I was talking about Juliantina a little while back with a friend and she was like, this isn’t f/f TV tropes, this is fanfic tropes, and that really did apply. They got all these cute and romantic tropes that, yeah, usually apply to m/f couples, but the way it was one after the other and the way they mostly avoided so many bad tropes just sucked us right in. Val decided to break up with Lucho, so she did. She decided to come out (to Guille), she did, he was great about it. She asked Juls about Jacobo, they talked it out. They broke up, they still were in each other’s orbit and clearly still in love. I think last week’s really great treatment of them had a lot of us lowering our guards.
But maybe you’re right, like, there was cheating, on Lucho, for a bit. That’s not a positive trope. Being outed, homophobic bullying, parental disapproval, these aren’t positive tropes. This one is just one of our big…three? that we hate. We can excuse a lot of things, especially when it furthers their love and puts them together to fight an external force, but this is not only a bad trope with respect to any romance, it comes with considerable baggage for f/f ships.
We talked so much about how they managed to do all the good parts, I guess it really was by chance, or a different approach than we think, anyway. They were careful about it, I think, about how they chose to go about it, and they’re probably right in that their target audience will still continue to root for them even with this trope, it’s just another very normal telenovela romance trope. We just have a very specific experience and background with it.