I love Stacy. She was done dirty, but I love her in spite of that.
I love how she is very clearly an exaggerated depiction of a stereotypical romance novel/movie protagonist. She’s a “nerd” who loves books (who’d definitely read at parties, lol). She’s so clumsy it borders on unrealistic. She comes off sort of awkward, and she apologizes for things that aren’t her fault. She’s based on a common archetype.
But I also love how she subverts that same archetype by knowing what she wants and being confident enough in herself to go after it. She never questions how Luke could ever love someone like her, or anything like that. She’s confident in who she is, and in fact, she thinks her and Luke would make a great match! She’s so confident in this, it ends up being a flaw, since she fails to fully consider Luke’s perspective. And she gets so caught up in imagining a happily ever after that she goes in for a kiss before she even gets confirmation he likes her. She does the polar opposite of the stereotypical 900-page slowburn most romantic leads go through.
Since the rest of her character follows stereotypical romance tropes so clearly, and the romantic pairing she’s in has the “book nerd x popular boy” dynamic, you’d expect her biggest flaw to be that she’s shy and needs to come out of her shell and believe in herself. But it’s actually the complete opposite—She’s so confident in herself and her ability to make Luke like her that she ends up ignoring his feelings entirely.
Idk, I just think that playing with those tropes is really fun, and I can’t wait for season two to show me her true potential by using her established traits in more interesting ways. As is, it seems like she was given an archetype the audience was supposed to see as played out or unlikable, so I hope they lean into what makes her stand out, and portray her as an actual person. Because I think her particular blend of traits can actually be quite entertaining. What does a hopeless romantic do after the romantic fantasy world she got lost in breaks apart?
