Since its inception, the American version of the hit reality dating phenomenon Love Island has been something of a red-headed stepchild. It wasn’t until last season—which produced not only 30-odd episodes of high-octane hijinks but three couples whose relationships remain solid a year after being released from the confines of the villa—that Love Island USA became the sort of appointment viewing that could rival its British corollary. Several members of last season’s cast have become stars in their own right; a spin-off show, Love Island: Beyond the Villa, will follow six former islanders as they navigate their newfound fame.
All to say, Season 7 of Love Island USA had a lot to live up to. From a financial perspective, it’s safe to say that this season has been nothing short of a success—every week, the show seems to set a new audience high. Still, in the online corridors where Love Island discourse dominates, this season has received its fair share of criticism. There are the two islanders who have been unceremoniously removed from the villa for using racial slurs in the past. There’s the blatant gamesmanship that seems to have, until recent days, trumped most of the islander’s search for love. And then there’s Huda.
So, how exactly will Love Island USA be remembered in the annals of reality television? To begin to answer that question, we’ve assembled a symposium of sickos here at Defector who have spent their summer locked into the trials and travails of some of America’s finest future influencers.
Rachelle Hampton: I’d love it if we could all start off by giving our Love Island bonafides. What was the first season y’all watched in its entirety?
Kelsey McKinney: Hello fellow islanders! I am new blood. This is my first season to watch live all the way through. However, because I am watching Love Island UK at the same time, I feel as though I have been baptized by the beautiful fire pit around which all the islanders gather. I have all the enthusiasm and insanity of a new convert. I’ve never been happier to be somewhere than I am every single day in front of my television, consuming my many hours of daily programming.
Israel Daramola: I was also a latecomer to the show. My roommate was obsessed with it and finally roped me into watching last season, and as I’m sure we are going to talk a lot about, that cast was a lot of fun to watch: full of dramatics yet incredibly endearing and mostly genuine. It was also impressed upon me heavily that this was out of the norm for the U.S. version of the show and it seems hard to make lightning strike twice, especially when you watch this new season and can pretty safely presume that the big takeaway from last season was look how famous you can get by being on this show.
Rachelle: Despite all evidence to the contrary (my deep and public obsession with reality television), I’m also a relatively new adoptee of the Love Island lifestyle. For years, I’d start a new season in real time and then inevitably fall behind and stop watching because 30-plus episodes is a lot of fucking episodes! But then last year, I told myself I had to finish at least one season of Love Island. I was going through a period of intense change and needed a load-bearing wall in my life, and I knew some hot young dummies on an island would give me exactly what I needed: an adult version of Cocomelon. I couldn't have picked a better time to lock in. To this day I still believe that last season was one of the best seasons of reality television I ever watched, along with the queer season of Are You The One?
I know a lot of people were skeptical about whether or not the producers would be able to capture that magic again, but I gotta say, I was pretty locked into this season from day one. What about y’all?
Kelsey: I’ve never been more locked in. I’m voting when I’m told to vote. I’m seated when the new episodes drop. The only thing I cannot manage is Aftersun, which I have no interest in. While I’ve watched very few seasons of Love Island compared to everyone else, I have spent most of my life watching reality television, and I do think this season is pretty good reality TV.
Israel: I am certainly sat. I’ve been here since Episode 1, but it has not always been easy to bear this cast and the, uh … let's say concerns I have about them and their dating methods. But that’s not to say it hasn’t been entertaining or engaging; it’s just much different than what you’d expect, I think.
Kelsey: I keep hearing a lot of people say that this season of Love Island USA is a great season of reality television, but a bad season of Love Island. I don’t know what this means, as I am new and obsessed. Do y’all agree with this? Can you explain it to me?
Rachelle: I agree to a certain extent. I think some major tentpoles of the franchise were either done away with entirely or reserved for the very end. There’s the fact that the only recoupling where the girls had power didn’t happen until late in the season, along with the Hideaway not really being open until this week. There normally aren’t as many islander-led dumpings as there were this season, which I think gave the villa a Survivor vibe for a few days.
