#roptl

ohh this one's gonna be spicy: i think cynthia fucking sucks as a character and as a gender exploration of the era.

i'll put a caveat: maybe eventually, the show would've changed her trajectory had it actually been able to live past one season before being banished unfairly into streaming nothingness. maybe this was always the idea.

what we have though is a character who was kind of annoying from the get go and who was actually where she needed to be the entire time: with the t-birds. i feel like she was a square being shoved into a circle with the pink ladies and very much a case of "non-binary people are women lite" that i don't care for at all. (and her casting is emblematic of where all mainstream nb rep is currently frankly. they're all interchangeable in looks and race) i really felt she wasn't the strongest character both in where she was positioned and where she was written.

she never really fit the pink ladies as is. she was weird, very annoying, and when the show tried to do something addressing the clear fact that she's non-binary, it really waffled along. it should've been that she realized she didn't necessarily fit with either of them and then made her way between them. or even became part of the t-birds after they grew a little.