Just wanted to clarify, as I think I was one of the folks who talked about Sterling thinking this was all a trick by April- I wasn’t thinking that was ever actually the case, more wondering if that dark thought ran across Sterling’s mind when she saw April flirting with Luke. That their whole thing had been some twisted head game April played with her. Obviously that got cleared up later outside. But I think she coulda thought it was a possibility given they were enemies less than a week before.

Ah, I’m answering this so late all the relevant previous asks are weeks old by now, but yeah, I assumed the anon was referring to other comments out there? Your ask hadn’t come across as implying it was an actual trick, just the possible perception of. 

And honestly, thinking more on it, since I just giffed the scene where Sterling leaves the lock-in, the way she’s legit angry and going, what’s wrong with you, there’s this genuine confusion at what exactly WAS going on, so it could definitely have been a fleeting possibility, not even necessarily that it was all a trick, but that April was playing weird mindgames with her, the April she knew a week ago wouldn’t have flirted with Luke either.

Can I just say I’ve been listening non-stop to Slow Burn, I am sucker for shows using music for significant moments (and it is the perfect song for them). I am also suffering because I cannot stop remembering April’s face when Sterling played the song, she looked like she was in pain and on the verge of tears ?

Oh, I’m like that about songs too! Except I actually tend to not know any songs in general till I hear them on media so that’s my first and only association with them. I have this whole list of songs I just associate with f/f scenes. For Stepril it’s not just Slow Burn but that Hit It Hard song from ep 7 too, lol. 

But no doubt, Slow Burn is definitely their song, ughhh, including ep 10. :((( April’s face in that sceeeene, like, I think because we see so much of Sterling’s interiority and Maddie has such a ridiculously expressive face, in contrast we tend to picture April as someone more in charge, knowing what she’s doing, but her expression showed how she’s also just playing this as best as she can with what she has.

Sorry of you’ve already discussed this but at the end when dana(?) is about to say The Thing do you think blair guessed what she was going to say? It seemed like she grabbed her hand and said no? I might be misremembering lol but it stuck out as i was watching it

I did briefly mention it earlier but yeah, she did seem to guess! I don’t know what it was about how Dana and Debbie looked over but she did seem to sense something life-wrecking was about to happen. Maybe she expected just something horrible, but that…oof.

what does sterling means by “but people change back” with luke? is it bout april become her enemies back?

Oh, you know, that’s a good question. I didn’t take it that way but I guess it is kind of hazy, let me work out how I immediately took it and moved on.

Let’s see, if you remember the conversation in ep 7 when Sterling and Blair were on the stakeout with Bowser he implied Michelle could have changed and things could work out this time and Sterling latches onto that and is like, does he really think people can change, in the context of April. And then of course after that, for a brief few days it feels like everything has changed and is so perfect. So when Luke says, if you gave her a chance, you’d be surprised, people change, I think to Sterling, it reminded her of how she had actually experienced all that, but now it was all over. To me it was about the situation changing back, that April had “changed” back into how she was before, too afraid to even be in a relationship. 

And also, since Sterling’s next line was about missing Luke and then kissing him, you could almost see her trying to will herself to change back into the person who was happy with him. Ultimately, I read it as a lament that she’d gone on this whole journey and things were back to her and April not being together and was all that change, forward and then back, worth the hurt.

Why do you think April was so fast to go back to being mean to Sterling after her dad came back instead of talking it out with her (I mean they did talk it out after but damn! her animosity towards Sterling when they were at the lock-in hurt to watch ?)

I think, aside from the show going for max angst, she just got SUPER freaked about her dad and it was her first instinct, paranoia that even being seen with Sterling would confirm everything anybody was suspecting. Maybe her first reaction had even been to go to her and that would have scared her even more, especially when it seemed like her friends (”friends”) were kind of suspecting something too. She does tend to react first and then settle down, like with Luke, as she then did with Sterling, but it’s hard to shut down that first instinct. 

I JUST finished watching TBH and omg that cliffhanger :0 I really wonder how Sterling’s story is going to go for next season? (Really hoping they get a season 2!!) April once said Sterling always got her way or at least that’s how it looked like to her but now things have been flipped and she’s probably at her lowest point so I wonder how that’s going to affect her in terms of not just her relationships but also her personality…

Haha, yes, that cliffhanger! They really did pile EVERYTHING on her in that finale and I do very much hope we get at least one more season to round off all these major revelations and storylines.

April’s not wrong, tbh, Sterling had been leading a CHARMED ass life until this point. When you compare them, Sterling’s got a twin sister she really gets along with, kind parents, a loving bf, everyone seems to like her no matter what, she does well academically, while April’s stuck there already being an intense and competitive kid and just made worse by the realization she’s gay and the wall she’d had to put up because of that. She has no real friends, just lackeys, and however close she was to her dad before, she still knew how homophobic he was and had to protect herself from that. And at the time, it was funny, but remember how when Sterling was straight up confessing that she and Luke had sex, EVEN THEN that somehow turned on April. I kind of loved that after the twins started the rumors and April caught on and zeroed in on Sterling, they put a freaking halo around her:

image

And April knows that on this one, she’s absolutely the one in the right. I can WELL understand her frustration and resentment and wonder if that wasn’t also a part of how much the rift grew.

But anyway, ouch, all that seems like it was setting up the harshest of falls. Now she’s lost everything, the only thing that didn’t happen was being outed. Getting dumped, then kidnapped, by the “aunt” your mom’s lied to you about for your whole life, at gunpoint, tied up, and then worst of all, no twin, wrong parents, charmed life gone. I don’t know, man, where’s she gonna go from there? Who’s she gonna live with–whose car is she going to get into to leave the junkyard, to start with? And you know, I mentioned April not really having friends, but Sterling doesn’t either, outside Blair. Is she gonna avoid her? But then she wouldn’t have anybody to talk to and the show kind of needs her to process this and show us her reactions. Maybe they’ll get her a therapist? She definitely needs one! With this show’s track record, she’ll probably vent by telling Ellen everything in the first minute of season 2.

I don’t know, she’s such a sweetheart, she may just go quiet but seemingly be okay with things only to explode later, instead of getting angry at her parents–at the Wesleys–right off the bat. She may visit Dana in prison, that’ll open up some storylines. I’m not sure if it’ll be made public, even if people know who Dana is, it doesn’t have to be revealed that she’s Sterling’s mom. But however it goes, however tough it all is, it’ll be a period of growth for her in the end, she’ll get through it and she and Blair will come out stronger, that’s just the show. But I don’t really know how those first eps will go, especially with juggling Luke and April and April’s dad and the bounty hunting. 

But you know, this is one of the things I SUPER love about having central wlw characters, where that becomes part of the main arc. And in fact, for this show, with its strong religious themes, I mentioned this before too, but the show is literally better off for including this very relevant nuanced plot point for these particular characters and for providing this super organic reason for why Sterling would keep a secret from Blair and actually choose to hang out with someone else. This isn’t tokenism or trying to think of what to do with a character but built into the actual storyline. It’s something that’s a major part of her and will affect and be affected by all the other major storylines. It could be that April ends up being the confidante, although she may have even more reason to choose the “easy” safe option Luke is. We’ll see, I hope!