The Wave is kind of dumb, but from what I've heard the worst thing about it is that it kind of papers over the whole "mass child abuse" thing. Now, that might seem like a low bar, but there's a German Netflix film, "Wir sind die Welle" ("We are the Wave"), which uses the name but really doesn't share any similarity at all except that its about students becoming fixated on their clique of what they view as radical politics. Here's the thing: In "The Wave," just like in the original Third Wave "experiment," it's really explicitly about fascism, Nazism most especially. In the German Netflix caricature, the students are all progressives who are either direct victims of things like racial/gender discrimination or are concerned about the environment or war-profiteering, and the antagonist is a student who wants to blow up some facility belonging to an arms dealer who is illegally running guns to [I think it's implied to be Sudan?], before the other student leader thwarts the plot and defeats the arms dealer peacefully.

How fucking audacious do you need to be as Germans to take a story that is [purportedly] about Nazism and elements leading to its popularization, and then make it into a screed against radical progressives? You're literally the last country in the world with any right to do such a thing, and I'm even including America in that list, because your whole thing is "being an Ally" in the now-common craven liberal fashion, but on the level of an entire nation-state. I know their true "whole thing" is financial imperialism, but I mean their whole thing in terms of their cultural posture.