Girl Posse/Playing With
Basic Trope: A group of girls who follow around the Alpha Bitch and tend to parrot her views.
- Straight: Lucy is the most popular girl in school, and has a small group of devoted followers: Alexia, Bonnie, Courtney and Debbie. These girls tend to follow Lucy around school, echoing her views and acting as her enforcers.
- Exaggerated: Alexia, Bonnie, Courtney and Debbie follow Lucy everywhere, and each has a complimentary personality: Alexia is all about hitting Anything That Moves, Bonnie is Lucy's second-in-command, Courtney is always looking for ways to secretly backstab Lucy and become top dog, and Debbie is a Dumb Blonde who's too ditzy to realize her friends are jerks.
- Justified: Lucy is popular, despite her abrasive personality, so it's only natural she has several girls willing to bend over backwards to stay in her favor and be popular too.
- Inverted:
- Lucy follows a bunch of popular girls.
- Liza is either a Lovable Alpha Bitch or a Spoiled Sweet School Idol, and Amanda, Bethany, Chelsea and Dorothy are her more benevolent counterparts to Lucy's Alexia, Bonnie, Courtney and Debbie.
- Lucas is followed everywhere by Alex, Bob, Conner and Derrick.
- Subverted: Lucy is popular, but her personality keeps her 'friends' from wanting to spend too much time around her.
- Double Subverted: However, a few girls decide that dealing with her all the time is a small price to pay for popularity.
- Parodied: Lucy is always surrounded by a gaggle of mindless girls who parrot whatever she says and carry her around everywhere... even when she sleeps.
- Deconstructed: Since they spend so much time hanging around Lucy, people associate all of Lucy's negative traits with them, too. They may be "popular," but only as shadows of her... and when Lucy falls from grace, so do they. Nobody bothers to get to know them, just seeing them as extensions of Lucy. They have no real friends aside from Lucy, even within their own seemingly tight-knit circle.
- Reconstructed: But who cares about any of that, because they're, like, popular!
- Zig Zagged: Lucy is obsessed with being pretty and popular because she's struggling to compete with the memory of her "perfect" sister--who has passed away. Lucy's best friend clings to her because her mother is an abusive alcoholic. Lucy and her friends respond inappropriately to the pressures they're under by ridiculing and bullying "unpopular" girls. Also, Lucy's friend Alice is good friends with a girl in band, but ignores her at school. Some of Lucy's victims decide to fight back, and exact a revenge much worse than any of the petty things Lucy and friends had done.
- Averted: Lucy is not usually accompanied by any more than the occasional friend.
- Enforced: The principal wants an ordinary school, so he makes sure the bratty popular girl always has a bunch of other girls around her.
- Lampshaded:
- "Hey, wait - why are we so eager to be the slaves of a person nobody really likes?"
- "So, if I get a makeover and start acting bitchy, does that mean that I'll get minons too?"
- Invoked: Lucy deliberately seeks out impressionable, easy-to-control girls so she can surround herself with them as a show of power.
- Defied: "Get away from me! Disgusting freaks, don't you have any minds of your own? You think I'll just let you leech off of me?!"
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
- Played For Laughs: Lucy's friends not only parrot her, but do so in a Creepy Monotone, as if lobotomized.
- Played For Drama: Lucy's friends are secretly terrified of invoking her wrath should they ever break from the group, efficiently chaining themselves to her.
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