at it’s heart, to all the boys i’ve loved before is a love letter to what it means to be a teenage girl. in all of its painfully introspective, pastel-pink glory. it’s about personal identity; growing up and becoming less fearful of change; the people we let into our lives (and also the people who leave); and learning to live a perfectly imperfect life.
after re-reading the ending of the book last night and re-watching ps i still love you earlier today—the last thirty minutes was a poorly paced speedrace to get to that weird floating treehouse kiss scene to end with a neat bow and lost a lot of the charm it had in the first half. in the book, john ambrose got more closure, peter got more jealous (and actually had emotions of his own wow), and lara jean is less flaky/just as indecisive/more sympathetic.
lara jean pulls a meredith grey—she just wants a boy to pick her, choose her, and love her—but the boy who does is john ambrose and suddenly it feels all wrong. lara jean gets a lot of hate in service of propping up peter kavinsky to be the perfect internet boyfriend. his character is watered down in the second film so as to not offend the fangirls who have launched the series into meteoric success (and that’s just bad writing). he is a boyfriend prop who doesn’t do much and essentially ends in the same place as he started: he is completely reactive. he’s so much shadier in the book and makes bigger mistakes, but as much as lara jean is naïve in her first relationship, peter’s new to this too. his first relationship was completely unhealthy and he’s still deeply affected by his father’s estrangement from the family. so yes, they’re both problematic, but they’re also 16/17 and trying to figure out their feelings in the span of two weeks.
some say the love triangle in this film is team peter vs. john ambrose, but the real triangle is between lara jean’s romantic ideals vs. unideal romance. she has this picture-perfect idea of what her first love should be like and this fantasy of a boy that she’s basically written into existence. and yes, john ambrose is perfect, and she tells her heart that john ambrose is perfect because a boy like him would never break her heart. the same heart she has spent all those years sealing up in love letters she would never send. but then lara jean realizes that heartbreak is very real and it hurts—and she learns that sometimes the realest parts in life are the things that make youfeel. so this girl who bakes peanut butter chocolate cupcakes in a teal apron and handwrites love letters in her childhood bedroom acknowledges that the fantasy isn’t real, but she does have something real right in front of her.
what’s real is messy and a little broken and doesn’t fit neatly into the purple prose of her novels. but it doesn’t have to be perfect; it just has to be hers. so she picks.
and well, john ambrose deserves better. #justiceforjohnambrose