The Real Love Story in Rip GirlsIf you were to describe Sydney’s friendship with Gia in

The Real Love Story in Rip Girls If you were to describe Sydney’s friendship with Gia in Rip Girls without specifying Gia’s gender, it would sound like a conventional Hollywood love story. It has the complete arc: meet-cute, initial attraction, developing trust, a betrayal, and a reconciliation. This particular story belongs to a time-honored tradition of teen romance plots in which a girl discovers that her love interest pursued her under false pretenses — as part of a bet, a dare, a con, or any sort of deception, usually involving the love interest’s friends being “in on it.” These movies are usually told from the perspective of the boy, who develops genuine feelings for the girl during the process of deceiving her. After the lie is revealed, the boy finds a way to convince the girl that though it started out fake, his feelings are now real, and the two live happily ever after. Examples include She’s All That, Ten Things I Hate About You, Cruel Intentions, and Rip Girls’ Disney Channel neighbor Genius. The difference is that Rip Girls is told from the perspective of the girl who is being deceived. And also that the deceiver is a girl. Yes, Sydney has a male love interest, and yes, they kiss. But it’s Gia that Sydney takes photos of from a distance when she first gets to the island. It’s Gia that she meet-cutes with. It’s Gia who teaches her to surf, ushering her into the feminized space of the ocean, and Gia she fights with, and Gia whose approval she desperately needs at the end. Many of her conversations with Kona are about Gia and how great she is. And Sydney and Kona have no arc: they meet, like each other, and continue to like each other. They never have a falling-out, a crucial component of the teen romance formula. Sydney and Kona might like each other, but Sydney and Gia are a love story. Which makes Rip Girls the second aquatic-sports-based DCOM with a strong queer reading. -- source link

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