I recapped Daisy of Love on ONTD today.

Yes, my taste in both books AND television is excellent.

There are certain things which happen with regularity in children’s series about middle schoolers aimed at young girls that do not really happen in real life all that often. Here is a but a short list, culled from readings of The Baby-Sitters Club and GirlTalk. Other tropes or other series/tv shows in which these things happen are welcome and encouraged in the comments.

Modeling.
Since there is usually at least one main character who breathtakingly beautiful (while also being intelligent and modest), modeling is a good, exciting plot to turn to. Because what young girl doesn’t want to be judged solely on her looks? GirlTalk blew this wad early, in the third book of the series, The New You. Allison Cloud models after being selected in a Belle modeling search. She could have gone on to have a real modeling career, but the she wouldn’t have time to read 100 books over summer vacation.

Stacey was so pretty that Scholastic felt justified in using this plot twice. The first was in the tv show, where Stacey was selected to model for Bellair’s and also could have gone on to have a big career, but chose baby-sitting instead. Much more glamorous. Then in Stacey and the Fashion Victim, she participates in Stoneybrook’s Fashion Week. Yeah.

Another important plot point is that the only other girl in the modeling group that your modeling character knows is the sworn enemy of the series’ main clique. Stacy Hansen in GT, Cokie Mason in BSC. They’re bitches, and they’re beautiful.

A fun twist to this plot is that in Stacey and the Bad Girls, Stacey is rejected as a model, for being “too commercial.” What, perms aren’t edgy?!

Beauty Pageants.
When I think of beauty pageants, I think of Delta Burke and Bravo’s series Toddlers and Tiaras. And the South. But in middle grade girls’ fiction, geography knows no bounds. Every town has a beauty pageant, and every girl wants to enter. Now, since sometimes the BSC takes on a feminist slant, in the BSC beauty pageant plot, it’s clients who are entering, and Mal and Jessi form the beauty pageant opposition.

But in the GirlTalk book Beauty Queens, Allison and Sabrina both enter and it’s a big fucking deal and stuff. I don’t remember what Allison’s talent was–reading? I think Sabrina gets Miss Congeniality. Whatever. I haven’t read that book in ten years.

Synchronized Swimming.
Have you ever done synchronized swimming? No? Well, in middle school book girl world, schools have synchronized swimming teams. Wtih costumes. And underwater stereo systems. Perhaps there were editors out there with Esther Williams fantasies. Again, it’s our Allison who does this sport, in Allison, Shape Up!. Jessi, our ballerina, gets this plot in Jessi’s Gold Medal. Of course, these girls take to “synchro” (that’s what the cool kids call it) and win medals and shit. But because it’d be too boring a plot to include in chapter 2s, no matter how good at synchro-ing your heroine is, it’s always a one-book deal.

Horseback Riding.
According to movies and tv shows and books, before girls love boys, they love horses. Randy, because she likes to be surprising, had this plot in GirlTalk. Surprisingly, it was a multi-book arc for her. The other girls tried it, but sucked. Mallory also tried it, and naturally sucked. Mallory and the Dream Horse is easily one of the most snarkable books of the series. Who can forget Mallory, dressed like she is from the 1965 Sears and Roebuck catalog, hanging out at a cool rich kid’s birthday party where everyone else is dressed like they are auditioning for “Kids Incorporated”?

Poor Mom, Rich New Dad.
Is your mom a harried, overworked, lonely single mother? Have no fear, because soon a really rich dude will walk into her life, marry her after like a week of dating, and soon you will all be moving to an awesome mansion, which you will have to share with your new stepsiblings. If you’re a main character in a middle grade book series, at least. Both Katie Campbell and Kristy Thomas watched as their moms were swept off their feet, and soon they had to leave the little houses they had known all their lifes for mansions. Oh noes. Katie’s new stepdad’s mansion is way cooler than Watson’s, if you didn’t read GirlTalk. It has an elevator, an indoor pool, and is fully staffed. I want to go to there.

You could make a lot of points about Twilight and why it sucks. You could focus on the use of words like “chagrin” and “dazzle.” You could talk about the series as “abstinence porn,” or raise the question of Edward Cullen as an abusive control-freak. None of these things really bother me, though. I can overlook all of it for the unadulterated DAZZLE.

Something was bothering me, though. It bothered me when I read an excerpt of Stephenie Meyer’s Vogue profile, thinking the whole time, “Why the hell is this woman in Vogue? Oh well, at least it’s not a Plum Sykes feature.” There was something nagging me about the whole Twilight phenomenon, something that was just… off.

It only became clear when I somehow ended up at the Forks, WA website. There is a interactive map feature, where you can look at all kinds of different places in Forks which are featured in the book. Like the Thriftway.

I was kind of surprised when the map came to La Push, though. I had always assumed, for some reason, that the Quileutes were not a real tribe, because I would imagine that they wouldn’t appreciate their culture being co-opted to create a mythology of werewolf vampire killers for a series of books for teenage girls. But La Push is real, and First Beach is real, and their website makes no mention of the Twilight connection. (Although I guess on the bright side, they’ve raked in a lot of money from increased tourism.) Even the stores and restaurants that Bella goes to in Port Angeles are real places.

In fact, if you want, you can participate in a six day, five night trip to Volterra, which luckily includes wine tasting. I shudder to think how much wine it would require to make me forget that I spent 2299$ on a Twilight tour in Italy.

