wolkenfuehlen

Thanks for stopping by!

s e r e n i t y

Thanks everyone for stopping by and for your awesome words

Nina, aww that's such a nice way to look at it

Finnegan - Thank you too You've helped out a lot

Hot Rod

Congrats on 13 years here at .

Lucresiare

I don't know this show at all but congratulations !

What's this show about ?

DGSAFDMD

OMG!! Congratulations on the 13 years! I still remember when I watched this show when it first aired on WB.. good old times!

wolkenfuehlen

Thanks for stopping by, guys! I really can't quite believe it's been so long since the show aired

Hm, well, basically, it's about a group of friends attenting a posh all-boys boarding school in a small town? One of them is actually from the town and attends the school on a scholarship, and his townie friends are sort of part of the gang as well. There's romance, conflict, drama....everything you really need from a show!

PhoenixRising

CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL OF YOU FOR 13 YEARS!!!

Wow, it's amazing that you've managed to keep this board active for so long for a show that lasted only eight episodes! Gives us all hope.

Regulus-Fan

Congrats on 13 years Amazing milestone!

sweet creature

Congrats on the 13 years!! Such an impressive number.

Finnegan

Come on Anja. It's about true love (and becoming "young" in order to love truly).

See the Steven Antin appreciation thread for Antin quotes about what YA is.

"But what does 'true love' do in YA?" one may ask? IT TRIUMPHS.

Just today on a re-watch, I for the first time understood why the closing narrative comments of YA episodes 1 & 8 contain words about "Finding our heroes" and "Triumph."

That's there to make us ask: "Who is the hero of Young Americans"? Who is the protagonist?

The answer, I think, is "love." It's a drama about true love. Of course, true love (like the school) is personified by Hamilton Fleming, the dean's son, who truly loves "Jake" Pratt and re-enacts an updated version of the old "test of true love" stories, like "The Frog Prince" or "Beauty and the Beast," -- a version in which cross-dressing replaces magical enchantment as the means of making the beloved physically repulsive to the lover.

-- I'll post a better documented version of this argument later on the episode 1 thread, since episodes 1 and 8 contain the narrative language about "finding our heroes" and "triumph."

s e r e n i t y

Thank you all for stopping by guys

The show is, like Anja said, about a group of friends in a small town, each with interesting stories and characteristics, that attend an all boys school (even though one isn't a boy ) and well, it has love and friendship and is overall filled with FEELINGS and cuteness so you all should watch
and as you can see, it's only 8 episodes, and it aired 13 years ago, meaning we do a lot of in-depth analysis here (amongst other things ), and well, as Finnegan's shown, the show has multiple different layers and interpretations
Y'all should watch it and join our little board

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That's a bit simplistic... YA to me is a coming of age story, the likes of which has been done both better and worse on other shows. Love is a part of it of course, as it is when you're 15, but any show you can mention is about love, really. If you boil it down just to that then you make it sound like The Young and the Restless, lol, and it's better than that.

Not to mention that it's cuter.

Finnegan

Yes, but it's also a coming of age story in reverse -- on a symbolic level that's obvious only to those who need it, namely, adults. Finn states the theme in his lake lecture in episode 1, talking about giving everything up to become15 again. I'm pretty sure all the conspicuous anachronisms -- a full service gas station, an all-boys prep school, 1920s gas station architecture, 1930s coke machine, 1940s trucks, 1950s gas pumps and air pumps, 1960s and 970s song and movie cultural allusions, are there to muddle the time frame and underscore that you're never too old to "go to Rawley" like Krudski. It's subtle, though: YA doesn't fully give up the pretense of being set in the present and narrated in the present until the very end of the last episode, when the tense of Krudski's narrative comment switches to the past tense: "I knew I'd never forget ... that summer ... somehow we all felt older."

Krudski's "cheating on the entrance exam" is a metaphor. He's old. He's a writer dreaming it up. He doesn't belong at Rawley, just like he tells Scout. Scout's answer: "It's all in your head."

And what does one "go to Rawley" to learn, if not how to love truly? I think that the Jake-Hamilton storyline, so separate from the ostensibly "main" story-line, is what Rawley teaches. Hamilton is the Dean's son for a reason: he personifies the school. He also enacts a classic "true love" story. That's what Rawley teaches, and that's what one rejuvenates and "goes to Rawley" to learn. If one gives up the complacency of adulthood and recovers youth's innate desire to grow, then one can learn to love better.

Bella states the "true love" theme at the end of episode 1. And Jake and Hamilton enact it. The Jake-Hamilton story is a modern version of the old "test of true love" story, like "The Frog Prince" or "Beauty and the Beast," but one in which cross-dressing replaces magical enchantment as the means of making the beloved physically repulsive to the lover. When Hamilton sacrifices his heterosexual preference -- and his hope of a normal life with a family -- for Jake, she turns into a girl. Not objectively, but that's his subjective experience of it.

YA's point about "true love" is the same as that of the medieval "test of true love" stories that it revives: Compassion can rule passion so strongly as to give birth to it. You can love the frog enough to want to kiss it, and that changes what the frog is for you. There's more, especially in YA's second half, but that's the start.

majesdane

Congrats on 13 years! An amazing accomplishment by any means.

wolkenfuehlen

Thank you all for stopping by!