Once upon a time, Aria Montgomery was my favorite of the Liars. Now, I know that’s probably because I just really liked Lucy Hale and because I am pretty much always immediately drawn to the characters with tragic back stories and or love stories. Now though, Aria is my least favorite of the Liars. In fact, she and Ezra are now my least favorite characters, period. I may even like Jackie and Meredith more than Aria and Ezra, which is saying something because Jackie and Meredith were awful. Through seasons one, two, and parts of three, Ezria was my favorite and they were my favorite characters. Through seasons three and four, they started to lose their appeal, but I longed for they days of season one and two. Plus, if there’s anything I had learned from my original binge-watching obsession, Heartland, it’s that some relationships are worth shipping even if they break up, fight, and or face ridiculous obstacles in nearly every other episode. Obviously, I was hoping Ezria would be one of those couples. Unfortunately, seasons four and five showed me they weren’t one of those couples. Still though, I kept on holding onto hope that maybe true love would prevail for Aria and Ezra. When seasons six and seven came around, they put nails in the coffin of my love for Ezria. I tried to keep hoping, but all hope has been lost. I don’t really care if they end up together or not. In fact, I really don’t care what happens to either of them. They both annoy me now.
Emily and Alison are close seconds on my list of least favorite Liars. They’re just kind of boring. Throughout the whole series, I have felt little to know emotion for Emily. Actually, the only times I’ve ever felt anything for Emily were in the moments with her dad. I didn’t even care when Maya died. I am just completely unaffected by anything in PLL related to Emily Fields. As for Alison, I liked her more when she was dead and missing. I’ve tried to empathize and sympathize with Alison and I do feel for her, but I just don’t like her as a character. She has as a character has added nothing to the show. She couldn’t have stayed dead or missing and it would have been fine with me. Let Charles DiLaurentis be Spencer’s secret brother/sister earlier than the season 7B premiere and let someone else fall in love with a doctor who isn’t really a doctor. That’d’ve been fine with me. at least I would have had stronger feelings about it as time passed. Sure, in the moment, I totally felt for Alison in every one of her tragic reveals, but now that time has passed, I just don’t care.
After Emily, Alison, and Aria, I find it hard to choose my favorite Liars. Even though Mona isn’t included on the official list of Liars, anyone who has read previous PLL posts knows that she’s on my list of Liars right beside Spencer and Hanna. I suppose, these three are my favorites because they are the most relatable, even if I did used to say Aria was the most relatable. They’ve all three felt what it’s like to be rejected. They know how it feels to feel unloved and unaccepted. They know what it’s like to find that one person who looks past all the negative and loves you for the positive anyway.
Even though Mona hit Hanna with a car and tortured her and her friends for years, Hanna has still always loved and mostly accepted her. Does she trust Mona? “Sometimes.” She always loves her though. Even when Mona was in Radley right after confessing to being A, Hanna went and visited her, despite Caleb and the other’s wishes that she not. That’s true friendship. That’s what I want in a best friend—someone who loves me no matter how crazy I am. Thankfully, that’s exactly the kind of best friend I do have. I know good and well that my obsessive tendencies sometimes border, if not cross the line of crazy. And yet, my best friend loves me anyway. She lets me send her excess amounts of posts about my obsessions, she has long, detailed conversations with about my obsessions, and she even joins in on many of my obsessions, sometimes before I’m supposed, sometimes without knowing I’m obsessed, and sometimes after I’m obsessed. That’s true friendship—loving your best friend even if they’re insane. Hanna loves Mona even though she was clinically insane. And Mona? Well, Mona—I think—has and is doing everything she possibly can to prove to Hanna that she loves her too. She’s trying very hard to atone for the sins she committed as A and just as a mean girl in general. Anyway, I love a character who is the redemption character—someone who spends the majority of their time in the story becoming better than they were before and if she does end up being on the A Team or evening being Uber A herself, then that’s even better, because as a story arch, I just thing that would be absolutely brilliant.
As for Hanna, she’s the realest character of all. She doesn’t have any deep dark secrets. Her skeletons are those of a broken family and a broken self-image. She acted out because her parents had marital issues and thus she had daddy issues. She developed an eating disorder because the popular girl told her too. She became the popular and kind of mean girl, because she was bullied and all the other things she has done have either been on accident or with an accomplice. To quote the song “Nervous Girls” by Lucy Hale, “Hanna in her skinny jeans is too damn scared to eat.” That was Hanna Marin for several seasons and long before we even met her. All she cared about was looking good, being popular, and getting the guy, because those were the things she thought she needed to be loved and accepted. Then, Caleb came to town and slowly showed her that none of that stuff was when made her beautiful, loved, or accepted. Of course, she didn’t actually believe that until he left for Ravenswood and came back, but she is finally too that point where she knows Hanna Marin is all she needs to be. Of course, she still struggles, but that’s why she’s such a great character, so yeah, actually, Hanna may be my favorite character of them all. One thing is for sure though, Haleb is definitely my favorite couple!
Finally, there’s Spencer Hastings. She has been rejected time and time again by her various family members. She just learned she was adopted by her mother (which by the way makes all of the other Spencer and Veronica scenes make so much more sense) because her biological mother was in a mental institute. Throughout the series, she has discovered that her father cheated on her adoptive mother not once, but twice and got both women pregnant. Her half-sister Melissa and half-brother/cousin Jason are two of the sketchiest people ever to live in Rosewood. Her ex-boyfriend once made her believe he was working with A and made her believe he was killed in a motorcycle accident. She’s been being stalked for a decade. One of her best friends made her believe she died, then that she was kidnapped, only to confess that she really just ran away. She was placed in the same mental hospital that she would later find out is the same place where she was born because it’s the same place her biological mother and half-sister, or brother, I’m still not too clear on that, was locked up for who knows how long. Spencer Hastings has been a mess throughout the whole series and it’s only becoming more and more clear with every episode as to why it’s totally okay that she’s a hot mess 98% of the time. In fact, it’s basically a miracle she’s not truly insane by now. Actually, at this point, Spencer could end up being A and I wouldn’t blame her in the slightest, because half of Rosewood is related to her and has done tragic things to her anyway, so why not? Then of course, there’s Spoby, who just needs to get back together already, because they’re breaking my heart and I don’t even care half as much about the show anymore as much as I once did.
Anyway, this post was written mostly just because I was reading some of my old posts and couldn’t help but laugh at myself for how much I loved Ezria only to get to a point where they are my least favorite characters! Then, I decided I might as well write about how I feel about the other Liars too while I’m at it.
Brittany Alexandria 