By Emily Cutler | TV | August 1, 2019 |
By Emily Cutler | TV | August 1, 2019 |
Jane The Virgin aired its series finale last night, and I want everyone here to know that it made me cry real, genuine tears of real emotions because I was touched by the things they were saying and doing. If you don’t know me well, you might not understand why that statement is sort of a big deal, but I’m attempting to be more open to both my own emotions and emotionality in general. You know why I’m doing that? I mean, mostly it’s therapy and getting older and trying to find contentedness and letting go of past demons and sh*t. But also, it’s because three generations of Villanueva women taught me that love is transformational, and I’m trying to be open to that.
There will be a more detailed analysis of the plot below (and spoilers), but I need to spend a second of the idea of love as transformative. I don’t want to get all Marianne Williamson on you (because Williamson is not a joke or funny, she’s a conwoman who has belittled people with medical conditions and fat-shamed people and I need her off my internet), but there’s this thing that Jane the Virgin did that I really want to talk about. Essentially, it said that if you love someone or something, you can, get this, find ways to expand yourself to accommodate changes to that love in order to be kind to the people around you. Crazy, right? Like just the general outlook that despite hardships and tragedies and fights and hurt feelings, people can overcome their own pain because they love people and people love them.
Not that I want to pretend that all of the world’s ills can be resolved if we just care enough. There are reasons that Jane the Virgin never touched on topics like abuse, homelessness, terrorism, and kid jails. There are, admittedly, things too hard and depressing for even a hug from Alba to cure. But mostly the show celebrates the fact that loving means continually opening yourself in ways you couldn’t do without that love. The same characters who were horrible in the first (amazing) season have redeemed themselves not just by conveniently forgetting that they were terrible (what’s referred to by scholars as the Eric Northman effect), but by actually becoming better people. And the people who started out pretty decent have become better because they had loved ones around them who depended on them adapting to new situations and rolling with life’s sometimes awful punches.
So, yes, it’s a nice show about nice people with the occasional sociopath thrown in to keep things interesting. The evil twins, wicked mothers, murderous lovers, the deaths and wrongful impregnations weren’t really the show. The show was all of those terrible things happening to nice people who faced them by saying, “I love you, and we are going to get through this together.” It was really nice, guys. And if you don’t need a little nice right now, I either am worried about your mental health or I need you to teach me your secret because sh*t’s getting real.
OK, so now the specifics of this all-encompassing love. Therefore:
This is mostly going to be a list of the times Jane the Virgin made me cry. In no particular order: