Pretty Little Liars Explained

Hi everyone, I’ve started a new blog that’s mostly going to be a studblr/personal blog, but I still might post some PLL theories if this season shapes up better than the last. I’ve been watching, but pllexplained is just a bitter reminder of all of the work so many people put into figuring out a mystery that ended up not being well thought out. 

Seriously though, thank you to all of the awesome people who followed me and worked through the clues and story lines for a really awesome murder mystery. #pllarmy is seriously the best, and I’m so thankful for all of you! 

If you want to follow me, my new blog is http://lawspo.tumblr.com/. If you’re not into the studyblr anesthetic, thanks for a good run.

So the finale was shit, it didn’t fit in with the mystery up until this point. Vanessa was wonderful and no hate towards her, but the writing was so subpar that it’s super disappointing. 

Interested in all the ways the Charles/Charlotte/Cece  reveal doesn’t add up? Check them out below, but be warned that it will just make you hate the reveal more.

1.) Ages in the Toby/Alison flashback

I’ve seen this mentioned a few places before, but the ages in the flashback of Toby and Alison just can’t possibly be correct. Not only that, but Marlene’s half-assed coverup for this huge plot hole doesn’t make sense either. 

Toby’s mom died in 2007 (because in the Halloween episode that takes place in 2008, he says that she died a year ago). Cece was born in 1986, meaning that in 2007 she would have been 21. Cece transitioned when she was 16, which would have been in 2002. Based on the story given to us in the finale, Cece would already have been a woman when Mrs. Cavanaugh was killed - so the fact that she’s shown as a young boy in a dress is a huge, ridiculous plot hole.

2.) Cece dating Jason 

Okay, so let’s just first acknowledge what this is: an incredibly shitty attempt to fix a bad plot hole they created early in the series. Think about this logic for a minute “I want to get close to my family, clearly I have to date my brother”

No Cece, no you don’t. She could have just befriended him, or hung out with his friends, or any other way a normal person would get close to their brother without dating him. Not only that, but let’s look at the timeline quickly. 

Cece started dating Jason after she posed for a picture in the Rosewood High yearbook in 2004. The Cape May trip we see a flashback of in the finale took place the summer before Ali went missing, 2009. So there are plenty of people who are abstinent and I get that, but are you telling me that 2 young adults dated for 5 YEARS and didn’t have any physical intimacy? Not even sex, anything would have been entirely inappropriate since they were siblings. 

Either they dated 5 years without ever so much as kissing, in which case that’s a ridiculous assumption and a plot hole, or Cece and her  brother fooled around, which is incest and another sloppy plot hole in the badly written episode. 

3.) Where was Sara Harvey?

So Cece was in Radley until she stole the game from Mona.... but that leaves us to ask where was Sara Harvey?

Sara Harvey was kidnapped off her bike the day after Ali went missing, in 2009. Cece wasn’t involved in the A game for years, and Sara was’t involved in the game until the lodge fire. 

That means from 2009, when she went missing, to the time of the lodge fire in 2012 Sara Harvey was - where? Before 2009 she wasn’t in Rosewood, so she couldn’t have met Cece before that point, and after 2009 she was already missing and Cece was back in Radley. 

Not only does Sara not have a motive for targeting the girls, the timeline for her makes no sense. She couldn’t have been kidnapped and taken to the dollhouse, because Cece hadn’t made it yet, but she also couldn’t have met Cece, who was institutionalized. Another plot hole. 

4.) Speaking of the Dollhouse... 

So Cece had nothing to do with the A game until she learned from Mona that the girls were glad Ali was gone, and then she started to target them out of revenge. That means there’s no way the dollhouse could have been built when Sara was kidnapped. 

So when was it built? Looking at the plot, we can see that Cece was in Radley throughout the time Mona was there, she just was able to sneak in and out. The only time that she was out for long enough to plan and construct a multi-room, underground, torture bunker was when she was in France.... but clearly that wouldn’t have worked. 

“Maybe she had someone else build it!” you might think; but no, you can’t have a psychiatric patient pay a construction company a significant amount of money to build a torture dungeon in a remote forest without raising some eyebrows. The fact that the dollhouse was supposedly built while she was institutionalized doesn’t make sense.

5.) Yellow tops the night Ali Disappeared 

So according to this horribly thought out finale, Bethany was upset that Mrs. DiLaurentis was having an affair with her dad (which is a ridiculous, out of left field explanation, but I guess that’s for another tirade) and so, stole Cece’s clothes to sneak out and come to the DiLaurentis house. 

Questions from this: Why did Cece and Ali have the same shirt in the first place, what’s the likelihood that out of all the clothes Bethany could steal she would steal that top, and what’s the likelihood that not only would Bethany steal the one top that both Cece and Ali owned, but Ali would also be wearing that same shirt, that same night.

The idea that Bethany randomly stole a shirt,  which randomly was the same exact shirt Alison owned, which Ali randomly happened to be wearing that night is so unbelievably stupid and such bad writing. Basically the writers shrug, say “What a coincidence!” and expect us to just ignore how stupid this is. 

6.) Jason saw Cece and Melissa talking that night

Jason saw Melissa and Cece talking that night, but Cece corrects him and says it must have been Bethany. Okay, well Bethany lived her life in Radley and would have no reason to be talking to Melissa, solidifying this as another stupid copout from a previous plot point. 

This isn’t even all of them, just some big ones, a few last small points:

Why would Bethany have drawings of Mrs. D as a demon, if she was the only one who had loved and cared for Bethany’s friend, Charlie. 

Why would Cece have a Radley visitor badge if she was already a patient there. 

“I think Charlotte has mental disorders completely aside from being transgender because she comes from a crazy family.“

Can we just talk about how much ableism and transphobia there is in this statement? Yeah, pll fucked up the finale and frustrated everyone who had followed the mystery, but in the process they did something even worse.

They took the complex and often misunderstood nature of the transgender experience, conflated it with severe mental illness, stigmatized them both and labeled them crazy. Whine about time constraints all you want but if your writers aren’t good enough to handle a complex topic then don’t fucking handle it.

Liars in 5 years: "wait, where the fuck are our moms?"

Watching the PLL marathon now, and in the last episode, when Toby’s house is blown up, I noticed a big clue in the A ending! 

This episode (5/5) takes place right after Wren leaves for London. In the A ending a mover says that that’s the last of it and that he hopes they enjoy their new home. 

In with the other things being moved into the new home is a mannequin with BV’s veil and dress -- Looks like Charles and Black Veil moved somewhere together.....