To All the Boys I've Loved Before: Where Did They All Go?

They left me when I was sixteen.

The heroic Percy Jacksons, the sensitive Peeta Mellarks, the dauntless Four Eatons, the boys in “young adult” stories whom I fell in love with while growing up as a closeted Filipino in rural Pennsylvania faded away after many years of compassion, laughter, distress, and agony... And after they were eventually replaced by the flesh-and-blood likes of my own exes, my own non-fiction heartbreaks (one of which was quite recent), I never thought my crushes from the novels of yesteryear would return--- until they did. The sentiment of romance hidden from those who were never there was all packaged together in a hat box of a story--- ​To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before.

Sometimes movies fall from the sky. In the case of ​To All the Boys, ​you could say I absorbed its presence though the downward glare of its’ Sunset Boulevard billboards, barraging me with the hashtags, “#TeamPeter”and “#TeamJohn”, and commanding me to “#ChooseYourTeam”. To which I responded: Don’t tell me what to do. And like capitalism by way of rebellion, I typed the hashtags into my Twitter (the brainchild of my now ex-boyfriend who was not an ex at the time), to figure out just exactly who or what was telling me to choose my team so that I could subsequently take up arms against them and their billboards.

The billboards advertised the sequel to a film I had only heard about on Buzzfeed’s front page, social media statuses my One Direction (post Zayn) fangirl cousins in Manila, and eaves-droppings of discussions about Asian-American representation that I was too mentally exhausted to participate in. The Netflix film, and the book I later learned, was called ​To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before​, and up until this moment, I didn’t realize that I had already become slightly aware of it through osmosis, but never took the time to understand why the names “Lara Jean” and “Noah Centineo” were relevant--- I had probably assumed that they were clothing brands too expensive for my meager wallet reserved for tickets to art house theaters and surprisingly comfortable Criterion Collection apparel. I hadn’t opened Netflix in quite a while because of my active hate of its autoplay function (don’t tell me what to do), so I decided that now was the perfect opportunity to educate myself on a film that was on so many people’s radars. The guy I was seeing at the time had attempted to get me in touch with recent pop culture, so if anything it watching the film could have been a conversation starter leading to a long romantic evening. I logged into the Dusty Red N, and lo and behold, it was there plastered in all of its young adult glory. After soaking in the title in a curly high school cursive and Lara Jean in the thumbnail (I recognized as Vietnamese and not Korean right away), I didn’t even have to press play for the movie to start playing. So I watched it.

We begin in a fantasy--- the whole film is a fantasy, but this one began in the fantasy genre, complete with a massive field, swelling music, and a hopelessly romantic princess walking to her prince. Little did I know that the film would end in the same way that it began, but under the rules of its actual rom-com nature. The beginning Fantasy ends with a pillow smacking the face of our high school heroine, Lara Jean--- off to the races. With these movies, I always end up asking myself what the quirk is. Does she like her cats too much? Is she a sensitive cheerleader with a competitive spirit? Lara Jean is a middle child of a single parent household (her mother passed away) bookworm, she is shy but not unconfident, and obviously she has a balls to the wall best friend named Chris (of course she does) One bit of characterization held my attention more than the others.

Funny enough, in ​To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before​, a film adapted from a young adult novel, our main character is a writer of young adult fiction. Ding ding ding. Maybe I can pull something out of this after all. And the fiction she writes takes the form of love letters. Five of them to be exact. Each letter is addressed to a different boy whom she had an unbearable crush on during some moment in her life. These love letters act as Lara Jean’s stories meant just for her. The five boys whose addresses are written on the envelopes are different archetypes: the first love, the studious one, the sursrpise-I’m-gay, the boy next door, and the jock. The story is heavily focused on the latter two archetypes she has created: Josh, the one-two punch of a neighbor​ and​ sister’s ex-boyfriend, and Peter, the goalie of the lacrosse team (​Oh, so that’s Noah Centineo...​) To Lara Jean, these boys are just fictitious characters living in her stories, never to come true. She confesses later that it's okay when it’s pretend. Unfortunately for Lara Jean, and to the horror of many fifteen year olds in need of a character to attach themselves to, the letters get sent, the secrets are out, and the characters have escaped their pages. And thus, one of the most interesting questions posed by the film is set into play: What is an author to do once her creations come home to roost? And what are they to do if they fall in love with them? Once fantasies become reality, they are no longer fantasy. In other words, playing pretend is very difficult when real feelings are involved.

For Lara Jean, to face the truth, to realize that her thoughts, her paragraphs, or her letters that were once fantasy have ​become​ reality or ​have been​ reality the whole time... that is what she might do if she were, you know, not an emotionally repressed teenager. Coming to terms with feelings is not an option, instead, Lara Jean as a writer, she decides to fight her characters with another story. A “made-up” performance to put all of her characters back in the book--- specifically Josh, who Lara Jean just doesn’t want any part of. Her insecurities of dating her sister’s ex-boyfriend far outweigh a real confrontation with him. The plan to rid of her emotional demons? Fake a relationship with another character in one of her stories--- Peter. It’s a symbiosis: A pseudo-relationship will make Peter’s ex-girlfriend jealous (or so he says), and Lara Jean can push Josh away from her once and for all. Her emotions will be safe and sound once more. Unfortunately, Lara Jean, like so many pretend-players and wannabe schemers, falls victim to a common problem in fighting fire with fire, fantasy with fantasy. At some point, too much make-believe becomes reality... and the ability to recognize the tipping point is the difference between emotional growth and decay. If we remain in our stories, when reality hits, it may hit hard.