I will say that this conversation feels like a bit of a chicken-egg situation. Until recently, there weren’t really many couples to cheer for, which I think requires production to step in and create storylines.
Israel: I don’t know if I agree with the sentiment exactly, but I get what they might be trying to say. I think it’s easy to get swept up in the events of last year and feel like, Oh! Maybe Love Island USA turned a corner, but it’s also just as likely that that season was the anomaly and this one is closer to business as usual. I think this season has had a lot of drama and a lot of discourse-fueling shenanigans and hooligans. But it's hard to say that there’s been a lot of LOVE on Love Island this season, at least not until recently.
Kelsey: Yeah, Iz, I really felt that lack of LOVE in the last few episodes where things have been a little more lovey-dovey. I found myself smiling a lot at the television during the challenge where they gave all the couples a fake home-ec baby that cried. It was so cute to watch them just … like each other.
Israel: We’re kinda dancing around it, but we should probably talk about The Boys this year. They have probably been the leading issue with the season’s lack of love, and they all seem to be extremely YOUNG in a way that is noticeable even with their ages and they also seem to be, for lack of a real term, podcast-poisoned in the way they approach the women and dating in general.
Kelsey: For people not watching, I would like everyone to know that there is a 22-year-old on this season with his OWN NAME tattooed in 16-inch letters across his back.
Rachelle: The tattoos this season were egregious. There was another guy who had a tattoo of a baby Cupid holding a machine gun?
Kelsey: That man also recently said on a TikTok live that he can’t be racist because he has a tattoo of a black woman on his side. You’re right, Iz. They’re all poisoned in a strange red-pill way except for Chris, who I salute.
Israel: The thing about Love Island and shows like this is that the groups of boys always end up loving each other WAY more than they do their individual girlfriends, but this season feels especially egregious in that regard. The boys seem to have much more emotional intelligence and vulnerability with one another in ways that they deny to their partners
Rachelle: I saw this really compelling Reddit post that suggested that the lack of love we witnessed for most of this season is a product of how Gen Z dates. There seems to be a real allergy to earnestness and cringe, which is unfortunate because falling in love requires both of those things! They all want so deeply to be cool, chill people when some of the best scenes from last season were people (very fairly!) crashing out and expressing their emotions fully, without any regard for how it made them look.
Kelsey: One thing I am choosing to believe despite really any evidence is that part of the reason they were all freaking out at the beginning of the season is because they were all having nicotine withdrawal. There’s something about the way they’ve all settled into conversations and cringe that feels like maybe they’ve all detoxed. But maybe it’s just that they’re now used to being filmed constantly and talking about their emotions constantly.
Israel: That’s pretty funny. Speaking of expressing emotions, I find the online conversations about people like Huda and Amaya to be both frustrating and fascinating. It feels like the online audience is just as uncomfortable with the intense emotions of these ladies as the guys were.
Kelsey: The other thing that really bothers me about the conversations around both Huda and Amaya is there’s a kind of false familiarity that comes with parasocial obsession, where people have been diagnosing both of them with all sorts of mental maladies and problems based off … edited one-hour television shows that are mixed-and-matched by a bunch of producers to create fake storylines. Like, sometimes you just crash out! You just cry! Some people are more prone to that. It isn’t necessarily an illness unless you consider emotions an illness, in which case, go to therapy.
Israel: I do think, in general, crying bothers people. Especially when you do it a lot and obviously the edits aren’t doing anyone any favors, but there comes this cynicism in which a person (always a woman) can only be crying so much because they are trying to manipulate a situation. And that belief isn’t just projected out by men but by everyone in a deeply patriarchal society. And then on the flip side, my roommate and I both feel like Olandria, who goes out of her way to never cry, never get too riled up, always be above the emotional messiness, also seems extremely repressed, which isn’t good for anyone either. But that repression is championed as the stoicism of black women, and ... OK but it’s still repressive as hell. On that episode where she just lashed out at Taylor, I was kinda happy to see it, even if it was kinda too late by that point.
