Beyond Selidor

HI! I found this while I was looking for PLL meta on DW/LJ, and I hope it's okay for me to engage with you here on your thoughts, which are, actually, very much my own. This is the conversation I have been wanting to have, but find it impossible to have unless I happen to agree with the person on whether or not Toby is abuse. I have very little patience for people defending him, especially these days.

Like you, I definitely see this narrative as having a very bleak view of men and women's relationships with them, in a good way, where it engages with the cultural abuse of women, especially teenaged women, and men/boys, even when they're well-meaning, still have a lot to gain from this sort of oppression of women.

I have always seen PLL as a modern take on the Female Gothic narrative, but it subverts that by giving us MULTIPLE heroines, who maintain positive bonds with each other. So while the traditional Female Gothic with its lone heroine and the dead woman in the attic gives us women who are both equally doomed in different ways, PLL actually offers a way out of that bleakness by showing us that women sticking together is how you work your way out of that metaphorical haunted castle or an oppressive small town with all its patriarchal and controlling trappings. And given all its gothic themes, it makes perfect sense that this narrative finds men to be inherently unworthy of the girls' trust and abusive/controlling.

I guess where I am having trouble is that your reading that the show deplores Toby is my PREFERRED reading (which is why I haven't gone on an anti-writers' rant, just an anti-Toby one. ;), but I am worried that I might be giving the writers too much credit and possibly fanwanking something that's problematic? Because my instinct is to want to defend it because I think PLL is pretty much the most positive take on women and their relationships with each other currently airing, and I would argue EVER, really. And the fact that that central premise never changes, no matter what else does, means a lot to me.

I suspect that the writers dislike Toby, but that the fandom has latched on to Spencer/Toby so strongly that the writers fear to do anything too drastic with them. So while Marlene King was making promises that Toby was evil last season, she is now vocally supporting Spencer/Toby, and I have seen this reflected in the cast interviews, too? Admittedly, I generally avoid cast/writer interviews, so these are the bits that I have seen when other people have been discussing them. Instead of dealing with what Toby did last season, they seem to have given him his own arc, and more of a POV than any man on this show has ever had.

So what's bothering me is that intentionally or unintentionally, the writers have created a 'romance' narrative that appeals to a lot of people, and they're unwilling to address the issues of this relationship. Like, I can accept that Toby is abusive and that the show sees him as abusive, but I still need Spencer to confront him and hold him accountable for his actions. I just really hate that her character arc is suffering because of this relationship, which has never happened on this show before.

You're right that Aria/Ezra have issues, but the reason that they never bothered me at a level that Spencer/Toby do is that I feel that the show consistently acknowledged their issues? Aria is very good about calling him out when he does something out of line, she's also capable of walking away when that's what she needs to do. And I feel that we're not seeing that level of in-text critique of Spencer/Toby?

But! I would love to be proven wrong about this (because as I said, your reading is my preferred reading, and I WANT to believe it!), so I would love to hear more on the ways that you think the show is expressing disapproval for Spencer/Toby.