Laura Sook Duncombe’s previous Literary Ladies Cage Fight columns for The Butter can be found here.
Hey gal-pals! Welcome back to Literary Ladies Cage Fight, where we celebrate the heroines of our fave novels by pitting them against each other in head to head combat! I am Aphrodite, the Goddess of Love, and my sister Artemis and I co-write this column.
You mean I write this column and I allow you to help out. In any case, let us waste no time in introducing this week’s competitors. There are many eternal debates: chocolate or vanilla, Democrat or Republican, butter side up or butter side down. Today we tackle one of those debates: Babysitter’s Club or Sweet Valley High? We will examine this topic through the figureheads of these iconic series: plucky Kristy Thomas and go-getter Elizabeth Wakefield.
Same rules as always: at the end of five rounds, lady with the most points wins. Fight fair, ladies, and have fun!
Round 1: Harry Potter house
Nearly every babysitter in the club has a one-word epithet, and Kristy’s is “tomboy.” She grew up without any sisters, and so she likes lots of “boyish” things, like sports, having big ideas, and being a leader. (These books are rather dated, no doubt the reason they went out of print in the late ’00s. They have since been re-released in updated versions, but one imagines Kristy is still “bossy.” #YesAllWomen, Kristy!!) She is the President of the BSC and the coach of the local softball team, Kristy’s Krushers. She is a true Gryffindor if I ever saw one (and would be welcome as one of my supplicants any time. Artemis loves bossy women.)
What have I said about talking about yourself in the third person, Artie? Elizabeth “Liz” Wakefield is four minutes older than her twin sister, Jessica. They are physically identical (“perfect size 6, with blonde silky hair, blue green eyes, and a California tan”…I know I’m the goddess of beauty but give me a break! Did any teenager ever look like this?). Elizabeth is the “good” sister, responsible, serious and mature where Jessica is irresponsible, silly, and immature. Despite being such a horrible stick in the mud, she is still super pretty so she is very popular at Sweet Valley High. I think she’s a Ravenclaw because she’s too timid for Gryffindor and too self-important for Hufflepuff. Her sister is one of the greatest Slytherins I’ve ever seen, but alas, we are not profiling Jessica today.
Winner: Kristy. Both she and Elizabeth are ambitious and bright, but Kristy isn’t so sanctimonious about it.
Round 2: Sidekick
Kristy has an army of sidekicks: her eponymous babysitter’s club. There’s the saintly, mousy Mary Anne, the hippie Dawn, the creative Claudia, the avant-garde Stacey, and a whole bunch of other ones that got added later that nobody cared about. (Except Jessie! She was a ballerina and she was awesome.) These gals are Kristy’s willing accomplices in her zany schemes, which usually result in them getting money or fame. They don’t always see eye to eye, but when they work together, Stoneybrook takes notice.
Elizabeth’s sidekick is totally her sister, Jessica. Jessica is really good at getting into all kinds of trouble, and Elizabeth is able to get her out of it. (Although, Elizabeth gets into trouble sometimes too…remember when she rode that guy’s motorcycle and had an accident and got amnesia?) They fight a lot, but they are also best friends. Jessica tries to get Elizabeth to be more adventurous, and Lizzie tries to get Jessica to stop being evil incarnate. I’m not sure if they make each other better, but they do balance each other out…?
Winner: Kristy. Because none of the other babysitters spiked her drink so that she lost prom queen, which led to her getting into a car accident and killing a guy. So, pretty easy choice.
Round 3: Love Interest
Kristy very sensibly doesn’t have much of a love life. She occasionally flirts with Bart Taylor, the coach of the rival softball team, but she’s not as enamored with him as he is with her. She also has a love-hate thing going with her frenemy Alan Gray. As an eighth-grader, she is too busy running her babysitting empire and various other Ponzi schemes to waste time on a man.
The love of Elizabeth’s life is Todd Wilkins. She handed him a tissue in kindergarten and has had the hots for him ever since. They cheat on each other often, make up and break up, but hey, that’s love? He was her first kiss, and first love is never really over. I like to think that they ended up nerdily ever after. (Yes, I am IGNORING “Sweet Valley Confidential”! Because it was a piece of trash. Like, more than the rest of the series. And that is saying something. Todd would NEVER marry Jessica and I refuse to acknowledge that book’s existence. Lizzie and Todd forever!)
Winner: Elizabeth. Because sometimes I get to pick the winners, and I always thought they were really sweet together.
