Children are not particularly discriminating consumers. They’ll watch pretty much anything shiny that you put in front of them, because they don’t know any better. A moderately well written film to an adult will literally be “the best thing” a teen has ever seen. When you catch a teen’s interest early, they’ll probably continue be interested in your brand for the next 10-20 years, at least. That money adds up. The attention they get from sharing everything with each other adds up.

Adults need to be impressed, and even then their interest will be moderated. It’s a lot harder to make something a lot of adults are excited about.

That’s not something specific to the US. If you chose a manga or anime at random, it’d most likely revolve around a highschooler.

I don’t think I see anyone else saying it: Because High School was the last school for the vast majority of people. It was the transition into adult life and responsibilities.

In American history a lot of people didn’t even make it to High School. You got enough of an education to work whatever job, or were forced to quit schooling and start working because of family financial needs.

College wasn’t needed for a good paying job that would be enough to own a home, car, have a family, etc.

So High School was the end of the line for being a kid in school and whatever freedoms came with that. Especially for the Boomer generation the economy at the time really allowed a lot more freedoms for High School kids than had ever been available before.

Baby Boomers are the reason why high school became so culturally relevant.

You had a large cohort of students coming of age together at a time when the country was wealthy enough where you had a class of people who had gone through puberty but wasn’t being given the full roles and responsibilities of being adults. This new separate age group between kids and adults was relatively novel.

You also started seeing a major change in cultural forces like music and cinema which catered to this set of consumers. This catering became very important as companies realized this was when adults formed a lot of their tastes and preferences. Cultural output started focusing on this age group as tastemakers.

Because being an adult in the U.S. sucks. Many people work right out of high school until they retire/die without ever going on a real vacation.

So people fantasize about the time when they weren’t wage slaves.

• Countless coming of age experiences happen around that time

• A massive peer group, with all the dynamics that entails. For most, it’s the last time they will regularly interact with that many peers ever.

only about half the population goes to college, and 20 years ago it was only about a 1/3 and so on.

high school is a universal experience, college is not. so there is a broader media audience for high school, and yes for many people high school was there youth and they became working adults once they left it.

the prolong adolescence of college and post-graduate study is mostly for the top 25-10% of the population who are wealthy and not relatable to the vast majority of the population. when i was a college kid and a graduate student, my uneducated parents thought college was just partying all the time because of movies about college only showed frat parties and antics. They had no clue I was working 80 hour weeks and getting drunk maybe once a month or less.

Because most people peaked in HS.

We don’t…

Corporations market to that demographic, because their brains aren’t fully developed yet and you get in there before they know better.

For media like TV/movies, it’s partly the same thing, but also lowest common denominator. All the target demos can identify with a story based in highschool because they’ve all lived it.

That’s why in John Wick he avenged his dog, a 12 year old boy understands that waaaaay more than losing a child. So even tho that would make the movie make way more sense, he goes all Liam Niessens over a pet.

In an ultra capitalist society, everything else always take a backseat to marketing, including the plots.

Largely universal experience. Lots of activities and clubs vs adult hood (sports, rallies, math club, robotics club, etc). High feeling of potential (every is wonder what they will become instead of the are).

Some Americans “peak” in high school. They were popular and/or good at something like sports. After they moved on to university or their first job, they found out the larger world isn’t impressed with their high school accomplishments.

Because adulthood is shit.

Because life in the U.S. is all shit after high school.

Because most of its citizens peaked in it.

People assume life will get better after high school. Family life, work, friends, etc… Doesn’t really work out that way for most people, so they start looking at their past as their best of days. It may be more apparent for US citizens because a large part of our history education is the concept of “American exceptionalism,” which really only existed for the small generation right out of WWII.