Spoilers ahead!
Part of an endless pool of entertainment, teen dramas have long been extremely popular, and more recently have been a hot topic of discourse on multiple online platforms. Shows like The Summer I
Turned Pretty, The Vampire Diaries (TVD), Gilmore Girls, and many more showcase a plot revolving mainly around teenage female protagonists.
As a result of their young age, the characters in these shows often make choices that the viewer doesn’t agree with: Isabel (Belly) Conklin, from The Summer I Turned Pretty gets drunk on the Fourth of July and ruins her brother, Steven’s relationship; Rory Gilmore from Gilmore Girls drops out of Yale;
and TVD’s Elena Gilbert continuously puts her personal needs before others, among other examples. Oftentimes, the main female characters in these shows get the most hate and backlash on platforms like TikTok. Belly, Elena, and Rory are some of the most popular female main characters in teen drama television and yet somehow, they all receive extensive hate and backlash for the decisions they make.
Belly (The Summer I Turned Pretty), being the most recent character to enter the conversation, currently gets the most hate on the internet. As Belly navigates her late teen years and early twenties, she is constantly faced with difficult choices to make. She has to navigate the relationships she has with two very important people in her life who happen to be brothers (Conrad and Jeremiah), all while trying not to hurt either one. At the end of the second season, Belly has to choose between picking Jeremiah and hurting Conrad or vice versa. Yet people fail to realize that no matter what choice she makes, the outcome won’t be perfect. They also forget that Belly is a young adult and she is going to make mistakes, as is normal for young adults to do. Though she is the main character and more focus
tends to be on her, Belly gets more hate for bad choices that she makes than any of her male counterparts. For example, Belly got more hate for choosing to be with Jeremiah at the end of season two than Conrad got for lying to her about his feelings, or Jeremiah for being in a relationship with Belly so soon after his own brother was.
Rory Gilmore (Gilmore Girls), although a less recent presence, but whose following has increased online, receives a lot of hate for her decision making and personality. In the beginning of the show, Rory is a studious and overall put-together character. What people don’t like is her switch from a perfect and pristine student to a flawed young adult who ends up making more than a couple of bad decisions. Because she was set up as such a perfect character in the beginning, when her flaws were introduced in later seasons, people began to dislike her and disagree with her actions, deeming them out of character. People like to see themselves in a smart, studious, and good individual like Rory, and when that ideal of the character breaks, they feel like they can’t relate to her anymore because they don’t want to be associated with her mistakes. Rory represents an academically gifted high school student having trouble upon entering university, and struggling to find herself. Yet her hardships, however normal, are received with less empathy and pure judgement from third-party observers.
Elena Gilbert (The Vampire Diaries), is yet another female main character who gets extensive hate. While she makes some bad choices, she is surrounded by people who have done much worse things, yet no one bats an eye. In the middle of a love triangle between two brothers, Stefan and Damon,
Elena, not unlike Belly, is damned if she does, damned if she doesn’t. Elena has also experienced a great amount of grief for such a young person, but everyone seems to think she is selfish for needing a friend to stay by her side. After losing her parents, although she had an aunt who stepped in, Elena took on a more maternal role towards her brother Jeremy. Yet, even though Elena was a teenager adjusting to her parents’ death and a drastic shift in her family dynamic, people still have a problem with her. Elena received hate for making decisions based on her feelings, but ultimately, she was a teenager who had gone through so much in such an early stage of her life. Still, people tend to overlook the ages and situations of these characters and tear into their flaws instead.
It seems that in all of these shows, the female main characters get the most hate out of all of the characters, even more so than their equally flawed male counterparts. When watching them, people tend to forget that the character is supposed to portray a teenager who is inevitably going to make
mistakes like all of us do. Hence, when watching these shows, viewers should exercise empathy, asking themselves if they would really do anything different when faced with the same pressures
and circumstances.