Editing Ontology:Q69,80 (section)

== Background ==

{{book|Growing Around}} is a mostly unreleased children's series by YouTube creator {{TTS|tts=Mr. Enter|MrEnter}}, centering around the concept of a society created by children that act as the guardians of adults. According to secondhand internet sources, the series had tens of episode drafts and some amount of effort into developing a fully animated pilot.<ref name="cn"/> At this moment the only released work in the series is {{book|Growing Around: Party Panic}}. Either way, so many people have already said things about the series that the sheer body of reviews is almost its own small series to be analyzed.

=== {{book|Growing Around}} and dystopia ===

Many reviewers analyzing the single released book {{book|Party Panic}} as well as miscellaneous bits of production information have commented that based on the content of the characters' daily life, {{book|Growing Around}} appears to them to be a dystopian society.<ref name="tbc"/><ref name="cgs"/> Variations of the phrase "{{TTS|html=cite|tts=Nineteen eighty-four|1984}}" or "{{TTS|html=cite|tts=Nineteen eighty-four|1984}} spinoff" have come up multiple times.<ref name="tbc"/><ref name="cgs"/> {{TTS|tts=Mr. Enter|MrEnter}} has stated that the series was not intended to come across this way. These two observations are not inherently contradictory.

Looking at the problem solely from the point of view of fiction, the standards of fiction are generally different from the standards of real life. Many reviewers of existing children's media will make jokes or offhand remarks about how "the Teletubbies are terrifying" or "{{book|Pokémon}} should be horrifying". There may even be some amount of merit to these claims at times, only if the assumptions they began with were actually considered accurate to the fictional universe. However, some works manage to be internally coherent enough to get people to suspend disbelief. A series does not have to be intended as a dystopia to be horrifying to somebody. The way a work is understood [[E:Watsonian interpretation|within its own internal perspective]] can clash wildly with [[E:Doylian interpretation|the way some particular group of reviewers decides to see it]], and this does not inherently mean the reviewers are the ones who are right. If that were the case, vast numbers of children would suddenly decide that {{book|Pokémon}} was a bad game just because mom and dad didn't understand it, while all the people who designed the games are probably somebody else's mom or dad.

From the point of view of reality, things get more interesting. Narratives which are intended as dystopian fiction are typically designed to make remarks on real-world societies. It can be argued this creates deep fundamental problems with the genre of dystopian literature. Every dystopian novel is more or less the act of people in one country making vague remarks about how bad some other country is, real or imagined; some dystopian narratives can land badly when it happens that the population of people attempting to teach a "valuable lesson" simply operates from incorrect information. In particular, some of the most well-known dystopian narratives bash Marxist workers' states, while to anybody in those countries at the time they would come across as works created specifically by somebody who never fit into a country to begin with — read in its historical context, a work like <cite>The Giver</cite> is about equivalent to an "anti-Australianist" book with a main character based on the experiences of someone who moved from Australia to Sweden. People often try to approach the concept of dystopia with highly binary views of literary concepts, thinking that a series is either utopian or not, dystopian or not, utopian or dystopian, while in the context of how reality itself works, it is common and almost universal for all countries and countable cultures to perceive themselves one way and to be perceived by others another way. Some people find North Korea horrifying when they hear strange out-of-context stories about the country "[[E:North Korea banned radios|banning radios]]", but by its detractors' own standards of community and patriotism, a lot of people inside North Korea more or less enjoy living there. A country or fictional setting can be horrifying to someone, perhaps even on an objective level, without being horrifying to everybody inside it. What is and isn't a dystopia when the people inside the world have both happiness and sadness, and much of everyday life simply oscillates around the same particular baseline of what is normal?

Reviewing the series purely based on {{book|Party Panic}}, it is clear that one of the central focuses of this book is to portray the overall countable culture that children have created to live in and the concept that because kids created their country or world to suit the way they always wanted it to be and they have been operating it for probably hundreds of years, they would not end up hating a society which was overall designed for them. {{book|Growing Around}} presents itself as if it <em>could have been</em> a world where children suddenly took over and changed everything, yet it chooses not to be, and chooses not to try to portray that moment of transition in order to remain more outwardly "believable" — if adults had never been in charge in the first place, there would be no difficulty gaining power over them because that would simply have somehow have been the case for hundreds of years already.<ref name="always"/> From this point of view, {{book|Growing Around}} can be classified as [[E:metatransitional literature|metatransitional literature]]. It aims to portray specifically a world similar to the real world, without any supernatural elements such as magic or unicorns, where everything is basically just shuffled around as if it could have developed out of the current world, yet where some limited amount of cartoon physics and entertaining impossible combinations of otherwise "realistic" objects is allowed: if a child decides that an eagle would be an interesting pet, and eagles exist, it happens. This is a kind of imagined societal transition. It is not class-based, it is not based around countable groups of people such as nationalities, it is not rooted in any of the ordinary real-world forces of history, but it conceptualizes an ongoing historical period which keeps regenerating itself over and over much the way real historical periods do, and which much like real historical periods is not easy to simply break open and instead can keep going regardless of whether any particular individuals like it or not. Some people without a lot of knowledge of world history might remark that {{book|Growing Around}} reminds them of Communism because Communism keeps going on and on for decades and only <em>they</em> find it horrifying. Some people might remark that {{book|Growing Around}} reminds them of capitalism because living in capitalism can feel like a total absurdity where the people in power make utterly strange and childish decisions and yet it keeps going and going because nobody knows how to break out of it and make it all stop. In this sense it can be argued that {{book|Growing Around}} is a strangely authentic portrayal of the general concept of what a historical period is. Historical periods are historical periods. They do not care if every individual living in them likes them or somebody finds them horrifying; they just keep operating the way they operate and perpetuating themselves either way.

=== {{book|Growing Around}} and anarchism ===

(unfinished)