How Pretty Little Liars managed to outrage its most devoted progressive fans

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http://www.vox.com/2015/8/15/9156455...rs-transphobic

Pretty Little Liars is a fantastic TV show. It's often dismissed as frivolous, as tends to happen with entertainment that targets teenage girls, and it's definitely ridiculous and over the top. Plenty of plot lines straight up make no sense. But the ABC Family show is also a great modern take on themes from detective fiction and film noir, a deliberate and potent exaggeration of high school conflict that works for the same reason Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Veronica Mars did, an unusually sophisticated treatment of teen sexuality, and a surprisingly powerful indictment of the patriarchy. I love it dearly and recommend it heartily to all.

Or I did, anyway, before the "summer finale" of its sixth season aired Tuesday night. After years of speculation, the episode unmasked "A," the anonymous tormentor who's been targeting the show's main characters: the not-as-artsy-as-she-thinks wannabe writer Aria Montgomery (Lucy Hale), the Type-A overachiever and Adderall addict Spencer Hastings (Troian Bellisario), the hyper-earnest competitive swimmer Emily Fields (Shay Mitchell), and the lovably scatterbrained but secretly super-smart Hanna Marin (Ashley Benson).

But many thought the precise nature of the revelation was awful and played into some really nasty, bigoted tropes.

To say more than that will require revealing lots of plot twists, but if you don't mind spoilers, here's what happened in the finale, where it went wrong, and why fans are furious.