HAPPY SEPTEMBER 14TH!! (Valentine’s Day ?)
Thank you!
I guess I accept what happens, what Juliana’s error was (letting her insecurities talk her into not trusting Val), where she’s coming from, but….how are they going to reconcile after this? Val is going to be extremely hurt by this, and with the limited time left, how can they get back together? Or do you buy the theory that they will end as friends and get together after a timeskip?
You know, I wouldn’t have before, but now…maybe that makes sense. They seemed so much on the same page before, a timeskip would only deprive them valuable time of being together.
Now, there’s quite a bit of processing to get through. If the series were longer, I could imagine them being able to do that in a few more telenovela days, but since it’s not and since they appear to have deliberately kept all this drama and escalation for now…yeah, maybe. Maybe. I dunno, when they talk, they talk so well, they just cut through everything. They could resolve things very quickly or not at all, it depends where the show goes.
Are you still on the ship?
Yep. They’ve had sooooo many good moments and their romance and the characters aren’t ruined for me.
Tbh, obviously I don’t love that this happened, but I can reconcile how it could happen with the characters and situations we’ve seen so far, which is important to me to accept within canon. Sometimes, you just have to be like, okay, this is clearly a decision the writers made for drama and it’s totally OOC and the plot leading the characters, and then, I’m still gonna ship, but it becomes a different experience, where you want to just go canon divergent or exclude whole parts of their history. At the moment, I’m still on the ship as it is in canon.
Do you really think there’s one show that can only portray “positive” tropes? That’s fucking unrealistic and DOES NOT exist. Never will the day come that everyone will agree to everything happening because we all have different experiences. Stop acting on your moral high ground. Honestly give them a fucking break
Oh, I wasn’t saying that. I was talking about what attracted us to it and its treatment of tropes and our reactions to them.
We will accept almost anything, and in fact, are mostly accepting even here, but death, forced insertion of men into f/f plots, and babies, those are the ones that always get to us because they’re so common and they imply such a…lack of us. They stop centering on us and instead focus on other things and often carry homophobic messages with them.
ETA (I should have waited a second longer to post this)
And another anon:
But the thing is, friends to lovers and mutual pining thing are tropes, sure, but the “presumed lesbian sleeps with a guy” is so very harmful that they can’t be compared. Like sure these things are all tropes but they can’t be weighed equally ya feel
Right, that’s what I’m saying. They’re all just storytelling devices when we don’t include context, but we do have very specific contexts for some of them. It’s not just being a good or a bad trope, that’s difficult to define, there should be a good balance, as my kind anon above pointed out, but we have some harmful ones that have to be used very carefully.
Televisa just made an article of other tv lesbian couples it is quite basic but they are really out there trying to educate their audience and I respect that
Lol, awww. they are trying, aren’t they.
It does feel rather unfair on everyone involved, doesn’t it. They’re trying to catch up to something that frankly, our own media has yet to give us and they’re like…quite a few stages behind. This is, what, Willow/Tara for them? So early ‘00s level? (It’s bizarre that TLW, IMAY, and Saving Face all came out in 2004-2005 and then we had like nothing at the same level for like another decade, until Carol in 2015?)
Through no real effort on their part, simply making some core characters f/f and committing to that, they attracted all these people who’re expecting something so much more advanced from them. Although they certainly enjoyed the attention from those people, now they’re seeing what happens when those people bring in their own experiences. But then it’s really not fair on us either, as simply people, to have to ignore our own history with bad tropes because of someone else’s inexperience with them. What can either side do? Well, hopefully work together and learn from this, moving forward.
The thing is Juliantina has been all tropes this entire time. The ‘meet cute’ & ‘friends to lovers’ & ‘drunken almost-kiss’ & ‘stunned by a dress’ & ‘parental disapproval’ & ‘sleeps with someone else after a breakup.’ We’ve seen this with m/f couples a thousand times. But never with f/f couples which is what made this seem so new and romantic and special. Except unfortunately we do know the ‘sleeps with someone else’ trope far too well, which is why it hit so bad. But the writing hasn’t changed.
I was talking about Juliantina a little while back with a friend and she was like, this isn’t f/f TV tropes, this is fanfic tropes, and that really did apply. They got all these cute and romantic tropes that, yeah, usually apply to m/f couples, but the way it was one after the other and the way they mostly avoided so many bad tropes just sucked us right in. Val decided to break up with Lucho, so she did. She decided to come out (to Guille), she did, he was great about it. She asked Juls about Jacobo, they talked it out. They broke up, they still were in each other’s orbit and clearly still in love. I think last week’s really great treatment of them had a lot of us lowering our guards.
But maybe you’re right, like, there was cheating, on Lucho, for a bit. That’s not a positive trope. Being outed, homophobic bullying, parental disapproval, these aren’t positive tropes. This one is just one of our big…three? that we hate. We can excuse a lot of things, especially when it furthers their love and puts them together to fight an external force, but this is not only a bad trope with respect to any romance, it comes with considerable baggage for f/f ships.
We talked so much about how they managed to do all the good parts, I guess it really was by chance, or a different approach than we think, anyway. They were careful about it, I think, about how they chose to go about it, and they’re probably right in that their target audience will still continue to root for them even with this trope, it’s just another very normal telenovela romance trope. We just have a very specific experience and background with it.
Chipmunk looking Sergio is just as bad as Lucho but in different ways. I knew I was justified in hating his ass
We were right to hate him all along.
