Against all odds, we survived. Barely.
Love Island USA season 7 is officially over, and so is our collective nightmare.
Peacock wrapped up its reality dating competition series last night with a two-hour long finale, crowning fan favorite Amaya Espinal—aka Amaya Papaya—as the $100,000 winner. Technically, her partner Bryan Arenales won too, but let’s be honest, no one is talking about him.
Season 7 was Love Island USA’s most-watched season yet, breaking records almost immediately after its June premiere. The first nine episodes alone pulled in over 1.2 billion minutes viewed, along with a massive bump in social media engagement—a trend that pretty much continued throughout the season.
The show has literally never been more popular. And yet, the overwhelming reaction to the finale has been relief: It’s finally over.
Just look at social media:
We’re finally free. #loveislandusa pic.twitter.com/iji1VrP15s
— Mike 📺 (@michaelcollado) July 14, 2025
anyways thank god love island usa season 7 is over im finally free pic.twitter.com/cs2P34GiA6
— Vanessa 🦖 (@lwtomr) July 14, 2025
Love island is over pic.twitter.com/lMkwSC7bGi
— 🇵🇸 (@JoeDaActivist) July 14, 2025
From “war is over” comments to “we’re finally free” posts, the show’s fans have never been so happy to see the back of Season 7. But why? For a show this popular, that’s not exactly a normal reaction: wanting it to end. So, what’s behind the burnout?
Well, ironically enough, it’s the fans themselves. Instead of enjoying a show about hot people doing hot people things, viewers turned this season into a mess of stan wars, parasocial meltdowns, and cyber-bullying.
Things got so bad, producers eventually aired a message at the beginning of an episode, reminding viewers not to bully contestants.
“The keyword in Love Island is … love. We love our fans, We love our islanders. We don’t love cyberbullying, harassment or hate,” it read.
This message came after a brutal bullying campaign against 21-year-old Vanna Einerson, for getting what viewers deemed to be bad plastic surgery and filler. She arrived on the show during “Casa Amor” week, which is when the men and women are split up into different villas and tempted with new singles.
After Einerson left the villa and got back her phone, she recalls breaking down in tears while reading the comments viewers left on her social media page.
Outside of the cyber-bullying against Einerson, viewers have also never put the islanders and their behavior under such a microscope as they did this season. They used any perceived negative facial expressions or tiny moral slip-ups (which is, spoiler alert, what makes reality TV shows fun to watch), to justify launching harassment campaigns.
Another contestant, Huda Mustafa, who is a 24-year-old fitness influencer with a young daughter, also received an inordinate amount of online vitriol.
People accused her of being everything from “not a girl’s girl” to mentally unwell. It got so bad that the father of Mustafa’s child had to step in and remind fans that Huda is a human being, so please treat her as such.
As people kept pointing out on X, this season felt like people were treating the islanders like characters in a Marvel movie, using their “favs” as an excuse to start fan wars.
My takeaway from this season of love island is that people don’t know how to enjoy media anymore. Everyone has to find someone to stan, create a fandom, dig into people lives. The line between viewer and parasocial delusion is gone. It’s sad.
— m ✰ (@mar3uss) July 14, 2025
“My takeaway from this season of love island is that people don’t know how to enjoy media anymore. Everyone has to find someone to stan, create a fandom, dig into people lives. The line between viewer and parasocial delusion is gone. It’s sad,” a user wrote on X.
While fans in season 6 turned Love Island USA into a cultural phenomenon, they are also responsible for making Season 7 an exhausting experience for everyone involved.
thank GOD the show is over next week like this has been such an unenjoyable watch bc of y’all weird new fans 😭
— ً (@grandekordei) July 6, 2025
Next season, everyone should go touch grass and remember that Love Island is just a show—not a battlefield. It’s not that serious.
The post The Torture of ‘Love Island’ Is Finally Over appeared first on The Daily Beast.
