#honestly I shouldn't let this kind of Extremely Tumblr Drama get to me | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

js589 · 2 years

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Did the CW secretly write AWAE Season 3?

Oh my god, the drama. So much drama, so little time. Season 3 marked a HUGE tonal shift in AWAE, one I would argue was NOT for the better.

The usual disclaimer: I love AWAE. This is NOT meant as a slight to anyone working on it and certainly never the actors. I think the cast did extremely well with what they're given. I'm just some rando complaining on Tumblr, and this does not need to mean anything more than that.

Seasons 1 and 2

Seasons 1 and 2 definitely had their own plots and arcs (including That One of Which We Do Not Speak With the Conmen), but for the most part, they left time for the relative slowness of rural PEI life to sink in. Sometimes, the B plots (and even the A plots!) of early episodes are… kinda mundane. The stakes are relatively low.

You know what? That's charming! That's excellent! Give us an episode where Anne learns she shouldn't meddle in Matthew and Jeannie's relationship! Give us an episode dedicated to this vague specter of Diana's parents' expectations! Scrap the whole conmen plotline but somehow keep the Malcolm Frost interaction! Give us whole episodes—not half-episodes—that really get into it!

There's so much going on in season 3 that it's kind of exhausting to care about it all. And it's frustrating, because I genuinely want to! Let's dive in.

The WTF-ery of Winnie

I write this section as someone who LOVED Winnie when she was introduced. I was like, "Oh! They're giving us a savvy, clearly older young woman who is going to help Gilbert realize he needs to talk with Anne!"

…I mean, it did happen eventually.

Just, you know, not at all in the way I would expect given her initial presentation.

(That's not a good thing, in case you're wondering.)

Winnie, over the course of the 7 episodes she appears in (though her appearances in 3x03 and 3x09 are very brief) and probably forty minutes of meaningful screen time goes from savvy heiress who knows the score on courting and is absolutely done with it to "how could you make me believe you loved me?!" and then literally begging Gilbert to choose her knowing that he loves someone else. By a show that is supposed to uplift women. (And Gilbert is given lines that basically mansplain Winnie's worth to her WHEN IT SEEMS LIKE THE WINNIE FROM 3x02 KNOWS DAMN WELL WHAT SHE'S WORTH. Like, I dislike the conmen plot of season 2, but the scene where Gilbert breaks up with Winnie? I don't have words for my disdain.)

I was about as confused as Gilbert was, honestly. Confused and angry.

Winnie was done so, so, SO wrong by. She was written incredibly inconsistently, and the direction went from interesting to… stereotypical stock drama love interest who we know won't be picked. Seriously, as mentioned in the Gilbert rant, they made her so absolutely enticing that it was like, "well, I know where we're going with this and you're going to frame it as Gilbert making a decision for love", and then, in a point that will be touched upon later, the plot was dragged out about 4 episodes too long. Winnie's plot should have ended at episode 6 with her giving Gilbert what-for about ditching her for Anne and telling him he's lucky she wasn't interested, and very lucky that her family are so chill.

When they didn't do that, I honestly thought there would be some catch beyond the Sorbonne offer. I thought the Roses would be cons, or Winnie would have some secret… Nope. Gilbert is just That Perfect and Lovable. And the romance was all in Winnie's head. Which is a shame because she deserved a lot better than the narrative gave her.

Quite frankly, with how much the show attempted to cram into season 3, her storyline would have been better in a later season, or not done at all. There were plenty of factors that could have had Gilbert and Anne angsting over each other without a triangle to force audience investment. Watching them dance around each other (sometimes literally!) without Winnie was more than enough!

And honestly, their far too literal last-minute get together was just... disappointing. Gorgeous and very sweet, but disappointing. But we'll get to that later. You know what else having Winnie in season 3 didn't leave time for?

(No) time for Ka'kwet

Or really anything else. But mostly Ka'kwet.

I'll talk about her in my rant about how AWAE sure loves to put its female characters through hell. Of course, there's a little more nuance when it comes to Ka'kwet because of what her arc addresses, and justly so! It just bears mentioning here that her story didn't have time to be addressed as fully as it should have been with everything else this season tackled.

Again, I posit that moving Winnie to a subsequent season (which, yes, I know we didn't get) would have done wonders for this season, not least of all for Ka'kwet, whose story deserved more time. How does the trauma she experienced affect her family? That's only hinted at. Are her family/village in contact with others to spread the word? Can we delve a little more into the backgrounds of the other kids she's held captive with? Does she recognize any of them?

This is Anne's show, yes, but it does give spotlight bits to other characters, and Ka'kwet DOES NOT APPEAR for the three episodes between 3x04 and 3x08. (Going back to edit: a charitable read of Ka'kwet's absence here is a nod to how long the suffering of Indigenous peoples remained under wraps. I'm not convinced that's what it was, but I can hold space for that as a possibility.) So many avenues of a story about the grief and loss and weight of this genocide are lost in its own show. Again, I'm glad they showed it; I just think that they could have explored it more than just… giving it to Anne as a side quest to (rightfully) lose at the end of it. As with most of season 3, the premise starts strong, but the follow-through winds up being rushed.

