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If there's one demographic that pop culture is watch free movies online | Adult Movies Onlineobsessed with, it's the seemingly monolithic entity that we've come to know as Teen™.

Whether it's Gossip Girl(rich teens in the city), Pretty Little Liars(devious teens in a murder mystery), Glee(teens who sing), Saved By The Bell(wholesome teens going to school), we as a culture just can't stop asking: What are these kids up to?! Follow along closely, and you're likely to get whiplash from the severe ways each caricature careens back and forth.

But there's no period that has contradicted itself more when it comes to the portrayal of teens than 2018. From viral internet stunts to student protests, this year has shown us that the way we talk about teens has finally started its long-overdue evolution.

SEE ALSO: The largest protests in American history are happening now. Expect them to get bigger.

On Saturday, an estimated 800,000 people flocked to Washington, D.C., to join the historic March for Our Lives. They stood with the youth-organized rally for gun control, created and headlined by student survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooting in Parkland, Florida, that left 17 students and faculty dead and 15 more injured.

In perhaps one of the most unforgettable speeches of the day, Parkland shooting survivor and student activist Emma González listed off the names of the students who had been killed in the shooting, and then stood silent for six minutes and 20 seconds — the duration of the time it took Nikolas Cruz to murder more than a dozen of her peers.

Her silence was palpable. Without saying a word, González, tears streaming down her face, communicated the maelstrom of emotions coursing through her and the other protestors: rage, grief, determination, hope.

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González's speech immediately garnered rounds of praise.

"Emma Gonzalez has given two of the greatest speeches in American history. She's inspired a nation to aspire to our highest level of consciousness," said entrepreneur and activist Michael Skolnik.

It was a message so salient and powerful that it’s almost easy to forget that at the start of 2018, just a mere four months ago, it wasn't the #NeverAgain movement that we associated with teens, but rather two other words that dogged the conversation about kids: Tide Pods.

The Tide Pod challenge tasked teens with eating a Tide Pod, and it appeared to be making the rounds on YouTube, resulting in kids accidentally poisoning themselves. It was theoretically the perfect example of youthful self-destruction, and taken as a sign that today's teenagers were not ready for the challenges of the real world.

"The people who are eating Tide Pods now will be old enough to vote in 2020. Let that sink in," conservative commentator Tomi Lahren decried in a head-scratching Fox News segment about how the Tide Pod challenge was actually political. (Hint: it wasn’t.)

Never mind that the actual reported cases of people eating Tide Pods was pretty low: 39 teens, a statistically significant number, sure, but disproportionately small in relationship to the level of outrage the "trend" inspired. "The extremely small number of people who have actually taken the #TidePodChallenge does not in any way justify the real hysteriathat has swirled around America," wrote Mashable's Peter Allen Clark in January.

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Still, the media ate up the craze in the way it does whenever there is a seemingly rash, semi-dangerous fad that supposedly proves the foolishness of modern-day teens. We've seen it time and time again: The teens are obsessed with fidget spinners. The teens are have created public menace Logan Paul. The teens won't stop Snapchat streaking. The list goes on and on.

It was this narrative — teens as nonsensical and impractical — that opponents of the March For Our Lives tried to use in order to discredit the protest.

"How about kids instead of looking to someone else to solve their problem, do something about maybe taking CPR classes or trying to deal with situations that when there is a violent shooter that you can actually respond to that," former Senator Rick Santorum said on CNN's State of the Union.

But the attention to detail, specificity of their demands, and the inclusiveness of the conversation all indicate a level of care and detail that shatters the myth that these teenagers are somehow naive children playing at advocacy.

Everything about the planning of the March for Our Lives opposes the narrative we've come to tell about teens.

When gun rights advocates lobbied a reroute of gun control debates following the wake of tragedy — "Now is not the time, now is the time to grieve" — the student survivors countered with a specific date to talk and then provided a very specific list of demands for Congress about gun control.

When others rightfully pointed out that students of color don’t get the same treatment about gun violence, organizers acknowledged the unfair treatment and extended the stage to students of color.

That's just a small sample of the sophistication and savviness that seems to mark the entire #NeverAgain movement. "The Pro-Trump Media Has Met Its Match In The Parkland Students," read a BuzzFeed headline for a story about how student activists are winning at the internet-led information war. "The March For Our Lives Presents A Radical New Model For Youth Protest," theorized The New Yorker, explaining the way the march worked with corporations and artists.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

That praise is justified. In the wake of unimaginable tragedy, the students have organized, advocated, and rallied harder than most adults can even imagine. Gone are the days when we can discredit the efforts of teens solely because of their youth.

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But it's important to remember that this type of youth-led advocacy isn't new. Kids and teens have always been at the forefront of civil rights movements. Ruby Bridges was only six years old when she became one of the faces of the Civil Rights Movement by being the first black child to walk with riot police into the all-white William Frantz Elementary School in 1954. Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai was only 11 years old when she shot in the head by the Taliban for advocating for education opportunities for girls.

It's not the actions of teens that have changed; it's the way we talk about teens.

It's not the actionsof teens that have changed; it's the way we talkabout teens.

Two of the biggest movies nominated at the 2018 Oscars — Call Me By Your Nameand Lady Bird— deal with the complex interior lives of young people on the cusp of adulthood. Young Adult literature is thriving, with authors crafting thoughtful coming-of-age stories centered around gun violence (Long Way Downby Jason Reynolds), police brutality (The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas), mental health (Turtles All the Way Downby John Green), and more. And the tastemakers in the music industry are increasingly younger and younger artists, The New York Times Magazinenoted.

What we're seeing now is society's long-overdue reckoning with the fact that teenagers are not bizarre almost-adults, but complex people capable of extraordinary feats in their own right.

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That's what makes the youth-led #NeverAgain movement so powerful and so fascinating. What we're witnessing is the raw human-work of teenagers struggling to grow up: the mind-boggling contradictions that come when adolescents try to figure themselves out, the impassioned idealism that comes from being young, the joy of finally coming into your own, the frustration of not being able to do everything yourself immediately. What we're watching is the guttural teenage war cry of that famous Walt Whitman sentiment: “I contain multitudes.”

With the March For Our Lives, teens have given us a resounding notice that they've successfully flipped the script. It's the youth, not the adults, who are ready to do the work.

"My friends and I might still be 11 and we might still be in elementary school, but we know life isn't equal for everyone, and we know what is right and wrong," said young activist Naomi Wadler in a powerful speech about why the media hasn't covered the deaths of black girls. "And we also know that we stand in the shadow of the Capitol, and we know that we have seven short years until we too have the right to vote."

Wadler's speech was a reminder that, yes, kid protestors are just that: kids. But they're coming. And when they get here, they'll be a force to be reckoned with.

Teens have been saying that for a long time. In 2018, we're finally starting to listen.

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