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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