#don't mind me i'm just over here nitpicking at s4 because some parts of it feel so different from s3

[actuallylorelaigilmore]

I actually really liked the ending of the new episode. At this point, the Penelope and Schneider ship doesn’t seem to be going anywhere (even though Avery’s lack of appearances kinda gets my hopes up A LITTLE), so if Max is Penelope’s endgame, then I’m happy because they were a great couple, they loved each other, and he actually spent time with her family. They brought out the best in each other too. Plus, I wanna see Penelope be with someone great. It makes me sad to see her so lonely.

Hi anon!! Thank you so much for messaging me, I’ve been waiting since last night for somebody else to have seen the ep so I could discuss it. :)

I agree that Alvareider is clearly not canon right now, not that I expected it to be–and I’ve said all along that Max is my favorite of Penelope’s love interests so far, so if he were endgame I’d be happy for her about that. I’m not upset about either of those things specifically. (Though everybody knows my heart lies with Pen/Schneider and always will. That’s what fanfic is for.)

What upset me about the end, once I’d sorted through my feelings and could explain them, is that S4′s focus on Max has been giving me emotional whiplash because it casts S2 and S3 in a different light if that’s where the show is going now. 

My understanding of their S2 breakup was that they were both sad but understood they wanted different things and were just therefore incompatible. My understanding of the S3 finale was that seeing him made Penelope sad because she wished they could have worked out, but she knew their differences were insurmountable and so she chose to focus on her happiness whether she found love again after that or not. 

But now in S4, it turns out Penelope never really stopped thinking about him and she misses him so much that she thinks their breakup was a mistake. Does that mean she felt that way at the wedding when she saw him, even though her speech at the end was all optimistic about her future going it alone? Does that mean when we rewatch S2 now we’re supposed to be on Lydia’s side of their fight when she tells Pen she shouldn’t have broken up with him, because even Penelope will think so later? If she and Max are endgame, then his appearance in S3 finally makes more sense to me, but it also means different things.

Besides that, I just have the same problem with their reunion that I did with the Avery/Schneider reunion, no matter how cute the actors are together. It’s LITERALLY the same problem. So I don’t know if maybe I’m the weird one, for not seeing how ‘missing someone a lot’ is all you need to get back together, whatever your reasons for breaking up…but I don’t get it. 

We don’t know exactly what caused the Avery/Schneider breakup, though we know his drinking was involved, so maybe we can guess that his reestablished sobriety will help them repair things. But it’s not like we see any of that, so ‘they were miserable without each other’ was their onscreen reason for reuniting, and it didn’t make sense to me that we were now supposed to expect them to work.

With Penelope and Max, we KNOW the exact reason why they broke up, and it’s a binary incompatibility. He wants to raise kids with someone or he doesn’t. She wants to raise more kids, with him this time, or she doesn’t. Has he changed his mind? Has she? If not, how is their relationship going to last beyond that happy ‘I missed you so much’ reunion? Even if they explain it later, the not explaining it before they oh-so-romantically get back together meant I was watching that scene going ‘wtf this doesn’t make sense’ instead of ‘oh yay look how happy she is.’ Because if they still have a built in end date with divergent futures, Penelope is just going to be brokenhearted again later.

If they’re able to work it out, great! Her whole family–Schneider included–loves him, he’s a genuinely good guy, and he really always did make her happy. I could see them being endgame. But I have a hard time being emotionally invested in relationships when we don’t get to see them actually work through problems. When she went off her meds and stood up Max and his parents, we saw her explain things and realize she didn’t have to hide that part of her from himself–that’s the sort of exchange between them that made me like Max! 

I’m on the ace spectrum so maybe that’s why I don’t understand ‘time to sidestep our problems and just skip to being together again because we hated being apart’ but it’ll never make sense to me as a person or as a viewer, because I enjoy seeing people deal with their problems, and model conflict resolution, especially in adult relationships. And especially on ODAAT, which is usually so direct and full of communication rather than romance cliches. (Don’t get me wrong, romance cliches can be fun too! Where I expect to find them.)

tl;dr Max is great but which of them changed dreams so now they can be endgame? And why wouldn’t they tell us that before staging the reunion?