I just watched s2 of Alrawabi school for girls and was looking through the fandom's spaces to see people's opinions on the ending, I found that a bunch of people despise Shams, honestly I think she's not that bad and specially not the worse character but people are hard on her because she's """"weird""" and can't relate to her traits.

I know any fandom for this show is pretty much totally dead buy I wanted to share my opinions on Shams's character and her treatment by the fandom specially because of the 3rd point:

1.- The documentary wasn't for hurting or "taking down" Sarah.

Shams wanted to make a documentary about social media and choose Sarah as the protagonist because she could register both the starting and ending process of fame. Her saying she was going to fall at some point was literally just a fact she knew she didn't say that with another intention.

Shams never hurted Sarah directly or even interacted with her lol, the only time she did something that didn't benefited Sarah was when she didn't included the part where Sarah hesitated to vandalize the school and honestly It wasn't even an attack on her (the released video didn't even mentioned her directly it was more about Tasneem) Shams just didn't "help" her and you can see how Sarah ended up warming up and having fun that night.

After the outing of Sarah's abuse Shams realizes she has to help her and use her documentary in a way that helps Sarah heal.

2.-Shams wasn't the cause of Farrah's s******.

Some people talk like the documentary was an attack on Farah, but that first part wasn't even really directed to her, we see in that part a "collage" of different girls that were in the same situation as Farah, we just see Farah's reacting to her parts because she's the protagonist and not just a filler character.

The documentary didn't even mocked her, those were again her "friends" and the rest of the girls who laughed at her at that moment, Farah just realized she was mocked all of this time after seeing people were laughing (she realized everyone was consciously mistreating her, because until the last chapter she actually believed or wanted to believe that she was included in the social group).

Shams exposed some people's secrets insensitively but Farah wasn't really attacked.

Also how is Shams worse than all the people that actually bullied Farah all this time? Or than the people that actually openly laughed at that last moment?

3.- Shams's weirdness

She was literally just kinda obsessed with the documentary. She does physically express herself more rigidly and have certain issues interacting with others (but also people forget she was also bullied because of this and it's implicit that it was like that for years).

She does shows empathy, you can see it when she changed the documentary to help Sarah, when she found about Farah, even in small interactions like when she started to approach Nadeem.

She isn't a narcissist, she didn't think or say at any point she was better than anyone, she didn't try to "look better" than anyone else, and she didn't had any reason for it because she didn't think she was worse than the rest neither (narcissism usually comes from trying to compensate insecurities). Tasneem or Hiba are def more narcissistic than her.

I've seen autistic people say they relate to her, and she's definitely autistic coded.

Issues expressing feelings, issues interacting (being seen as rude or cold), a very intense interest in certain topic that the rest percibe as excessive and obsessive (the main interest is also "observing" people lmao, which is something a lot of autistic people do to try to "learn how to relate to people", this interest is expressed in her hobbies of photography/video making and spying themes, and consequentially in the documentary), she even wears the headphones and has her "safe" spaces to be alone (the bus and her room).

It's clearly one of this cases of incidentall representation, this is pretty common when they try to represent a "weird" character, a lot of autistic people are seen as just "weird" by people that doesn't know they are autistic or doesn't understand how autism works so all their characteristics and personalities are copied when they are building these characters.

Even the way I saw a lot of people talk about her is the way I see a lot of people talk about autistic people.

It makes me think that Anthony, after years of being the one responsible of his family's name, he finally has a companion who he can trust with her judgement and can share the responsibility's weight with (specially knowing he had to learn to do all that by himself due to her mother being unable to help leading the family after his father's death), so he can finally not being on alert mode most of the time.