With the progress of television content, more open and attractive content and aesthetics emerged (Goddard and Hogg, 2018). The TV series Euphoria was popular with its diverse topics like LGBTQ, Trans characters, drug issues, and so on. Those elements in the series are influenced by positive and negative sides. However, the significant attribute of that is the series certainly brings some resonance with the young generation because it found a representation like protagonist Rue who was a reliable projection for the young group. It provides a position for young groups to project their issues of identity, gender, and mental illness and help them get relief and accompany from Euphoria.

The successful established of Rue from voice-cover

At the beginning of episode one, we followed Rue’s voice to get into the storytelling. It is genuine to start knowing the whole story from Rue’s perspective because Edholm (2022) asserts the narrator shared things with private experiences such as how parents born us or how parents raised us in detail could make the distance between the story and people getting closer. This is an intimate interaction that people always do with a close individual and the action of telling a private story helps construct a trustworthy and understandable relationship to connect with the audience which makes them feel the emotion, action, and thought. Meanwhile, the audience would be touched deeper when they follow the character to face some circumstances such as when Rue loses her identity in peers and finds it back, her gender recognition, and her mental illness. People continuously in a sense of substitution feel what Rue felt rather than analyze her action in a judgment side.

How was Rue representing the identity, gender, and mental issues

After the reliable character is established, the rest of the episodes’ story in Euphoria would be more acceptable and recognized because people can find themselves from Rue’s actions. Firstly, the crucial perception followed Rue to find the young group’s identity because this character was based on the contemporary context which displayed some circumstances modern adolescents faced like how Rue found her position in her peer group. While this did not limit the resonance around only one age group because everyone owned their teenage phase. This also can evoke all age’s teenage experiences in their memory. The second significant resonance is the gender issues which the character Rue showed female traits. There are many LGBTQ issues in this TV series, but these character traits linked to females can include more common experiences. And as the research always shows a strong female lead character rather than exploring females’ loving, kindness, and gentleness in a positive way (Wu and Fakhruddin, 2023). Euphoria constructs female characters like Rue, who have various female traits, demonstrate different appearances in life, and construct many relationships with others, even though some of them are passive actions. This made this female representation more vivid and real. In addition, mental issues play an important part in the Euphoria. This is a valuable attempt to show these mental symptoms in a well-known TV series which could make more illness reactions be accepted and understood. For example, Rue shares their bipolar experience without any hidden and tries to fight with this. This process of facing mental illness can encourage and help the same patients get resilience as Leah and Juliana (2024) asserts that teenagers can develop the ability to punch back, adapt, and preserve mental issues through watching characters with the same condition to overcome the illness in TV series.

References:

Edholm, R. (2022). ‘“I’M NOT ALWAYS THE MOST RELIABLE NARRATOR”: ON CHARACTER VOICE-OVER AS A RHETORICAL RESOURCE IN HBO’S EUPHORIA’. SERIES: International Journal of TV Serial Narratives. University of Bologna, 8 (1), pp. 5–16. doi: 10.6092/issn.2421-454X/13657.

Goddard, M. N. and Hogg, C. (2018). ‘Introduction: Trans TV as concept and intervention into contemporary television’. Critical Studies in Television. SAGE Publications Inc., 13 (4), pp. 470–474. doi: 10.1177/1749602018798217.

Leah, D. and Juliana, L. ‘Supplemental Material for Queer on TV: Using the Minority Stress Model to Explore the Role of LGBQ+ Television Exposure in LGBQ+ Audiences’ Psychological Well-Being and Identity Status’. (2024). Psychology of Popular Media. American Psychological Association (APA). doi: 10.1037/ppm0000548.supp.

Wu, L. and Fakhruddin, W. F. W. B. W. (2023). ‘Discourse Analysis of Female Identity Shaped by International Media through Systematic Functional Linguistics’. Eurasian Journal of Applied Linguistics. Hacettepe University, 9 (1), pp. 74–82. doi: 10.32601/ejal.901007.

Wenyu Li 33831990