The "Footloose" plot

3x07 might be one of my favorite episodes, but man oh man… Like, this show was never going for full realism. I get that. I think everyone knows that. And I of course love that it wants to land on the progressive side of history. Great! Wonderful!

But it's also a repeat of 2x10 with a little added… unbelievability. In 2x10, we see Miss Stacy show up in her own defense to the town hall and give a speech, and for a moment, we're not sure it will work. On the part of the kids, Moody has all sorts of little mishaps that could (and arguably should) but don't actually wind up costing them the mission early. And Aunt Jo has involvement in other episodes and a backstory that has us going "why yes, this woman would be able to offer light bulbs!"

In 3x07, there is no doubt that this will work. We've been through this before. We know Anne's firing from the paper won't stick in some shape or form (though it would have been interesting to see the fallout of that if the whole damn schoolhouse hadn't burned and the printing press hadn't been stolen—maybe Anne would have written an article about the residential schools). And of course, it's not like I wasn't expecting this not to work, because this is Anne, but wow, everyone except the school board claps? Everyone? The whole of Avonlea, who joined in on this unplanned demonstration led by a teacher who quite likely still isn't entirely popular?

Show me more than just the stodgy old white men dissenting, please, because we know it's not just them. I mean, I guess we get Jane by way of Prissy, but like, the students are all in on Anne's plan from the get-go after Gilbert's rousing speech (which, points for being a great friend; now go be a great friend to Anne's face, or better yet, tell her how you feel), and people seem excited to join in on something they don't really understand with the promise that it's… going to be good? It's just SO overly "and everybody clapped". You know what? Let Anne take an L. Let the school board scream them down and give sanctions! Let the parents approve of punishment! And let Avonlea's beloved band of miscreants on the newspaper be like "Yeah but we're morally in the right" and show subtle support from other adults. It's really not that hard.

Isolating Anne

Anne has experienced social isolation and ostracization from the time she was a toddler. The Avonlea girls are a little fair weather about their friendship even after 3 years, but Diana is supposed to be her stalwart friend and Gilbert… ostensibly is.

Ostensibly.

*sigh*

This one is actually relatively minor on my list of nitpicks, but like, did we really need to have Anne and Diana's friendship implode (a storyline done beautifully, BTW, which I would not change) at the same time that the godforsaken bonfire scene was going on? Really? We really needed Anne to be all alone in regards to her peers? She does have Marilla and Matthew and Aunt Jo, and their wisdom and support are invaluable, but jeez… let her have her friends!

Gilbert actually gets this, too. And it's just… ugh. It can be written better, or more organically. I really think this was a "too many plotlines; not sure which to tackle, so let's just make them all one big crisis" problem.

Will they/won't they? (Spoilers: yes)

There's an old chestnut about how romantic relationships become boring once the couple is together. That, I think, is utter and absolute nonsense. I'm not going to say that everyone should be in a relationship or that no relationship is boring, but like, come on: Bash and Mary are clearly having the time of their lives being married! (For two episodes…)

Getting Anne and Gilbert together as late as they did with only a few longing glances on Anne's and (plenty enough on Gilbert's, though!) and very little in the way of actually showing their friendship developing was just… come on. I'm not actually surprised when people say they don't think Anne's good to Gilbert because all we see is when something's wrong! Let them have something right! Let them get together and learn how a relationship works! Let them figure out how to deal with external problems as a couple! Yes, they'll be that couple who gets together as teens and gets married, but if you went into this season not expecting that, I do not know what to tell you.

Will they/won't they just gets old so quickly, and with Winnie thrown into the mix, even though we know Gilbert is going to choose Anne, the up and down of Anne and Gilbert's relationship throughout the season in an effort to make it look like Winnie is a viable choice when that choice means moving an ocean away is just not a real threat.

(About those love notes…)

Oh man, on my list of "hey that was actually super shitty": the notes Anne and Gilbert wrote to each other getting torn up just to draw out the will they/won't they. Anne's letter just being mercilessly ground up felt like a massive fuck you. Anne tearing Gilbert's up at least made sense in context, though the convenient little word clouds and assumptions when she pieced it back together didn't. These two had enough miscommunication and self-esteem issues without that, but I guess we really just needed something to make the audience think 1) that Gilbert was really going to go through with something he was never going to go through with, and then 2) that Anne wouldn't find out until season 4 that he didn't.

Which basically effectively happened anyway.

The last three minutes of the season

Unfortunately, these were also the last three minutes of the show. This was purportedly not known to anyone at the time of writing or filming, though Netflix was even at the time infamous for axing shows at the 3-season mark. Even as a season ending, however, I argue that this was incredibly unsatisfactory.

We know that Gilbert was leaving for Toronto. We know that the show likes to separate Gilbert and Anne, and to also create drama for them, usually between them rather than them facing the problem together. With season 3's writing, I have serious doubts that a season 4 would have stayed away from the catnip that is causing yet further misunderstandings between them in a show that already had too many

And thus, this rant, too, ends abruptly and unsatisfyingly.

#just some word salad #not tagging this in the fandom

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