I really dug the character beats in this movie, almost entirely because I had an equally convoluted, deeply stupid, teenaged-brain-concocted plan to reveal my feelings to the Love Of My Life on a school field trip (albeit in middle school), and numerous elements of that plot were eerily 1:1 analogs to my own life.
Of course, I was a fat, pasty-white nerd who wore weird, ill-fitting clothes, listened to bizarre music, and liked to quote nerdy shit in lieu of having a unique personality, so unsurprisingly the extremely popular, pretty, sports-and-Jesus loving girl of my dreams was not as interested as MJ ends up being in FFH.
Honestly, getting over the hump like that, even with such an epic and multi-stage failure as I eventually experienced, pretty much broke the seal for me. I was a lot more open with people I was interested in going forward.
I mean, most of those didn’t go better (and several went worse). But I eventually got it figured out with the current not-legally-but-15-years-in-it’s-basically-close-enough Mrs Penblade.