The lies we tell ourselves about ourselves is a recurring theme within the film, but more importantly, in a time of social media where millions compare themselves to their peers and become addicted to the dopamine rush that comes with every like and comment, it is a theme that runs consistently through the lives of people. It affected me quite profoundly as I finished the film. After all, the climax of the film happens in part due to Lara Jean’s phobias of emotional confrontation, but also a situation involving Peter in a hot tub; a situation sent to the entire student body. The writer has been caught outside of her fiction, a place where she is most vulnerable. Eventually, yes the movie ends, Lara Jean learns to to separate her stories from her real life, she realizes gets the guy (it doesn’t matter who ,just that she does), and we end on an ending profoundly similar to the movie’s beginning: massive field, swelling music, and a hopelessly romantic princess walking to her prince. Then there was the book.

I decided to read the book for two reasons. One, I had already given into a certain amount of media consumption for this franchise, and why stop now? And two, remember my boyfriend who made me a Twitter preceding my watching of the film? We broke up. And only days after I decided to watch a film about a girl who overcomes her lack of emotional intelligence and awareness. Was I Lara Jean? Living in my fantasy world? Not being able to see the signs pointing to the direction my relationship was headed? Maybe the book could provide me with another outlet to express my grief, another shoulder to cry on in order to give me friends a break. And there I was. A twenty four year old gay Filipino, half-sobbing, reading a book aimed at sixteen years olds and trying to gather some sort of meaning to explain why my relationship did not work out.

Needless to say it was a difficult read. Did it give me the solace and peace that I needed to move on? Not exactly. But I was able to think a little more clearly about my own fantasies and wish fulfillment now that both the film and the book were in my arsenal. The biggest difference I felt during both experiences, aside from the deep emotional loss during the book-reading, was I felt the book to be more panicked. It’s scattered style of memory recalls, jumps in thought, and inconsistent chapter lengths were a fast paced and frantic read. The film was paced with a very methodical approach... Lara Jean in the film feels semi-polished, a diamond with some weathering in need of a tune up compared to the Lara Jean in the novel, a diamond with fractures and cracks on the inside. Obviously, both versions of Lara Jean contain remnants and aspects of the other, but they felt incredibly distinct to me. Adaptation itself is a transformation of a story into its most digestible parts, and though some find this to be invaluable and unfaithful, in the age of Netflix, who has been having a huge push in YA content (​Insatiable​, ​13 Reasons Why,​ ​Dumplin’​, ​The Kissing Booth,​ etc.), these condensed worlds can still be of meaningful and impactful value for those who seek to ​experience​ the fantasy as well as audiences who want to ​examine​ their realities.

Netflix’s constant stream of YA content has resulted in a bridge between two mediums. Schlocky sometimes? Maybe. But for the most part, they can act as are easily absorbable, direct emotional translations and reenactments of scenarios that have played out in our heads. And there is no better way to begin to spread stories of emotional triumphs and losses than streaming services, which have essentially become libraries to host all adaptations that need homes both on screen and in audiences’ heads. ​To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before​ acts as an evolution of YA novels of days past... The dystopias, the fantasies, they have become our neighborhoods, our schools, our homes. Is there still room for a Hunger Games or a Divergent to break box office records and hold their own in the zeitgeist like they once did? Perhaps... but it is films and books like ​To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before​ that are beginning to hold their own. YA dystopias are welcome, but I am sensing that we may not need them as much as we did in decades’ past. Some might say that the current state of the YA novel or film has evolved from a place of dystopia, but as it turns out, the dystopias of pages past are the streets we walk on today.

My biggest revelation from my journey into the world of ​All the Boys​ was that YA films and novels have a purpose that I was not keen to when I was growing up in high school. The issues that these characters face, as high schools, as artists, have a different weight to them now that I have experienced romance, heartbreak, self-discovery, all of these things that the younger version of myself would have had to imagine in order to relate to the fiction (whether it be films or books). The term “YA” or “young adult” has been staring people in the face since works like Enders Game or The Fault in Our Stars. It’s obvious to me now. Perhaps the best time to experience these stories is not as a teenager. Perhaps it is more impactful to read them in your twenties, when you’ve been dumped by several people, enough to understand how these characters are feeling. The characters in the work, all teenagers, are more complex than they even realize. The worlds of the young adult genre read differently once your personal baggage is attached--- baggage acquired from a time of change from late high school to post-college. Reading and watching ​To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before w​ as an emotional time machine that asks every viewer: If you knew what you knew now, what would you do in this situation?

The characters that we loved in the books we read growing up, have escaped the page and showed up in everyone in our lives, manifesting themselves in one or two people. YA novels can act as a guide on how to deal with them. The Lara Jeans, the Peters, the Joshes, these are people who exist. These stories, both in film and television can aid in understanding where your parent is coming from when they scold you, why your friend is acting the way they are acting, or in my case, why my emotionally unavailable partner is acting the way he is. When experiencing as a teenager, we don’t realize that YA stories are a guidebook to the people we will encounter later on in life. And on the other side of the coin, when experiencing them as a true young adult, stories like Lara Jean’s can provide methods of understanding those who are currently around you--- our families, friends, collaborators, and of course, if we pay close attention, all the boys we’ve loved before.