The Success of 'Heartstopper' Lies In Its Unabashed Sweetness

The queers are tender, and that's why fans love them

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The teens of Heartstopper. Netflix.

The Netflix series Heartstopper is the most wholesome show on television right now. Based on Alice Oseman’s graphic novel of the same name, the series follows a group of English teenagers navigating the highs and lows of love, identity, friendship, and growing up. Many of the characters are queer, and mental illness is another central focus of the series. Though it won’t appeal to everyone, the show’s success – 3 seasons on Netflix certainly qualifies as one – can be attributed to how it pulls viewers into an optimistic fantasy world.

To be sure, Season 3 isn’t all sunshine and roses. Charlie (Joe Locke) struggles mightily with his eating disorder this season, and Elle (Yasmin Finney) experiences a rare – for this show, at least – brush with transphobia. Nonetheless, the series still lives in the fantasy realm that delights viewers. The teenagers experience obstacles, but everything works out in the end, as we know it will. 

Everyone in Heartstopper is always doing their best, and their best is often quite good. While the characters occasionally mess up and hurt one another’s feelings, it’s mostly a vision of people saying and doing the right things, caring for each other at every turn. For viewers, it's a fantastical enactment of how you wish someone would respond to you in a moment of crisis, insecurity, or vulnerability. If it’s not catharsis, these moments at least have a sort of healing, almost therapeutic effect – an emotional tonic.

Though the series mostly centers on the teens, the adults emerge primarily as sources of advice and support. Olivia Colman made viewers everywhere cry when her son Nick (Kit Connor) came out to her in Season 1 and she responded with love and understanding. In Season 3, Hayley Atwell joined the series as Nick’s aunt, offering him advice on how to best support his boyfriend Charlie as he dealt with his eating disorder. (The scene where Nick breaks down in front of his aunt because he’s so worried about Charlie and doesn’t know how to help is perhaps the most moving moment of the entire series.) 

In many ways, the show functions as wish fulfillment, similar to the appeal of romance novels and fanfiction. It’s easy – and even encouraged – to wish for the opportunity to come out to Olivia Colman, or for Hayley Atwell to look at you with immense kindness and offer her support. Charlie’s mom, who struggles to give Charlie what he needs, is the exception to this rule, but her presence on the show only emphasizes how perfectly helpful everyone else is. 

The mantra of ‘representation matters’

Heartstopper is exactly the kind of show that people point to when they say that representation matters, and that slogan serves as the organizing principle of the series. The show’s ethos about diversity and representation is right there on the surface, and its messaging isn’t exactly subtle. Every character exists to represent different experiences with identity, sexuality, gender, and/or mental health, yet they all fit together like neon puzzle pieces in this idealistic story. 

One could read the show as a series of easily digestible lessons about how to be there for each other and for oneself. Indeed, Heartstopper comes close to veering into after school special territory, but it stops short because of its investment in the characters and its efforts to uplift and draw in audiences. In still images and photosets, the show appears like one of those “in this house we believe” signs, but if you engage with it fully, a more vivid picture emerges.

As a piece of formally inclusive media, Heartstopper operates as a correction to the under-representation of certain groups. The show's asexual and aromantic representation has been meaningful to many people, and viewers have applauded the decision to depict Darcy’s gender identity journey alongside that of the actor who plays them, Kizzy Edgell. The characters and their individual struggles mean something outside of the show’s dream-like world, standing in for larger ideas and experiences that viewers want to see represented on screen. This is an obvious point to make (and the show doesn’t try to hide its noble intentions), but these stories ultimately feel satisfying and conclusive rather than mechanical.

Source.

Heartstopper’s broader social significance is not a question of narrative vs metanarrative or text vs interpretation. Instead, it’s a matter of looking at storytelling as a social or emotional good, with representation functioning as the primary measure of this good. If we look at the connection between the viewer and the text, rather than, say, a text’s ability to change the hearts and minds of an entire nation or influence legislation, we can better quantify media’s effects without being hyperbolic. 

From ‘Skins’ to ‘Heartstopper’

As a contemporary entry on the timeline of queer media, Heartstopper reads differently depending on the era in which you grew (or are growing) up. Online, millennials have noted that they wish Heartstopper existed when they were adolescents, and that this absence produces a sense of bereavement for their younger selves. Some viewers report feeling a certain amount of bitterness towards the show and its characters because they didn’t have relationships like that growing up, nor do they now. 

Heartstopper is most commonly compared to Skins, not because they are especially similar shows, but because they are both popular British series that represent era-specific trends in teen media. Skins, which premiered in 2007, followed teens in Bristol as they dealt with “controversial” issues like drugs, sex, and mental illness. The show was at times brutal and shocking, trafficking in an aesthetic of gritty realism that painted teens in a sometimes demented light. As one user posted on X, it’s heartening to see that young people have positive representation with Heartstopper when all he had was Maxxie from Skins. “All they did was do drugs, yell at their moms, and fuck without condoms,” he wrote.

Skins was the adolescent fare of the 30-year-olds now watching Heartstopper with grief-tinged delight. In many ways, the series failed to reflect many of our teenage experiences, instead feeding us a hyper-real image of teen angst that we could then proudly – and perhaps aspirationally – display on our Tumblr dashboards. Heartstopper isn’t necessarily more realistic than Skins, but it moves viewers by providing a sense of comfort rather than angst. 

Though Tumblr is far less active than it was a decade ago, Heartstopper is beloved by those still using the blogging platform. Gifsets and photos from the series receive thousands of interactions, and many fans on the site engage with the show with an earnest, open heart. Fans reposting scenes from the show on Tumblr or X want to share Heartstopper’s sweetness and sincerity, as opposed to wallowing in melancholy or striving for a particular aesthetic. 

Admittedly, there are plenty of posters online who make fun of the show’s tenderqueer mentality, and that descriptor isn’t totally unfair. However, the fact that the series has captured so many viewers across generations indicates that its unabashedly heartfelt tone is a quality audiences are looking for in media – at least some of the time. For those who can stomach such sincerity, these tender queers are slowly warming our cold, cold hearts.