Cat Fight In The Kitchen-Wattpad Rant

The Popular Crowd

Boo! I'm back. Happy (late) Halloween! How was your October? Mine was stressful.

Anyway, let's get on to the rant because it's one you guys have been requesting forever and I'm just now getting around to (because I'm a lazy bitch and time flies when you have five preps a day): The Popular Crowd

It seems like almost every story (still) has the "popular crowd" or "in kids" as antagonists in the story and I feel like you guys know how I feel about cliques. Don't like 'em. So today I thought why don't we talk about these popular crowds and maybe we can come up with some ways to twist up the regular "mean girls", "plastics", "gods walking amongst mere mortals".

I guess before we do that, I should probably give you some of my high school background, so you know what my school was like and where I'm coming from. If you went to a larger school or one with a different dynamic, by all means, leave your experience in the comments. I'm telling you, your experiences are valuable research for people whether or not you think they are. You have valuable information. Be a dear and share it.

So I graduated in a class of 100 students (there were probably around 1300 kids in the entire school, Kindergarten through seniors) in a small town where I was related to probably half of the district. My dad was the high school football and basketball coach (which meant everyone knew him, because in small schools in the South, sports are usually a pretty big deal).

My school used to have those "who's who" awards, like "most likely to succeed", "best hair", "best laugh", "funniest", "craziest" and all that. Well, we used to have one that was "All School Favorite" and freshman through seniors got to vote for the two seniors (boy and girl) they thought were the "best". Like it was, in a way, an award for the most popular person (because you had to know a lot of people to get the votes, even though we didn't campaign. They literally gave us a slip of paper and you just wrote down whoever you thought deserved it). And the people that always won were the ones that had lots of friends because they were nice, they were funny, they worked hard, they were involved in activities, they contributed to the community. They weren't always the best looking or the richest or the meanest. They were literally the most popular because people genuinely liked them.

They had to ban that award (because I guess everyone gets a trophy now, but we didn't back then. We literally handed out awards for being popular. Shame on us (that's sarcasm)). Anyway, so our senior year, my best friend was voted "All School Favorite Male". And everyone was super surprised that I wasn't the favorite female, but I was painfully shy (and funniest and most talented) and a total bitch, and the girl who got it totally deserved it. She was involved in her church, she sang in the choir, she tutored. She ended up graduating as Speech Pathologist. So go Bailey!

Anyway, so I wanted to break down the "popular" crowd into a more interesting dynamic. What if we take the criteria for this "All School Favorite" award and put that into our popular crowds? I think it would make for a more entertaining dynamic if these popular crowds weren't rich and bitchy. So let's break it down and generate ideas!

1. Nice

This was always the most important factor in voting for "All School Favorite" for us, the entire time I was in high school. Because everyone has this notion that if the voting is anonymous, there is no way to rig the system, and it's our one chance to speak up about our social hierarchy, they we want the nicest person to win. You don't call someone who is a complete jerk to you your favorite person. It's not sane. So let's think about that, because sometimes even being nice is a conflict.

My best friend is the nicest guy in the world. Seriously. If you can't get along with him, you're the jerk. It's that simple. He will go out of his way to help you and he's always been like that. He was always giving people rides when he could. He'd help people with his homework. He had this problem with telling people no. And sometimes not being able to tell people no is a huge problem.