Nobody Told These Girls They Were Worth Saving: A warm, unflinching, slightly exasperated love letter to every woman who watched Euphoria

By: Jassy Diaries|Posted on: May 17th, 2026 Sunday

✿ ✦ ✿

LET'S BE HONEST

Okay so. I want to start this essay the way I start every important conversation in my life — having a lot of opinions and absolutely no one around me was safe from hearing both. Euphoria Season 3 premiered on April 12th, 2026, and by 10:45pm that same night I was in my notes app writing paragraphs. That is not normal behavior. That is what happens when something touches a nerve that was already a little raw.

And I think a lot of us felt it — that particular, unsettling feeling of watching young women cycle through pain that the show treats like wallpaper. Incredibly well-lit wallpaper. But wallpaper nonetheless — something decorative in someone else's room, not a story being told on its own terms, by someone who actually believes the women inside it deserve more than the circumstances they were born into.

This is a conversation. About the show, yes. But also about us. About what we've been trained to accept from the stories we give our time to, and — here is the part that actually matters — what that teaches us to accept from the stories we tell about ourselves💌.

I'm writing this for every woman who has ever stayed somewhere that didn't believe in her because at least the lighting was good and someone was paying attention. You deserve the version that actually stays on your side. Keep reading.

WHAT'S ACTUALLY HAPPENING

The Show Has a Narrator.

It's Just NotWho You Think.

Here is the thing about Euphoria that took me a while to name clearly: Rue technically narrates the show. Her voice opens episodes. Her interiority is supposedly our window. But Rue's narration is a costume — it's the outfit the show puts on so that a very specific, very male, very unchecked creative perspective gets to move through these women's lives looking like empathy.

The actual narrator of Euphoria is Sam Levinson. And his thesis, delivered episode after episode with gorgeous cinematography and an incredible soundtrack, is essentially this: women suffer beautifully, men stay complicated, and nobody meaningful ever faces a consequence.

The premiere episode proved this within its first twenty minutes. We meet Cassie — one of television's most genuinely interesting characters, a woman whose entire identity has been constructed around being desired by people who don't actually value her — and the first image is her on all fours in lingerie with dog ears, being filmed, while Nate walks in and immediately degrades her.

The camera doesn't flinch. It doesn't indict. It watches with the specific kind of interest that tells you everything about whose perspective you're actually inside.

That is not feminist storytelling that sits with difficult material. That is a male gaze wearing feminist language as a hat. And honestly? It's been wearing that hat for three seasons now and it fits worse every time.

There is a difference between a story that depicts women's pain and a story that understands it. One keeps you watching. The other makes you feel less alone. Euphoria has always been very good at the first one.

Rue doesn't trust people. She trusts exits. And anyone who offers her a route away from feeling becomes automatically safe to her — which is how she ends up deeper in danger every single season, most recently in indentured servitude to a drug operation run by a man who despises women and wants her to pay for that on his behalf.

That is not a character flaw.

That is a trauma response that has never once been interrupted by someone saying, clearly and directly: you are worth more than the exits you keep choosing.

And Cassie — my goodness, Cassie.

She is not just a victim of Nate Jacobs. She has become the enforcer of her own diminishment. She performs the thing she thinks keeps him because somewhere along the way she decided that being chosen badly was better than not being chosen at all.

That is internalized misogyny doing its most devastating work — quietly, in private, disguised as love. And the show watches it happen without ever once saying: baby, you are not the problem here. The man who charges you for his own insecurity is the problem.

THE REAL TALK MOMENT

Nate Jacobs does not need Cassie. He needs a counselor, a genuine reckoning with who he's been, and the willingness to sit in the discomfort of his own confusion long enough to actually do something about it. Instead, the show gives him drama.

Cassie absorbs the consequences. And the narrative calls it a complicated love story. It is not. It is a transaction dressed in a Cybertruck and a Bottega bag, and Cassie is paying with herself.

This Isn't Just About

a TV Show.It Never Is.

Here is where I want to bring in some real context, because this pattern — the aestheticization of women's suffering without accountability — is not just a Euphoria problem. It is a storytelling industry problem that has very real consequences for how we see ourselves.

Research from the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative has consistently found that women remain significantly underrepresented as showrunners and lead writers in prestige television.

