Paper Girls is acutely aware of how much growing up sucks, time war or no

polygon.com:

Aside from the current influx of edgy nursery rhyme pop remixes, the worst thing that happens to childhood is, without a doubt, the swift, humbling devastation of adulthood. Slowly but surely, the marine biology daydreams of middle school become froyo job applicants hungry for a master’s degree. The music of youth — my favorite was Ashlee Simpson’s debut album, Autobiography (pre-lip sync scandal) — becomes, over time, someone-your-age’s child’s uncool oldie, a dusty relic pointing back to the Mesozoic era when an iPod had no screen. Such is the conundrum at the center of Paper Girls:Why is my older self so extraordinarily dull? How come my older self’s apartment lacks the presence of a Nobel Prize, or even a laundry unit? And how come we’re still renting? The hard pill response to all of these inquiries is the echo of one’s own asking. Adulthood sucks because it couldn’t care less about your dreams or wants. It simply looms above you in perpetuity. Kind of like tax season.

Amazon’s Paper Girls, a somewhat faithful adaptation of the well-loved comic by Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang, is, amidst its hammy sci-fi dressings, a tender story about girlhood and uncertainty, of becoming and eventual unbecoming. Like its small yet mighty leads, the show oscillates between nostalgic ’80s coming-of-age yearning and bizarro intergalactic theater, wherein youth must confront the flicker of 2000s tech-store fluorescents, the awkward confidence of ’90s rave culture, and the dreaded and jaded older self, head-on. Across the season’s eight episodes, time is shattered alongside walkie-talkies, college dreams, sibling hatred, the uterine lining, and heterosexuality to boot.

Our titular paper girls — Mac (Sofia Rosinsky), Tiffany