The Balance of Power

Hi, all.  Work on the mini-update proceeds, my current focus is on updating every last break time event involving the bad and popular girls to reflect the result of Avenging Angel. It's fair to say that whatever the state of things, life at the school will be different from now on - why? Well let's answer that with a lore post!

Since time immemorial, it has been the case that a pecking order has emerged in high schools. It has differed across different times and cultures, but always someone will rise to the top. The staff can try to stop it, they can introduce levelling measures like uniforms, but human nature asserts itself in the end.

Saint Alancia's is no different. Over the years, cliques form, shift and dissolve, most are no bigger than a handful of girls, little more than a friend group, (Stacey, Katie and Rachel are an example of such,) but the two biggest and most enduring are the Bad Girls and the Popular Girls.

The Bad Girls - a name which instantly conveys that this clique comprises the school's troublemakers - are surprisingly organised and regimented considering. Though they have no official leaders, one or two girls tend to rise to the surface in each year group and another, usually a fourth or fifth year, assumes authority over all of the school's bad girls. Jessica is the current leader of the first year bad girls. If you earned your ribbons in Avenging Angel, then you will have to decide whether you will follow her.

The Popular Girls on the other hand have no need of a leadership structure. It would not work for them as all of them are alpha females. Their relative numbers are always lower than the Bad Girls, because whereas the latter will accept more or less anyone who can sufficiently impress the group with their cruelty, joining the Popular Girls is far more difficult.

If a girl is cut out to join the Popular Girls, she won't need to be given the honour, she'll simply take it. Being a Popular Girl is a state of mind, and only a girl who has this will be capable of impressing the existing Popular Girls enough for them to let her in. A girl who is not can spend her entire time at Alancia's trying, and only get further away with each failed attempt. The popular girls can spot a tryhard a mile away.

Popular Girls trade secrets, favours, rumours and lies, and so joining them also requires a prospect to already possess a level of intelligence and cunning. (Being from Lady Gardens or Mount Pleasant also helps, but isn't essential, as Honeypot girl Malia has shown.) In another life, Jessica may well have made a good popular girl, but she is too brash and impatient, and has terrible impulse control.

For many years, certainly since at least the time Miss Paris was a pupil at the school, and probably long before that, the Bad and Popular Girls have achieved a degree of coexistence. Neither group likes the other, but each has learned where its boundaries with the other lie. The Popular Girls are unquestioned rulers of the schoolyard, but have achieved this largely through manipulation and gerrymandering.

The Bad Girls are far stronger in numbers and physical strength, but steer clear of them. While it is highly unlikely that any formal negotiations ever took place between the two groups, (and even if there were, they would have been done by girls who long ago left the school, and would be unlikely to be remembered,) the two sides have nonetheless respected each other's positions as war would have suited neither of them.

Then along came Poppy. This firecracker second year first popped onto the Popular Girls' radar when she challenged, beat up and humiliated Celine, the former leader of the Bad Girls, and took her place. Strong, powerful and exceptionally cruel, Poppy is also believed by many to be quite mad, which of course makes her dangerous. Most of the older bad girls were loathe to follow a second year, but having seen what she reduced her defeated opponent to in the proceeding months, they fell into line lest they suffer the same fate, and so she instead turned her predations on other schoolgirls whom she decided she liked the look of. (Missy, for example.)

Now, two years later, Poppy's ambitions have grown and she has decided to take over the school, supplanting the popular girls. Whichever side you chose in Avenging Angel, the balance of power has now been disrupted completely - Either way, the Popular Girls now know that they are at war and that Poppy is taking no prisoners. And every girl at Alancia's knows it too - expect them all to react differently to you regardless of which path you chose. If Poppy won, the spell is starting to break and the Popular Girl's fearsome reputation is crumbling. if Angel won, the reprisals will be brutal, as the Popular Girls now know that they must crush the Bad Girls to secure their position.

One of the fun things about Poppy's Story is that because it's side quests - none of it is critical path - I have had a lot more freedom to make the choices in it matter. By the time this arc is complete, you will have your unique version of Alancia's, where all of the choices you've made play out. Who will be standing tall at the end - Malia and her friends? Poppy? Or our mystery third participant...

(Her role in all this should hopefully make more sense once we get to act 2...)

That's all for today, see you Wednesday!

Trinian