The Winter I Was Really Behind On a Trend

I like a lot of things. It's a part of who I am. I like a thing. I get invested in it. Then it leaves my brain until something inevitably reminds me of it and all I do is think about it and analyze it for months on end. One thing that happens is that every single time a TV show I enjoy comes out I get overly dedicated and invested. One such TV show is of course, The Summer I Turned Pretty, based on the novels by Jenny Han.

I've been an avid Jenny Han reader since middle school. I read "To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before" twice in the sixth grade. I wrote TWO of my college application essays on Jenny Han related topics. I wrote my personal statement essay, the one that went to every college I applied to, about a Jenny Han book. I’m obsessed. Couple that with the fact that I tend to get on my soapbox (my laptop) and rant about topics I like, well, this rant was inevitable. What better post to come back to than something both months too late and absolutely played out? It would be out of character if I did anything else.

To some people, this is a childish endeavor. I mean it's a TV show about a 15-year-old girl trying to figure out if she likes her childhood best friend or her other childhood best friend that are related to each other. Not just related to each other actually, they’re brothers. It’s a show made for teenagers, about teenage issues. It's unimportant. Why do you care about a television show when the world as we know it is falling to shambles? The world is on fire, there are wars happening, people are dying, I get it. It's still an important topic, since people are invested in it, but a lot of people will minimize it because it’s not seen as legitimate. The problem is that it’s geared towards women, so people automatically view it as a lesser topic to analyze. I don’t care, frankly, because not only am I the target demographic, but I believe that all forms of media are important. Also, this is my blog, so I can do whatever I want here. Sorry, not sorry.

There's a common debate, of course with any show that has two characters that are fighting with another over a love interest. Which team are you on?  I've talked about my opinions about debates like these in another post. I think that this show has one of the most interesting incarnations of the debate. Not only is there a book vs show debate, there’s also an “is this foreshadowing or is this a coincidence” debate to the level of a Taylor Swift easter egg, because at one point, this show WAS a Taylor Swift Easter Egg. I, personally love this, and I find it interesting. I’ve found my people. Over-analyzers.

All this thinking I've done has lead me to think I can predict which team you are, just based on a few key details of your life. So, before you read this, I want you to vote, so that at the end, we can experiment and see if I was right! If you haven't interacted with The Summer I Turned Pretty yet, I'm sorry, but I would like to ask you to please not vote, and to just enjoy the ride. That sounds really commanding, but I just really want to know if I'm actually smart, or if college has fried my brain and given me an ego too far big. Thank you all very much, and please enjoy my unhinged thoughts. Also, if you haven't guessed, spoilers ahead.

Which Team Are You?

• Jeremiah
• Conrad
• Other
• Neither

I would like to preface this by saying that I'm trying to be as impartial as I can, but I am always going to be team Conrad. I've been team Conrad since the sixth grade when I first started the books, so I'm not going to stop now. I promise that my critiques are not only all my own thoughts, but more importantly as fair as possible, even if it means critiquing something that I might like. That being said, any perceived unfairness can be commented below.

My ultimate theory is that the guy that you choose-Conrad or Jeremiah, Steven or Cameron-comes down to what you think you want in a person, and to the way that you believe love should be expressed.

The way that the boys interact with Belly is the type of love you want to receive. Not only in your love language, but in the scale with which you think love should be discussed. A love weight, if you will. The difference between the characters (pre Jeremiah season 3 character arc, because while there was foreshadowing at times the "we hate Jeremiah we love Conrad" was so heavy handed even I cringed) was the weight their gestures held. Not like, that they meant more or anything, but just that they were grander, and more visible.