It seems strange that Stephenie Meyer didn’t make up any locations for her books except for, I am assuming, the houses of the characters. Isn’t part of the fun of writing fiction is that you can make up your own locations, settings, and objects and manipulate them to suit the story? It reminds me of Mallory Pike in Mallory Pike, #1 Fan, where she thinks that fiction must be truth and have a counterpart in life. No, that’s why it’s FICTION. If you want to give a Cullen a fast car, you don’t need to consult someone on a year, make, and model number, unless you’re searching for an endorsement deal. You can make up your own goddamn superfast car.

In the series, Stephenie Meyer failed to create her own mythology, the way JK Rowling did or even Ann M. Martin and Francine Pascal. Stephenie Meyer couldn’t even be bothered to think up something as basic as The Dairi Burger. It seems like a strange decision to have to set everything in real places. If you want to set a story in New York City or Paris or another big city which already has a mythology in the collective consciousness, that makes sense. It’s a specific decision that is made to convey a ready-made meaning. But to set your series in a small remote town which no one has ever heard of–well, it wouldn’t make a difference whether Forks was real or not, because it doesn’t already have a meaning attached to it for 99.9% of the people in this world. She could have made up her own town on the Olympic Peninsula and given it stores and other locations as she saw fit.

It’s decisions like these which really mark Stephenie Meyer as an amateur, I think. It shows that she didn’t have the self-confidence to create an entire world for her stories. Now, I thought some of the things she did make up, like the Vampire Wars of the South, were pretty interesting. So I’m just not sure what her problem was and why she decided to hold herself to the Mallory Pike Rules of Fiction as Inspired By a Made-up Ernest Hemingway Quote.

In elementary school, there were certain things that I rejected as a matter of principle: The New Kids on the Block and all later iterations of pop music, the color pink, anything with ruffles, tennis lessons. The things I did like: music that rocked really hard (I was around 14 years old before I admitted that music that didn’t have guitars with distortion had any merit at all), Beavis and Butt-head, wearing black (which my mother didn’t allow outside of black leggings). As much as I liked the BSC, there was no one who I really looked up to, who I totally wanted to be once I hit middle school. I liked certain parts of who Kristy, Claudia, Stacey, and Dawn were–I admired Claudia’s talent and outfits, although I was always an excellent speller; I like Stacey’s popularity with boys and love of wearing black, but she was too conventional, somehow; I liked Dawn’s commitment to causes but sometimes she was too overbearing; and I was too uncoordinated to ever be like Kristy, plus I didn’t really like her “uniform” that much. I have also always hated turtlenecks.

No, the Baby-Sitters Club members were all missing something: Rebellion. It was hard to be a rebel when you spent all of your free time watching other people’s children. Many people would be uncomfortable hiring someone who wore a black leather jacket and said “Yo” instead of “Hello.” There was no rebellion to be found in BSC at all. People who so much as chewed gum were chastised for their wild behavior.

BSC was not the only series I read, however. I also received three GirlTalk books a month. One of the biggest differences between BSC and GirlTalk was that the GirlTalk girls did not baby-sit. They hung out, shopped, and had sort-of boyfriends/crushes, and that was about it. Awesome. And while they weren’t a formal club, the four main characters of GirlTalk did have a “We are so different, yet we are all good friends!”-thing going on as well. There was Sabrina, who was friendly and ditzy and loved the latest fashions, but couldn’t really pull them off. There was Katie Campbell, who was preppie, matching her headband to her sweater to her plaid skirt, but joined the boys’ hockey team. Also, her mom eventually married a hottie rich French-Canadian and they moved into an mansion that made Watson’s house seem like a cottage. There was Allison Cloud, who was beautiful and exotic (she was Chippewa, so “exotic” was of course the ghostwriters’ adjective of choice to describe her looks), but didn’t care at all about her appearance because she was too smart for that, so she read all the time instead.

And then there was Randy Zak.

Like Stacey, Randy was a Native New Yorker and wore lots of black. But she also held the title at Bradley Junior High for “Most Detentions Accrued By a Female Student.” She played the drums in a rock band called Iron Wombat, which inexplicably played a lot of Prince for a rock band (the series is set in a suburb of Minneapolis), but otherwise seemed to rock pretty hard. She road her skateboard everywhere, and loved trash horror movies. Her black clothes, unlike Stacey’s, did not come from Bloomingdales’ “Young Sophisticates” section. No, Randy’s clothes came from the Lower East Side or Alphabet City instead. Here is an outfit desciption from It’s All in the Stars, narrated by Sabrina:

Randy has a great sense of style, too. Tonight she was wearing one of her SoHo outfits. She had on a black miniskirt, a black turtleneck sweater, purple-and-green leggings, a bunch of beaded bracelets, and wild earrings. And, of course, she wearing her black leather jacket.

Randy’s style is actually not that far from how I personally dress, oddly enough, since these books are like 20 years old. And I’m not thirteen years old.

Randy definitely reflected who I wanted to be when I grew up far more than any BSCer. She never took shit from anyone, and she did her own thing, all while ROCKING OUT. There were several years in my life where I self-identified as a Metalhead. We had other things in common too, like we both had dads who worked all the time and had high-powered jobs, and Randy is also an equestrian, just like I was. I even got my dad to buy me a black drumset, but I eventually gave it to my older brother because I have no sense of rhythm. Randy is just so freaking cool. I still want to be Randy Zak, damnit.

Who is your favorite YA rebel? And what characters did you identify with and want to be?

Lastly, here’s a picture of the first GirlTalk book, showing the differences between the different characters:

(GirlTalk never was that popular, I guess, because it was pretty hard for me to find a decent picture of the cover.)