You get the feeling in all these Pretty Little Liars exit interviews and memoirs from the cast that the network and the studio had their hands all over every scene in every script of this TV show. It was about the tweets and the Tumblr gif sets and the Teen Choice surfboards and the NOISE NOISE NOISE NOISE. It’s why Ezra’s not dead or in jail, why he’ll end up riding off into the sunset with Aria. And it’s also why the other Liars got cardboard cut out replacement love interests during the time jump, so they could inevitably dump them and be reunited with their most significant love interests on-screen. And why for Emily, it was the opposite.
The criticism of Paige McCullers, even from professional TV critics, to this day, drips with barely masked disdain for the ways she’s not feminine enough, not gentle enough, not apologetic enough. The way she doesn’t fit the mold of culturally acceptable womanhood. Her hair, her button-downs, her muscle t’s. The way she walks and the way she talks. And the only reason those same people have loosened up on Ali is because she was punished, and thoroughly. She didn’t apologize for who she was, for what she knew, and so suffered to atone. […]
What a story it could have been if Paige had been given the same care and attention as the male love interests on this show, if she’d grown organically on-screen, and if Alison had been written with consistency and courage. What a story to see Emily choose between her first love and her most significant relationship here in these final episodes, to know that either one would be a radical decision. The queer Dead Blonde Girl, resurrected. Or the self-harming kid in the closet who came out on TV during an epidemic of gay teen suicides in real life, and who lived and lived and lived and loved and got the girl. My heart should have been broken by the beauty of this mess, the glorious breathtaking jumble of impossibility; one of the longest running lesbian characters on television choosing between two complicated, polarizing, unapologetic women. Women who devastated and undid her and helped her and healed her, each in their way, hating themselves and each other and, in loving her, finding themselves made whole.
What if Paige and Ali had been given the same mandate as Ezra? What if any ferocious woman anywhere was ever given the same mandate as her dime-a-dozen white male counterpart? It haunts me. (It haunts all of us now, whether we acknowledge it or not.)
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