The setup didn’t seem so bad to me, it was in service of making sure the movie premise actually happened, like, would it have made a difference if she’d told her at home but Abby still said yes? Much of the movie’s characterization of Harper is that as much as she’s a loving, attentive gf to Abby the rest of the time, with respect to this specific thing, she’s indecisive, drags her feet, is defensive and embarrassed about it, just does not handle anything about it well. That IS the plot, even as she proposes this silly idea of faking a friendship, we’re supposed to be like oh, no, because not only is this a movie and we know things will go wrong, but yeah, she lied about it to begin with and only told her in the car, she is weak when she comes to this and that weakness will be the downfall of this plan.
I didn’t see her as not showing remorse, for either Abby or Riley, the reason she did come out was because of the level of hurt she caused both and not wanting to hurt Abby? Through some of the Shitty GF Actions, as we’ll call them, leaving her alone to fend for herself and the bar and all that, yeah, at that point she wasn’t even fully aware she was hurting her, she was too busy regressing and trying to paper over everything with, it’s fine, it’s fine, but then obviously saw how the suffocating convo hurt her and did apologize, and then got jealous and well, it’s a holiday movie where contrived things happen and people do stupid things.
And another anon:
I guess to add in another piece to the Happiest Season discourse, my issue isn’t with Harper directly, it with how the story is written around her. The audience is told over and over that Harper is this great person (great enough for Abby to propose after being together for barely a year) but the audience is barely shown this in her actions. We see a bit at the beginning when they’re on Christmas lights tour but it ends there and moves swiftly into gay toxic panic land. The writers needed to show the audience what is appealing about Harper not just tell us
I decided to add this one as well because I guess these two asks really get to what’s puzzled me about this perspective, where Harper is essentially in the position of an antagonist who has to earn the good faith usually just granted to characters in her position.
Isn’t Abby, a person who clearly is not blind to Harper’s faults when they become apparent, thinking about proposing actually showing us in itself? We can trust Abby, no? At least before she forgave Harper at the end, since so many disagree with that specifically. If we don’t trust Abby’s judgment from the start, then what even is the point of watching the movie? We don’t have to be in love with Harper ourselves, we just to buy Abby’s love for her, which I did. I remember when I tried to gif my miscellaneous Harper/Abby set, I had to whittle it down to 10 moments from way more.