Removed:
- Reality Ensues:
- When Amy and Molly try to "mug" a pizza delivery man of an address, they fashion their hair into balaclava-like masks and scream demands at him from his back seat, expecting him to surrender. Instead, the plan immediately falls apart when the he angrily points out that they don't have a weapon, meaning that he's the one in control.
- Amy and Hope’s make out/sex scene is portrayed as incredibly awkward, due to it being Amy’s (and possibly Hope's, though it's unclear) first time. She has a hard time taking off Hope's tight jeans and shoes and puts her finger into “the wrong hole”.
- Amy accidentally drinks from a cup filled with used cigarettes. She ends up vomiting not long after consuming the sickly beverage.
- Amy and Molly take a long time to reach Nick's party because they don't know where he lives - Amy even points out they never talk to most of the other people in their grade unless it's for scholastic purposesnote .
- At the same time the film averts this trope: Many guests post from the party on social media, but they all carefully avoid those platforms that would also transmit the location.
- Using her phone to watch porn in the taxi means that Molly runs out of battery far quicker than she would have normally, which she discovers just after Amy leaves hers behind.
- Molly kept quiet about her crush on Nick because she hates having feelings for a popular Dumb Jock and says there's no way a guy like him would be interested in her.
The trope is about people expecting reality to behave like fiction, and these all look like people just making bad decisions. I'm savung the entries here in case someone thinks they can recontextualize an entry to be about the trope.
Removed:
- Broken Aesop: The movie is correct that academic achievements aren't everything and that Molly and Amy are using their intelligence and academic success as shields. However, demonstrating this by placing them in what appears to be a very wealthy environment and having all of the other characters go to extremely prestigious schools, seems very out of touch with academic and financial pressures facing a lot of other high school students. It's less impressive that someone like Gigi got into Harvard if, as it appears, she is extremely wealthy, and it mostly suggests that college is still extremely important, it's just more about the pressure to do everything.
I'm not following how the students being from wealthy families breaks the lesson that your social life is just as important as your academic/professional life.
Edited by CaptainCrawdad Hide / Show Replies
Sorry, this was me. I think it qualifies as a Broken Aesop because, while the point that the social life is important is totally valid, every single person going to a prestigious school makes it seem like that's the norm and that it is comparatively easy to get into the schools. This is definitely not true, especially considering the heavy implication that the characters with such strong achievements, such as Gigi - for whom Harvard is a fifth choice - are extremely wealthy in comparison to Molly and Amy.
The aesop isn't about difficulty. It's about priority. Amy and Molly prioritized their schooling above everything else. They assumed that the others were prioritizing socializing above all else, but are shocked that they were doing both. In Molly's speech at the end, she doesn't talk about how difficult it was for her to succeed. She says she was too scared of her classmates to get to know them, but has now come to appreciate how great they are. How hard her classmates had to work relative to Amy and Molly to get into good schools isn't really material. The point is that they were trying, while Amy and Molly weren't bothering to try to get to know them.
Someone removed the entry on Ryan from Ambiguously Bi citing this reason:
"Ryan was not flirting with Amy she was being friendly that is all. It is true that her sexuality wasnt mentioned but I dont think it is fair to add it right there while there was no implication."
Since characters discuss the ambiguity of whether Ryan is into girls in dialogue, there's definitely an implication that she might be into girls, and we get confirmation that she's into guys when she kisses a guy. We do not get confirmation that she's "just being friendly" with Amy, so it's left ambiguous as to whether she's bi or straight. In the interest of not edit warring, I'm putting this here to see if there are any objections to re-adding.
Removed:
- Camp Straight: One of the possibilities for Ryan may be this, or rather the Distaff Counterpart equivalent, with a tomboyish even androgynous style of clothing and hair, who hangs around mostly with dudes. Amy is completely uncertain whether Ryan is into girls or not and spends most of the film trying to find out. It is later revealed that at an absolute minimum Ryan is into guys and specifically much more interested in Nick than Amy.
I think this is a Square Peg Round Trope situation. The tropes the entry is describing are tomboy and Ambiguously Bi, and Ryan is already listed under those. She might be an Ambiguous Gender Identity as well. Camp Straight is a completely different trope, about straight men who display Camp Gay mannerisms. Ryan has nothing to do with any of that.
Hide / Show Replies
Given that the trope page for Camp Straight outright mentions a distaff counterpart, albeit for it being rare, i'm inclined to say she counts. Side note they really have to fix the links and apostrophes on discussion.
You can only write so much in your forum signature. It's not fair that I want to write a piece of writing yet it will cut me off in the mid
Even if the trope were to allow distaff counterparts, Ryan still does not fit. The trope is about a character who seems obviously gay (by being camp) but is not. A female example would still be someone who seems obviously gay, but is not.
- Ryan does not seem obviously gay. The characters spend the whole movie trying to figure out whether she is or is not. If she were an example of the trope, Amy and Molly would assume she is gay from the start.
- We never get a clear indication on whether she is into girls or not. It is left ambiguous in the end. If she were an example of the trope, we'd find out that she is straight.
So Ryan fails both aspects of the trope: she does not seem obviously gay, and she is not definitely straight. She is Ambigiously Bi and a tomboy.
Edited by CaptainCrawdad
Well I will say that the given example added that it was ambiguous, given that it said "One of the possibilities". We allow ambiguous examples on this wiki.
Edit: But then again I guess that would be covered under Ambiguously Bi so you probably have a point there.
Edited by jjjj2 You can only write so much in your forum signature. It's not fair that I want to write a piece of writing yet it will cut me off in the mid
I don't know, I still think Ryan's look is much more LGBT than 'tomboy'. The piercings, glasses, hair, clothes... A tomboy paints a mental picture of girl who doesn't try and go for a stylised look and Ryan's style, though androgynous is clearly pretty stylised.
Also Molly does think Ryan is into girls. Amy is the one who isn't sure, in large part because she is way too self conscious about asking a girl out to be certain.
Does Hope really qualify as a Straight Gay? Her opening lines have her teasingly complimenting Amy on getting Ms Fine's phone number, we never see her showing any interest in guys and her clothes and make up are noticeably less traditionally feminine than Annabelle - she wears jeans, boots and a cowboy jacket to the party.
Hide / Show Replies
Removed:
I think this is just a simple aversion to the trope. The characters are feminists and flawed, immature characters, but Straw Feminist is a specific type of character, a caricature of feminists to mock feminism. If anything, I think the characters are a serious take on young Soap Box Sadies who are learning to look at themselves as critically as they look at their pet issues.