They explored the story from multiple sides. Yes it was a controversial topic, but they explored it. The reason Lulu’s abortion stood out to me at the time (besides even touching the subject) was they didn’t sugar coat it either, even though the circumstances were different. She was young, was surrounded by people with money who could have had the baby cared for, and they still supported her through the procedure and the story because it was about bodily autonomy. That would be unheard of in 2026. It’s also very real too.
We also saw her growth and then the show start to regress her. You could argue in character that Mona’s death caused her to break down in such a way that she lost some of that hard earned maturity she had been given. I think part of why there were some bts issues with SMG’s Kendall is that it inherently aged Erica closer to reality physically and that period of time also did it emotionally, and they decided to pull back from that. I think her accident and addiction story also showed Erica having her own kind of maturity, and then the baby story kind of erases all that.
It’s a tough business for women as they age. Jackie Zeman’s Bobbie becomes the mother to Carly and a grandmother within like two years, and then undergoes a fairly significant and noticeable cosmetic procedure, grows her hair out and died it darker red and started being styled more sexy. The show also froze Lucas in age until they were not really writing for Bobbie anymore, and barely used him anyway as a teen, so we didn’t see her dealing with any of that. An older person should feel as sexy as they want to, I don’t fault that. But because TPTB began to stunt characters like Erica and Bobbie at mid 30’s to 40’s waiting to SORAS their kids (see also Sharon & Nick on Y&R, Hope on DAYS, etc), everything is out of whack. Again, I’m not saying all these older characters should have become Alice Horton. Alan and Monica for example were believable grandparents for their characters, but they still matured them away from the kinds of things Victor and Nikki had to endure starting in the mid 90’s on, or Tom and Margo, or Marlena , the patron saint of characters forced to repeatedly be de-aged mentally until Will came out of the closet!
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titan1978 ·
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