In a lot of ways, I’m an uncomplicated TV viewer. Yes, after the fact, I will analyze and critique and categorize tropes and storylines and character arcs to my media-nerd heart’s content. But while the TV is on, I’m mostly just watching what’s happening on screen.
I think that’s why I tend to buy in to the main character energy. I’m a sucker for identifying with the girl in the middle. The one it’s all about. I identified so closely with Rory Gilmore, and Angela Chase. And although I’ve always been a Willow girl (Buffy is just too much of a girly girl cheerleader type for me to identify with, even when considering her not-vampire-slaying side), she’s still giving main character energy as a central figure in that ensemble (and one of just three characters – along with Buffy and Xander – who appear in every single episode of the 7-season series).
The characters I’d never truly considered as options for identification – or adoration – until recently, are the nemeses. Specifically, the mean girls who are (initially) positioned as antagonists to those central girls: The Cordelia Chase. The Paris Geller, if you will.
Icons of mean girl dynamics in the high school halls. Top of the food chain. Queens, the both of them. Not that I would have recognized this in 2000.
But at this phase in my cycle of enjoying, rewatching, and often listening to podcasters enjoy and rewatch shows that are reaching their 20, 25, and in some cases 30 year anniversaries, I’m coming around to the utter joy, charisma (pun acknowledged, if unintended), and necessary intensity that these characters bring to the mix. When I rewatch an early episode of Gilmore Girls or Buffy now, I am delighted at the catty repartee.
I’m drawn in by these characters’ self-assuredness, by their intelligence, wit, fierce independence, and IDGAF attitudes.
I also see the necessary counterbalance they play to the heroines of the story. Sure, dramatically they might offer narrative conflict at times. But often the story has little to do with them. In those episodes, what they offer best is a little bit of salt to balance out the sweet. If the main character is going to be a naive belle, she needs a sassy frenemy who’s willing to break rules, speak her mind, and/or knock her down a peg, for the show to feel well-rounded.
I don’t know if this is news to anyone, or if I’m the only one for whom its taken years of re-watches for the veil to lift, but I love a mean girl nemesis! They are clever, they are hot, they are driven, they are smart! And look, chances are they will join your friend group at some point in the future, so don’t piss them off too much, because I’m sure they’ll carry a grudge.
