Elyul rant
I genuinely think people need to separate Elyul’s character from the actress playing her, because I can understand Elyul completely while still being incredibly annoyed by her.
Imagine being five years old, having your entire life destroyed, being separated from your brother, losing your parents, undergoing an operation where one of your kidneys is removed, and then growing up in extreme poverty while being physically and mentally abused by the woman who was supposed to care for you. She remembers virtually nothing from before she was five, so the only life she knows is one where she had to become hard just to survive.
Then she meets this incredibly wealthy man whom she already dislikes, while simultaneously seeing the family, comfort and opportunities that she never had. Of course there is resentment. Of course there is longing. She’s literally looking at the life she could have had.
And then she finds out that this man is her brother.
She knows how wealthy he is. She knows the life he got to have. And yes, she initially feels guilty and tries to soften. But then she discovers that the person her brother married is connected to the reason her entire childhood was destroyed. WHAT exactly do people expect her to do? Smile, forgive everyone and happily move into their family? 😭
Obviously there is going to be resentment. Obviously there are going to be misunderstandings. You don’t spend your entire childhood being deprived of love, family and security and suddenly become emotionally well-adjusted because you discovered your biological brother.
That is why I understand Elyul.
What I don’t understand is the acting.
Respectfully, Aleyna Çalışkan, I have defended you many times when people harassed you, bullied you online or attacked you over your personal life, but I cannot pretend that I think this performance is good. I don’t.
And especially when she cries, I find the acting even more distracting. You can visibly see how much she strains her eyes and pushes the expression, to the point where the emotion starts feeling forced rather than genuinely felt. Instead of making me feel sorry for Elyul, it sometimes pulls me out of the scene completely and makes me even more annoyed. The character is going through genuinely heartbreaking things, but the performance doesn’t always make those emotions feel natural.
The problem isn’t that Elyul is annoying. She’s supposed to be emotionally complicated. She’s carrying years of abandonment, anger, jealousy, longing, insecurity and resentment. That’s an extremely difficult character to play, and I don’t think Aleyna has the experience to carry a role with that much emotional weight.
She would probably suit a more straightforward badass character perfectly — someone cold, intimidating and completely unbothered. But Elyul requires much more than that. She needs vulnerability underneath the anger. She needs the audience to understand why she’s acting the way she does even when she’s being unreasonable.
And that’s where Ates,despite being toxic himself in s1, had an advantage. HE knew how to act. He could make the audience hate them in one scene and understand them in another. The could actually captivate you.
With Elyul, I mostly just get annoyed.
And another thing that makes her feel even more disconnected from the story is the casting. She doesn’t resemble the child actress enough for me to completely buy that these are supposed to be the same person. The hair, facial structure, height and overall appearance are noticeably different, so instead of feeling like an older version of the same character, she often feels like someone who was simply placed into the role.
So yes, Elyul is annoying. But I don’t think Elyul is badly written.
I think the character actually has one of the most understandable backstories in the entire series.
My problem is that the actress isn’t giving that complexity the performance it needs.