Extracurricular is like someone binged Breaking Bad then watched an episode of Law and Order SVU then said, "But what if he was actually sympathetic? What if his continued criminal activity in the context of the time frame and the narrative both made sense? What if the motive behind this criminal activity was not just sympathetic, but accurate: he needs to commit crime to earn enough to survive and attain the opportunities he requires so he will one day be able to survive without having to commit crime to do it, a very understandable and true to life perspective? What if he was allowed to be both a victim of classism and economic inequality, as well as blatantly profiting from systemic misogynistic practices and patterns, presented in such a way that makes him personally responsible for very visceral losses and traumas, partially due to his willful disregard for others for the sake of his and his own, partially due to his own unwillingness to confront the nature of these choices,, and partially due to his lack of experience and his underestimating of others who are in the same or similar positions as him?
What if his female LI whom people may be inclined to bash unnecessarily actually was responsible for a good amount of what goes wrong, not because she is a wife or a mother or a daughter whose demands, something to do with family, the home, or social expectations, hinder his capacity to be a proper full fledged criminal, but rather because she encourages him to choose crime and business and profit over human decency? And then what if it was actually crucial to her character arc rather than just a plot device to explain why the hero can't catch a break? In fact, what if her initially treating the situation like a game and making decisions without accounting for real people was significantly highlighted as a result of the elitist and classiest habit of simultaneously romanticizing the circumstances of the poor and cheapenjng the realities? What if she is constantly using her power and privilege to save him and save him and save him and what if he's resentful of that because it's both not an option for him and because walking away from him and this will always be an option for her? What if the ability of the rich to walk away from decisions that cost everyone else dearly was a major point of discussion and contention between them? What if she was allowed to be both spoiled and entitled and much deserving of criticism for it, as well as someone deprived of and deserving of unconditional love, who pretends and feels equally and sometimes simultaneously, who deserves to feel good at something she chose for herself but just can't seem to get the only thing she ever has chosen right?
What if everything that goes wrong never would've happened if both protagonists had parents who genuinely valued and loved their children intrinsically? What if everything does happen because two utterly and completely alone self-proclaimed independents who once, because of their pasts with their family, saw relationships as only predatory or parasitic but inherently built on imbalanced power and neglect, stumbled into positions of mutual need, which mutates through the series into a sickeningly unhealthy and codependent lifeline that is still emotionally healing both to them and the viewers if only because it is the first time that either of these two youths - these two kids, both abandoned and hopeless if in different ways - have ever been prioritized or even counted or even known, as people?
What if our victim was allowed to be a victim of circumstance and unfairly coerced and making her own choices? What if she was allowed to be both sympathetic in her attachment and loyalty to the one adult man she's been protected by rather than attacked by, but also in her anger and fear and disgust and her exhaustion? What if the man that loves her doesn't appreciate her, but what if really he does, and what if he doesn't know because he doesn't care, but he actually does because does care? What if they're just dating and it's not real - but it is - and she's hungry, so hungry and tired and needing something real and tangible and consistent and she latches onto this weird, mysterious, incomprehensible, silent old man who represents her pimp but speaks to her like she matters and like he cares what happens to her and he wants her to care about herself too, because both of her parents are dead and her boyfriend says he doesn't care, so why does he and what if he stops, what if he has no reason to try to convince her to care, what happens to her then?
What if the whole thing was this love story between two broken, desperate kids who found themselves only through each other, but the consequences of their prioritizing that love were real, palpable, and affected characters we not only followed, but were forced to confront first as the shallow background characters that are so common in stories that glorify violent crime, like the naive new sex worker and the oblivious asshole in her life, only to have their depths and layers unraveled before we are forced to watch them, fully realized people we now care about, pay the ultimate price for not even our protagonists' victory, but mere survival specifically with each other?
What if the whole point is that 'absence makes the heart grow fonder' isn't just about wishing you had what you lost? It's about never having been given something, never knowing it, and wanting so badly, so fiercely that it's debilitating. It's about getting a glimpse of what it might be like and going weak with yearning and all the while cursing yourself for even daring to speculate that it could be attainable because that distant, unacknowledged hope is sustaining you like an IV drip, prompting you like a park sign warning of wolves, but call your desires by name and the howling at your back and hunger in your gut never stops. It's about find someone else who has never had what you never had and suddenly you can give it to them and that gives it to you. It's about having all your life and having it ripped away, maybe because you didn't protect it, or maybe because someone else never had it and couldn't let you.