‘XO, Kitty’ Season 3 Treats Its Queer Love Letter Like a Fever Dream

In the precursor for XO, Kitty — the To All the Boys franchise — Laura Jean Covey pens five letters…five letters, written at different times in her life, all addressed to the boys she’s loved before. She never intends on sending them, they simply exist, tucked away in the teal hatbox her mother gave her, as a way for her to exorcise her own emotions on the page.

“I write a letter when I have a crush so intense I don’t know what else to do,” Laura Jean explains in the movie adaptation. “Rereading my letters reminds me of how powerful my emotions can be, how all-consuming.”

Much to Lara Jean’s dismay, her letters find their ways to their addressees: her sister’s (ex-) boyfriend, Josh Sanderson, a boy named Kenny from camp, Peter Kavinsky from 7th grade, Lucas James from homecoming, and John Ambrose from Model UN. She escapes unscathed on two fronts: Kenny’s letter is addressed to the camp where they met, so he likely never receives it and Lucas turns out to be gay. But through a series of heterosexual hijinks that I won’t delve into, the letter sent to Peter Kavinsky sparks a fake relationship which leads to a real relationship that’s persisted (to some degree) across three movies and, apparently, three seasons of this spin-off.

This is the lore that this universe has created and, during the second season of XO, Kitty, the show’s writers extended this lore to the youngest Covey sister. After arriving at the Korean Independent School of Seoul (KISS), Kitty Song Covey (Anna Cathart) falls in love — like, heart-eyed emoji in love — with her former enemy turned bestie, Yuri (Gia Kim). Unwilling to upend Yuri’s relationship with her girlfriend, Juliana (Regan Aliyah), Kitty seeks out a new relationship (with Sasha Bhasin’s Praveena) and consigns her feelings to a goodbye letter that she keeps tucked into a little box in her nightstand. She never intends for anyone to see it, she just keeps it nearby to remind her to avoid old habits.

But, of course, as the lore goes (and perhaps, as a bit of karma for Kitty having sent out Laura Jean’s letters): the letter gets out. It becomes entertaining fodder for Kitty’s snowbound friends, who pass it around, trying to figure out who wrote it. The letter moves from one person to the next until its author and its subject become clear. Things between Yuri and Kitty have already been tense — they’d shared a kiss before leaving — but this love confession, in front of their respective girlfriends, dooms both relationships.

In the immediate aftermath of the ski trip, Yuri works doggedly to rekindle her relationship with Juliana so it is, perhaps, understandable that the Kitty and Yuri were denied their processing session. But, by the end of the second season, Juliana has moved on, starting a new relationship with Praveena, leaving Yuri with plenty of opportunity to reflect on what happened. Unfortunately, that never happens. At no point during the show’s recently released third season does Kitty explain what prompted the letter or share how she feels now. Yuri doesn’t have to examine her closeness to Kitty — which had always been an issue for Juliana — or reflect on why she kissed Kitty. They interact sparingly in the show’s third season and, aside from one conversation, XO, Kitty treats Kitty’s admission of love for Yuri as a fever dream that never really happened. Kitty and Yuri are friends now…just friends.

In any circumstance, this treatment of a queer couple would be bothersome, but when juxtaposed with this universe’s own lore, it’s dispiriting. Why are Josh Sanderson, Peter Kavinsky, and John Ambrose afforded more time to interrogate the contents of their respective letters than Yuri? Why don’t Yuri and Kitty get a chance to hash out their feelings in any real way? To be clear: this isn’t about Yuri and Kitty being together; whether Yuri’s a brief stop on Kitty’s romantic journey or endgame is almost immaterial. This is about whether XO, Kitty treats the love that Kitty has for Yuri as valid and real as the love that Laura Jean had for any of her male suitors…and nothing about this show’s third season says that they do.

What makes the treatment of Yuri and Kitty particularly disappointing is that it undermines what is otherwise a strong season for Yuri. In the new season, a lawsuit has wiped out Yuri’s family’s financial resources and she’s forced to fend for herself. Even returning to KISS (the Korean Independent School of Seoul) isn’t guaranteed: Yuri has to sell her belongings just to pay her tuition. The show’s inexplicable need to keep Yuri and Kitty apart means that Yuri cannot lean on her half-brother (a teacher at KISS), even as he grapples with a life-changing storyline of his own. She gets a job to support herself and gets lessons on “how to be poor” from her former beard, Dae (Choi Min-yeong). Yuri learns to see herself in a different way and, perhaps more importantly, to care less about the way that other people see her. Her evolution is highlight of XO, Kitty‘s third season.

“You are way more than the spoiled rich girl everybody else sees,” Kitty wrote in her letter to Yuri. It’s a real shame that XO, Kitty keeps the couple siloed from each other as Yuri learns that lesson.

I have, admittedly, been grading XO, Kitty on a curve since its debut in 2023. In a television landscape that rarely surprises anymore, the bisexual awakening of Kitty Song Covey was one of my favorite moments of the year. Beyond that, though, it felt that XO, Kitty was clearly trying to establish itself as an Americanized version of a teen K-Drama and, as a result, it felt incumbent to measure the show against that landscape. The hallmarks of the genre were all present in XO, Kitty — the wholesomeness, the romantic tropes — but where the show excelled was in its depiction of LGBT characters. Overall, K-Dramas have been slow to embrace LGBT representation but the landscape is changing and teen/YA shows are leading the way (2021’s Nevertheless is a standout). XO, Kitty felt like an opportunity to push the genre even further.

In their annual report, “Where We Are on TV”, GLAAD highlights “a significant increase in LGBTQ API representation” from the previous year: an additional 22 characters and boost of six percentage points. With five LGBT API characters among its cast — Kitty, Yuri, Q (Anthony Keyvan), Jin (Joshua Hyunho Lee), and Praveena — it’s clear that XO, Kitty is driving that increase in representation. What’s more: those numbers don’t include the show’s diverse cast of extras which regularly feature queer couples at the international school or at a local queer nightclub. Given Netfix’s global reach — XO, Kitty‘s third season tallied 12.9 million views after its release and ranked #1 globally — it is likely that XO, Kitty is the most-watched English language show featuring API LGBT characters ever.

In the face of those numbers, it was hard to treat XO, Kitty like anything other than a boon for LGBT representation and so I overlooked the show’s more problematic aspects, particularly its treatment of Juliana and Praveena. That was mistake: ignoring the way that XO, Kitty painted Juliana — the show’s lone black female character — as irrational for her justifiable worries about Yuri’s relationship with Kitty and Praveena’s role as the “disposable love interest” only gave the show license to continue with their lazy writing. To wit, this season the show adds Marius (Sule Thelwell) to the cast: a character who combines everything we’ve seen about Juliana and Praveena — a black, queer, unfairly maligned antagonist who is a disposable love interest — into male form.

I graded XO, Kitty on a curve because I thought (hoped?) the show would endeavor to push the K-Drama genre forward. I saw Kitty’s bisexual awakening and the subsequent letter as potential jumping off points…springboards for more robust LGBT storytelling, consistent with the lore that had already been established in the TATBILB universe. But it’s clear now that the writers of XO, Kitty do not see things that way, that perhaps they have never seen things that way. They are, seemingly, content to value quantity over quality and to sacrifice LGBT storytelling for traditional (read: heterosexual) K-Drama-esque romance. The actors deserve better, the audience deserves better, and, above all, fans of K-Dramas who long to see themselves represented on-screen, deserve better.

XO, Kitty season three is now streaming on Netflix.