It would be easy for me, when thinking about writing a piece about Giant Days and finishing my time at university, to just meander through the similarities between my life and the character’s lives in Sheffield. Like Susan and McGraw, I grew up around Northampton and moved North for uni; my name is Ed, and I feel like my personality is quite similar to Ed Gemmel’s; one of my best friends I made at university is a gorgeous Esther-esque goth queen (although my friend Georgia is not a drama magnet, that’s other people); and like Daisy, my time studying came with major queer revelations.
The world of university works so well for a story focusing on the love between friends, because when you first start uni and move into halls, your support network has suddenly disappeared, leaving you to very quickly make new, meaningful friendships. The close - and fierce - intensity of university friendships still stands. It’s part of what makes student life an easy space for storytelling, an isolated world with specific rules that give storytellers a shortcut in worldbuilding and plot so they can focus on character. There’s tropes and moments to fall back on; the homesickness of living away from parents for the first time, the stress of deadline/exam seasons, lethal drinking games in shitty flats, experimental sexual encounters, and pesto pasta. These provide a kind of background framework that then characters can bounce off of, because in each of these situations, it becomes about how different people approach them.
Stories of uni can go in all sorts of directions, it’s a space with a lot of potential. Whether it’s the banter of channel 4 comedy Fresh Meat, the mental health issues, romance, and class conflict of Sally Rooney’s novels, or the loving comfort of Giant Days’ friendships, the idea of university in storytelling varies in tone, attitude, and style. This makes sense if starting uni is this clear demarcation of a new chapter, there’s potential for growth in all kinds of directions.
When I moved onto campus at Edge Hill University just over three years ago, I went to the Golden Lion pub for a goodbye lunch with my parents, and sat at the table next to us was Toni, one of the first other freshers I spoke to. That night, a group of terrified first years from my halls went to a bar called Styles, clearly trying to bond and build some connection immediately, a group of people lost at sea in university. While The Golden Lion and that group of students have become mostly memories, Toni is still one of my favorite people (she likes all of my tweets, a sign of true friendship), and Styles is a place that defines my student life possibly more than the uni itself.
At the start you don’t know what’s going to stick, it’s all new to everyone and no one knows what they’re doing. That attitude stays with you throughout the three years of undergrad in many ways, as it’s a time of exploration: academically, in relationships, in life. Your life becomes a small, very contained bubble, as you’re only really mixing with people doing quite similar things to you.
Fresh Meat follows a contained bubble of students living together in a squalid house in Manchester, and like Giant Days, it’s a comedy following a close group of friends through their entire undergraduate life as they get into all kinds of scrapes. But unlike Giant Days, the focus here is on the banter, on the drinking, on trying to look cool. It’s a show about social anxieties. The perspective of Fresh Meat is about an absurd awkwardness of the interpersonal dramas of young adulthood; it’s a lot of people doing stupid things while drunk or high, and a lot of sexual mishaps. This gives it a kind of ladish bravado balanced on the perfectly pitched hedging performances of the actors. The ostensibly “objective” lens of live action makes it easy to focus on the grime and noise of the moment, of the day’s banter. Giant Days features these things, but it’s not the focus in the same way. Fresh Meat is built out of banterous anecdotes, funny stories of misadventures, where in Giant Days those just provide texture, and the heart is in longer lasting connection. The characters in Fresh Meat are scared of ernest expression, instead hedging around feelings -- in ways that do make for good comedy -- but in Giant Days, the characters are open about their feelings in a way that, compared to Fresh Meat feels revolutionary.
Sally Rooney’s novels also place their focus on consistent connections, long lasting, close relationships. Both of her critically lauded novels follow relationships that span years, their plots mainly revolving around university years, but with a scope bigger than that. These are stories of millennial mallase, of sex, of internal conflicts around anxiety and mental health, of external conflicts of class tensions. She pushes the earnestly loving relationships of her characters as close to breaking point as possible. The university setting says something important about the kinds of stories she is telling; it’s a transition point, you meet new kinds of people, you move away from your parents, it’s a natural break in status quo to lay the groundwork for story. In Normal People, the transition to uni is used as an inflection point where the power dynamic between our two leads switch; in high school, things come easily for Connell, he’s popular and pretty and a little mysterious, while Marianne is ostracised and awkward; this flips in Dublin where Connell struggles to find his place, but Marianne navigates their new space with ease. Their interior perspectives are put at the forefront by the form, meaning its wrapped up in singular, present moments of emotion and drama, and then reflection and anxiety surrounding those moments. They are moments of conflict and anger and mistrust. But those are fleeting, and while they drive the plots of both Rooney’s novels, her characters refuse to be broken apart by them, her characters are ones who cling onto their relationships with one another, despite conflicts. They’re grounded in mutual love, even if that isn’t the focus of the plot.
With Giant Days, however, Allison, Sarin, and team bring that love between friends into focus - it’s a book where the fundamental feeling that you are left with is love. Where Rooney’s stories are about pushing their relationship Meanwhile, Giant Days sits in the love and celebrates it. That isn’t to say it avoids meaningful, emotional conflict, or that it’s limited to an exclusively positive perspective, but that the book’s response to drama is to find solidarity in the friendships forged in the pages in the face of hard emotions. There are points that could cause long lasting conflict, like during their second year when Susan and McGraw start seeing each other in secret while McGraw is dating Emilia. There are consequences to the dishonesty, Esther’s (also secret) friendship wit Emilia falls apart, but ultimately the most important thing in the world of Giant Days is the central friendship of the book. Things move on, but their love has to remain or the book isn’t what it is.
