Is it
wrong to love a character because they remind you so much of yourself? I don’t care; this shy, bookish girl
resonates with me so entirely. It’s an
acute familiarity, one that pulls me right back to my teenage years. I wasn’t awkward in the same way – my adolescent
awkwardness was a completely different animal – but the feelings, temperament,
and sensitivity behind it is wholly the same.
Though “shy, bookish girl” is an admittedly common trope, I’m not sure I’ve
ever seen it captured quite so well on TV.
A
repeat visitor to weight-loss-centered Camp Victory, Becca is a quiet bundle of
insecurities. To paraphrase a line from Othello, she makes friends not wisely
but too well: the few friendships she manages
to forge are extremely cherished, and the loss of one is felt deeply. She’s incredibly shy but hungry to connect
with someone, a difficult one-two punch.
She needs someone like the much-more-outspoken Will to make the first
move, to speak in her general direction if not specifically to her.
Then, she can swallow her nervousness enough to timidly dip her toes in
the water of friendship.
The
resemblance I see in this nervousness, this conversational paralysis, is almost
squirmingly uncomfortable. My heart goes
out to Becca when she doesn’t get to watch a certain show because she can’t
bear to ask for use of the TV. So often,
she lingers the edge of a scene, waiting for invitations that aren’t forthcoming. It’s the old feeling that social interactions
are like a moving train, and in order to take part, she needs to jump on.
But
sometimes, she jumps. When she wants to
start a camp LARPing group (she’s a huge fantasy nerd – I love it,) she sets
out to find members, taking along Will for moral support. She also stands up boldly for her friends,
usually Will. She lays into a pair of
self-centered girls who find Will’s private journal in the lost and found, and
when Will finds out her crush thinks she’s gay, Becca sets him straight in a
hilarious, half-panicky declaration.
She’s
not as good at speaking up on her own behalf.
If she can open up to someone, she’ll gently come alive with geeky
delight describing the fantasy universe she created for her LARP or the runic
cypher she uses when she’s writing something for-her-eyes-only in her
journal. In general, though, she
struggles to get her emotional needs met.
She has one of those faces that apparently beg for people to tell her
their problems, and she spends a lot of time on the receiving end of other
people’s crises, mostly Will’s. They
never seem to get around to Becca’s worries, which build until she simply can’t
hold them in any longer. Then, we get a
beautifully messy moment of catharsis where everything she’s bottled up comes
tumbling out and Will is forced to be the listening ear for once. Ah, the sweet taste of introvert victory!
I like
that, despite her fears and shyness, Becca still musters up quite a bit of
bravery. Organizing the LARP takes
massive guts for someone like Becca, and in one of the show’s most memorable
scenes, she acquits herself fantastically just when it looks like she might be
caught in a fib. Her accomplishments in
these scenes, for her, are akin to looking down the barrel of a loaded gun, and
I only hope I had that much nerve when I was her age.
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