Ask Lemmy

I dunno if you watch anime but most mainstream ones start off with a high school kid discovering they've got a special gift.

I am not at all nostalgic for high school, it was a nightmare. Don't know anyone in real life who thinks it was a good part of their life.

It's a common setting for stories from all over, though. Coming - of - age stories are eternally popular. And here, kids are in high school as they transition from child to adult, so that's where many of those stories are set.

Because the midpoint of a human lifetime, in terms of subjective experience of the passage of time, is at approximately age 22.

Because most people peaked in HS.

Because being an adult in the U.S. sucks. Many people work right out of high school until they retire/die without ever going on a real vacation.

So people fantasize about the time when they weren't wage slaves.

Largely universal experience. Lots of activities and clubs vs adult hood (sports, rallies, math club, robotics club, etc). High feeling of potential (every is wonder what they will become instead of the are).

Because most of its citizens peaked in it.

I genuinely have no idea, my HS was an absolute nightmare and I hold no nostalgia for it whatsoever.

In Canada we don't care about it like that.

I don’t think I see anyone else saying it: Because High School was the last school for the vast majority of people. It was the transition into adult life and responsibilities.

In American history a lot of people didn’t even make it to High School. You got enough of an education to work whatever job, or were forced to quit schooling and start working because of family financial needs.

College wasn’t needed for a good paying job that would be enough to own a home, car, have a family, etc.

So High School was the end of the line for being a kid in school and whatever freedoms came with that. Especially for the Boomer generation the economy at the time really allowed a lot more freedoms for High School kids than had ever been available before.

Why are you asking about US when Japan got all that highschool themed stuff?

Baby Boomers are the reason why high school became so culturally relevant.

You had a large cohort of students coming of age together at a time when the country was wealthy enough where you had a class of people who had gone through puberty but wasn't being given the full roles and responsibilities of being adults. This new separate age group between kids and adults was relatively novel.

You also started seeing a major change in cultural forces like music and cinema which catered to this set of consumers. This catering became very important as companies realized this was when adults formed a lot of their tastes and preferences. Cultural output started focusing on this age group as tastemakers.

Children are not particularly discriminating consumers. They'll watch pretty much anything shiny that you put in front of them, because they don't know any better. A moderately well written film to an adult will literally be "the best thing" a teen has ever seen. When you catch a teen's interest early, they'll probably continue be interested in your brand for the next 10-20 years, at least. That money adds up. The attention they get from sharing everything with each other adds up.

Adults need to be impressed, and even then their interest will be moderated. It's a lot harder to make something a lot of adults are excited about.

That's not something specific to the US. If you chose a manga or anime at random, it'd most likely revolve around a highschooler.

Because adulthood is shit.

• Countless coming of age experiences happen around that time

• A massive peer group, with all the dynamics that entails. For most, it's the last time they will regularly interact with that many peers ever.

only about half the population goes to college, and 20 years ago it was only about a 1/3 and so on.

high school is a universal experience, college is not. so there is a broader media audience for high school, and yes for many people high school was there youth and they became working adults once they left it.

the prolong adolescence of college and post-graduate study is mostly for the top 25-10% of the population who are wealthy and not relatable to the vast majority of the population. when i was a college kid and a graduate student, my uneducated parents thought college was just partying all the time because of movies about college only showed frat parties and antics. They had no clue I was working 80 hour weeks and getting drunk maybe once a month or less.

from my experience, people from romania do

Because life in the U.S. is all shit after high school.