Awesome / The Baby-Sitters Club

• Mallory telling off her bullies and ex-friends in Poor Mallory!.
  • Later she and the girls make several prank phone calls to those girls.
  • There was a point in the book where Mrs. Pike joins the workforce in temp clerical positions while Mr. Pike stays home to look up the want ads (a reversal of their previous roles as male breadwinner and female homemaker). Mr. Pike fails to clean up and barely picks up the kids (leaving his neighbors to pick up the younger Pike siblings from school) and leaves the work for Mallory, who has to take care of her siblings and do her homework. He also acts very grouchy and yells at his kids and wife. Later, Mrs. Pike takes him to task for leaving the work to Mallory and not doing anything, telling him that when she was home, she took care of cleaning the house and cooking along with childcare and he should do so and not leave the responsibility to their 11-year-old daughter and neighbors. This gets Mr. Pike to become more proactive in the household and in his job search.
• In "Claudia and the Bad Joke", a practical joke that Betsy set up accidentally leads to Claudia breaking her leg. In response, the Babysitters Club low-key avenge her by combatting any prankish behavior from their charges with a prank war of their own. The initiative they take to discourage pranking is awesome enough, but the way Kristy gets Betsy to realize her jokes aren't funny is admirable. Thus far, the prank war has only further encouraged Betsy to pull her pranks. So Kristy takes an approach where she pulls a couple pranks that, while rather harmless, still give the girl a taste of her own medicine. When Betsy voices that the latter of the two pranks embarrassed her in front of her peers, Kristy uses this as a teaching experience to explain how a prank that hurts or humiliates someone is never funny on the receiving end.
• In The Truth about Stacey, our girls struggle with competition from a rival babysitting agency that threatens to take over the Babysitters Club's business. They even stoop so low as to send their own members to pose as new recruits for the club, who sabotage and purposefully betray the club and mock them for their trusting nature. However, our girls get even when they learn from their younger charges that the Babysitting Agency, despite having the edge of being older and "more mature", aren't all they seem to be. Unwittingly, their charges dig up some dirt on how the girls from the Agency are lazy, neglectful, are only in it for the money, dispassionate about playing with the kids, brings boys over while babysitting, burn their cigarettes on their employers' couch. And they figure this out simply by doing what babysitters are supposed to do, talk with their charges like a friend.
  • A rather small one, but when our heroes confront the Agency for their negligence, they make a point of how unfit they are to babysit when they bring up how none of them know the specific details about each child, like how one child is allergic to peanut butter, or how one Child Prodigy likes scrabble over Candy Land.
  • It all comes to a head when they see that one of the rival babysitters lets her three-year-old charge play in the street. Being true babysitters at heart, they tell the boy's mother how her kids' babysitter is negligent. Not only does she laud our heroes for telling her, but also admits she was wrong to choose the Babysitting Agency without getting to know them. Later, she tells the other parents, whose children also spill the beans about how dissatisfied they are with the Babysitting Agency. This effectively evens the score, gets the Babysitting Agency shut down and puts the Babysitters Club back on the map.
  • The cherry on top is when the former Babysitting Club tries to open a Make-up Applying Agency at school, but nobody will go to them now that everybody has seen how dishonest they are with customers (and perhaps how they backstab their competitors). In the truest sense, their lack of integrity has backfired on them.
• The whole idea of Mary Anne Saves the Day. Mary Anne is always called a baby, but she really gets a backbone in it and calls the others out when she needs to.
  • Speaking of that, Mary Anne and Dawn handle the situation with a sick Jenny very well.
• Mary Anne's Makeover has Mary Anne telling the bitchy Dawn (who has been giving her a hard time over a hair cut) to "go choke on an alfalfa sprout." Beware the Nice Ones indeed. Also works for any fans who just want Dawn to shut her trap.
  • Mary Anne also calls out her stepsister's and friends' hypocrisy in always telling her to be more independent and stand up for herself, but when she does, they get angry with her.
• In Mary Anne and Too Many Boys, Stacey and Mary Anne return to Sea City with Mallory's family, and once again Stacey tries to leave Mary Anne with the bulk of the babysitting labor just like in the previous book Boy-Crazy Stacey; but where the first book had Mary Anne calling out Stacey after leaving her with the kids just so she can flirt, Mary Anne actually gets to shut Stacey down before Stacey can do anything. Character Development and Took a Level in Badass at its finest.
• Baby-Sitters' Island Adventure centers on Dawn and Claudia being stranded on an island with some kids (including Dawn's younger brother Jeff and little Jamie Newton). Claudia reveals some quick thinking when getting everyone to safety and manages to keep calm and take care of little Jamie when he gets a high fever. Dawn later says that she can't imagine what she'd do without her.
• Claudia meeting her idol, solving the mystery, and getting her dream museum job at the climax of Claudia and the Mystery at the Museum.
