Warning: This article contains spoilers for the first season ofPaper Girls.
When Amazon Prime dropped the first season of its adaptation of Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang’sPaper Girlscomics, the show was instantly compared toStranger Things. Granted, it’s a sci-fi series set in the 1980s and it involves teenagers on bicycles, but the similarities stop there.Paper Girlsisn’t about monsters seeping in from another dimension; it’s about time travel. And it doesn’t have a nostalgic view of its ‘80s setting likeStranger Things. In fact,Paper Girlsis decidedly anti-nostalgia.
Shows likeStranger ThingsandThe Goldbergstake a romanticized look at the 1980s. It’s all shopping malls and bike rides andAmblin movies.Paper Girlsactively pushes back against this romanticism. The series’ portrayal of its historical context is closer to the uncompromisingly ugly ‘80s setting ofIt, with brutal bullies, Reaganomics, and no parental supervision. The inciting incident revolves around the girls winding up in an abandoned building while their legal guardians pay no mind to where they might be. The muted color palette ofPaper Girlsis a stark contrast to the bright, vibrant compositions ofGLOWandRed OaksandWet Hot American Summer.
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Paper Girls’ study of nostalgia doesn’t just deal with its historical setting; it explores the universally relatable teenage experience. Adults tend to look back on their teenage years as the prime of their lives. Once the bills start piling up and vacation time dwindles down to a couple of weeks a year,being a teenagerseems like a breezy and simplistic existence by comparison. ButPaper Girlsreminds audiences that being a teenager is incredibly complicated when its teenage characters are flung into the future and confronted with their destiny. KJ has to grapple with her sexuality when she sees her future self making out with a girl.
No story has been able to tackle teen nostalgia this way before.The time-bending narrative ofPaper Girlsputs its teenage protagonists in a room with their twentysomething and fortysomething selves. People usually get nostalgic about their teen years because they hadn’t yet made all the mistakes that led them to their current station in life, but their adolescence formed who they were and paved the way for all those mistakes. Erin’s older self doesn’t even remember the other paper girls, because in her timeline, she quit the paper route after one day and never saw those girls again. She resents her teen counterpart for being a quitter, setting the stage for her to be lonely and unfulfilled in her middle-age years.
Nostalgia doesn’t just apply to the past. It’s possible to be nostalgic about the future, too, but that’s just as dangerous. If an aspiring novelist dreams about a future in which they’rethe next Stephen King, then they’ll be bitterly disappointed if they never get published – they’ll even be disappointed if they manage to publish a couple of books that don’t take the world by storm like King’s did.Paper Girlsdeals with nostalgia for the future as much as it deals with nostalgia for the past. WhenTiff Googles herselfin 2019 and learns that she went to MIT, she’s immensely proud of herself and can’t wait to grow up into a scholarly student. But when she meets herself in 1999, she’s dismayed to learn that she was kicked out of her prestigious college.
It’s easy to look back on the past with remorse, butPaper Girlsalso offers an inspiring reminder that it’s never too late to make a big change. Adult Erin laments that she never made anything of herself, but she ends up pilotinga giant Voltron robotand saving the day with a heroic sacrifice. Regretting decisions that were made decades ago won’t get anyone anywhere. It’s important to live in the moment and seize opportunities as and when they arise.
Mac is a special case. She doesn’t have a future to look forward to, because she learns that she’s destined to die of cancer at the age of 16. In 2019, she meets the adult version of her older brother who used to terrorize her as a kid. He’s now a responsible husband and father with two daughters and a fancy medical degree. He regrets the way he treated Mac when they were kids and uses her unexpected time travel as a chance to reconnect and right the wrongs of the past. But when she finds Dr. Dylan to be a lot more boring and sensible than his teenage self, she looks back on memories of her brother – essentially her childhood bully – through rose-tinted glasses, just because he was more fun than a doctor with two kids.
Mosttime travel narrativesfollow characters who desperately avoid encountering their past or future selves in order to keep the space-time continuum intact. ButPaper Girlsforces its characters to interact with their future selves for an introspective study of regrets and ambitions and personal identities. With Erin and Tiff being stranded in the 1970s in the season finale, the stage is set for the next installment of the series to un-romanticize another oft-romanticized era.
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