Netflix’s new series, I Am Not Okay With This, has a girl dealing with the usual problems of being a teenager. Also, she’s queer and she has superpowers.
The series is based on a graphic novel by Charles Forsman, the same creator of The End of the F***ing World, which was also adapted and later shown on Netflix.
While the concept of a young girl with powers sounds similar to the Netflix series, Stranger Things, the similarity ends there.
I Am Not Okay With This: A high school genre?
This series can be described as part of the seriocomic high school genre that is being pumped out by Netflix.
The protagonist of the series, Sydney “Syd” Novak (Sophia Lillis), is a surly teen who describes herself as a “boring” white girl.
Sydney has a hard time dealing with her feelings on many things: the suicide of her father, her resentment with her mother, and how she feels for her best friend, Dina (Sofia Bryant).
It doesn’t help that Dina is in a romance with the popular football player, Brad Lewis (Richard Ellis).
So when Sydney finds she has telekinetic powers– able to move and destroy things with her mind– she has no idea how to talk to anyone about them, let alone control them.
Another character in a list of troubled teens
I Am Not Okay With This was created by the same director and producer of End of the F***ing World, Jonathan Entwistle.
Likewise, the team behind Stranger Things— Shawn Levy, Dan Cohen and Josh Barry– are executive producers for this series.
You may know Lillis as Beverly Marsh in the 2017 movie, It, based on Stephen King’s novel. She was also the younger Camille in HBO’s Sharp Objects.
She’s set to star in Alan Ball’s newest project, Uncle Frank, and in the grim remake of the classic Grimm fairy tale with Gretel & Hansel.
Lillis told Entertainment Weekly that she prefers to play dark, troubled characters: “I am drawn to those. I don’t mind.”
I Am Not Okay With This: Trying hard to be normal
If you’ve watched the trailer, you may think that Sydney would probably have your usual romance with the geeky neighbor Stanley Barber (Wyatt Oleff), who has an oddball kinship with her.
However, Sydney is queer. She has to sort out her sexuality, what with her feelings for Dina, and deal with the antagonistic Brad at the same time. So at the very least, she’s gender-fluid.
It’s all these factors– being orphaned, being female, and being queer, plus having superpowers– that pushes Sydney away from her peers and makes her attempts to be normal futile.
As they say, high school is hell, right? And then you get superpowers. Anyway, check out the trailer for the series below:
