annawrites:

so a thing that has always baffled me a little is this idea that neil josten is somehow completely ignorant about pop culture.

for one thing, this boy spent half of his teenage years in transit, and i can guarantee you that only a very small percentage of that time was spent actively running from an immediate threat. most of it would have been extremely tedious – endless car rides, sitting on public transport, waiting around at airports, being stuck in shabby motel rooms with only a TV for company while his mother went out and organised the next trip. mary would have had her hands full finding ways to keep him entertained on the road when he was younger, and there’s only so much time you can spend doing something productive before your attention span fizzles out.

for another, if they were learning new languages, then listening to language learning tapes in the car would have only gotten them so far. in order to blend in, pick up local accents and learn colloquial slang, and learn things about local culture and whatnot, they would probably have resorted to local radio stations, books and audiobooks, TV shows etc, and mary probably listened to the news religiously and picked up newspapers where she could.

thirdly, being utterly unaware of current pop culture would have really made neil stick out at school? i know he was never allowed to really socialise, but mary would have made sure that he knew how to make smalltalk and fly under the radar. that plus the fact that neil bounced between a shitload of different schools in different countries and states would have meant that neil had to pick up on new trends and stuff very, very quickly. i can even imagine him using the blending in excuse to get away with watching a movie or something – “everyone at school’s talking about it mom, they keep asking me when i’m going to see it” – because hell if that boy didn’t take small pleasures where he could and used his sneaky streak on his mom sometimes when he could get away with it.

all of these things make me think that it’s much more likely that neil’s pop culture knowledge is actually quite extensive but very jumbled and mixed-up, kind of like a tumblr dashboard (like seeing gifs of TV shows you don’t watch, if you know what i mean)? there are probably not a lot of movies he’s seen in their entirety, and if he did, he was usually more focused on the language than the actual plot. or he looked things up on the school computers just so he’d know what people were talking about. or he knows the lyrics to every single popular song by a popular band at the time but he has no idea what the band members look like or what the songs are called. he knows obscure foreign films and he’s read the first three harry potter books in french and one of the later ones in german but he only saw half of the fifth movie and most of the seventh, in spanish with french subtitles.

tl;dr neil josten is a mess but he’s not an oblivious idiot, thank you for coming to my ted talk