One thing that’s really getting me about Miquel is how much he pressures Nora to do things. It’s always small things: sing for me, climb onto the roof with me, leave the party with me. The girls pressure her a bit too, for example trying to get her to drink, but they always stop without her feeling like she has to give in. Miquel just pushes a little bit extra until she goes with it. And the weird part is, none of what he’s done is actually, by itself, bad. If it wasn’t a recurring theme, it wouldn’t even be noticeable, and even as a recurring theme, pretty much everything he’s done are things that are portrayed as explicitly romantic in romcoms and similar media. Despite the fact that this is the sort of behavior that prevents me from watching most romantic comedies, if I wasn’t positive that he was going to be involved in the assault storyline I would have resignedly accepted that he was just supposed to be a rival romantic interest to Alejandro.
At the beginning she says she’s going to wait for her sister and he convinces (pressures) her into leaving with him because he says Emma isn’t going to show up. Then it turns out he was right so letting him convince her to leave was actually the right thing to do. He convinces (pressures) her to sing for him despite numerous protests and her expressing how awkward she feels while singing, but he validates her after and the world didn’t end, so it must not have been a bad idea after all. He pressures her to climb to the top of the tower with him, ignoring constant protest both before and while she’s climbing, multiple times using both his body and his hands to prevent her from walking back down the stairs. But when she gets to the top she feels happy about it, so surely she just needed to come out of her shell a bit and the climb up was actually fine. I have seen so many things almost exactly like this portrayed as romantic gestures, intended to show the girl how to have fun, let go, be more herself, while also proving that the romantic interest is the perfect guy for her.
He gets her tickets to something she wanted to see, the unasked favor pressuring her to do something in return, like go to the theater with him. Similarly he buys her a book, so she feels compelled to reciprocate by buying them drinks. He’s forcing a back and forth with her to simulate the natural push and pull of any relationship, but at an increased speed and largely without any initiation from her. He constantly has her responding to him, constantly on the back foot. Many people have noted that he seems to be around Nora all the time, and that’s to further facilitate his sped up entry into her life.
The most recent clip is the first time he’s actually done anything that seemed noticeably off by itself, when he disregarded the obvious emotions Nora was going through and literally pulled her away to have lunch with him. He bulldozed the situation to make sure it went the way he planned and he wanted, emotionally pressuring Nora to forget talking to Alejandro. But even this is something that I have seen portrayed as romantic! The fun love interest, crashing in and helping her take her mind off of her ex and get over the past.
Miquel makes me uncomfortable, but he makes me uncomfortable because he ignores consent in a way that is totally normalized by society. These things are so common that I actually expect to see them at least once or twice in almost every love story I see. It’s only because it’s become such a constant recurring pattern that I’m now convinced it’s a purposeful feature of his character. If this continues, and all the signs pointing to his involvement in the assault follow through, I think it’s going to play out from an entirely new angle.
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