Mean Things Come in Threes
By Sandra Vo, Staff Writer
Picture this. You’re a clumsy girl who’s never quite fit in, and you’ve just transferred high schools (again) and now you find yourself trying to navigate this unfamiliar environment with all of your textbooks held tightly against your chest. Due to an unfortunate accident just before your first day of school, your thick glasses have been cracked and taped back together with masking tape you pulled from your father’s toolbox. You feel alone in the swarm of people, the misfit of them all.
Then you fall. For seemingly no reason at all, you trip dramatically in the middle of the hallway during passing period, and your books and papers tumble out of your hands and onto the floor. Heat floods your cheeks. Embarrassment can’t even come close to describing the pure humiliation and shame you feel. As expected in a typical high school, there are plenty of snickers and a complete lack of helping hands. Just as you reach for your chemistry textbook, a hot pink Louboutin heel steps right on top of it. You look up, your lips parting in horror.
Here she is. The head honcho of the high school hallway, the princess of the pubescent people, the tyrant of the teenage throng. “Oh ew, I just stepped in nerd,” she sneers, triggering giggles from all around you. It’s the popular mean girl and her two lackeys.
And she’s just marked you as her target.
When people talk about mean girls, the movie Mean Girls rightfully comes to mind. It’s the prime example of a popular girl with skewed morals who seeks to dominate the high school social scene through terrible misguided actions. As always, her two followers echo every word she speaks as if it’s gospel, but why do we see this trope across so many different films and television series? What could possibly be the appeal of an evil version of the Three Musketeers?
By Sandra Vo, Staff Writer
Picture this. You’re a clumsy girl who’s never quite fit in, and you’ve just transferred high schools (again) and now you find yourself trying to navigate this unfamiliar environment with all of your textbooks held tightly against your chest. Due to an unfortunate accident just before your first day of school, your thick glasses have been cracked and taped back together with masking tape you pulled from your father’s toolbox. You feel alone in the swarm of people, the misfit of them all.
Then you fall. For seemingly no reason at all, you trip dramatically in the middle of the hallway during passing period, and your books and papers tumble out of your hands and onto the floor. Heat floods your cheeks. Embarrassment can’t even come close to describing the pure humiliation and shame you feel. As expected in a typical high school, there are plenty of snickers and a complete lack of helping hands. Just as you reach for your chemistry textbook, a hot pink Louboutin heel steps right on top of it. You look up, your lips parting in horror.
Here she is. The head honcho of the high school hallway, the princess of the pubescent people, the tyrant of the teenage throng. “Oh ew, I just stepped in nerd,” she sneers, triggering giggles from all around you. It’s the popular mean girl and her two lackeys.
And she’s just marked you as her target.
When people talk about mean girls, the movie Mean Girls rightfully comes to mind. It’s the prime example of a popular girl with skewed morals who seeks to dominate the high school social scene through terrible misguided actions. As always, her two followers echo every word she speaks as if it’s gospel, but why do we see this trope across so many different films and television series? What could possibly be the appeal of an evil version of the Three Musketeers?
In the eyes of the writers, this trope might be seen as an easy way to create an antagonist. Sure, it might not be the most original thing in the world, but the box office ratings have proved time and time again that people will still watch the movie. That proves true in Heathers, The Princess Diaries, and Camp Rock. The existence of the two followers adds to an antagonist’s overall power, since nobody would watch a movie if it looked like the antagonist appeared easily dismissible.
Even the motives behind all the mean girls seem to be lacking in creativity as well. Many of them are jealous of the main character’s talent, rising popularity, or even just because the male lead (that the mean girl usually has a crush on as well) happens to have fallen for the main character. It’s always the same story every time. A group of three girls bully the main character right up until the ending, where they get their dues by public humiliation or falling into a cake or pool (which seems to happen an awful lot).
Isn’t this a waste of the mean girls trope’s potential? The benefits of having tangible antagonists is that they can develop characters of their own, and thus go through their own character development as the story progresses. Why limit them to staying as the three mean girls forever?
For example, take a common situation. The head mean girl is crouching down so that she’s eye-to-eye with the main character, who is kneeling down on the ground after having been freshly humiliated in front of the entire school. The two girls are close enough for the mean girl to maliciously whisper something to the main character without anyone else overhearing. Most writers view this as the main confrontation that will lead to the eventual climax of the story, but doesn’t it also build up something else?
Doesn’t it reek of sexual tension?
However, the relationship between the main character and the mean girls can also safely morph into a platonic one. For every antagonist created, there is potential for a redemption arc as well. Writers could even make the mean girls form a pact with the main character by introducing a different villain that forces them to unite together.
There’s isn’t necessarily anything wrong with having three mean girls in a story, but their potential never seems to hit the heights that it could reach. Just because mean things come in threes doesn’t mean they always have to end that way.
Dancing with the Stars’ Tango with Irrelevancy
Once revered as one of the greatest reality television shows of all time, Dancing with the Stars now faces a tall order to stay relevant in the age of streaming and decline of cable TV. Though it’s earned its place in the hearts of middle-aged people and the older generation, Dancing with the Stars has failed to capture a spot on the watchlist with a younger audience (many of whom may not even know what the acronym “DWTS” refers to).
