The third and final season of “The Summer I Turned Pretty” premiered over a year ago. Every Wednesday night, people congregated in front of their screens to watch the events of the show unfold. Depending on your preference, you either spent most of the time screaming in frustration or leaping with joy, or both. I had my moments when I had to pause my TV and take a lap around the living room, but my hope never wavered. Jenny Han always stays faithful to her books—I knew the ending, and I was going to be more than happy with it.
A year later, I’m still ruminating on one issue that people kept regurgitating online and which made me question whether we were watching the same show. The hot take of the summer? Belly Conklin is the villain. Now, I’ll say this first, and it’s even ridiculous that I have to: Belly made some regrettable decisions across all seasons, and most of all in this final one. For far too long, she failed to consider how her actions would affect those around her. However, to go online and call her the villain is extremely reductive, and it dismisses the larger nuances that make Belly who she is. Instead of assigning blame to everyone in the show—because truly everyone made some stupid choices—people decided it was easier to put all the blame on Belly. I, for one, think this is the laziest way to engage with media of any kind.
Let’s remember this story revolves around a love triangle. Both Fisher brothers had their own way of hurting Belly. Conrad made Belly feel like his love for her was scarce, leaving Belly to grasp whatever kind of attention she could get from him, good or bad. Conrad went to-and-fro with Belly—whether he meant to or not, he strung her along in the earlier seasons. Jeremiah gave Belly everything and more. However, he had no problem shifting his alliance. He was always ready to hate her as much as he was ready to love her. Despite their actions, Conrad and Jeremiah continued to be defended by people online, praised, even. Meanwhile, Belly was defiled, and her actions were magnified to an unnecessary extent.
“Everyone wants a complex female character until they actually get one” isn’t a phrase I use to dismiss blame, but rather to emphasize the hypocrisy and inconsistency of the internet and the demands it makes. During the “Twilight” craze of the late 2000s to early 2010s, people called Bella Swan plain and uninteresting—I once read a joke that Edward couldn’t read her mind because she had no thoughts to begin with. Now, we have Belly Conklin, whose internal dialogue is revealed to us from the very first episode of the show. We are trusted with her feelings and how she views the world around her. We are invited into her inner world and asked to treat Belly with compassion the more we get to know her. During those weeks of one episode release after another, when people either loved or hated her, it felt as if I was inhabiting a third space on the internet. All summer, I and many others were navigating an angry mob of people calling for the ostracizing of Belly Conklin, as we tried to hide the fact that we weren’t carrying a torch like the rest of them.
None of the characters on the show are easy to digest. You will find fault in all of them eventually. Instead of villainizing Belly alone, we can say that her romantic impulsivity incites the complicated love triangle between her and the Fisher brothers. How this triangle and the rest of the events of the show evolve over the seasons concern all three of them. The show exposes all their flaws. Belly’s indecisiveness is notable, but so is the emotional avoidance we see from Conrad and the insecurity we see from Jeremiah, along with his oh-poor-me attitude.
The internet has yet to develop the maturity it takes to handle a complex female character. I would go as far as to say that the intolerance people expressed toward Belly suggests that what the internet wants to see is a one-dimensional and pure representation of female characters and not the humanity that lies underneath their mistakes. It’s not that Belly Conklin should be exempt from accountability; the problem is that she wasn’t considered to be as redeemable as her romantic male counterparts. Being the main character of any show comes with its downsides. Since Belly is central to the story, her mistakes are the easiest to identify and pin against our corkboards. Yet, this isn’t an excuse to continue to do so. To me, Belly Conklin was never the villain. She was and still is the girl who made mistakes and learned from them, thankfully finding herself along the way.