genuinely infuriating! the single point i did give was mostly just as apologies to sophie, kate, francesca, and posy for being stuck in a show honestly less empathetic to women and minorities than the bloated corpse they called seasons 6-8 of game of thrones. almost every single character came off as two dimensional as a paper doll despite the best attempts of (most of) the actors. it is genuinely horrifying how uncritically sexist this season was. any work they did in previous seasons trying to flesh eloise out as spirited and strongwilled but naive young woman was simply gutted. they framed her belief in equality among sexes like it was a selfish whim of a stubborn teenager, a la the sexist stereotype of those "mean feminists who hate men and bully other women." Her feminism is reduced to a character "flaw," which is to be proverbially beaten out of her by her family so she can inevitably bend to the will of a mother who (for some reason i will never understand) is written time and time again like she only values her children based off how hard they try to sell themselves to the opposite sex. even when you try to battle through and ignore how the concepts of gender, class, and even race seem stuck in some regan era conservative sitcom, the writing just plain ****! every attempt at salvaging benedict's childish behavior through his confessions of "love" ranged from utterly unconvicing, to simply pathetic as they just blatantly ripped off other more successful confessions ranging not only from mr. darcy's famous confession monologues but also THEIR OWN confessions in season two. no matter how hard anyone on the cast or crew tried to spark life back into the script, every aspect of the writing felt like it was just going through the motions without actually knowing what drives romance as a genre. in the end i only stayed for the kanthony crumbs they always string me along with while hoping against my better judgement for something at least midly entertaining to give me a break from the onslaught of daily BS, and i left feeling like i spent 9 hours trapped in an alternate reality where the women who were against suffrage timetravelled to the modern day and tried to sell me fanfiction. and i LIKE fanfiction. even writing this every time i felt like i was just being dramatic and hyperbolic i would remember how there's literature from the era the show is set in that are genuinely more feminist and portray each character with more complexity and nuance, even in lighthearted comedies, than in a single second of this trainwreck.
