I’ve decided to write about my Outsiders pet peeves
TRIGGER WARNING: Dally’s suicide
1. Saying that Ponyboy is bratty or over dramatic. First of all, he’s a freshman in high school. Mostly everyone I know was annoying as a freshman too. He JUST turned 14 in the book, so yeah some of the things he says are petty or rude, but he’s a child. Not only is he a child, but he’s established from the beginning as a character that feels things deeply, he contemplates things that he can’t really vocalize with a majority of the people around him. He has no parents, and he feels lonely after their death. I personally have siblings but if my parents died, especially at a young age, I’d feel lost and lonely too. Him having brothers doesn’t make the gravity of his parents death any less saddening.
2. People who watched the musical and said anything along the lines of “I don’t like that Dally committed Suicide”. Because he committed suicide in the book too. And it wasn’t like some secret that he did it, it wasn’t “heavily implied”. He wasn’t just lost and confused so he made trouble and was reckless. Because Dally was not unintelligent. He knew if he robbed the store, the cops would come after him. He knew that if he pointed the gun at the police, they’d shoot him. There was nothing accidental about his death, and to imply that is insulting the characters intelligence and minimizing his feelings. Assisted suicide is still suicide.
3. Anyone who demonizes Darry, wasn’t paying enough attention to what ever version of the Outsiders that were reading or watching. I mentioned earlier that I didn’t like how some people talk about Pony, but Darry also tends to get demonized by a lot of people. A lot of people think that you can’t like both Darry and Pony, but that’s not true. Darry was doing his best in his circumstance and always had Ponyboy and Soda at the top of his list of priorities.
4. People who write Dally in a way that glorifies his actions in life. I understand that everyone wants to think of the gang as these sweet little guys with an adorable found family. Hell, I love those fanfictions, but you can love a character and also understand that objectively they aren’t a good person. I love Dally, and I’m sympathetic to him because of his past, but I won’t justify the things he does. Dally does, and has done a lot of bad things in his life, and he has a lot of flaws. I’m not going to make excuses for him. I can be sympathetic to him, and also truthful about him.
5. I have seen some people talk about Randy’s redemption in a negative light. A lot of people saying it felt like too little too late. However, Randy having that redemption is so important because it emphasizes the similarities is the social classes. His arc also serves as a reminder that’s the docs were human too. He was an example of positive change within the series.
6. I understand if the outsiders isn’t your cup of tea, but just because you don’t like it doesn’t make it bad. I don’t like rom coms, but that’s not because they are bad, it’s because they are rom coms, I can’t sit through the genre. The outsiders is at its core a coming of age novel that still rings true for a lot of people today. So my last pet peeve is people saying it’s “it’s just a school assignment”. At its core it is an assignment but a lot of people see themselves in these characters and that’s something no one should feel bad about.
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