Round 4: Tragic Flaw
Kristy is flawless. She is a perfect person and I won’t hear anyone say anything different. Yes, she is “bossy” and “a tomboy.” All of us know those are really code-words men use to bring down women who they perceive as a threat. Darn right, Kristy is a threat! She creates a highly profitable business at 13, she still finds time for charity, and she occasionally solves mysteries. Kristy is the girl you want in your corner.
Elizabeth’s biggest flaw is being a doormat. Like, she lets Jessica take advantage of her over and over. Learn your lesson, girlfriend! Tell Jessica NO! Explain to your parents that she is heading for disaster and needs professional intervention! Don’t let her run your life! I know that her life would be pretty boring without Jessica to mess it up all the time, but get a hobby. Think of what a better journalist Elizabeth would be if she didn’t spend so much time rescuing Jessica.
Winner: I guess technically Elizabeth, because she has an actual flaw? Let’s go with Elizabeth.
Round 5: Happy Ending
The Babysitter’s Club are encased in amber. They never age. They never leave the eighth grade. They just keep on babysitting the kids of Stoneybrook for all eternity. Being 13 forever sounds like hell on earth, but they all seem pretty okay with it. The future is always bright.
Since we’ve already discussed that “Sweet Valley Confidential” DOES NOT EXIST, we are only looking at Elizabeth’s life up to senior year. The series ends with Elizabeth turning down Oxford to go to SVU with her terrible sister, Jessica. But—she and Todd get back together! So at least there’s that! And they will live HAPPILY EVER AFTER FOREVER.
Winner: You know what, how about YA fiction? Because I love these series. I grew up on them. But looking back, that is some seriously anti-feminist shit. There is NOBODY worth looking up to or identifying with. Sweet Valley was weirdly moralistic and soap opera-ish (how many kids died after disobeying their parents? A lot. #RIPRegina!) while the BSC was pretty heteronormative, ethnically non-diverse (other than some tokenism), and pro-traditional-gender roles. They made me a reader, but thank Goddess I graduated to better things.
So, the winner of this round, and of this match, is YA fiction! You’ve come a long way, baby. Join us next time for some classic literature favorites.
Tags: books, laura sook duncombe, literary ladies cage fight, the butter
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Regina Morrow is the reason I will never do cocaine.
Me too, that terrified me as a child.
I only ever read the “Sweet Valley Twins” series aimed at innocent pre-teen readers, and now I’m sad that I apparently missed out on so much entertaining trashiness.
There is seriously SO MUCH. Not just trashiness, just complete melodrama that makes you end up utterly hating the characters in hindsight. In one of the first books, Jessica blackballs a girl from joining their sorority (they have those in high school? Only in Sweet Valley) because she thinks she’s too fat; the girl ends up eating lettuce and running around the track until she’s almost as hot as the twins (of course, NO GIRL could ever be as hot as the twins). In another one (“Wrong Kind of Girl”), Jessica doesn’t let a girl on the cheerleading squad because she has a bad reputation (her nickname is “Easy Annie” – I admit I did not know what that meant at the time). The girl is so devastated she tries to commit suicide!!! Those are actually some of the better ones though, at least they taught about bullying, although of course Jessica never has any character development past the end of the book. 😉 Other gems: a family friend of the girls comes to stay w/them, hits on a teacher, and when he turns her down she rips her shirt and says he tried to assault her; of COURSE Jessica spiking her sister’s drink bc she’s pissy about her getting prom queen (Elizabeth gets behind the wheel and ends up accidentally killing Jessica’s boyfriend)…what else…Bruce Patman almost raping Elizabeth, Jessica joining a cult…I too started with the endearing SVT series as a young’un, and stumbling on SVH by accident in a Goodwill rocked my 7-or-8-year-old world.
I never dreamed there was so much racy goings on in the sweet valley high books. BSC forever!
Did you stick with the series for the evil twin/Elizabeth’s manslaughter trail/child abandonment mini-series? I want to talk about those beautiful books so badly.
Oh my god, I THINK I remember those. Were they the ones where the twins were babysitting for those children in some kind of creepy haunted house and kept getting pulled into an alternate murder-universe whenever they went to sleep? And something about yellow daisies? Or is that a different insane sub-series?
That is a DIFFERENT bizarre sub-series. This one was presented as fully canon, and even the evil twin had an evil twin!
Now I can’t find anything on Google about the one I just mentioned, and am convinced that I dreamed/made up the whole thing.
I read every single SVH, and have pretty advanced level knowledge of the series, and I don’t remember this at all. If I think about it very hard, there is a tiny flash of “maybe?” but I can’t hold onto it. Could it be Sweet Valley Twins?
