nevanna | "When you're on a while ride, your friends are always by your side..."

A few years ago, I found myself reminiscing on social media, with some of my former classmates, about an elaborate game of make believe that they created in elementary school. They called themselves the “Magic Rock Club”; the large rock in question stood at the edge of our school playground, and was either their headquarters or an object of worship, or both. My friend recalls that I was part of the club, too, but I just remember desperately wanting to be, both because of their enticing shared mythology – which involved trips to another dimension and a wizard who served as their guide – and because I hated the idea of being excluded from the Cool Thing that my friends were doing together. (Often, among kids of that age, the point of forming clubs is to exclude others, but I don’t recall any specific instances in which they were cruel in that way.) I also have more isolated memories of other classmates “assigning” me to chase certain boys around the playground, as part of a system that was probably as elaborate as seven-year-olds could manage.

At Cartoon Night, we’re currently watching Craig of the Creek, which mostly consists of slice-of-life episodes about a diverse group of kids having adventures in the woods. I’ve told several people that the tone and attitude remind me a lot of Hey Arnold! which was one of my favorite shows from the 90s. Craig and his friends have built their own miniature society, largely without adult intervention, with its own rules and customs and hierarchies. For them, being tagged as “it,” winning a card game, tracking down the missing book in one’s favorite series, or being insufficiently horse-like to hang out with the Horse Girls, have the highest imaginable stakes, because sometimes, that’s just what being a kid is like. I also really enjoy the fact that, thus far (and I have no spoilers), the show hasn’t entirely committed to being realistic or speculative fiction. Viewers might conclude that Craig’s home-schooled pen pal is probably not writing to him from another dimension, but he readily believes that she is, and the episode doesn’t end with a “reality check” that informs him otherwise. The “anything is possible” outlook is part of the show’s charm.

Most of the episodes stand on their own, but there is an emerging arc about a “king” who leads a separate group of kids and has targeted Craig as a key part of his tyrannical plans. When I saw the social dynamics between this character and his “subjects,” two things occurred to me: firstly, that I wouldn’t be surprised if the show’s creators had researched cults before writing those episodes, and secondly, anybody who doesn’t think that the social dynamics of childhood playtime can be spectacularly cult-like has had a very different experience of childhood playtime than my peers and I did.