(forgive the abbreviations)
This post is a spur-of-the-moment shower thought, the product of college admission deliberations weighing on me and the rest of the rising seniors dreading their return to high school in the fall so please do not be too critical about the prose.
So, I utterly adore the To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before series. I really do, novels and films alike. I also think that the films (mostly) brought the novels to life as best as films can (I have a few bones to pick with the 2nd film but that is to be expected in the older sisterly tradition.) However, there is one change I really cannot forgive - the college saga. This isn’t a sequel to our previous post about unrealistic college acceptances in cinema (Noah Flynn,) perhaps it is more in line with the recent Rory Gilmore post.
Anyways, Peter Kavinsky was definitely the kind of guy who could have been recruited for his sport by Stanford and the likes just as Lara Jean might really have been a likely candidate for NYU (these are sweeping statements which I would happily defend in greater detail if asked (encouraged, forced.) Still, I think that replacing The University of Virginia with Stanford and UNC Chapel Hill with NYU was incredibly unnecessary. This is not just because I think that cinema absurdly fetishizes certain universities but because the essence of the story was entirely diluted.
For those who haven't read the books (and please do): Basically, LJ and PK plan to go to UVA together but when Lara Jean's application is turned down, she considers attending the College of William & Mary instead so that she might be near Peter. However, she finally chooses to attend the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, though, after falling in love with the campus. It makes more sense that Margot encouraged her to apply somewhere out of state rather than not encouraging Stanford. Also, as a side note of sorts, it's a much cuter (and more realistic) plot that she goes on an impromptu road trip to UNC with Chris than the random makeup with Gen at NYU.
Stanford is one of the best schools in the country, Lara Jean is not crazy for wanting to go there (regardless of her boyfriend), and no parents, nor an (interfering but lovely) older sister would be justified in discouraging it. The same applies to her potential transfer. LJ wanting to transfer from Berekely or NYU is immediately ‘not crazy,’ when the school in question is Stanford. In the book, UNC is a bigger achievement because it is out of state and (if I remember correctly) has a lower acceptance rate. This reduces the storyline about how smart LJ actually is, the books teach us to value her more than her baking skills and unique sense of style (not that these aren’t two essential aspects of her character.) The story in the book was that Lara-Jean chooses the ‘better’ school over planning a transfer to the ‘comfortable’ choice in her state. And realistically, anyone who has read the books (or actually even just from watching the movies) would understand that LJ is far better suited to a ‘real’ campus than the chaos of NYC. It’s not that I can’t imagine Lara Jean in New York but only in the romanticized version of the city.
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