Twelve Forever is a cartoon about a girl who wants to be, you guessed it, twelve forever. This desire manifests through the ability to transport herself to an alternate dimension, the aptly-named Endless. In this world, she is granted the powers of a superhero and is able to play and indulge her childish fantasies to her heart’s content; however, on her twelfth birthday, Endless becomes haunted by the Buttwitch, a demon representing her fears of puberty and adulthood who seeks to destroy her and her paradise.
Unsurprisingly, like most of the story-based cartoons we get these days, this is a coming-of-age story about the fear of growing up. I therefore did not expect much of it, as I always feel a disconnect with the genre. I am an adult who has already come of age, and many of the typical coming-of-age stories hold little to no relation to my own experience, with many of them being uncomfortably normative in their push of heterosexual and neurotypical life experiences. (Can we please stop having stories about extremely flirtatious tweens finding their soulmates at age 12, it’s deeply creepy.) I can enjoy them as a narrative and even as a good message for kids, but I often feel at a very far remove on a personal level.
That was not the case in this show. The characters all felt devastatingly real and relatable to my own childhood and life outlooks.
There will be some vague spoilers here, so you should probably watch it yourself. It’s only one season because it was tragically canceled, but I think it still holds up well as a complete product.