What It's Like Being Alone was a stop motion comedy series that aired briefly in 2006. In hindsight, it's rather crude and often crass and sometimes even cringy with its humor, but hey, that's the mid 2000s for you, I suppose. Even still, the somewhat immature and outdated humor aside, the show was something that caught my eye for various reasons.
Part of it, truth be told, was simply the visual aesthetic. I've always been a sucker for stop motion. As a little girl, my favorite movie was Nightmare Before Christmas (well before Hot Topic got its grubby little paws all over it) and I've always been an enormous fan of Wallace & Gromit, even rushing to the theater opening day for their long awaited feature film. I liked Gumby, I liked the stop motion in Pee Wee's Playhouse, and I loved the Prometheus & Bob segment from Nickelodeon's KABLAM which I'm sure I'll cover at some point.
But the second part is, frankly, the concept itself, and how oddly relatable it was, especially to my adolescent teenage girl mind growing up. Often feeling left out, ignored by my family and of little interest to my own "friends" - of which were extremely few to begin with - I spent a lot of my time alone, surfing the internet, hence how I first came across this gem of a series on Youtube back in the day. Seeing a group of orphans stick together, because they had to not because they wanted to necessarily, I felt oddly at home in this cozy little clay universe. But I also felt home in it for another reason, and that's because I was queer.
Growing up in the time period I did, knowing I liked girls, was rather terrifying. It wasn't the dark ages by any means, but it also certainly wasn't what we have today, where it's perfectly fine to be openly gay. Back then, the word "gay" got thrown around by kids at school to mean 'stupid' and 'dumb' and 'gross'. I can't tell you how many times I got called a slur of some kind by other kids leaving school, as I just waited for my parents to pick me up. Every goddamned day, seriously. And I wasn't even really 'out'. I guess I just gave off that exceptional of a lesbian vibe. Either way, it wasn't good. Between that and the fact that the only other queer person in my life, my Uncle Freddy, died from AIDS when I was about 5 or so really created this belief in me that queer people were not allowed to live, and be happy. That gay people weren't people. That we were, for all intents and purposes, "monsters".
So to see a bunch of other monsters, monsters who also didn't have families (I had a family, certainly, but lordy did I not feel like I belonged there and often the psychological abuse I endured backed that up) really made me feel like this was a place that was created for me and me alone, especially since it only ran for 13 episodes.
It had this undeniable charm to it, especially for someone like me, someone so lost in untangling their identity, that I couldn't help but relate to, and wish it had run longer. At the same time, I've always been the sort of TV viewer who simply appreciates what I was given in the first place, especially considering most of what I love on television is stuff that shouldn't have made it to air in the first place. Plus it helps that I was, as a teenager (today too, but not as much) an enormous fan of dark gothic sort of stuff, of which this definitely fit the bill. Hell, it had a goth girl IN it. I was a big fan of Slave Labor Graphics comic books and movies like Beetlejuice, so you know where my interests lay at the time, and still somewhat do today. But really, for someone who felt like a monster, an unlovable unwanted monster at that, What It's Like Being Alone really hit a special place in my heart and made me feel welcome.
The man who created this series (who has since, to my surprise upon just learning this, gone on to direct many successful films with The Rock) also wrote and directed a short film before this, titled "Evelyn: The Cutest Evil Dead Girl". At the time, I saw it merely as a knock off of the comic book Lenore, but at this stage in my life, I appreciate it for what it is. I also, even with that feeling of being an imitator, felt somewhat related to it back then when I saw it, because, again, I was fascinated with death, and still am. So the guy really has a penchant for making stuff I like.
What It's Like Being Alone is, by todays standards as I stated, fairly bland and kind of hard to watch, if mostly because of the humor involved. Visually it's still marvelous, but the writing is kind of tough to stomach now. Even still, I appreciate it for what it was at the time; a safe haven for a scared, confused little queer girl who liked monsters, and often felt like one herself. A girl who rarely felt at home not just within her own skin but also within her own family. A girl who, against all odds, managed to survive to adulthood, likely because she had things like this to fall back on for comfort.
What It's Like Being Alone, despite having such a bleak title, actually allowed me to not be alone, and for that I'll be forever grateful.
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