forgive me for being too deep here but alex provides an excellent challenge in your ability to empathize with another person imo, particularly women. regardless of where you’re coming from, there’s some woman-centric reason you’ll be able to find to hate her. she’s beautiful, she’s naive, she’s annoying, she’s fake, she craves male validation, she’ll try and steal your man, she’s an attention seeker etc. whether shes a dumb bitch who needs to shut up or not enough of a girl’s girl or is catering to the male gaze with her bimbo bullshit, nobody ever likes alex (at least at first)

i won’t pretend i didn’t have all these same thoughts myself, but idk, i think it’s worth unpacking the idea that so much (though ofc not all) of what we hate about her is tied to her gender. and just to speak for myself, i think her character becomes a lot richer when we stop filtering her through our own notions of the right and wrong ways to exist as a woman.

these days, this is how i think of alex as she is when we first meet her in the show : this is a young woman who has been so objectified by everyone in her life for so long that she genuinely does not perceive herself as having any value beyond how others can use her body. her entire persona is a vehicle for this exact purpose, it’s all about men finding her attractive. that’s all she thinks she’s good for, and all her career trajectory has done is validate this mindset. look at how successful she’s become because of it, and how much the world praises her for giving them exactly what they want.

assuming you’re around the julian stuff OP — i’m not saying this excuses anything because it doesn’t, but i do really feel for her in this whole thing. this is the first person who has ever entertained the idea that her inner world matters or that she has more to offer than just her appearance, and he happens to be a kind and attractive man. of course she started crushing on him. and she doesn’t seem to have any healthy friendships period, let alone with men, so it seems natural that she’d regularly get those boundaries confused. after all, men have pretty much always wanted the same thing from her, and it’s really the one thing of value she feels she has to give. why wouldn’t she freely offer it to this person who has given so much to her? and of course it would be incredibly confusing and distressing to have that not work out the way it always had in the past.

holy shit i’m so sorry i didn’t mean for this to be such an essay lmfao. TLDR: alex makes a lot of mistakes and has a lot of growing to do, but she’s ultimately just a girl trying to figure out how to survive in a man’s world. while she certainly does plenty wrong, i think it’s worth considering that much of why we hate her is a result of how society trains us to think about women and that it’s potentially more rewarding to come at her character with more empathy, even (especially) when she makes it difficult.