Up to this point in the storyline we've seen Quentin slowly growing and maturing as a person, then all of a sudden he's in love with Amanda -- makes him look like an idiot.
People don't seem to mind her relationship with Tim Shaw. They're both scheming opportunists and fit each other a little better.
And speaking of idiots, I can't see why Amanda is any more annoying than Rachel Drummond. The Innocent Babe Lost In The Woods - "Oh Dear, I Don't Understand" stuff, and then nosing around in everyone else's business, is a bit more than I can stomach at times.
You hit it right on the head -- at least in my mind Connie. All that nice character development all gone for nothing, as he looks like a superficial idiot in falling for her WITH NO REASON FOR IT OTHER THAN LOOKS ESTABLISHED ON SCREEN. For some fanfiction I was working on for some time (I got stuck on this very point, and in the course of trying to reason it out the first story went and birthed another one), I had to try and understand where he was coming from on this. Even after power watching all their eps and looking for all the throwaway lines they used to establish character, the best explanation isn't all that great -- but you do what you can. Keep in mind that your mileage on this may vary.
The way I figured it is that he fell for Amanda not long after he found out that Beth had known of the children and never told him. Quentin at that stage was very slow to trust, and he had trusted her, and in his mind felt betrayed. Then along came Amanda, all worshipful, only seeing the exterior, knowing nothing about the curse and all that. With her he could be a normal man again -- as opposed to with Beth, who knew all the dirty secrets. I think that echoes in his exchange with Beth's ghost too -- where she forgives him and he has this combination of anger frustration and self hatred where he tells her he can't forgive himself. She accepted things about him that he was never able to accept about himself -- and I think that scared the living daylights out of him.
As to what Quentin was seeing in Amanda? She saw only the face he was showing the world, and, being a fairly shallow little golddigger, wasn't interested in digging further to see the PERSON. I think the closest analogy to Quentin's position with the two would be Scarlett O'Hara at the end of GWTW -- if he looks deeper he will see that he was in love with the ILLUSION of Amanda; a dream that didn't really exist. Beth is sort of in Rhett Butler's role -- the one who had always been there and helped him solely because of her love for him, but has that love and support taken for granted. This of course leaves Q at the end of 1897 in an even sadder position than Scarlett, as he had obtained the empathy and maturity to realize too late what he had lost.
Oh, another point of difference I noticed. When Beth died, Quentin cried for her -- considered a very unmanly thing to do in that time. When he thought Amanda was dead in 1970, he didn't cry or mourn -- he had a temper tantrum like a child who had lost a toy.