Jeremiah's actions are a more outward expression of love. He does things that are out of his norm for Belly, from dancing in a debutante ball to making a grand declaration of love via proposal outside her concussed brother's hospital room. His feelings are always known to everyone, not just him. They were larger than just “Belly and Jere”-she went to his frat parties, he tells everyone she is his future wife, so on and so forth. Everyone knew that Belly and Jeremiah were in love, especially Belly and Jere. While it seems like a good communication strategy, at times it was very performative, in a way. There were times where it was a performance to show that Belly chose him, and not someone else that she may know who is also weirdly shaped like his brother. Like dude, do you REALLY need to cuddle on campus? Seriously? Part of why he is a "golden retriever boyfriend" is because of his openness: he wants people to see him in love, to realize that he is dating someone. His relationship status is as much a part of his personality as having fun and loving life is. He is carefree with his love, showing it off all the time, much like the way he is with his friends. In a way, Jeremiah is stable and dependable: everyone always knows where they stand with him. He broadcasts a certain image of himself-life of the party , fun-loving, carefree and irreverent-which he can be pigeonholed into. People don't see his emotional depth BECAUSE of the personality he creates for himself, which leads him to lean into the personality more, which causes the cycle to get larger. He is actually extremely emotionally conscious: he knows Belly likes Conrad and that she was getting married to erase that. He knows his father thinks of Conrad as someone who can do no wrong. He knows where he stands with everyone, and what is expected of him. It's unfair to reduce him to a dumb guy just because he's pretty and goofy. Jeremiah deserves better. After season 3, I don't need to explain why he is a bad partner (since, once again, the show went really heavy on the "Jeremiah hatred"), but I hope you can at least see why he may be a good one.

Conrad's scope of love is smaller. He's about small things: making sure Belly and Laurel eat or getting Belly the glass unicorn she pined after. He doesn’t need everyone to know that he loves Belly, because he knows it and she (sometimes) knows it, so that is enough for him. Part of it is probably his emotional repression from being the “model child” for so long, but part of it is just Conrad. We see from a very young age that Conrad’s love language is gift giving, whether it be the gift of his knowledge, his time or something Belly really wanted. Conrad is all about smaller, less noticeable acts of love, which does mean some of it is under the radar. He’ll overthink just about everything, so a simple postcard is enough for him to fly across the globe on the barest of suspicions that him and Belly are meant to be (not his finest moment, but it all worked out). He thinks that the smallest crumbs of love are enough to show his undying burning desire for Belly Conklin, when in reality, she has no idea he loves her at all, and just thinks he’s being Conrad. This hot and cold that she gets from him is exemplified by two things: Junior Mint and the post card. In the books, Conrad tried to win Belly Junior Mint because she’d been eyeing it all summer, which took him forever, (and was quite expensive for a carnival game), but he didn’t say that, and instead told her that the girl at the counter told him it was a good idea. Okay king, way to make her feel like the center of your attention. The post card is an example of how he feels about other people’s expressions of love. Rational people reading this, what part of that postcard screams “fly to Paris and surprise me for my birthday”? The sentence, “I’m glad you think about me”? Jokes aside, Conrad’s love is far more private. He’ll make sure someone eats, but he won’t tell you his feelings until they explode out of him at a wildly inconvenient moment, like the night before your wedding. Repression is his middle name. Not actually, since I’m pretty sure it’s something wildly “preppy trust fund kid from the East Coast”, but you get the picture. Conrad’s “brooding bad boy” moments may not be all that “bad boy”, but he is brooding, because his deep thoughts are never going to be on the surface. Some people are attracted to that push and pull of not knowing where you stand with a partner (Belly certainly is), but it puts significant amounts of strain on the relationship Conrad has with almost everyone he communicates with. I’m glad he has Laurel, but he needs to work on his communication skills, jeez. How is this man going to be a doctor if he can’t talk to people? Anyways, all this to say, Conrad’s love may not be as visible as Jere’s, but it is important to him that it is his and his alone. He doesn’t need to flash mob someone to tell them he loves them, he’ll just buy them a glass unicorn of explain to them the meaning of infinity. While he has major flaws, especially when it comes to showing his love, when you understand what he means (like Belly does, because that girl should NOT have been overthinking that necklace so much), he can be a great partner.

