I don’t understand why they couldn’t have left Portwell as a cute high school relationship where they’re unfortunately going two different directions, realize that together, communicate about their future, and come to a respectful breakup where they’ll have their good memories, and they’ll always care about each other in some way. That’s more consistent with these characters, it respects the shippers and the characters, and it’s something that happens in real life. I still think with the Portwell we saw in season 2 they could have worked out (like, they’ve always been in somewhat different places, like him having his future planned out and hers always being up in the air as discussed in the couch scene, but they still understood each other and connected, that’s part of why they work so well), but if the writers needed to break them up, that would at least be better than destroying them and making them out of character.
Seriously, why did the writers act like Portwell was bad and would never work? And now, acting like Gina didn’t have feelings for EJ. I feel like I’m being gaslit as a viewer. How can you spend all of season 2 making me not want to ship R*na, pouring everything into making Portwell one of the best relationships ever, give two characters incredible growth, and then try to backtrack and act like none of that happened. When I saw the way these characters looked at each other and acted around each other. This is bad writing, plain and simple.
It’s not just a matter of liking one ship more than the other. If R*na was handled better, if they found a way to handle Portwell respectfully in a way that made sense, I could have been on board. Imagine if they had let Portwell unfold more like Jack and Gina’s airport episode, where they’re cute and fun but at the end of the day Ricky is the one she really feels things for. Because the way they wrote Portwell, it feels real and important and they’re so clearly in love and happy together. It’s not just this cute little midgame ship, they have a connection like I’ve never seen. They fake date, they scheme together, they do so much for each other and they have so much effort put into their relationship only to have it torn apart and treated like it was never important.
Also, once again, EJ has fallen in love with a girl and she doesn’t love him back (Gina was definitely in love with him too but whatever the writers want to gaslight us into believing I guess. Which is so dumb because you can love more than one person in your life. Why did they feel the need to completely destroy every bit of Portwell after working so hard to make us ship them). Pointing this out isn’t prioritizing EJ in the relationship, it’s pointing out the crappy writing. Why are we doing this again. I think the writers must hate EJ or something because he never gets serious songs, of the main four he has the least time spent on him (other than this season with Nini being gone), and the writing this season for him was just awful.
And this sucks for Gina because she’s having to put in the emotional work again with Ricky, which I discussed in this post so I won’t get into again. Do they hate Gina too? She wanted the guy who shows up, and Ricky hasn’t really done that yet, not in a meaningful way because it was just him hanging out with Gina because he didn’t have any responsibilities while the only reason EJ wasn’t “showing up” for her like normal this season was the pressure on him, and he still found ways to encourage her and make sweet gestures like picking her flowers. Ricky should be putting in so much more work.
It’s sad for so many reasons but in large part because it’s going to be hard to watch the show from here with how all the relationships were handled. I wish I could love R*na and ignore the bad writing, but I can’t. And they could have been such a cute couple.
