Sonny’s General Hospital daughter needs to be driving story
General Hospital probably has the most bloated cast in daytime, which is why some characters inevitably end up backburnered for a while, but sometimes the backburner status is so egregious that it needs to be called out — as is the case with Kristina Corinthos.
Kristina Corinthos Should Be Leading General Hospital Story
When you’re a popular Daytime Emmy-winning actress portraying the daughter of two of the soap’s most-long running leads, it would make sense that you’d be front and center in stories. Unfortunately, we get the exact opposite with Kristina Corinthos, the adult daughter of Sonny Corinthis (Maurice Benard) and Alexis Davis (Nancy Lee Grahn) and played by Lexi Ainsworth off and on since 2009.
Ainsworth took a hiatus from the role between 2011 and 2015, but since her 2015 return, she has only been prominently featured in two stories, and one of them didn’t even seem to be about her in the end.
When Kristina announced she was no longer in college at the end of 2015, we eventually learned she’d started a relationship with her English professor, Parker Forsyth (Ashley Jones). Kristina soon came out as bisexual, and by 2017, Kristina left town with the older woman to share a life together. A year later, Kristina returned after she and Parker broke up, and Kristina fell in with the Dawn of Day cult and had to be kidnapped by Sam (Kelly Monaco) and Jason (Steve Burton) before she was raped by the cult leader, Shiloh.
An intervention ensued, but the Dawn of Day story ended up being more about Sam and Willow (Katelyn MacMullen) than it was about Kristina, and we never even got to see any of her trauma and fallout from the experience. Since then, we have also barely even seen Kristina.
Why Can’t We Just Have More Kristina?
Every time Ainsworth does make an appearance on GH as Kristina, it makes us scratch our heads and wonder why she has no story whatsoever. We know she’s been bartending at and managing Charlie’s Pub, but that’s about it. We go months without her being mentioned at all, but it’s always a joy when the show does remember that Sonny and Alexis have a daughter together.
There is so much potential for a bisexual character who is the daughter of a lawyer turned journalist and the town’s mafia kingpin. Ainsworth makes every moment she is given worth her time, but those moments aren’t enough. Kristina isn’t a plot point to break up Carly (Laura Wright) and Sonny or to let us know Molly (Haley Pullos) wants a baby. She is an intelligent young woman and not just the character to bring in every few months for other characters to talk to.
Many GH fans have already noted the chemistry between Ainsworth and Evan Hofer, who plays Dex. It looked like there might be something there for a while, some potential for Kristina to have a romance, but the soap shoved him with Josslyn in a lackluster ‘romance’ not based on character but based on bringing Sonny down.
Why can’t we see how well he could work with Kristina or see how well Kristina will work with just about everyone? Ainsworth has chemistry with every scene partner and deserves to be front and center in Port Charles and not just a writer’s afterthought.