Heartstopper understands the bisexual panic of watching Pirates of Caribbean
Heartstopper tells a tender, rabbit-hearted story of secondary school classmates Charlie Spring (Joe Locke) and Nick Nelson (Kit Connor) falling for each other. Based on Alice Oseman’s YA graphic novels, the eight-episode Netflix series is a coming-of-age queer romance that retains its optimism, even when tackling serious subject matter.
There’s Charlie, the anxious, gangly, curly-haired drummer with an iPhone background that fittingly reads “gay panic.” He is the only openly gay student at their all-boys secondary school. Nick is the classic golden retriever love interest; he’s the star of the rugby team whose kindness makes him an outlier in his group of friends, and who always assumed he was straight.
It’s just that hanging out with Charlie, his new best friend, makes him begin to wonder if that assumption is wrong.
A number of yearning gazes, a smattering of delightful tropes — Charlie joins the rugby team for reasons that are entirely predictable — an “Am I gay?” internet quiz (he gets exactly 62%), and a smooch or two later, Nick has an epiphany during a fateful viewing of Pirates of the Caribbean. It’stold succinctly in four shots: a close of up Keira Knightley, then Orlando Bloom, a vaguely aggrieved reaction shot, and then a shot of Nick smoothly Googling “bisexual.”
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It’s a particular rite of passage, for those who grew up watching television and movies feeling vaguely sexually confused. Sometimes these viewings spurred that leap of faith from “I want to be them” to “Oh, I want to be with them.” This particular moment from Heartstopper
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