The Out-of-Touch Adults’ Guide to Kid Culture: Meme-ing the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard Trial
Reading Time: 4 minutesA little bit of everything this week: Dragons, promposals, Johnny Depp, and more
This week everyone is talking about imaginary dragons and a real legal case. Hopefully the trailer for House of the Dragon will draw some attention away from the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard trial. Also: It’s prom time again, and this year it isn’t being held on Zoom.
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Viral video of the week: The House of the Dragon trailer
It’s been too long since the Game of Thrones finale, but the Westeros drought is set to end this August, when HBO releases House of the Dragon. The trailer is burning YouTube down with over two and a half million views in its first eight hours online. The series, based on George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, is set 300 years before the events of Game of Thrones but still features at least two returning Targaryens (fantasy, am I right?). Sadly though, the book upon which House of the Dragon is based is the first of a two-part series, and Martin hasn’t written the second part yet, so a Game of Thrones-style final-season disaster is possible. But on the other hand, dragons! House of the Dragon will premiere on HBO on Aug. 21.
Prom 2022: The return of the promposal
It’s springtime, and for high school kids, that means prom. In fashion terms, looks patterned after the troubled teens of HBO’s Euphoria are popular among hipsters this year, and so are prom suits for women/girls. I can only assume/hope that rocking a formal dress with a pair of Chuck Taylor’s is still an edgy, quirky prom move. (The boys, as always, will be wearing rented tuxedos.)
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Prom in the 2020s seems almost exactly like I remember my prom in 1874, but there’s one major difference: The promposal. Nervously asking ‘so, uh, do you want to, like, go to prom with me?’ isn’t enough. Now you need to make a promposal—plan a whole production designed to go viral, like this ambitious lad who talked his friends into setting up an impromptu ‘romantic dinner.’ Or this fella who put together a gift box to match his girl’s dress. Those are cute (I guess) but some promposals are just weird, like this one that features a mock arrest, complete with police. Or these dorky, multi-ethnic ‘cowboys.’
If there’s ever a time when a grand romantic gesture is appropriate, it’s high school, but man, the pressure on everyone with this crap. If you ever miss being in high school, check out some videos of promposal fails. They’re such perfect encapsulations of the awkwardness and horror of adolescence, you’ll never feel nostalgic again.
Meme-ing the law: The Internet dives deep into Johnny Depp v. Amber Heard
Celebrity trials that turn into media circuses are as old as circuses themselves, but this Johnny Depp vs. Amber Heard thing is getting out of hand. I try to avoid this kind of nonsense because I’m busy doing important things like playing Elden Ring, but I can’t escape this one. On the surface, it’s a run-of-the-mill defamation case in which Depp is suing Heard for penning an editorial that implied that he abused her, but the public has taken an obsessive interest in the messy details of the messy relationship at the center of this messy court case.
Court TV’s rating have doubled since they started covering the trial, and TikTok videos filed under #JusticeForjohnnyDepp have been viewed nearly 8 billion times. In the court of public opinion (at least the part of the public on the Twitter and TikTok) Depp is clearly the sympathetic party here. I don’t have a side, and I find the whole thing distasteful, but I predict a rise in contempt of court charges in the future as ‘fans’ of this trial smirk, joke, and mug in imitation of Depp and company. As TikTok’s @MCULokii put it to Vice: ‘I believe the edits or videos are all in good intention. Nobody is here to make light of such a serious topic like domestic abuse,’ they said. ‘After all, Johnny Depp makes jokes and laughs [in court] so we should be allowed to laugh too!’ Tell it to the judge, kid.
‘Troubled teens’ fight back
The popularity of residential treatment programs for teens (and even ‘tweens) skyrocketed in the 1990s, fueled by dramatic daytime talk show segments where rebellious kids were given old fashioned discipline through enforced stays at ‘boot camps,’ boarding schools, wilderness programs, and other juvies. Back then, it was easy to see these programs as a godsend, a tough-love path to correcting the course of kids headed to jail or the gutter—that’s what the people who owned the places said, and Dr. Phil, Montel Williams, Oprah, and all the rest seemed to agree. Now, though, through social media and the internet, we can hear the other side of this story, and it turns out that taking teenagers by force to isolated prisons a thousand miles from their homes maybe doesn’t make them happier and better-adjusted.
Message boards like Reddit’s r/troubledteens are filled with posts of victims of these facilities—some were locked up for being gay or having bad parents, and they almost all report being abused. TikTok troubledteenindustry hashtag is absolutely heartbreaking, but there’s more going on than tales of woe. Now that they are over 18, survivors of these programs are naming names, organizing, and actively trying to shut down this industry. It’s working, too. Utah, once the epicenter for these kinds of facilities, recently enacted reforms aimed at residential treatment centers, companies are closing up shop, and congress is being urged to pass legislation aimed at curtailing the industry’s worst practices.
Kids are dropping out of college to make money in NFTs
No one over a certain age understands what NFTs are, but the promise these virtual assets offer is enough to entice some young entrepreneurs to drop out of school. ‘You’re way fucking better spending 50 hours doing your homework on Twitter, YouTube, and Discord on NFTs than any fucking thing going on in college,’ according to Gary Vee (aka: @nft_godfather) on TikTok. Vee, it should be noted, has a definite ‘how do you do, fellow kids?’ vibe about him, but it’s not just middle-aged dudes with backwards baseball caps into NFTs. The Daily Dot profiled Elo Mukoro and Matthew Owusu, a couple of 22 year-olds in Texas who are ditching college to chase NFT gold. ‘Me and my boy, Matt, we saw what was happening, originally we jumped in and didn’t know much, but sure, let’s explore it,’ Mukoro told the Daily Dot.
I don’t think very many more people are going to make money in NFTs—seems like the train has left the station—but I encourage young people to drop out of college anyway. You can always go back to school; you won’t always be able to chase a flavor-of-the-month get rich quick scheme.