You know what's I think is the best kind of awesomeness?
The way heroes can come into your life at any time. It isn't restricted to when you're a kid. I know this is true, because I'm not a kid, but I just found a new hero.
That hero's name is Terry, though she goes by some other names: Terry the Tomboy, and LovesDirt96.
Terry the Tomboy is portrayed by Lia Marie Johnson, a very talented actress who regularly plays the character - as well as many others - on a YouTube channel and television show, both called Awesomeness TV.
Recently, though, the Terry character broke out from Awesomeness TV's format of brief sketches and became the subject of a TV movie on Nickelodeon.
And that movie where I discovered Terry - and where I also discovered the fact that I think Terry rules. And I felt compelled to write this, to explain why I think she rules, and what the character means to me.
In order to understand that question of why, though, you need to know the character.
So, for the uninitiated - the basic premise of the sketches and of the movie is that Terry is, true to her nickname, a tomboyish girl. Throughout the sketches and movie, Terry tries to help other people through an online advice-and-guidance video show she creates from her garage. With the assistance - and sometimes hinderance - of her style-obsessed cheerleader brother Brian (played by Chris Bones) and her somewhat-hapless best friend Duncanty (Noland Ammon), Terry also uses these videos to chronicle her individual perspective on life.
And that perspective - that fearless expression of Terry's worldview in all its particular individuality - is key to what makes Terry awesome to me.
You see, Terry knows exactly who and what she is.
And she's cool with that.
Because Terry's cool with being, well, Terry.
That, in itself, would be heroic.
But Terry doesn't stop there.
Because Terry tells the world who and what she is, with her video guides.
And, yes, Terry's viewpoints can seem comedic and silly.
But that's also part of the appeal of the character, to me.
Because Terry doesn't just tell the world who and what she is. She does more than that. She shouts it. She dances to it. She posts her viewpoints without self-depreciation or irony and doesn't care a bit that other people might mock her for how the videos or viewpoints might make her look.
What matters to Terry is is inspiring other people - getting the word out to other people that being a tomboy can be cool.
And that getting a tomboy can be cool.
And that - most important of all - being yourself is pretty much the best way to achieve true awesomeness.
Terry's proud of who she is. And, to my way of thinking, Terry's pride is in her strength - and her strength is in her pride.
And the way those two elements go together in Terry's character make her truly inspirational to me in real-life.
Because pride and strength simply must go together in real-life, too - especially when we're feeling our least confident and least impressive.
Because that authenticity - especially when we consider how shameful society can make authenticity can feel for our women and girls in American culture - is so important in the real world, and so sadly absent from American media so much of the time.
Because that kind of broad honestly - both in media and reality - is vital to existence, as far as I'm concerned.
Because I think it's the only way to be truly happy in real life.
And that's a real struggle for me, to maintain that pride and strength. Especially because, as I've said in prior blogs, I'm not the smartest person ... or the best person.
And I spend way too much time trying to be ... because I'm too often looking for perfection in myself, trying to be perfect as an abstract quality, judging myself when I fail.
And Terry inspires me because she's got the kind of attitude I most admire - the attitude of someone who is perfect at being themselves because that's all they're trying to be, both inside their own heads and how they present themselves to the rest of the world.
This lack of filtration of the self is something I've been working on in my own life for as long as I can remember. And, thanks to inspiration from characters like Terry, I've been succeeding more and more of late. Because an unfiltered life - a life where you let yourself show the world who you really are - is the only way to truly experience what life's all about, and to live in any particular moment unafraid of being judged for how you express yourself - no matter how it might look to others.
And, lately, I've finally come to understand how good it feels to throw off the weights of letting other people judge me. I've realized how liberating it can be to just express myself without worrying about whether or not it seems perfect. Plus, you know what else? Sometimes, it can really be just kind of fun to let myself be loud and proud of who and what I am ...
... and the things I truly love in life.
And it helps me be closer to other people.
Because those guards and filters can - and do - keep me away from other people. And having the support of friends becomes more and more important to me, the more honest and open I become about myself. I don't think people are designed to be isolated, even though solitude can sometimes be necessary. I think those of us who have been hurt by life can too often choose isolation as a path toward refusing to take a risk with other people. But, more and more, I find that life is better when you have friends, and people you let yourself care about, even though sometimes it won't be rewarded, and can sometimes lead to pain.
The pain is worth it, when you know that for every person who will turn out to be not quite what you expected them to be, there'll be someone else who turns into a best friend.
And Terry shows that to be the case in the essential nature of her character, and especially in Terry the Tomboy: The Movie. That's her best friend, Duncanty, whom I mentioned before, on the left in the picture above, but on the right is Brett (played by Charlie DePew), a young man that initially impresses Terry in the film's plot, which revolves around what happens to Terry when she tries to win Brett's affections by doing everything except being herself out of fear that Brett might prefer Terry's early-childhood friend Britannica (Audrey Whitby).
So, wait, Dee, I hear you saying. This is one of those movies where the entire story is all about girls and boys fighting over each other's affections? Uhhhhhh.