By: Sandra Vo, Staff Writer
Once revered as one of the greatest reality television shows of all time, Dancing with the Stars now faces a tall order to stay relevant in the age of streaming and decline of cable TV. Though it’s earned its place in the hearts of middle-aged people and the older generation, Dancing with the Stars has failed to capture a spot on the watchlist with a younger audience (many of whom may not even know what the acronym “DWTS” refers to).
This is not for the lack of trying however. Many younger people will find the names of this season’s celebrities quite familiar, as it features people such as Olivia Jade (an influencer known for her involvement in a 2019 college admissions scandal), Cody Rigsby (the “Peloton Guy”), Jojo Siwa (influencer and pop star), and Suni Lee (Olympic Gold Medalist). So why has the show failed to pull in viewers?
Perhaps this can be attributed to dislike of the show’s host, Tyra Banks. Or perhaps this is a result of fewer and fewer people buying cable TV (although the show is available to stream on Hulu). But perhaps most worryingly for the show, the premise of the show just isn’t enough to garner viewers anymore.
Dancing with the Stars essentially gathers celebrities and pairs them with professional dancers to learn dance routines every week, which are then scored by a panel of esteemed judges. The celebrity with the lowest score (a combination of both the judges’ points and audience voting) is eliminated each episode. However, although the songs played may come from a variety of different genres, Dancing with the Stars specializes on different types of ballroom dancing, a form of dance that might not appeal to a younger demographic.
But this is not to disparage the show’s newest season as completely unsalvageable. This show’s season has featured its first ever same-sex dance couple (Jojo Siwa and her partner, Jenna), an entire night dedicated to Britney Spears, and a variety of awe-inspiring routines. Dancing with the Stars still houses its magical charm in terms of stage production, performances, and judge banter, but as it stands, that charm seems to have an expiration date that passed long ago.
Deception Review: A kind of magic
By: Andrianna Veatch, Staff Reporter
If you loved the TV show “Forever”, and liked the “Now You See Me” movies, ABC has produced the perfect blended show for you: “Deception”.
By: Andrianna Veatch, Staff Reporter
If you loved the TV show “Forever”, and liked the “Now You See Me” movies, ABC has produced the perfect blended show for you: “Deception”. “Deception” stars Englishman Jack Cutmore-Scott as the American magician Cameron Black—and he does a blimey good job of it, if I may say so myself.
Black’s career in magic comes to a screeching halt when he is accused of killing a young woman in a car accident, only to be forced to reveal this magician’s greatest secret: it was not him, but…you know what? No. You are going to have watch that big reveal for yourself. Anyway, Cameron then has a really good reason to team up with FBI agent Kay Daniels to help her hunt down and apprehend various and sundry criminals, and eventually convince her (and perhaps the rest of the FBI agency) to help him in his own quest.
The show is goofy, but its heart is in the right place; if approached with the proper willingness to suspend belief, it is sure to please and enchant. The show is still early in its first season; climaxes are theatrical in their execution, and for some reason someone decided to go with an Outer-Limits-like intro and exit exposition style (detailing the episode’s philosophy) which sometimes works and sometimes does not, but the overarching story being set up seems solid enough, and the subplot is tightly knit and serious, contrasting it with the general light-hearted air of the series. In the end, “Deception” is really just a show for fun—and everyone needs that kind of magic.
Medical Ethics—Oh the Drama!
By: Andrianna Veatch, Staff Reporter
The average Joe likely knows next to nothing after first aid, yet medical based television shows with their complex lingo continue to be popular and successful forms of entertainment.
(Photo: ABC)
By: Andrianna Veatch, Staff Reporter
Nothin’ gets the heart beating like life or death—and medicine literally runs on life or death. Now, the average Joe likely knows next to nothing after first aid, yet medical based television shows with their complex lingo continue to be popular and successful forms of entertainment. And like a lot of modern entertainment, their depiction of ethics is up for debate.
Perhaps the most medically supportive TV network is ABC, producers of such longstanding shows as General Hospital and Grey’s Anatomy, as well as the newly released The Good Doctor, and the sadly short-lived but thrilling Forever, starring immortal medical examiner Henry Morgan. However, one unfortunate consistent issue with many of the medical dramas in ABC’s lineup is that—for the sake of the titular ‘drama’ aspect—these shows become rife with breaches of professionalism and ethical conundrums. The researchers of PT in Motion, through analysis of the second seasons of both Grey’s Anatomy and House M.D. “…counted 179 depictions of bioethical issues in 11 areas, ranging from informed consent to organ-transplant eligibility to human experimentation."
In this day and age particularly, with health-care reevaluations on the horizon, medicine and medical care are delicate subjects for many people, one to be treated ethically even in the entertainment industry. Certain professionals are also concerned over the lack of a nursing role in many medical dramas, fearing that eventually such a portrayal or lack thereof will fracture the understanding between health professions by developing the belief that physicians alone are decision-makers in ethical dilemmas. This will impinge communication in the future.
From all this one can see a truth of mankind continues to stand firm: exaggeration entertains. Regardless of heated ethical debates or impact, if the drama is just over-the-top enough to get viewers’ hearts pumping and invested, the entertainment industry will continue to produce popular shows like Grey’s Anatomy, House M.D, and General Hospital.