#about pll

Today I was watching episode 4 of season 2 and when Hanna talks to the empty chair and says Allison was both her best friend and worst enemy I realized something I'd never realized before:

When the girls were friends with Allison, they were about 13/14 years old. I think people tend to forget that. They were young, they were barely starting their teenage years, and God knows how confusing those can be.

I don’t know about you guys but

Man

Was my generation fucked up when we were 13.

Allison was a huge bitch. She said mean things. Did terrible things to people. Acted as if she ruled the world. Why did the girls stick to her, then? Because she made them feel special. Each one of the girls was a different kind of misfit, an outcast, a loser. Allison was the one who united them and showed them the world from a different perspective – a bright, popular perspective. The girls now meant something to the school society. They were part of the “cool kids” group. Allison made them feel special, but also completely trashed them in the process.

Their friendship was complicated. The girls often felt like they had to prove something, like being any less than special was absolutely unacceptable. They were popular now, but any little slip would drag them back to the endless pit of self loathing and loneliness they’d lived until then. Popularity was all they had, they didn’t see any other way of being happy. That’s why they stayed with Allison. Allison made them cool. Beautiful. Confident. Even if that meant being a bitch.

Allison made them popular.

It might seem stupid to put it like this, but

I look at those girls

and I see me.

Not only me, my whole generation. Even if the girls who lived it with me deny it sometimes.

No, I was not popular. But I wanted to be. We all wanted to be. If you say you didn’t wish to be popular, you are either lying or not making a big deal out of what you truly felt. We yearned for popularity even without understanding what it truly meant.

Time passed. Allison died. The girls, who lost contact, started talking again. You see them hanging out, trusting each other, having fun. Even if the thing that united them is a twisted figure who sends mysterious messages and seems to have the power to kill everyone. It doesn’t matter, they’re united again, and you can see how much they liked it.

Things are so much better without Allison, friendship-wise, even if they don’t admit it.

Allison was the typical school queen, that bratty bitch who seems to rule her group of friends. Every school has one of those. My school had, that’s for sure.

Now the girls don’t care for that anymore. There is no Allison. They don’t need to prove anything, they can just be friends. I think that’s the major point here. Friendship doesn’t have to be tiresome, you don’t have to prove anything to feel special.

In order to realize that, though, you have to grow. And boy, did those girls grow.

Allison’s disappearance and death are traumatizing events that changed those girl’s lives.

Sure, you don’t have to see your dead classmate in order to grow, but that’s what changed things for them. Other people obviously have it different, but they have it. If they don’t have it, they don’t grow. Everyone grows eventually, though. Everyone has their past nightmares.

Growing is what sets you free from the cruel reality where friendship is just a way of getting popularity, which seems to be what makes the social world spin. You can’t be friends with someone if that means being a loser, right?

Growing is what makes you see that it’s wrong.

You can be friends with whoever you want. Popularity doesn’t matter that much, in the end.

In a way, I think that’s what the show is trying to tell us.

Whenever the girls have a flashback, Allison says or does something mean. I think that’s the way the girls slowly realize how much of a terrible friend she truly was and how twisted was the way their relationship worked. There was no way of seeing it before, though, because the girls had not grown yet.

Even with all the secrets and mysteries and dangers and whatever, I don’t think the show is just a detective-ish find-the-murderer adventure. I think that, in a way, it shows us the dramas that many 13 year old girls had to go through while surviving in the school’s social scheme. Allison is every single school queen you can find out there, and you hate her just as much as you hate the bitch that convinced you that popularity was important.

The figure of “A” isn’t dangerous just because of the secrets she threatens to tell, she is the ghost of Allison, the thing that brings back all those feelings of self hating and insecurity that the girls tried so hard to forget. We all have things like that. Bad memories from the confusing 13 year old period. You hate it how “A” always seems to know everything, but the real reason why it is such a terrible person is that it keeps the girls tied to their past ghosts. “A” goes out of its ways to make the girls feel as miserable and as lost as they felt when they were 13. “A” doesn’t stand for Allison simply because it knows their secrets like the girl did, it is because “A” makes the girls feel lost and confused and believe they are inferior, just like Allison did to them.

That’s one of the reasons I like this show so much. In the middle of all murders and conspiracies, it managed to capture the confusion of early teenage years and work so well with it that it doesn't seem tacky. In fact, it's barely there. You only see it if you pay close attention to it. However, it is always there. Maybe one of the reasons that make you root for the girls is that you understand what they've been though.