The Summer I Turned Pretty’s Real Villain Isn’t Belly, It’s Adam Fisher

Real villains wear tech fleeces — at least on “The Summer I Turned Pretty.”

The young adult romance series, which is wrapping up its third season on Prime Video, revolves around the often ill-fated decisions of Isabel “Belly” Conklin (Lola Tung), a teenage girl caught in a love triangle with brothers Conrad (Christopher Briney) and Jeremiah Fisher (Gavin Casalegno).

Whether fans are Team Conrad or Team Jeremiah (don’t worry, American Eagle sells official T-shirts for each), both factions united in season two in agreeing that Belly, the main protagonist, might actually be the show’s villain. She broke up with Conrad and started dating Jeremiah — extremely messy behavior — leading some fans to declare themselves “Team Anti-Belly.”

However, Belly isn’t the real villain of the show. Sure, she might bear some responsibility for the deterioration of the brothers’ relationship, but the animosity between them already existed. It was planted and grown by the real villain of the series, who sports salt-and-pepper hair, a puffy tech vest, and owns a fictional venture capital firm in Boston.

The real villain is Adam Fisher (Tom Everett Scott), Conrad and Jeremiah’s dad.

Adam started it

In his point-of-view episode in season two, Jeremiah reveals via voiceover that he’s always thought of Conrad as “smarter, faster, just … better.”

In season three, it becomes clear that Jeremiah’s feelings of inferiority come from his dad. When Jeremiah learns he hasn’t completed enough credits to graduate from college, Adam erupts, livid about having to pay another $20,000 for Jeremiah to complete an extra semester. Adam immediately compares him to Conrad, who is living in California as a med student at Stanford.

“Jere, do you think your brother would ever let something like this happen?” Adam says.

“No, we all know that Conrad is perfect,” Jeremiah replies.

Jeremiah projects that insecurity onto his relationship with Belly. During a fight, Jeremiah accuses her of nagging him and compares himself to his brother. “I’m sorry that I’m not some straight-A overachiever going to med school like Conrad,” he snaps.

At a lunch with the two families, Adam continues to show his preference for Conrad over Jeremiah. He toasts his children by praising Conrad as the “soon-to-be doctor, smart and selfless” while doling out a backhanded comment to Jeremiah, calling him “our super senior” and alluding to his uncertain future.

The lunch only gets worse when Jeremiah and Belly use the moment to announce their engagement, which their parents are predictably appalled by.

Jeremiah thinks he has to earn his dad’s affection

That’s not to say that Adam is entirely unsupportive of Jeremiah. He hands his younger son a summer internship at the VC firm he owns, and later, when Jeremiah catches a critical error in client paperwork, Adam is so impressed that he offers to pay for the wedding.

This decision thrills the young couple, but the joy is short-lived. Adam starts drastically reorganizing the wedding, and Jeremiah, eager to keep pleasing him, sides with his father over his fiancée. Instead of the intimate beach house ceremony that Belly wanted, Adam decides on a bash at the country club. The guest list? Adam’s business associates and employees.

All of this happens while Conrad and Belly are spending more time together in the house, reigniting old feelings between them. On the night before the wedding, Conrad makes a dramatic declaration of love for Belly, which she shuts down.

Team #FreeBelly

Jeremiah and Belly’s relationship reaches a breaking point on their wedding day, right before the ceremony is set to begin. Jeremiah, in a high-stakes breakup speech, makes it clear that his relationship with Belly is tied to his need to compete with and best his brother at something. When Jeremiah asks if Belly still loves Conrad, she admits that she’ll always love him a little, but that she is choosing to be with Jeremiah.

“That’s not enough. I don’t want part of you, Belly. I want all of you. I haven’t had that, not ever,” he says.

Jeremiah’s response shows how his commitment to Belly is about possession, specifically of something that his brother doesn’t have. He thinks of her affection as a zero-sum game, and he will only accept it if Conrad gets zero. It makes his relationship with Belly yet another arena to compete with his brother in, second to the one their father established with his favoritism.

Belly isn’t blameless in the breakdown of the brothers’ relationship, but she doesn’t bear full responsibility for it. She’s 16 at the start of the series and 21 by its end, dealing with her own insecurities and a serious case of first-time hot syndrome.

After three seasons, it’s hard not to feel like Belly isn’t a victim of circumstance in some way. She’s just a girl — a girl who picked the wrong set of emotionally challenged brothers to be caught in a love triangle with.

In its final few episodes, “The Summer I Turned Pretty” shows us a Belly who isn’t trapped in a love triangle or the toxic dynamic between two brothers. After her wedding to Jeremiah is called off, Belly goes to Paris, an ocean away from her family, friends, and ex-boyfriends.

It’s there that she becomes a protagonist that’s easy to root for. Drop-kicking a pickpocket, learning French, and dating a boy not descended from Adam Fisher — that’s where Belly starts to really thrive.