And, yeah, I hear that.
But the thing is - this is part of what makes Terry such a great character, and what makes Lia Marie Johnson's portrayal of her so compellingly subversive.
Because Brett and Britannica and all the other plot elements that come and go in the film are there to illustrate some very real, very important themes, in my opinion. And those themes are what make Terry the Tomboy: The Movie unabashedly feminist, unabashedly girl-positive and an unabashed example of awesomeness.
Because the themes of the film, and the sketches - and the whole character's concept - revolve entirely around Terry.
In fact, the film - like the sketches that preceded it - brings up an incredible number of tropes and wrongheaded ideas about the way American culture dictates how women and girls "should" present themselves, how they should act, how they should be ...
... and then proceeds to dismantle and skewer those tropes and ideas through the power of Terry's winning personality and her unique perspective - so it becomes so much more than what could come off as just another creaky critique of America's poor attitude toward women and girls.
Terry leads on this portrayal not by mere essay, but also by example.
She leads by showing girls that whoever they are, they can aspire.
And she leads by showing girls they can present themselves as who they really are inside without having to worry about being presentable by some arbitrary standard that would recuse them back into their rooms out of fear of judgment.
And she leads by showing girls that they can be tough, and rugged, and strong, and capable.
But what's also important to see there is that Terry shows people these things.
She doesn't just tell it to them.
And Lia Marie Johnson presents Terry as utterly fearless in portraying that, and - to me - that's absolutely wonderful.
Because, well, Terry isn't afraid to get dirty.
In fact, she loves dirt.
She is, after all, LovesDirt96.
And that's huge to me. Because we spend so much time in American culture telling girls they can't get dirty - which, to my way of thinking, is also telling girls never to even try to achieve. Because trying and achieving - the way Terry does - will inevitably get a person dirty.
And, for the silliest and most superficial elements in American society, that's a problem. And that can lead to problems for girls who try and achieve and build and fight for themselves and who shout to be heard and who take over the positions our society says are only for boys.
You know ... the ones folks so often call tomboys.
But is Terry worried about them? Is she worried about what folks say when she walks through town covered in mud, in her trucker hat and her flannel, eating her coldcut-and-bacon sandwich?
Nope.
Because Terry's inherent awesomeness is that everything she does, she does like Terry does it.
Whether she's swimming through mud or trying her hand at being a cheerleader, she's first and foremost always Terry.
And that unchanging, immutable quality is also pure awesomeness.
Because it also means Terry's kind of indestructible, in the most positive sense of that concept.
And I think girls - and women - need a few indestructible heroes now and then.
We need to see that women and girls can be themselves and still win in life, without having to take off their glasses and shake out their hair and change who they are and what they look like and what they value to win the day.
We need to see that girls and women can walk through tough times and come out on the other side intact, uncompromising - taking out the trash that gets in their way in life without throwing out who they are along with it.
But what's also great - to the level of awesomeness - is that Terry isn't indestructible in a big vacuum like is so common with the Indestructible Hero type. She's not simply imitating the guise of the stereotypical indestructible male American hero. She's not a "dude in a dress," despite the word "tomboy" in her name.
She's not some feminized armature around the core of a stubbly loner brodude who's staring into the middle distance while he cleans his stubbly loner gear for his next stubbly loner mission. Instead, Terry is portrayed as listening to other people, being open to new ideas and new experiences and getting out into the world to try new things. And, succeed or fail, she refuses be ashamed for very long, even when she falters in front of others.
Because Terry isn't anti-social.
And I mean that in multiple ways. Because being anti-social isn't just and only shunning the company of others. Because, so often, girls in America are actively encouraged to be anti-social even as they're instructed to be so-called "social butterflies."
Because girls are so often taught in American society to be mistrustful of each other - by advisement and personal experience. And girls in America are also taught to compete fiercely for the resource of the attention of others, versus actual friendship. And girls in America are also told that all their achievements can only matter in metrics of popularity, exposure, media presence.
And that's not fair. And it's not right. And it's also deeply unhealthy. Because that kind of behavior can keep people from becoming who they were meant to be. It can keep hearts from opening up to the fullness of our shared human experiences with other people. It can lead to feelings of isolation, to desperate loneliness even in a crowd. And it can keep all of us from blossoming into full, uniquely individual people.
And so I thank Lia Marie Johnson for portraying Terry as a character who counters all these bad examples with one amazingly awesome good example that, to my way of thinking, does a world of good to so many girls - and to everyone, really - who need an example like Terry.
Whether part of the design of the character or not, Terry ends up representing what girls - and people in general - can be if they cast aside worries of how they'll be seen by others. She represents how much fun life can be if you're willing to let yourself breathe by throwing away the shields and barriers between yourself and the rest of the world. And she represents how it's OK to be imperfect, and messy - like real-life is.
Because Terry is a good example that has helped me tremendously in my own life, and I like to think she helps others. And, as far as I'm concerned, helping people lead better lives represents the very best and most incredible kind of awesomeness there is.
No comments:
Post a Comment