• From the TV adaptation, an Alpha Bitch teases Mary Anne about Logan. What is Mary Anne's reaction? She throws the pie intended for Mallory (who is a carnival participant in a Pie in the Face game) at the girl and her aim is perfect.
  • Even better: right before that, Kristy, known for her skill in all things athletic, tries her hand at the pie throw and fails miserably.
• Slightly inspired by The Taming of the Shrew, Stacey decides to use "reverse psychology" on the snotty and bratty Delaney children. In a bid to get the children to start cleaning their toy room, Stacey starts throwing more toys on the floor because they claim to like the room messy. Then when the son demands milk because he's thirsty (with no please), Stacey then suggests she'll get some other beverages and starts removing several glasses and setting them after being demanded to "pour". She manages to get the daughter to pour just 2.5 glasses of milk, then plays them into cleaning up a spill by insinuating that they like her to clean things up and and that she can give them a bath. She tells them also "I would feel very, very sorry that you are eight years old and unable to get cookies yourself" after answering the daughter's question of what Stacey would do if they demanded cookies. Then she shows them how to play "Snail". The Sitters get hired again and manage to discipline two brats.
  • At the end of the book, Kristy is stunned when the Delaneys demand that Shannon Kilbourne (their regular sitter for years) get them a drink. All Shannon has to do is raise her eyebrow, and they meekly get it themselves.
• The first book has Claudia managing to gain control of Jamie Newton's three bratty cousins (which includes a He-Man Woman Hater in training) in one night; they end up having a quiet story time.
  • The second time she's asked to sit for Jamie's cousins, Claudia insists on bringing Kristy for backup. Kristy gains control of them with an ear-piercing whistle. The aforementioned boy on the brink of his girl-hating phase is so awed by this that he wants Kristy to teach him and he behaves the rest of the evening.
• Claudia and the Terrible Truth has Claudia babysitting for a seven-year-old and five-year-old whose father is abusive. She is extremely compassionate with the kids, as are the other babysitters. It also takes bravery for Claudia to approach her mom for help, especially in a universe where adults are not consulted as much as they could be. Finally, Claudia is shaken but remains cool-headed after the dad calls her private number - in the middle of the night no less! - demanding, "Give me back my wife!" (The mom had, by then, taken the kids to her sister's home in New York.)
  • A minor one goes to Erica Blumberg, who'd been hired to babysit the abused kids after Claudia was fired. When Erica realized what was going on, she called Claudia to get confirmation on her suspicions which led to Claudia and her mom getting the abused wife and kids out of the house. If Erica hadn't called Claudia, there's no telling how badly the situation might've escalated.
• During Claudia Kishi, Middle School Dropout, Claudia is sent back to seventh grade because of her poor grades. She's naturally depressed and discouraged, but meets a local artist who encourages her, explaining that she went to college and achieved fame even though she was held back twice herself.
• In Keep Out, Claudia!, the Lowells request that Claudia no longer sit for them, then turn Jessi away at the door when she goes instead. They also forbid their kids from participating in a concert with songs from Fiddler on the Roof (a musical about Russian Jews), assume Mallory is Catholic, and cause some other small incidents. All of these lead the sitters to realize that they're pretty racist. When the mother calls and asks for the "blonde-haired, blue-eyed" babysitter they'd heard about, both Stacey and Dawn refuse the job, so Kristy gleefully calls back, telling her that they're fresh out of blonde-haired, blue-eyed babysitters, but she'd be happy to sit for them if she's not busy taking care of her Vietnamese sister... she's promptly hung up on and declares they've lost a client.
  • Not just do Dawn and Stacey refuse the job, they both state that they wouldn’t be caught dead sitting for them!
• For readers who don't like Kristy, or mock the entire series, Stacey's falling-out with the club in Stacey vs. the BSC qualifies as this. Before quitting, she gives Kristy a "The Reason You Suck" Speech that's actually pretty accurate.
  "Yeah, well, anything you don't think of is stupid. I'm tired of your bossiness, Kristy. And that's not all. I'm sick of the meetings, week in and week out. And the rules. And the talent shows and fairs and contests and field trips and tantrums and stomach viruses and diapers and feeding schedules and sibling rivalries. I've had it! I'm thirteen years old! I want to spend time with kids who act my age and talk about something besides baby-sitting."
• In the spinoff series Friends Forever, the eighth book has Mary Anne deliver a scathing (as scathing it can get in a family-friendly book series)"The Reason You Suck" Speech to Cokie Mason for making fun of her and Logan's amicable interactions with one another post-breakup.
  "I’ll tell you the truth. You are mean. Why? Why do you work so hard at being nasty and saying horrible things about people? There’s no reason for it. Making fun of people and spreading rumors about them doesn’t make you look cool. Do you think it does?….It doesn’t make people like you. It makes you look stupid and petty and mean. And you know what? If you keep acting like this you will never'' be Most Likely to Succeed. You won’t be likely to succeed at all... because people will see the real Cokie. They’ll know you for what you really are."