Belly Conklin, protagonist of TSITP, has been dragged through the (metaphorical) mud of the internet in the most dramatic ways possible. She’s been called selfish, immature, cruel, manipulative, and devoid of personality. The level of anger is so intense it almost feels personal, as if Belly has wronged the audience directly.
At first, I joined in. I rolled my eyes at her indecisiveness and groaned at her impulsive choices. I even half-joked with friends that she was the “worst part” of the show. However, somewhere along the way, I started to wonder: why do we hate her this much? Why is the collective energy around Belly so vicious, so moralistic, so… patriarchal?
Tracing The Patriarchy
If you map the show across all three of its three seasons and evaluate the fandom, a persistent pattern emerges: the things viewers excuse in Conrad or interpret as “depth” in Jeremiah are the very same things that earn Belly moralising and excommunication.
Take, for instance, the entirety of the first season. Belly was supposed to only be 15 in the show: awkward, facing her own growing pains, and trying to grasp her way around her adolescence whilst making sense of love and a loss of innocence and childhood. Jenny Han, after all, wrote the classic coming-of-age setup. But fans pounced on every moment as proof she’s “immature” or “selfish.” Meanwhile, Conrad spent the season brooding, sending her mixed signals, and generally being emotionally opaque, and the response was entirely different. Jeremiah was allowed far, far worse, but excused because of his golden boy identity. Notice how it is essentially very similar behaviour, that the viewers judge differently based on who is doing it?
If I truly think about it, what unsettles me now is not Belly’s conduct, but the obsession that the fans of the show have with condemning it. Again and again, the same expectations reappear: that a heroine must be endlessly gracious, impossibly mature, and forever willing to put the needs of others before her own. I feel that the fury directed against her is not about what Belly does, but more about what she refuses to be.
I have observed that patriarchy not only is a construct of how men treat women, but how we all evaluate women, including ourselves. Belly is a perfect case study because her character keeps bumping up against this idea of femininity that tells us: be kind, be small, be selfless, and above all, be likeable.
This is what I call the patriarchal contract: that silent agreement we’ve absorbed throughout our lives, and through the media we consume. Women can have flaws, but only the kind that make them more appealing to others. Shyness is fine if it’s “cute.” Anger is acceptable if it’s “sexy.” Sadness is bearable if it fuels someone else’s growth. But the second a woman’s flaws inconvenience others, she is an annoying, insufferable character. In the show, this is where the double standard cuts deepest.Teenage boys are allowed to stumble through heartbreak and indecision- we even romanticise this, but the teenage girls must be endlessly wise, endlessly selfless, endlessly better than their years.
The Rage Behind Coming-of-Age
The emotional arc of Season 2, and to a large extent Season 3, revolves around the ideas of grief and heartbreak. Susannah’s illness and eventual death leaves every character struggling to process loss in their own way. Belly, of course, was expected to handle it perfectly: to absorb the sudden withdrawal of Conrad, who she had been in love with for years, manage Jeremiah’s feelings and engage in a void of mothering, and never bother to acknowledge her own grief. But when she faltered, when she had her moments of weakness, why was it such an unforgettable and moral failure?
Season 3, in particular, has ignited the most furious diatribes. This is the season where everything has come to a head: the cheating, the wedding plans, the confessions, the unspoken history with Conrad, and the final choices Belly makes about love and loyalty. Fans have fixated on her hesitation, her indecision, her very humanity. Why does it grate so much? Because The Summer I Turned Pretty is, at its core, a coming-of-age story, and coming-of-age is inherently messy. The show is as popular as it is because it recognises the chaos that growing up is, and the tangles of first love, and friendship and grief. It grates at us because it reminds us about the sharpness of being that adolescent, of all the moments where we acted rashly, and hurt people we didn’t mean to hurt.
Yet what makes these human moments so unpopular online is the persistent, unspoken patriarchal lens through which we evaluate her. I believe that there is another layer that makes Belly’s experience of growing up doubly fraught: intersectionality. Both as a woman, and as an Asian American character, Belly is constantly negotiating stereotypes she isn’t exactly allowed to break. The “model minority” trope of being quiet, disciplined, ambitious and agreeable is a cultural expectation that the show and fandom have both failed to properly interrogate.
Can We Look Within?
What I seek to do here is to use the narrative we have collectively written about Belly Conklin to look inward. The way fans react to her tells us a lot about the rules we have all absorbed and internalised. What makes her so unbearable to some viewers is not her behaviour, but the discomfort she exposes in all of us.
If we want to grow as viewers, as readers, as a culture, we need to pause before we pass judgment. We need to ask ourselves why a teenage girl expressing herself fully feels threatening. We need to interrogate the patriarchal and cultural expectations that silently dictate what is acceptable for women to feel, do, or choose. Belly Conklin isn’t perfect, but she doesn’t need to be. We must ask ourselves why we have spent so long being petty instead of asking why we can’t let her just be.
