the premise of The Summer I Turned Pretty as modernized by amazon prime has always felt dumb to me

"oh wow, X got so hot since last summer, what a total surprise"

please, there's no way all these kids wouldn't have each other friended on social media

... that's a good point

I guess you could finagle it all this person in particular didn't tweet or whatever for the whole summer, but how likely is that lmao

like whenever someone goes "x thing in a canon doesn't make sense because kids don't do that", i'm always the one responding with "i mean i'm sure some of them do"

but this is apparently my line

there is no way that all three of these kids just happen to not have instagram

Three kids??? Nah lmao

I could give them maybe one

My take would be this, really:
One doesn't use most social media (preference/lack of tech to enable)
One uses social media... badly.
One has two modes: the social media their family knows about, and the ones they obviously Cannot Ever know about.

If you picked three kids at random at any high school, yeah, you'd probably find more than one with an Instagram - but if you looked, you could probably find at least three individual kids who just don't have it for whatever reason.
They may or may not know of each other, but I can easily believe them existing.

I mean, they keep modernizing The Baby-sitters' Club despite that series being deeply rooted in a time when preteens had much more freedom and cell phones were basically just for rich businesspeople.

But yeah, the experience of not seeing most of your classmates for three months and then the shock and change in social dynamics when one comes back hot (or otherwise different) feels like such a universal experience that whoever made the decision to update the setting just didn't account for the fact that that's gone now.

ShaynaIsHere ... this is a very good point. and despite being relatively apathetic about it, i've seen both seasons of this show and know exactly which kid is which type

wedding rose?? "the experience of not seeing most of your classmates for three months and then the shock and change in social dynamics when one comes back hot " GOD i remember this so much from middle school

kids showing up in september looking literally unrecognizable. girls who grew a whole entire foot over the summer. boys whose voices changed

In my defense I also just. Did not care enough about being socially savvy, so most of it went over my head. XD
I had One Group of kids I followed around, but mostly just kept to myself and did schoolwork (and volunteered in local/school libraries).

oh yeah i was an observer in high school, too

i had a xanga in middle school. no myspace. yes facebook

i probably would not have had an instagram

i had facebook but basically never used it

and admittedly I don't keep up with my old classmates anymore

Honestly total lack of social media was already pushing plausibility even back when the first book came out in 2009

Be Maki-Mine🍁 2009??????

i had it in my head that these books were published in the eighties or nineties, goddamn

2009