Liz Parker is a pretty typical teenage girl. Sixteen and seventeen year olds are still getting their emotions under control. It amazes me how often people get angry at young protagonists on TV or in books. They do this on Switched at Birth and on the Fosters as well. Maybe I'm just a lot older than most of the people watching these shows. Maybe things of changed since when I was a kid. But the truth is, to the best of my memory, most teenagers made emotional mistakes. I kind of feel bad for those who judge fictitional character so harshly. Not because I care what people think of a character on a TV show. But when you hold people to impossible standards, you generally hold yourself to impossible standards as well. The mistakes that Liz made were very very typical mistakes. And her circumstances we're extenuating. When you calculate all the things that made her situation with Max harder, it's truly amazing that she held up as well she did. I think Liz breaking up with Max would've been very difficult for the same reason that it was very hard for Bella to break up with Edward in Twilight. In both cases, you have a girl who is dating a supernatural creature. What happens when such a relationship is over? She has to go through her life always having to keep the secret. How do you go back to normal? And what made his hook up with Tess even harder is that her best friend was dating his best friend. So even if she isn't with Max, she pretty much has no choice but to be around him. Either that or she has to give up on her best friend. If she does that, she literally has to go through the rest of her life with nobody to talk to about all this. These are incredibly difficult circumstances to deal with. Relationship stuff is difficult for young people under the best of circumstances. But with these outrageous circumstances, I think she handled it pretty well to be honest.
There is one thing that Liz went through in the show that struck me as brutal beyond words. Every time I see this scene, it just breaks my heart. Do you remember when Alex died and Max was trying to heal him? He failed. Maria then left with Michael. Max left with Isabelle. Kyle left with Tess and his dad. In that incredibly difficult time, because of all the awful things Tess did, Liz was left standing there all alone at what was probably the worst moment in her entire life. How do you ever forget the pain of that moment? I can certainly see why the constant reminders would be brutally painful. Given everything that girl went through, I'm willing to cut her a little bit of slack and not hate on her when she acts like a teenager.
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