Love & Passion Quote by Caroline Dhavernas

Dhavernas is praising a rare kind of teen storytelling: not the after-school-special panic, not the glossy CW fantasy, but a world where adolescents are allowed to be funny and messy without being treated like ticking moral bombs. The key phrase is "have control that way" - she is talking about agency on the page and on screen. These characters aren't just problems for adults to manage; they get to steer the scene, land the joke, make the choice, and live with it.

Her list - "sex and pot" - is blunt on purpose. It's the stuff so many teen narratives either sensationalize for ratings or punish for reassurance. She is arguing for a third lane: depiction without automatic condemnation. When she says "it's okay, it's not completely bad", she's not endorsing teenage excess as lifestyle branding; she's naming the difference between acknowledging reality and weaponizing it. The subtext is a critique of the adult gaze: the tendency to frame teen desire as either adorable innocence or moral collapse, with very little room for complexity in between.

"You can't say that to teenagers" lands like a frustrated punchline. It's the cultural paradox she is pointing at: adults want teenagers to be responsible while refusing to speak honestly about what responsibility actually involves. Her intent is less about provocation than about permission - for writers to trust young characters, and for audiences to tolerate nuance. In an era of increasingly "safe" content and loud parent-fear cycles, she's defending wit as a delivery system for truth.