u/whitegummi

this is a very big long rant about the four characters and how the message at the end was very empty due to lack of sufficient character development...

starting with lindsay, i find that she has almost zero redeeming qualities. i can’t think of one thing she did that wasn’t selfishly motivated. aside from loving her dog, which any dog owner would do, she didn’t do anything for anyone else? maybe at one point she had been good to josh because she did give her inheritance to help out with his mother’s declining health, but there’s nothing else? she was fake towards all the girls at the club, she emotionally cheated on josh (though that was probably a reaction towards his emotional cheating on her), and in general she was pretty insufferable and embarrassing--even josh's friends didn't like her. she thinks she's superior to everyone, but then she grovels to try to get help from people and then she's taken aback when they also treat her insincerely. she just sucked at brown nosing as well, as indicated by her poor attempts at getting law advice at the birthday party. i don't know what compelled her and josh to stay together for all these years, aside from some good times they had on the coachella grounds

as for josh, to me, josh is an enjoyable character to watch, but his character arc really just doesn’t make sense to me; he basically did some psychoactive substances and did a 180? i don't know, but it kind of seemed like lazy writing. he was cheating on lindsay on OF models, embezzling funds from the club, and was horrible towards ashley at the hospital. it's not his fault that he didn't know what she was going through or how severe her health issue was, but he was genuinely bartering with her health/life. yes, it's true that she blackmailed him for the job, but he decided to try to gain leverage over her at such a horrible time. aside from that, his relationship with lindsay--he and lindsay seemed to have both loved each other and had really good times together, but i don’t think they genuinely had anything more than ashley and austin. to continuously choose to love/be with each other is a choice, but like was it the right choice. i think his change was not well-supported by the plot--post drug trip, he let lindsay have a part of his salary, and he chose to go to jail and take the blame for everything and even wished her well at the end, but aside from the drug trip, what else jolted him out of it? he was so vindictive and angry before; it doesn't really make sense that he suddenly decided to let go of everything and make a heroic sacrifice for her.

ashley is lowkey insane, but on some level, i think she has every right to be. she’s naive and stupid and insecure, but i can’t help but feel bad for her. she has some insane schemes that were just stupid, and she was so insufferable in the later half of the show, but it’s clearly out of desperation. austin literally spent ten seconds with eunice and started falling in love with her; ashley is not insane at all for having a crash out on the car and checking on his phone constantly. even if there was no true love between austin and her, i understand her wanting to hold on to an empty relationship so badly. she has nothing and nobody but austin; her family on both sides don't give a shit about her, and she's a drop out. having no medical insurance is scary, losing part of your body is scary, and losing your partner to someone else that they met for ten seconds is also scary. if she didn’t help austin get that job, as crazy as she was for forging those documents, they would’ve never gotten to where they were. obviously she made some egregiously bad and morally wrong choices, but her motivations are understandable.

austin sort of started out as just a himbo to me, but not in a he's-just-a-genuinely-pure-and-helpful-guy way. he disagreed with ashley’s choices but he never stepped in to stop her and simply went along with it because it benefitted him. he also never advocated for her when she was in pain at urgent care. he basically fell in love with eunice (or whatever he considers “love”) in ten seconds just because she was attractive and the same race as him? everything he did was very selfishly motivated; he tries to be good to "expose park" but his form of good was still selfishly motivated by his desire to be with eunice. he didn’t genuinely care about revealing park’s crimes; he just wanted to do what she wanted so that she’d somehow love him. it was never about doing a good thing because at the end he chose to remain with ashley who needed him and would desperately do anything to be with him. it seemed that he had that sudden epiphany in the taxi, but what forced it? he was so hell-bent on getting that usb to eunice to the point where he jumped out of the roof; i just think it's sort of odd how her reluctant "i love you" seemed to have changed his mind completely.

anyway... all this is to say season 2 didn't really seem to have a defined message because the only character redemption arc (josh mainly; lindsay slightly) just didn't seem very significant. from ashley and austin, i guess that they submitted to power in order to get the perfect life that they wanted even if it was basically a loveless, empty life. with park still in power, i guess it demonstrates that it’s helpless to fight against a system that you have no real power in/didn’t build? josh breaking out of the cycle and being the only one happy/unselfish at the end despite having nothing post-prison seems to represent the main message, but because josh’s transformation in the middle was not sustained by any real struggle (?), it sort of dampens the impact. maybe they could’ve built it up more if they had two more episodes or so; the end just felt super rushed and the message was sort of unsustained.

bunny keeps jerking his head repetitively :(

beef s2 ending felt very empty/rushed, and josh's arc doesn't really have an impact