acknowledges the natural consequences, but he can feel like those consequences are truly his and not just the backlash of someone else’s.  

In the age of regurgitated hopecore, and the broadening of the cliché spectrum, it’s refreshing to see something so bleak. It's unapologetically bleak, and yet empowering because we can still make our mark in a zombie wasteland. We can still fight for something we may never achieve, because the fight by itself is worth fighting for. It’s rewarding to feel progression in the now, even if the end destination is just an abstract concept. It’s about finding a way to be happy just doing, living, creating, and surviving.

Petscop and Alternative Story Telling by Hunter Sheffer

As an English Literature major, I have spent countless hours reading and analyzing literary canon. While I love most of the works I’ve read, growing up in an age where the internet is easily accessible has exposed me to alternate forms of media that I feel have similar value to commonly celebrated literature and film. While the tides are constantly shifting on what society deems artistically valuable, it seems that indie internet creations, like games, videos, or independent writing—while receiving more attention than before—are still not taken as seriously as their more conventional mediums. The main work that comes to my mind when thinking about nuanced internet art projects is Tony Domenico’s Petscop. 

Petscop is a YouTube horror web series that ran from March 12, 2017, to September 2, 2019. The series is presented through a series of 24 Let’s Plays—videos documenting a playthrough—of a fictional, unreleased PlayStation One game, Petscop. The main character, Paul, receives the game from a mysterious fictional company, Garalina. Initially, Petscop is presented as an innocent but strange puzzle and creature collecting game. However, after inputting a code found on the box, the game shifts to an eerie, almost Lynchian, level called “The Newmaker Plane.” As Paul explores The Newmaker Plane, he is confronted with the idea of “rebirthing” and a character named Marvin’s previous attempts to kidnap his daughter, Care, who he believes was his lost childhood friend reborn. As the plot plays out, Marvin, or an AI imitating Marvin, utilizes Paul and the game to reenact the process of rebirthing Care. While there are multiple interpretations of what rebirthing is within Petscop, as it is intentionally left vague, one belief is that it is an expansion on a real-world pseudo-scientific therapy that attempted to treat attachment disorders and adverse behavior in children. This compression therapy has several adverse effects on children who have experienced it, including several fatalities. Within many of Domenico’s works, like the short story “Tapers,” a work that many names and concepts used in Petscop originated from, and the multimedia project “3D Worker’s Island,” child abuse and the psychological effects it has on its victims and the families of victims are extremely prominent themes. Interestingly, some of Domenico’s main inspirations while working on Petscop were other internet creepypasta, internet horror stories, surrounding video games like the Legend of Zelda story “Ben Drowned;” he also credits David Lynch and his film Inland Empire (2006) as major inspirations, stating, "too much is lost in that translation into words." 

If you are looking to step out of the comfort zone of conventional media and enjoy surreal, thematically dense horror, give Tony Domenico’s Petscop a try. 

Don't Live Life on DND, Try D&D! by Aubryn Owen

With the rise of Stranger Things, D&D has been pretty enthusiastically ushered into the spotlight. A hobby that was once viewed as deeply “nerdy” has been welcomed into the zeitgeist of mainstream media. But what is it really?  

D&D, or Dungeons and Dragons if you want to longhand it, has been around since roughly the 1970s and has grown in popularity from that point on. D&D is a tabletop role-play game that’s typically played between 4+ people. Players make characters; choosing from a list of fantastical races, classes, and backgrounds to determine who they want to be, then play through a story run by a DM (or Dungeon Master). But of course, that’s too easy, so when a player wants to do something they have to roll a dice to see how well they can accomplish whatever it is they’ve set out to do, which is where the iconic symbol for the game the D20 (twenty-sided die) comes from. Then, the question is, well, what adventures can you go on? A DM can run what is called a module, which is a prewritten adventure that comes in the form of a book, or they can do what’s called a homebrew campaign which is an adventure they’ve come up with on their own. It’s completely up to the DM’s discretion what they want to run.  

Now that I’ve given the most base level explanation of the game, let’s get into how you can get started playing! First and foremost is finding a group. Like I said in the beginning, D&D has been rocketing up in popularity and it’s fairly easy to do a quick search for people looking for a group, and you’ll find one. Or, if online isn’t your thing, check your local library! As for resources, because you will need them for character creation, it’s easy to feel like you’re blocked out of some really cool content because you just don’t have money for the books, but there’s tons of free online sources for everything from spells, races, and even extra classes with just a few buttons. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes, you might just find your new favorite hobby!