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Day Twenty: Favourite female antagonist
Mona Vanderwaal (Pretty Little Liars)
I just noticed that this meme (which I copied from someone else's journal) uses US spelling. I've gone through and changed it on this entry, so from today onwards it will be British spelling, but I'm not going to go back and change every other entry. So just imagine those letter 'u's in 'favourite'.
Pretty Little Liars knocks it out of the park in terms of female characters. It's got a great quartet of heroines, complex female love interests, mothers, sisters, female friends and frenemies, all of whom are given rich interior lives, and believable (at least within the soap operatic universe of PLL) motives, fears and aspirations.
And its female antagonists are something else. The show rests on two mirrored themes: female friendship and female enmity, and I could've picked any one of a handful of complicated, antagonistic girls for today's portion of the meme. I picked Mona because I find her thrilling to watch.
She is cruel, but with the capacity for kindness, mentally unstable but perceptive when it comes to understanding what drives other people, observant, watchful and chaotic all at the same time. In this show, which in its essence is about teenage girls making and remaking themselves and trying to control other people's perceptions of them and the stories they tell about themselves because they are unable to control anything else, Mona reigns supreme. She transformed herself, she manipulated others into believing so many lies, and for several years she was able to control her own story. She is one of the few characters in the series with the guts to stand up to queen bee (and master manipulator) Alison DiLaurentis, and one of the only characters able to see through the lies the quartet of protagonists tell about themselves.
Janel Parrish playing Mona is an absolute joy to watch, and I hope to see a lot more from her in the remainder of the season, and the series.
( The other days )
Mona Vanderwaal (Pretty Little Liars)
I just noticed that this meme (which I copied from someone else's journal) uses US spelling. I've gone through and changed it on this entry, so from today onwards it will be British spelling, but I'm not going to go back and change every other entry. So just imagine those letter 'u's in 'favourite'.
Pretty Little Liars knocks it out of the park in terms of female characters. It's got a great quartet of heroines, complex female love interests, mothers, sisters, female friends and frenemies, all of whom are given rich interior lives, and believable (at least within the soap operatic universe of PLL) motives, fears and aspirations.
And its female antagonists are something else. The show rests on two mirrored themes: female friendship and female enmity, and I could've picked any one of a handful of complicated, antagonistic girls for today's portion of the meme. I picked Mona because I find her thrilling to watch.
She is cruel, but with the capacity for kindness, mentally unstable but perceptive when it comes to understanding what drives other people, observant, watchful and chaotic all at the same time. In this show, which in its essence is about teenage girls making and remaking themselves and trying to control other people's perceptions of them and the stories they tell about themselves because they are unable to control anything else, Mona reigns supreme. She transformed herself, she manipulated others into believing so many lies, and for several years she was able to control her own story. She is one of the few characters in the series with the guts to stand up to queen bee (and master manipulator) Alison DiLaurentis, and one of the only characters able to see through the lies the quartet of protagonists tell about themselves.
Janel Parrish playing Mona is an absolute joy to watch, and I hope to see a lot more from her in the remainder of the season, and the series.
( The other days )