Rachelle: As an easy crier myself, yes yes yes. A lot of people are unable to focus on anything but the fact that you’re crying, even if you’re telling them that you’re okay, even if the words coming out of your mouth are perfectly coherent. At the end of the day, crying is a physical reaction that can’t really be controlled without disassociating yourself from your emotions. Amaya actually said it very eloquently at one point, and I’m paraphrasing because I can’t be bothered to find the exact episode, but she said that people, especially men, are afraid of a woman who can be very open and vulnerable with her emotions. You can see that fear calcify into disdain in a lot of her fellow islanders, especially the men with whom she gets coupled up.
Kelsey: I’m so interested in how we watch reality television as a way to understand people, but the close reading of people’s individual actions is going to drive me to an early grave. And when the emotions are big, that person takes the blame almost entirely.
Israel: I definitely don’t think anyone is being manipulative, at least not on purpose. But it is clear that emotions freak men out, especially the more intense they get, and it feels like everyone is dictating who is right and who is wrong based on that idea. But in all honesty, Huda and Amaya being so intense is also why I think people find them endearing. Especially on this season, where it feels like people on the show are “playing the game” more than they’re looking for love. People claim to be against earnestness, but that is what makes people easier to root for.
Rachelle: I will say, Huda gets a little less sympathy from me than Amaya and even Olandria, who I desperately want to see just hold herself a little less upright. Huda’s emotions are (mostly) perfectly reasonable responses to the situations she’s been put in, but the way she expresses them could be ... worked on. A lot of her fellow islanders have come out and said that she’d be screaming at Iris or Jeremiah for hours or slamming drawers for 40 minutes straight. I don’t have a whole lot of patience for that. I’m honestly not even sure she should’ve been cast for this show.
Kelsey: I find Huda completely understandable. She would make me insane in person, I think, but I think she has a lot of stuff to work through, and I think we are seeing her work through some of it live, which is terrifying. All of her reactions make perfect sense to me, unfortunately. But the thing that I think does make Love Island really special is exemplified in Huda, and that's how America is interacting with these people who are still in the villa right now and know nothing, and then the islanders are given cryptic readouts as to what “America thinks.” So I think the American show encourages the islanders to think about how they are perceived by the public.
Israel: Speaking of “What America thinks,” should we talk about Cierra?
Kelsey: Oh my god. We have to.
Rachelle: You know the I’d have two nickels meme? That’s how I feel.
Kelsey: LOL! This whole situation, where not one but two women have been removed from the Villa for using slurs online, also feels nuts to me because every 22-year-old is capable of finding this stuff. If casting made any mistakes, it was not deep diving into these people’s internet presences!
Israel: You know, I’m not here to talk about the character of Cierra or the other young lady that got kicked off for a similar thing in the past. I just have a question: At what point do we decide how much power the internet should have in deciding who gets to stay or gets kicked off the show? I know it's weird to ask that about a show in which America votes you off anyway, but voting isn’t really what happened here, and yes, both women deserved to be taken off, but I’ve seen this movie before where you give the internet an inch and they start taking miles. Is there a line? I guess that's what I’m trying to figure out here.
Rachelle: That’s a great question that I don’t have an answer to. I know that in some ways, Love Island was backed into a corner by eliminating Yulissa during week one for using a racial slur, specifically the n-word. I think if they didn’t eliminate Cierra, who used an anti-Asian slur, the optics would be pretty bad. And honestly, the vibes went up as soon as she left, so I can’t even really be that mad, especially because it paved the way for Kelsey’s (and the entire internet’s) favorite ship of this season: Nicolandria.