That’s true for the entire 54 issues, and maintained in As Time Goes By. It keeps that sitcom style comfort, but never falls into being repetitive. I think that stems from Allison’s (and Giant Days itself’s) webcomics routes, the format of releasing content one page at a time forcing a forward momentum as each page needs to work as its own structured joke, as well as continuing the narrative. This means we don’t have time to sit around in the negativity, it’s always time for the next joke. There‘s always the push forward, everything just falling into place nicely for the next adventure.
Until the adventure has to stop. Uni is a transitory space, it begins with an end in mind, it has a purpose and a goal - to get a degree. But in the moment that inevitability doesn’t feel like much of a factor, because your focus is the next assignment, the next night, whatever is going on in front of you. It’s a bubble, but bubbles burst. And that means the forward momentum of comfortability and adventures with friends suddenly grinds to a halt. One thing that I think drives this halting sense home in the release of Giant Days’ ending is the two month gap between the last regularly numbered issue and the As Time Goes By special. This might be for production reasons, with the special being longer than a regular issue, but it does mirror the interruption in routine of finishing your studies, an interruption I’m living in now, that forces a moment of reflective disorientation. My life as a graduate is starting to find balance, but my friends aren’t next to me all the time anymore, there’s extra steps to seeing people. We’re trying to “keep in touch.”
Those moments of disorientation aren’t unique to graduation, they happen with any major change, they can happen with or without warning. In some of the more recent comics, McGraw’s dad’s death comes suddenly and puts a bump in the forward energy of the series. At the end of issue 50, the cricket issue, McGraw steps away from the victory celebrations that are far too energetic for a cricket match to find out about his father’s death. McGraw’s constant, horribly masculine stoicism, and the fact he’s a supporting character more than a lead, meant he always stood somewhat separate from the adventures of the book. Men aren’t generally taught to deal with emotions, and McGraw can’t find the words he needs.
I remember when my Grandad died just as I started second year, and it put this existential malaise over the first few weeks back I wasn’t that close with my grandad, so it was less of a material shift for me and more a cosmic one, but a presence that had always been there had gone. Like McGraw, I was bad at letting myself feel feelings (a thing that I am working on). But what I did do was spend time with friends that I hadn’t seen over the summer, going to the same three pubs a lot, and built new traditions. This was the start of me and Georgia becoming such close friends, for pretty much all of second year we would go to these pubs (Spoons, Horseshoe, and Styles) and be distracted from shitty stresses of the rest of our lives. We were comfort blankets in stressful times. My period of grief was fairly short but other things came along, for both of us, and we had this refuge together in the pub. We’d just get very drunk and make really dumb jokes that I don’t even remember, but it felt safe in a way that almost nothing else in my life has.
It was a necessity because of shit that was going on around us, we were messes and our lives were messes, but that didn’t matter, it was something special, and important to me. Like McGraw says to Esther in issue 51, “I don’t know what’s going on in my head from one minute to the next. But I think life has to get bigger to make death seem smaller.” There might’ve been sadness around us, but it gave us room to love each other.
The dark times don’t always make themselves as immediately obvious as with a death. Sometimes you can’t see them, sometimes they hide as things that feel exciting and important. Daisy’s relationship with Ingrid fast becomes toxic, but it starts as enticing self discovery, a first (queer) relationship, pushing her out of her comfort zones, giving her room to openly explore desire. Esther and Susan can see that the relationship isn’t healthy, though, and Daisy is caught up in the excitement of it so she can’t see the forest for the trees. There’s a trope about same-sex sexually experimentation in university, particularly between two women, and it’s often played off as a joke, but there is a truth in it. For Daisy, and for me, uni provided a vital, mostly safe space to explore desire and identity.
I had a fling with a man that was Not GoodTM but I ignored a load of red flags because of the excitement from this queer experience. Eventually it ended, and it took me a while to acknowledge that this had any emotional impact on me, just making jokes about his cock in the pub. Over time, my jokes about it gradually shifted to something more emotionally honest, rather than avoidant. My friends stuck with me through all this, and it even brought some of us closer. Dunking on this man brought me and Toni back together in third year, making her a gorgeous bookend to my uni life. Without her friends there, Daisy wouldn’t have had safety room to explore her sexuality in the first place, or find her way out of her toxic relationship. There’s truth to it.
We need people around us for the good and the bad times. Friendships like the ones formed at university, like the ones in Giant Days, are vital for our survival. University is a place where intimate, joyous, loving bonds are formed very quickly and intensely, the experience of being a student is one of being a part of a codified community of people all in roughly the same place in life, doing similar things for the same amount of time. You’re all thrown into this place together and become reliant on each other to survive. Giant Days managed to capture the intense comfort of university bonds like nothing else. Even as time goes by, as Daisy and Esther enter the world of work and Susan continues her medical degree, and they don’t see each other every day, they’ll still have that love that endures.
The biggest take away I want to have from my three years at Edge Hill University is beautiful people that I met, I love you all.
