Character Highlight: Tanya Adeola (Class)

Continuing to make my way through the cast of Class. Tanya is the youngest member of the group and frequently one of the lynchpins, highly intelligent and tougher than she often gets credit for.

While her classmates are all in their late teens, Tanya is starting sixth form at age 14, after having skipped three grades earlier in her schooling. As such, she has a difficult time fitting in and is often discounted or outright ignored. None of the main characters are exactly friends with each other at the start of the series – theirs is very a “thrown together in fire” sort of bond – but I would imagine Tanya feels especially on the outskirts. She tutors Ram and they seem to get along well, but the arrangement is a secret, and while April makes an overture of friendship, it feels suspiciously like pity to Tanya.

It’s not all that uncommon to encounter wildly-smart kids on TV and in movies, characters who’ve skipped multiple grades and struggle to cope socially. But there are several facets of Tanya’s portrayal that neatly avoid common tropes for those kinds of characters, which I appreciate. First of all, her social issues aren’t down to a Sheldon Cooper-like inability to relate to those around her; no one compares her personality to that of a robot. Rather, she’s very simply 14, and most 17-year-olds aren’t anxious to hang out with 14-year-olds. She’s not a socially-inept supergenius, she’s just a little behind her classmates in that department.

Furthermore, Tanya is clearly majorly smart (she’d have to be to skip three grades all in one go,) but she doesn’t walk about talking like an encyclopedia. That’s a trope that really annoys me, when all of a genius’s dialogue is written to sound like they’re composing a dissertion as they speak. You know the type – the sort who would say something like, “We experienced copious precipitation this lunar cycle,” when they mean, “It rained a lot this month.” Why?!?

Luckily, Tanya doesn’t do that. She just talks like a very smart 14-year-old who knows her stuff but doesn’t craft every phrase with the express purpose of demonstrating it. Also, while her intelligence is an asset to the group, it’s not just that her superbrain is a giant repository of relevant science facts that help save the day. She’s practical, logical. She has good, intuitive instincts that come in handy. Being attacked by shadow monsters? Use a lamp to break up the shadows. No muss, no fuss! Similarly, when the gang is detained with the Prisoner, she’s the one who figures out that they can commune with it by holding the meteor.

All this is important, because it allows Tanya to feel like a character and not a deus ex machina of knowledge. I enjoy seeing the fits and starts of her interactions with the rest of the group, and when it comes to protecting Coal Hill, her contributions are consistently valuable.