Kelsey: I agree that they backed themselves into a corner by eliminating Yulissa. The problem with Cierra, which was immediately clear, is that production had given her a kind of golden-girl edit. They had a beauty filter on her. They wanted us to fall for her and Nic together. And to ask people to buy that narrative while a separate racism narrative is happening online is almost impossible. I think they sent her home because it was too difficult from an editing and storytelling standpoint, not because the producers of a reality television show have great morals or necessarily care what the internet thinks. On a personal level: good riddance and hello to Nicolandria!!!!
Israel: To jump off Kelsey’s earlier point, maybe this is something their casting department should’ve figured out themselves. You’d think they’d have someone going through people’s internet history.
Rachelle: Kelsey, please give us your Nicolandria pitch. I’ve seen some chatter that it’s over-produced BS. (For those who have made it this far and aren’t watching the season: Nic, of the aforementioned Nicolandria, was with Cierra before she got dumped for using a racial slur. But Nic and Olandria have shared several kisses and a lot of chemistry.)
Kelsey: Okay. I’m sorry, but these people are not actors. We know that because we have seen them try to lie to each other and they suck at it! I simply do not believe that you can have the kind of kiss that Nic and Olandria have had and not have something there, even if it’s just being horny. Love Island for the producers is like playing with dolls. They can make the dolls kiss, but they can’t make it believable.
Israel: I think the only concern I have about Nicolandria is that they aren’t a very affectionate couple, which is within their rights certainly, but doesn’t exactly make for the best television.
Rachelle: As a die-hard fandom girlie, I love a crack ship. I love friends-to-lovers. I’m down to board the Nicolandria ship.
Kelsey: Listen, I want baseball players who are absolutely straight to kiss. So I agree, I would like them to be more affectionate.
Israel: Is there anyone that you just hate on here, even if it's for no real reason other than the love of hating? I am so disgusted by Ace. I have hated everything about his self-elected prom king stance and the whole king of the wolf pack routine he has with the boys. He is very Napoleonic. A short man who is constantly assessing people as either threats or opportunities, and I don’t trust him.
Rachelle: Israel, SAME. His entire posture makes me want to fight. How do you have so much hate in your heart and look like a Teddy Graham? The past week has softened my stance towards him, but if I never see his face again after this show, I’ll be a happy woman.
Kelsey: Wow. I am personally an Ace apologist. I will say nothing more. But I hate Pepe. I have no reason for hating Pepe. In fact, I think I’m wrong. But the hate exists inside my heart.
Israel: My roommate also gives me a hard time because I won’t respect Chris’s “professional basketball” career.
Rachelle: WAIT, that’s a question I wanted to ask y’all as professional sports knowers: Are they actually professional basketball players? I saw how tall they are and I was like, yeah, seems plausible.
Kelsey: Lol! Iz, this one’s all you. I’ll just say I do not respect the basketballers.
Israel: Well, Chris plays for a team in France, I believe, but based on watching their basketball game the other night, he is NOT a real hooper. No killer instinct!
Rachelle: Okay, last question: Who do you think is going to win?
Kelsey: I feel really conflicted, to be honest. I think in the next couple of days any of these couples could secure a win. However, if I were voting right now at this instant, I would vote for Amaya and Bryan for sure.
Israel: I would say Amaya and Bryan are at the top of my leaderboard, but Ace and Chelley have this black Barbie and Ken routine that I think could earn them points. I will not respect it, but I cannot deny it. I worry about after the show though, because it feels like none of these couples have the juice to make it on the outside, except maybe the couple everyone hated because of Taylor.
Rachelle: Amaya and Bryan are also my winners, though I agree with you, Iz, on Chelley and Ace. Every time the producers get a shot of both of them smiling gently, I can’t help smiling back because they look so good together.
Kelsey: The thing is, in my opinion, they don’t need to. Dating shows don’t actually work for finding love. The odds of you finding a partner on Survivor are just as good as the dating shows. The dating shows are for getting Instagram followers, which you can then translate into money by doing sponcon. And in that game, everyone is winning.
