YMMV / The Sopranos (Warner)

• Accidental Aesop: The story makes a good case for the need for comprehensive sex education. In the absence of apparently even the most basic information from any teachers at their Catholic school, the girls learn about sex from porn mags and Cosmopolitan-type magazines. While the latter do provide some useful information on certain subjects, they don't give any advice about consent, advice that might have influenced Orla when it came to choosing to have sex with an unconscious man.
• Fair for Its Day: Even though the girls exist in an environment where Slut-Shaming is the norm and they themselves also participate in it, Orla isn't shamed by any of them for wanting to experiment with BDSM. Manda's only caveat is that Orla should try some vanilla stuff first and remember to use protection.
• Squick: Orla takes a bit of chewing gum out of her mouth and offers it round to the group to show that she’s got a new tooth coming in. Manda inspects it and then sticks it in her own mouth.
  • Manda tells the group about a time Catriona ate a McNugget that had a cyst in it.
• Unintentional Period Piece: The book was set in 1996 when it was first published in 1998, and it includes a number of elements that mark it as a product of its time:
  • Father Ardlui’s sermon includes an anecdote about being on a tram in Edinburgh "way back in the days when they had trams." Trams originally stopped running in Edinburgh in 1956, but made a (controversial) comeback in 2014.
  • Spimmy manages to get in touch with Kylah after she turned down his initial offer to join the band by finding her name in the phone book. These days they might try to contact her on social media.
  • When she does agree to meet the band, they bring her a cassette from their last practice session so she can find out how they sound. These days they could probably send her a recording made with their phones. They also bring Kylah CDs to try and impress her with their taste in music, whereas someone looking to do that now might share a playlist they curated on Spotify.
  • Electronic tills in the shops are a considered a novelty, whereas now they've been replaced by fully digital tills and self-checkouts.
  • Some of the girls in the choir wear digital watches that they've synchronised, since four of them go off at the same time during a rehearsal.
  • Kylah mentions ordering clothes from a catalogue. Nowadays someone living in a rural area with not much in the way of clothes shops would probably order them online.
  • The first pub the girls hit has a "manageress", rather than just using "manager" in a gender-neutral fashion.
  • A police officer in Edinburgh gives Kylah and Chell some directions to The Pillbox that include passing a Somerfield supermarket, a chain that was fairly prominent in Britain in The '90s but has since been subsumed by The Co-op Group.
  • At one point, Kay is reminded of a particular text she studied for "Standard" i.e. Standard Grade English. The Scottish exam system was overhauled and Standard Grades, the exams typically sat by students at the end of S4 when they are fifteen years old, have been replaced by the National 5 exams.
  • Grant's Vodka, which Kay, Catriona and Iain drank when they were at Catriona's flat, was rebranded as Glen's Vodka in 2003.
  • The cash used in the book includes £1 notes, which were phased out as legal tender in early 2000s.
  • Manda and Chell mention AIDS and "Mad Cow's Disease", both of which were topical issues at the time. On the whole, there's more concern about catching HIV from someone from the city compared to the Port. At the time of book's original release, HIV was sometimes referred to as "The Edinburgh Flu" due to the city's comparatively high level of HIV cases.
  • Stephen learned about taxidermy from an Open University programme. Nowadays, the OU's audio-visual materials are distributed online instead of airing on BBC Two in the wee hours of the morning.
  • The Scotland Against Drugs campaign that Stephen references at one point was superseded by the Scottish Executive's Know The Score campaign in the early 2000s, and then later by the Safer Scotland and Healthier Scotland campaigns from the Scottish Government.
  • Fionnula is surprised to see that Kay has a computer in her bedroom. Now, instead of bothering with a desktop computer, she might have a laptop instead.
  • The Station Guy was arrested for distributing anarchist slogans in John Menzies, a Scottish chain of newsagents that was taken over by WH Smith in 1998.
• Values Dissonance:
  • With changes in care practices in hospitals since the 1990s and charities like Teenage Cancer Trust putting in more work to provide healthcare services tailored to teens in hospitals in Scotland and the rest of the UK, it seems unlikely that Orla would be left alone and unsupervised in an adult ward.
  • Michelle getting immediately sacked from her job at the Superstore once her boss found out she was pregnant seems less likely now given that HR procedures have become more standardised in workplaces across the country.
  • When they were thirteen, Fionnula and Manda watched while a twenty-nine year-old have sex with a girl the same age as them (and even in the Year below them at school). It doesn’t occur to them at the time that they are witnessing a rape, but they have a vague sense that there may be some sort of larger coercive force driving the incident that will one day affect them as well:
  "[A] great shift of headlight oozed round in the dark and them both cooried up, part of the tremulous, excited-feeling cause the vandalism, but also…knowing one day they would give in to some lad."
  • Orla notices that the sailor's wrists are tied back oh his bed "kind of poofy like-style - but that wasn’t his fault."
  • One of the characters uses the phrase "Honest Injuns", which has fallen out of use in the UK due to its racist connotations, although it's most likely done so at a slower rate than in the US.
  • Teenage boys in the Port prove their mettle by swimming in the subterranean Lynn without using any "poofy" torches.

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