More than she bargained for
“Princess in the Palace” is principally a stellar vehicle for child wonder Ryzza Mae Dizon, but as the daytime teleserye continues to unfold, some viewers, this one included, find themselves being drawn more to the “presidential” character being portrayed by Eula Valdes.
People unfamiliar with the drama series need to be informed that its resident chief executive may be the tough and competent leader of our country, but she’s actually lonely and unhappy. More than anything, she wants to be a mother, so she ends up (rather improbably) adopting Ryzza Mae’s character.
Instead of “solving and salving” her problems, however, Ryzza’s character ends up adding to them—so, our hearts go out, not to the chubby child, but to her adoptive mother!
We know that the president is being given so many problems to “humanize” her, and make her more “accessible” to viewers. But, we can perhaps be forgiven for at times getting ticked off with Ryzza’s character, even if we know darn well that this is a fictive drama—because she’s turning out to be another unexpectedly heavy lead to bear for our already much put-upon prexy!
All she wanted was to love this “ordinary” girl, but she got much more than she bargained for, because her adoptee has come with a lot of “baggage”!
For one thing, her long-missing mother later makes a reappearance, and Eula’s character finds herself having to compete with her!
To make things worse, Ryzza is showing an undue preference for her real mother, breaking our poor president’s heart! The nerve of this ordinary girl who’s now a “princess in the (Malacañang) Palace” to cause our leader even more grief!
How can she properly focus on serving more than 100 million Filipinos with equanimity if this plump and clueless kid continues to (unintendingly) hurt her?
To make things worse, her birth mother herself comes with even more “baggage” of her own, gets her into sticky situations like getting lost in a public market, etc.
It’s gotten so messy that we are now ticked off with the kid and her real mother.
We know we’re making too big a deal about what is just a fictional drama on TV, but we feel that the character of the president shouldn’t be shoved this way and that, just to add to the series’ “cliffhanger” theatrics and melodramatics.
Yes, we know she’s all-too-human, but must she be depicted as such a helpless pushover for the “ordinary” characters she has haplessly gotten involved with?
How did she even get to be such an ostensibly competent president if she can’t cope with the itty-bitty personal problems and irritants thrown her way? It’s democratic, accessible and all that, but it’s also ultimately insulting to the character’s high office—and wildly unreal.
No way would our actual past female presidents, Cory Aquino and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, as well as possible future ones like Grace Poe or Miriam Defensor-Santiago, be such pushovers and helpless unintended victims of the people around them!
