how to make a high school setting realistic

'm well aware of how over done they are and how cilched their executed but can you blame me? I kinda suck at writing adults for the most part and tired my hands on middle school setting. The characters ended sounded too old for their age.

with all this distaste and hatred on setting, the mere mention of it just scares away adults who claim they can't relate to them. you all been dumb teenagers once, there is no excuse for that. Now that I say that, you don't need to relate to them to enjoy them but at least be tolerant.

mind you, Nackie, one of my characters in another to be webcomic, gets private education because of his condition (meaning he's a living weapon might to fend off the kaiju threat).

Ellen of planefinder (planes of existence), rarely goes to school because she's sharing the body with a British girl named hayley. most of the activity even happens during the weekends or night times.

The episode structure of Xeiego has it open to them dealing with a emergency in the big world of a problem their dealing with in the human world (rarely is it a high school problem). heck, the rest of the episode takes place in someplace in the bug world.

sadly, not so much for raven heart. half of it takes place in a high school with a dress code and other half either in the otherwoods of some place else. people might notice this and have a problem with it. (it also takes place in northern Ireland).

so I ask of you how can make the high school setting less unrealistic and more grounded in reality? (I'm also well aware this has been asked before)

This isn't a Worldbuilding problem, it's a writing problem. (And I mean that as a straightforward observation, not a put-down.)

Try this as an exercise: record a 5-min video of people (teens) interacting and doing something. Write the "novelization" of that scene. Work on it until someone else can read it, and think that the video is based on it.

I'd also say: dial your characters down a bit. It kinda looks like you come up with the idea and then come up with characters to fit the idea instead of the other way around. You have a few story ideas right? Swap the characters from one story to another and ask yourself - how would they deal with this situation that they simply haven't trained for? What would Ezainel/Ezainiel do in a world where he has no magic?

(Take a character like Marty Mcfly. He's dropped into the past, a sci-fi movie, and a western in the course of three movies. He has a set of skills that, while fairly normal for someone his age in 1985, come off as alien or out-of-the-box thinking in another time. He acts differently in each setting, and he can be successful at what he does, but overall he needs help from Doc.)

Whatever a character thinks is "normal" is probably a little boring to them, and what they think of as exotic might be dull to someone else.

Maybe go out of your way to feature more not-white people as well.

dude, every character i write is either unambiguously brown, a person of color, or just non white. white characters are just side characters or supporting characters with the occasional token white.

also were you lurking the places where i talk about ezainel? if i bring that up people wouldn't get it.

edited 9th Aug '17 8:04:53 AM by ewolf2015

I mean, drop the 'ambiguous'.

And yes, I clicked on that link you have at the bottom of your replies. Lurking is easy when the other person makes it easy.

but the world ezainel comes from is fantasy and he looks like your usual dark skinned Hispanic but with white hair. his earth counterpart is Eric Sanchez, a wannabe magician.

also the reason why I said ambiguously is because well, dark skinned redheads and blonde and scientifically impossible. but I decided to change that statement.

edited 9th Aug '17 8:06:03 AM by ewolf2015

It's not actually scientifically impossible at all.

For red hair especially, there are dark skinned red headed people in Africa with not a single white person in their recent ancestry (I say recent because we can't, for a fact, say that they don't have a white person in their ancestry somewhere in the last 20.000 years, only as far back as about 1000).

As for dark skin with blonde hair, look no further than Australian Aboriginies and Melanesians, dark skinned ethnicities for whom blonde hair isn't just possible, but actually common (for many of them, their hair darkens with age, but that's true for most white children with red and blonde hair too).

So that's perfectly fine, really.

Also, hair dye. Magical hair dye.