I’m a Conrad, through and through. I grew up with people showing me love the way Conrad shows love: small acts of service. Culturally, that’s expected. In my family, we don’t say I love you, we just feed you or teach you how to put your clothes on correctly. I think that’s a huge part of why I love Conrad so much. He has the same love language I’ve been shown my entire life. Also, I don’t really need the world to know about my relationships. I'm just not a big fan of always telling everyone all of my business, okay? Your girl loves a good soft launch (well, not really, since I've never done it before, but in theory, it seems fun), and Jeremiah’s style of love is like hard launching yourself off a cliff. He's the opposite of subtle. As someone who, myself, is the opposite of subtle (duh, look at this rant), it has it's pitfalls. All this to say, I think that the boy you identify with has to do with the love your family has shown you or the love you crave. I don’t need a gigantic declaration of love, but I want someone who will remember the small things. Of course, this is all pre-season 3, since season 3 was just a Jeremiah hate train (personally, I don’t think it lived up to the hype of the first two seasons, except the Conrad episode, but that chapter was also the most emotionally poignant of the book). There were so many subtler ways to detract from his character, but the showrunners chose to go big and heavy. He didn’t need to be a “manchild” to be unlikeable, okay? But that’s a rant for another day. Not really, since this is clinging to the strands of relevance this show had over the summer, but the damage is done.

At the end of all of this rambling, I would like to acknowledge that we need to remember three things to enter discourse about this show.

1. Belly and her lack of commitment did not wreck something that wasn't already fragile. Jeremiah and Conrad were fighting BEFORE Belly got involved. They were fighting in season one, before Belly was ever interested in Jeremiah. Many of their issues didn't only stem from Belly and her relationship with them: they fought about Conrad knowing about Susannah's illness, and Jeremiah himself talks about how everyone acts like Conrad is perfect (a reference to the way that Conrad is upheld by his family and the general population as the "better brother") in season 3. Calling it “the summer I wrecked a family” only works if there was a strong family relationship to wreck in the first place (which there wasn’t). This whole thing was almost entirely due to their parents, something that is far more clear in the books.

2. Everyone in this discussion is barely an adult. When most of the show happens, they're in their late teens to early 20's (in season 3, they’re 21-23). They've barely begun to experience life, which means that they're going to make mistakes that a lot of people don't think they should, since they’re not in the same headspace. There’s a wide range of people watching this show, from tweens to my (ageless but still older than me) mother. I'm almost the same age as Belly in the end of season 2 and I can confirm that it is actual lunacy to think that I'm going to be making entirely sound decisions. Most, if not all of my decision making is ruled by impulse, but whether that's the ADHD or the fact that I'm young, I have no idea. I'm no psychologist, okay? I'm just someone on the internet with a lot of thoughts and feelings.

3. All of these characters experienced a traumatic loss during formative years of their life. The Conklins and the Fishers both experienced the loss of Susannah, someone who was an influential figure in their childhoods. Even if sometimes she was manipulative (convincing Belly that she was meant for one of her sons was diabolical, we can all agree), and caused a lot of the issues between her sons (she knew that Adam had a favorite and she did nothing) she was extremely important in their lives and their development. For better or worse, her loss is going to have an extreme impact on them. Also, basically nothing (canonically, only Conrad goes to therapy, but he’s Conrad, so he could’ve been very vague) has been done for their coping strategies, so it’s also very likely they haven’t properly dealt with Susannah’s death. They haven’t fully realized how much of an impact this has had on them, so it will get larger and larger over time.

   
   

They are not absolved for all wrongdoing because of the reasons above, but they should certainly be humanized when all of this is considered. We can’t have this debate without taking all the factors into account.

FINALLY, the end. Please vote below to see if I was correct. Thank you and goodnight.

Teso, out.

Was I right?

• YEAH!
• Nope!