Heartstopper Forever... And Ever and Ever and Please Don't End!!

Heartstopper means a hell of a lot to me. I have never seen myself on screen in the way I have seen myself in Kit Connor as Nick Nelson, and that is saying something considering I am a woman. I’ve written about Heartstopper before, about how it does so incredibly well at showing an authentic queer experience, how it touches on some very real, very deep subjects in a way that makes it look like struggling is okay. There is a comfort in Nick and Charlie, a soul-deep welcome feeling the minute you see Alice Oseman’s animations flicker across the screen. You watch it and you feel seen.

I was a little bit scared that Heartstopper was ending with a movie, worried that if they no longer had the budget or the scope to create a final season that the film would strip away everything homely and real about the universe. I was scared that stories would be rushed, that endings would be unsatisfactory. Maybe, part of that is true. I think Heartstopper season 4 would have looked a lot different to Heartstopper Forever. We would have seen more of Tao and Elle and a lot more of Tara and Darcy and maybe there’d be a lot more happy to go with the teenage struggles.

I am in no way saying that I am disappointed with Heartstopper Forever, just the opposite actually. But it is hard not to imagine what could have been and compare it to what it was.

I remember watching the first season for the first time and watching every season after that. Always alone, always with tears in my eyes, wishing that I could have what they had. Queerness and happiness and love. The first season came out when I deep in a ‘proper full-on gay crisis’. The second and third came out while I was in a straight-facing relationship, a little bit worried that I’d lost my identity within it. It’s a weird one when you can see yourself in a show in every aspect of your life. Watching Nick as you realise that being bi isn’t a phase, watching Imogen figure out where she sits in the world, watching Tori in this film be content in a relationship that looks much like my own and telling me that it’s okay that it’s different because she’s happy and they’ll always just be Tori and Michael.

Relationships aside, the university discourse also resonated in a way I didn’t expect it to. Of course, I’ve served my time now, but thinking what it was like in the summer leading up to moving away for the first time, there was a lot of this uncertainty and tension that lingered behind forced smiles and house parties.

If we look at this film from a critic point of view, because I suppose this is a review of sorts, the film started uncertain. It was most definitely the Heartstopper we knew and loved but there was a disconnect. Like I wasn’t entirely sure where we’d left off and where we began. Joe Locke’s Charlie Spring spent a lot of the first quarter topless, and while Charlie had always been a character admirably sure of his own identity, he was also insecure in his own body and often hidden in a hoodie. It took a while for the eating disorder discourse to kick back up, and in that time, I was worried they’d forgotten it all together. That Charlie was magically better and everyone was pretending it had never happened. Luckily, that wasn’t the case and the film quickly covered the realities of the ups and downs of mental health, but I did find myself worried that Netflix were suddenly censoring it all.

It was interesting to see Nick and Charlie truly hurt by each other through this film, watch as the honeymoon period floated away and the cold harsh reality of the world stared them in the face. We saw a side of Nick we’d never seen before, drunk and angry and deeply sad. To watch the puppy dog persona to be replaced was hard but Kit Connor nailed every second of it. We saw more of his relationship with his mother, speaking of, Anna Maxwell Martin did an extraordinary job stepping into the role as Sarah in the stead of Olivia Colman (she is now THE mother of teen adaptations), but it was refreshing to see more of a genuinely healthy mother-son relationship in the midst of so many toxic parent storylines in cinema.

There’s a pain to growing up, trying to hang on to the tethers of your youth as your friends slip away and life moves on. It’s hard to see anything working out in your favour at times, it’s almost impossible to see a long-distance relationship lasting. I think Nick and Charlie are an example that communication is vital, that seeking guidance and comfort is non-negotiable especially within queer spaces. I loved that Charlie quickly became that example to younger students of Truham Grammar, that both were unequivocally each other’s person no matter what.  

The film remained true to the queer struggles of today, not just through the push back on homophobia, but most importantly through the character of Elle. My mum finished watching the series just a couple of days ago, and her biggest question was why Elle’s struggles were never shown. Because while it was great to see the gays coming out on top, the trans experience was almost neglected. The film brought us back with a heart wrenching moment where Elle pleads Charlie to march with her at Pride. She expresses for the first time that she is scared by the state of the world, that she no longer feels safe in light of the government, that all she wants is to feel free. Heartstopper has done wonders for the queer community in providing safety and opening eyes to the need to fight, but I hope that viewers (allies) realise that it’s not that safe for many in the real world. Supporting fiction is a start, but the state of the real world is scary. Rights are being stripped, and there is a very real cause to fight. Much of Heartstopper is fiction, but the need for trans rights is not.

On a lighter note, and much less important, one of my favourite parts of Heartstopper is the dogs. We have had the pleasure of seeing Nellie and Henry on screen for years (RIP Echo :( ) but as Nick picks up a job at a rescue centre, we are rewarded with many new furry faces. This film made me cry on more accounts than I can count on one hand, but strangely, many of those times were for Biscuit. Don’t worry! No dogs die. However, I think Biscuit is the cutest dog I’ve ever seen in my life and I don’t think I’ve ever felt cuteness aggression like it.

Between the warm and fuzzy feeling that Heartstopper never fails to give, there is an emptiness that the franchise is over. I owe a lot of my identity to Alice Oseman. I don’t think a show will ever quite get me like this one did.