And when women are absent from behind the camera, the narratives about women on screen tend toward one of two extremes: victimhood without agency, or strength performed so relentlessly it stops looking human. What rarely makes it to screen — what requires a writer who actually knows the inside of a woman's experience — is the full, contradictory, gloriously complicated truth of both existing at once.

The women in Euphoria are not written as full people navigating impossible circumstances with their humanity intact.

They are written as fascinating problems.

And there is a world of difference between a story that treats you as a person and one that treats you as a fascinating problem to observe. One of those stories teaches you something true about yourself. The other just teaches you to find your own suffering aesthetically interesting — which, for the record, is not the healing era we are trying to be in.

WHAT THIS HAS TO DO WITH YOUR ACTUAL LIFE

The stories we consume teach us what we believe we deserve. When we watch women cycle through pain without consequence, without anyone being held responsible, without the narrative ever offering an exit ramp — we absorb that as normal. We start to recognize the pattern in our own lives. The relationship where your suffering is interesting to someone but not urgent to them. The friendship that rewards you for shrinking. The version of yourself you perform so someone else doesn't have to sit with their own discomfort. Art shapes what we think is survivable. Make sure yours is telling you the truth.

WHAT WAS OWED: On Angus, On Kat, and the Grace the Show Refused to Give

I can't write this essay without saying this clearly: the way the show handled — or rather didn't handle — Angus Cloud's passing is one of the most revealing failures of the season. Fez deserved a conclusion rooted in the warmth that made him one of the most beloved characters this show ever produced. And Lexi, the woman who loved him most quietly and most truly, deserved to fall apart about it on screen in a way we could witness and feel alongside.

There should’ve been a grief scene. Everyone showing up at his grave, not planned, just the gravity of loss pulling people to the same place. Lexi arriving last because she's been everywhere except the one place that would make it real. And a full, gorgeous, ugly, human crashout at his graveside with all her people around her.

That's it. That's the whole scene. No dramatic twist. No plot device. Just people who loved someone, being honest about it.

And then: In honor of Angus Cloud. A resource. An acknowledgment that these worlds are real and people are living in them. That would have been care. That would have been the show being on its own characters' side for once.

Instead, much like what happened to Kat Hernandez — a character written out with zero closure after Barbie Ferreira reportedly had a miserable experience — the show treated a real human loss as an inconvenience to route around. Kat deserved a full arc about reclaiming herself on her own terms. She got erased. And the show never even blinked🌸.

When the people who disappear from a story are consistently the women who pushed back, asked for more, or refused to be written smaller — that tells you something. Not about them. About the room they were in.

✿ ✦ ✿

HONEST CONCLUSION: Stories That Stay On Your Side

You are allowed to demand more from the stories you give your time to. That is not being dramatic. That is not being unable to handle difficult content. That is knowing the difference between art that witnesses your experience with you and content that just watches it happen.

Good storytelling about women doesn't flinch from darkness. But it stays. It doesn't abandon the women inside it. It asks, relentlessly, who is responsible, what they owe, and what a life outside this looks like. It believes — at some structural, humane, bone-deep level — that the women it's depicting deserve a future worth imagining. That belief is the thing Euphoria has never quite managed, and it's the thing that separates a show that changes you from a show that just keeps your attention.

The growth that needs to happen — and I'm talking to all of us here, not just the writers in Hollywood — is learning to notice when a story, a relationship, a narrative about yourself isn't actually on your side. Learning to ask: does this believe I deserve a way out? Does this think I'm worth saving? Or is it just fascinated by the way I look while I'm struggling?

We were never the point of Euphoria. But we can absolutely be the point of whatever we choose to build, write, watch, and believe in next. Starting, perhaps, right here.

Okay, Now It's Your Turn

This conversation doesn't end with me — it starts with you. Drop a comment, share this with the friend who also watched and felt something, and tell me: what story — real or fictional — actually made you feel like someone was on your side?

✿  What did Euphoria Season 3 make you feel that you haven't said out loud yet?

✦ Where in your own life are you in a story that isn't on your side — and what would it mean to change that?

✿ What does it look like to demand the version of things that actually believes you deserve better?

I'll be here with more essays💌.