You’d think that by sheer law of numbers there’d be some high school movie that reflects my experience as a teenager. While there are some that I definitely can relate to in broad strokes, no film has ever come close to depicting the nonsense my friends and I finely crafted in our high school days.
It’s hard to say where it started, really. At some point all of us had seen the musical “Holy Musical B@man” by Team Star Kid on YouTube, a wonderful parody musical about Batman that we all really enjoyed. This combined with the release of the films The Dark Knight (2008), Skyfall (2012), and The Avengers (2012) lead to our conglomerate of strange creatives developing our own universe of lore but with ourselves cast as various characters. Established universes and boundaries didn’t matter. We had Batman fighting Loki, Q falling in love with Cat Woman, and our own original characters running around such as the retired precursor to Batman who was now a villain and a predictive text machine that gained sentience named Dictionair-e. It was extensive, elaborate, and collaborative story telling that we managed to run for several years with developing plotlines and characters that I still think about with a great deal of fondness.
People talk about their past having ‘lore,’ but me and my friends made some real capital L ‘Lore.’
It’s been some time since I looked over any of the things I made back then. The site that we would write and post on together no longer exists so tragically a lot of the things that we wrote as a group are gone except in our memories. I haven’t thought intensively about the things we wrote then since I had my grand revelation about the characters I write. The character who was me in our lore was Thor, a female Thor whose legend had been told as if she was a man, who people didn’t see as a woman. She was frustrated with a world whose perception of her didn’t match the way she was and couldn’t seem to find peace with (I had a very normal relationship with gender, can you tell?). I also wrote a character called the Knitter who was a morally gray and openly queer character at a time where I couldn’t be, but he gave me the space where I could. It was a perfect outlet.
In our group, I spent a lot of time writing in physical notebooks stories in our shared universe that were quieter or more reflective than the usual epic tales we’d tell together. Sometimes my friends would read these too and offer me ideas on where to go next or simply ask me when the next chapter would be done.
It was because of this reputation as The Writer that my friend Jill told me to come to her house one day. She had an idea for a story she wanted written within our communal universe and decided she was going to have me do it. Truly, we spent that day at her house in her room just talking about the story and then having me write it while sitting in the corner of her room.
Now that sounds normal enough, right? Odd to go to someone’s house and then be told “write me something,” but whatever, I rolled with it. But the reason that I remember this day so distinctly is that I didn’t just write the story, I wrote this story under duress. Since it was just me doing the writing, Jill was mostly in the room either encouraging me to write faster, distracting me, or usually doing both at the same time. We came up with a strategy to try to get me to write faster, which was to play the Macklemore song “Can’t Hold Us” on loop until I was done.
“Sam, there’s no way you played the song on loop the entire time, that sounds like torture.” You’re right! And that’s why every ten plays of “Can’t Hold Us” we would play Gloria Estefan’s “Conga!”
We did this until the nine page document of 3,548 words was done. We could’ve broken this up into smaller chunks. Jill could’ve told me the idea and let me go until I was done. Both would’ve been a more reasonable strategy, but we didn’t do either. We chose to playfully drive ourselves mad because why not? I don’t know why Jill wanted me to come over to write it. I don’t know why she didn’t just text me the idea and leave me to it, but I’m so glad she didn’t.
When Jill and I reunited for the first time in almost a decade, we talked about that day with just so much laughter. I even went into my old files and found the story back! I was terrified to see what sort of cursed artifact my fifteen-year-old self had crafted, but was pleasantly surprised to find out the story was pretty good! It was a deeply dated piece of work, for sure, but the structure, the characters, and the themes were all pretty solid! I had to stop myself from turning on editing mode, proving I recognized potential in the work but also recognizing it is a time capsule that needed to be kept exactly the way 2013 Jill and I intended.
Obviously my fifteen-year-old self’s worth isn’t determined by how good the nonsense they wrote is, just like my current twenty-eight-year old self’s worth isn’t determined by the nonsense I write. I am really proud of my past self for their work. Sometimes it’s easy to think of my past self as a different person, but I look back at the things they made and I see so much of me now in it. It’s so easy to dismiss the work from my past as cringe or just a stepping stone to me actually getting good, but looking at what I made—what we all made together—I see brilliance and creativity that was allowed to thrive without the kinds of expectations that strangle me and my work now. For that reason, I even find myself jealous of them sometimes.
When the site we wrote on in high school announced it was shutting down in 2017, many of us despite being at completely different colleges in different states came back online and gave our characters one last final adventure. Since then, we had a friend reunion back in 2022 specifically to celebrate us and our world. In working on this piece, I’ve dug up so many old notebooks and stories that I haven’t read in at least a decade.
I am so proud of the world that me and my friends made together, and I know my friends are too. I don’t know how many of them still write or if they think about how we honed our skills on this silly enterprise we built like an empire. More than anything, I’m proud of us and the amount of creativity and art we shared with each other for no other reason than to do it. I know it set me up for a life of looking for collaborators, of finding the people to be openly ridiculous with, the people that support ideas in order to craft worlds with, the people I’d play Macklemore on loop with. That instinct has been invaluable to me as an adult pursuing different creative endeavors. Because of it, I’ve found so many wonderful allies in different parts of my life that I’ve gotten to work with to make interesting shows, works, and art.
But I will always be infinitely grateful to this first world that got me started, the world my incredible friends and I made together.
Sam is unsure what exact words describe them best: Lunatic has been used, Gothic Romantic is apt, and Big ol’ Nerd is reductive but true. Mostly they just like stories in whatever form stories can be found. Sam specializes in Frankenstein, running “The Uncanny Productions” on YouTube, but they also dabble with podcasts, singing, and theatre as well. They have a DVD collection that’s long outgrown its shelf, a coffin they use as a desk, and an unrelenting joy for things that are spooky, ridiculous, or magical.
