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Ooof, yeah, that moment where she just stops breathing and just braces herself:
Because maybe it was, maybe she’s making too much of it and it meant nothing to April or she’s not going to acknowledge it but phew, April admits it wasn’t nothing and then we get this moment of relief.
It’s like those moments in fic where people let out a breath they didn’t know they were holding. 😛
Well, I think the show gets that people, and teenagers in particular, make decisions that aren’t always the most logically sound. They don’t do a cost benefit analysis, it’s often I want this to be true, so I’m hoping it is. We do that all the time, how many decisions do we make that we know we’ll pay for later, but we’re just hoping it’ll magically work out, sleeping late, eating unhealthy, skipping a class, procrastinating on literally anything? It doesn’t make sense, it’s just the best option in the moment. April herself was falling into that in ep 8 and 9, she knew there was no way she could come out safely, but oh, she wanted it.
But Sterling in particular has led a bit of a charmed life until the last ep. Like, okay, she breaks the rules (sleeping with Luke, drinking) and faces the consequences (school ostracization, mother kicking her out of the house), but the being kicked out of the house was about as gentle as possible, and when her mom found out about the sex it was a bonding moment and the drinking somehow fixed the school situation! So she’s actually come out on top.
She WAS scared about what to do with April, as she told that lady in the throuple, April could tell her parents, but she went ahead and kissed her anyway because in the moment, she couldn’t do anything else. And then she (rightly) freaked for two seconds until even THAT somehow amazingly worked out, against all odds, as we well know. You surprise the most Christian high maintenance girl in school with a kiss, it’s lottery probability not having that backfire badly.
There are some people who make high risk decisions again and again even when they turn out badly and they just spiral. This kid is rewarded again and again, like, I would have understood her optimism even if only half those things had worked out. She’ll think, oh, they’ll be fine, or at worst, I’ll spend a night out on the lawn, but honestly? She’s not thinking of the consequences at all, it’ll work out.
Hmm, while it’s possible that April puts all those points together and is surprisingly understanding, aside from the fact that it’s a TV show that seeks heightened drama, there’s a difference, I think, between an impersonal response that only looks at the logic and facts versus one that reacts to the emotion of the situation. Given who this involves, it would be extremely natural for April’s initial reaction be to the betrayal of it all.
And that’s what it would be, it’s not just that it’s her dad, or that Sterling technically never lied, or even what their relationship was like when it all went down. She’d be mad that it was Sterling who did get extremely close to her, who she told all her secrets to, who kept this from her. It would hurt on THAT level. It doesn’t matter that she was mean to Sterling and Sterling didn’t use it against her, that doesn’t get her bonus points when it was Sterling who chased a friendship and then kissed her. She totally bared her soul to Sterling about it all! Who throughOUT the show, has expressed concern and sympathy because of her father’s situation, all the while she was the one who secretly caused it, like, this isn’t about the father, this is about April and Sterling.
And in fact, if the show somehow does subvert some of the dramatic expectations and has Sterling tell April about it, that would very much change the equation, and April’s anger might be a one or two ep arc instead of half or full season.
Oh, for sure! My position from the start was actually a very strong “she doesn’t have to come out at any point for the likely duration of this show!” so that’s what the previous answer was, me lightly backing off of that because it IS so painful and you can see its effects on her. But of course it has to be done with so much care. That’s the thing, this being a TV show, there’s what’s best for the character/rep and what’s most dramatic and often those are not the same thing.
About Sterling, like. I sympathize! She got caught up with it, she’d JUST had a huge fight with her twin where the issue wasn’t the same-sex thing but instead the secrets, that’s the mindset she was carrying with her into the finale. It’s hard to balance, and even if it was a few days, clearly it was this very charged satisfying new dynamic that was making her feel something she seemed to have been chasing since the start of the show and probably before. And on some level she and April have known and been circling each other since at least the 5th grade. I can get that it felt super significant to her, worth the coming out.
Neither side is wrong–this isn’t even a sides thing, this is just…circumstance. They both have done not great things but are both understandable and ultimately sympathetic, they’re just kids making the best of normal kid stuff as well as the larger social injustices of homophobia.