And another anon:
I am so grateful to the tweet I saw w that spoiler a couple days ago Bc I had a visceral reaction to reading it, so I’m glad I had a couple days to process and decide not to watch til further notice. I think that warning allowed me to save some goodwill towards what we already had going for Juliantina so far. I gotta say tho, I am so fucking tired of f/f ships and lesbians/queer women being used to teach the heteros a lesson about not being homophobic pricks. It’s a slap in the face every time.
Good and prescient decision to listen to what everyone else considered a troll, lol. And that last one is a super fair point, buddy. One can argue the importance of teaching lessons, but goddamn, let us live.
Though, I guess on the other hand, if you’re not looking at it from a lesson point of view at all, what the repercussions are, it’s just a dumb jealousy and kinda cheating plot like the hets in telenovelas already get. If anything, they were a lot softer with this ship for a lot longer than we’d expected. And that’s how they got us.
And another anon:
As much as I hated it happened I’m just grateful we didn’t see anything and there was not a trace of doubt after it. Not trying to be nice, not anything. We got the least of evils we all know this could’ve so much more wrong than this. I’m emotionally drained for the night tho
Ah, I mean, yeah, I thought it was clear how much she hated it but well, that’s a low bar, huh. I still don’t think it was needed, but I do understand that aside from possibly teaching a lesson, it’s literally just drama for the sake of it. They had a good run without it but I guess they had to fall. I’m exhausted too, and we’re only on Tuesday.
And another anon:
On one of Maca’s and Barb’s videos today someone translated it and there was something where Maca said Val caught Juls with Sergio, but on the show, she didn’t catch them. Do you think that was a scene they filmed but didn’t go with, or do you think the translation was wrong or were Maca and Barb just bullshitting with us.
I think they were joking, that’s all. Any kind of deleted scene wouldn’t have fit in, since Val was still trying to reach her while Juls was kidnapped.
And another anon:
SPOILER that episode was too real… Not the kidnapping part (?) but the pressuring to do something…. God dammit so many things wrong this episode! (also Barbara acting tho)
Heh, thanks for the spoiler tag. Ugh, yeah, she looked so broken. Barbara was great, for real. You could tell how much it was all killing Juls.
And another anon:
Add something more why juliana doesn’t believe she is good for Val. My poor baby has to deal with all that; and then this?
Oof, yes, right? Her first thought was of Val. Man, that kid is going through it.
And another anon:
The thing that tears me up inside is knowing that apparently Juls cries about it right after?! Like, my poor poor baby… uggggh. She needs such a giant hug. Also, I will actually be pissed if their scene is more racy/revealing than the shower scene. That would be fucked up.
Right, what’s confusing me a lot about the reactions is she’s quite clearly the one who’s suffering the most here. Before she does it, the amount of confusion and self-loathing and doubt that brings her to this place, then during, then after? I don’t understand why people are mad at her when she’s madder at herself than we could ever be!
The show is not being vague or ambiguous about this. She feels like crap, she’s drinking, sleeping with a guy she’s visibly shown disgust for, and she’s crying like, through most of those scenes. We don’t need to see her internal processes or perspective more than that, that is all very, very clear in what we’re getting.
Like, maybe some of us do need this lesson, not just freaking straight homophobes in Mexico, but some of us for why somebody would do this. As if she should be blamed for this. For not listening to Val or giving her that chance to explain, for being too stubborn, sure, she should have listened. But if you can’t even grant the empathy to feel for her when she’s doing this, I don’t really what you’re doing watching a TV show that spells things out for you really clearly.
Even after juls sleeping with S i applaud the writers. When taking a step back this show is breaking ground on a w|w and guaranteed a lot of straights backing lupe. Not only do they see first hand how fucked up there words are but also pressuring/questioning someone sexuality and how they feel afterwards. As much as I hate the trope I actually understand this and applaud the writers for taking it this deep and hoping the homophobic parents are watching.
I will say it was freaking tough to watch Juls like that.
But also? Wtf was up with how it happened? Sergio plying her with drink, she’s literally wiping tears and forcing herself and he’s all jovial about it?
And another anon:
Is it just me or it was f*cking rape??? Or at least emotional abuse I thought it was going to hurt but now I’m MAD
I don’t know if we can extrapolate lack of consent, but it was pretty freaking gross and I actually hate that while the f/f story choices are supposed to have some kind of message (whether they hit or not), his and Lucho’s actions repeatedly get excused or pushed aside.
And another anon:
That was assault, Juls was drunk not in her right faculties and he was sober because he is used to drinkin and has tolerance, it’s assault. Lucho did the same with Val. Im lost for words here
I don’t know what it was but let me just say, if that was on an episode of ODAAT (which it wouldn’t be, it’d be too dark for them to show on screen), they would be discussing it in very different terms.
And another anon:
Wow talk about taking advantage of a situation. Sergio knows juliana doesn’t like to drink, so he gives her alcohol. He knows shes in love with valentina but still pursues her. I thought he was starting to get better but this is real low. Juliana is super vulnerable right now and he starts pulling some shit? Fuck that
Yeah, there’s nothing about it that wasn’t creepy and disgusting and behavior that should be called out and certainly not forgiven! She’s an 18 year old who hates to drink, how much of a lightweight and under the influence would she have been? It was her choice to drink, sure, but anybody who wasn’t a creep wouldn’t have considered her advances.
Is the show just…not going to address that? Does it think that this is somehow Juls making this decision and then regretting it and that’s that?
(re: juls is from Texas and technically American) hey what if one day Val said someth in English and Juls replied in English and it was. like. a cowboy southern drawl. ? what do we do? id have to rethink my entire life maybe
Hahahahaha, omg, I would love that to the bottom of my heart.