Accidentally learning things about myself through my hatred of TV characters
There's a telenovela I started watching called Las hijas de la señora García. My Spanish still isn't that great yet, so I mainly enjoy it because it's a show I can actually understand. The storylines are rather simplistic and over-the-top, so it's quite easy to follow. When I started it, I thought it was just going to be a stupid show "for input" and nothing else, but I surprisingly got sucked into it. All the characters are either insane for no reason, evil for no reason, naive to the point of stupidity, or just plain annoying. And yet, despite this cacophony of horrible people, the character I hate the most is the "good" main character.
The show centers on an ambitious mother and her two daughters. One daughter, Mar, is young and naive, while the older one, Valeria, is head-poundingly annoying. In the show, we're supposed to root for Valeria because she doesn't care about money, status, or material goods. She believes in hard work. She thinks her mother is overbearing and is teaching her younger sister to be a golddigger (which is true), but Valeria possesses a sense of duty and pride that borders on foolishness.
Throughout the first quarter of the series, I could barely stand it: how she rejected generosity, acted ungrateful about positive occurrences, and bitterly clung to her "virtues" with a proverbial chip on her shoulder. Every time she would stick her finger in someone's face and go on some long monologue about how she "was different," I wanted to pull my hair out. I actually started liking the deranged mother more because she became the unlikely voice of reason. Every time she called Valeria "necia," I almost wanted to clap.
About half-way through the series Valeria gets in a fight with her boyfriend's crazy ex-girlfriend. The woman barges in, ties her up, and tries to set fire to her house (subtlety is not this show's forte). Instead of fighting back or using any of that stubborn bravado she normally uses for people being nice to her, she cries. She begs for her life and apologizes profusely. Because despite her hard exterior, Valeria's not really about that life. In the end, her boyfriend saves her (of course), but the whole scene made me realize something about her character (and embarrassingly, myself).
Usually when you hate something to an irrational degree, it reveals something about our shadow self. The things that trigger us or enrage us the most, this feeling that seems to just come from "somewhere," usually comes from there. It's a side of us we're repressing. And that's when I realized the main reason I hated this Valeria character so much was because she had qualities that reminded me of myself, and I shockingly didn't realize it until she was at her lowest moment.
Because here's the thing: Valeria's pride doesn't come from ego, it comes from fear. She lacks the courage to love. She lacks the courage to trust. She even lacks the courage to imagine a better life for herself, because she's fearful that hope is not something she can truly rely on. So instead of being vulnerable to the world's hurts, she puts on a mask and pretends to be someone else, even when the only person she's hurting is herself.
Obviously I'm not just like this character (I don't have two hot dudes fighting over me IRL), but there are enough similarities that I've started evaluating myself. I'm also someone who stubbornly rejects everything, takes pride in "being different," expects the worst from people until I feel I can trust them, etc. I don't think this makes me a terrible person, but it does make me notice things about myself I didn't before. And it's crazy all this came from a cheesy telenovela.
Of course, because of that, most of Valeria's character arc is tied heavily to her romance with some rich dude named Arturo. "She's just afraid to love!!" the show screams on top of a sappy love song. At the end of the day, I guess the writers can't get too introspective for a show meant for bored moms and abuelas.
I'm almost done with the series, and now that I know Valeria is just an amalgamation of the crappiest parts of my personality, I no longer hate her that much. I probably should learn how to ask for help and be less stubborn....uh, maybe next year.