The Wraith of Childhood: How Contemporary TV Series Set the Origin of Characters’ Vulnerability—and of Creative Developments—On Childhood Trauma
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores how contemporary television series use childhood as both a narrative and affective device to revisit trauma, vulnerability, and emotional complexity. Drawing on affect theory, intermediality, and cultural analysis, it examines how “minor feelings” emerge in serial storytelling. Rather than portraying childhood as a space of innocence, the article highlights its role as a site of conflict, memory, and unresolved tension. Focusing on the use of toys as vectors of memory, it analyzes flashbacks as tools to represent fractured temporality and the lasting impact of early emotions on adult subjectivity. Using the Quebec television series In Memoriam (Crave, 2024) as its central case study, the paper shows how toys can trigger traumatic recall and illuminate ongoing psychic wounds. Television’s capacity for repetition allows these minor feelings to circulate within spaces of nostalgia and unease, often mobilizing the uncanny. The paper argues that TV functions as a mobile archive of feelings, shaping how viewers engage with both personal and collective pasts.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".