Character Playlist #2: Riley Luo from Genera+ion
sober - lorde
making bad decisions - bea miller
fuckedupminddd - lauren aquilina
serotonin - girl in red
dye it red - beabadoobee
anxiety - julia michaels ft. selena gomez
i need to be alone - girl in red
devil town - cavetown
why am i like this - orla gartland
this is me trying - taylor swift
self crucify - bea miller
too sad to cry - sasha sloan
comfort crowd - conan gray
i kissed someone (it wasn't you) - dodie
nevermind - julianna joy
the walls are way too thin - holly humberstone
i miss you, i'm sorry - gracie abrams
lookalike - conan gray
hiccup - valley
liability - lorde
next to you - new west
i want to be with you - chloe moriondo
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Riley and Greta in GENERA+ION (2021-)
Um, what I said that night wasn't 'cause of me not liking you. 'Cause I never stopped liking you. Um, I actually, um... I love you.
[...] I love -- I love you.
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hi I’m here to overthink this show about fruity teens again. sometimes the writing is just so good
by now we’re used to riley’s particular brand of melodramatic angst rooted in her inability or unwillingness to communicate with anyone deeper than surface level. the above desire to ‘go through life being ice’ ‘pure and crystallized, no feeling’ makes sense for where she’s at currently. any kind of vulnerability whatsoever feels like weakness, especially post-the motel scene with greta where she acted on genuine feelings for maybe the first time in her life and basically got told she was a big hot slut (greta I still love u baby)
here the ice metaphor is positioned as an infallible shield: if riley can make herself cold i.e. numb enough to the world that she feels nothing, nobody will ever be able to penetrate the wall she is building to protect herself. the teacher talks about absolute zero as ‘the lowest temperature that it is theoretically possible to achieve’ ‘at which all molecules will stop moving which means there is no energy produced’. if riley can freeze these unwanted feelings out totally, she doesn’t have to expend any energy trying to protect herself from anything that could do her emotional harm (ahem greta)
if I had to nitpick the directing in this I wish we’d seen a shot of greta starting to see what riley is speaking around here, but for their storyline it’s probably important that they still don’t really understand each other. the feelings are so there but the comprehension is not, and teenagers are innately self involved anyway
the episode ends with the conclusion of their week on thermodynamics, and riley is chosen to demonstrate an alternate property of freezing
what I think is especially inchresting is how this possibly sets up riley’s coming arc for the season: when something able to be damaged but usually resilient (a rose or like sad lil teen riley) is snap frozen cold enough, it isn’t made impenetrable like she obviously wants and has verbalised. instead, it becomes so incredibly fragile that when pressure is applied, it shatters. I just hope riley figures this out before she’s shut everyone else out enough that it becomes impossible to put herself back together afterwards
also a bonus that luz is the one to fix the fridge so it can FREEZE STUFF AGAIN which is not only an incredibly dykey thing to do but also has the side effect of making riley so upset about her apparently unreciprocated feelings for greta that she cries not once but TWICE in this episode, bringing riley’s total cry count over greta up to four. way to not care at all about someone queen
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(assuming that generation is renewed bcs any other outcome is unacceptable to me)
I am SO excited for what's next with Greta and Riley. Like, whether Greta is asexual or demisexual or just not interested in that stuff right now, I am so excited for a show to depict a teen relationship where sex is not the only or “best” form of intimacy!!
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i love that their roles are kinda reversed in these photos - greta is now the photographer and riley is the hesitant follower
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“Um, I actually, um... I love you”
“I love... I love you”
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