After a protracted period of Googling non-sequiturs, I found it!
http://www.amazon.com/Before-Wake-Sweet-Valley-Tw…
This book scared the living shit out of ten-year-old me. I remember my copy had a holographic cover and if you tilted it a certain way, flames and red pupils and scary dream-monster girls happened. It made a huge (and not necessarily good) impact on my young psyche.
And now I need to hear about the evil twin/manslaughter trail/child abandonment series!
It was books like 92 -100, with an additional special addition published sometime later (introducing the evil twin’s eviler twin). I can’t begin to describe how amazing this sub-series was. You probably want to read a really long livejournal recap of the penultimate book, right?
http://1bruce1.livejournal.com/60238.html
Of course I do.
Are you thinking of the post-prom books where there was that girl called Margo who looked exactly like E & J (but with dark hair) and she murdered her way across the country to come take over Elizabeth’s life? Amazing.
Reading this immediately made me think of the bizarre Sweet Valley book that haunted me as a child!! The twins go to some amusement park and things get super weird. This: http://shannonsweetvalley.com/2011/11/17/sweet-va…
Please tell me I am not the only one that read this and was super weirded out. All my suppressed memories are coming back!
Oh my god, that’s not even the weird amusement park book I assumed it would be! :O I think I’m remembering a Sweet Valley Twins book about a haunted carnival… ghost called Clare, weird spooky atmosphere, and clearly needed to be read twice despite being creepy as hell. I seem to remember giving up after the one with a ouija board, though (it’s not something they just sell among the regular board games here, so it seemed like Deeply Occult Stuff); that was too much for me!
This begs the obvious question …. How are there multiple freaky amusement park narratives?!
That’s the one I assumed she was talking about too! I’ve actually read both books, The Class Trip was one of my favorites. The book you’re describing, iirc, is actually titled “The Haunted Carnival.” (SVT wasn’t known for its creative titles. 😉 ) The super chiller books were all pretty scary (I was, and am, an unapologetic Giant Baby), but that one was soooo creepy. Did you ever read the others? I know that was the third in the series, and I definitely read the first two, probably others as well. The first was The Christmas Ghost (Jessica is Scrooge, and meets the three ghosts, after being bratty to Elizabeth as usual – it’s fun and very festive), and the second was The Ghost In The Graveyard, which gave me the heebie jeebies but is also a pretty cool story.
I loved that one so much that after my mother got rid of (with my reluctant permission) most of my Sweet Valley and Nancy Drew, she actually found it on Ebay and bought it for me so I could have it again. I still love it. It make no sense and is just GLORIOUS.
I read the books where the twins were in middle school when I was small, and once or twice read the blurb of a SVH book (drugs! sex! death!) with the end result that I was vaguely terrified of high school for years.
Did anyone read the two Sweet Valley back stories that were epic novels of the Wakefield families? They were like Michener books for children, and I LOVED THEM. Oh my goodness, I was so addicted.
I gave Sweet Valley U a shot when it first came out, and when Jessica ditched class to have sex, I was horrified. I hated those books.
Claudi Kishii forever! Even if she can’t spell her own name! Also, whenever I use paper towels instead of a real towel to clean up a spill, I think of how much Dawn hated her dad’s girlfriend (new wife?) for doing that, and I feel terrible about myself.
when Jessica ditched class to have sex
This seems like the most realistic moment that has ever happened in any of those series.
Except, wait, no: you don’t ditch class to have sex. You ditch class to talk about the sex you had last night/that you might have that night/that other people had. Or to play video games. Or both. “Class” and “awake and showered enough for sex” do not occupy the same time zones.
I adored the epic novels, by far the best Sweet Valley books.
Read everything Babysitters Club I could find. Taking the collections as a whole Babysitters Club is the clear winner!
Did anyone read the two Sweet Valley back stories that were epic novels of the Wakefield families? They were like Michener books for children, and I LOVED THEM. Oh my goodness, I was so addicted.
I gave Sweet Valley U a shot when it first came out, and when Jessica ditched class to have sex, I was horrified. I hated those books.
Claudi Kishii forever! Even if she can't spell her own name! Also, whenever I use paper towels instead of a real towel to clean up a spill, I think of how much Dawn hated her dad's girlfriend (new wife?) for doing that, and I feel terrible about myself.
WHY IS THIS COMMENT THREAD NOT PAGES LONGER.
I don’t even care if I’m a day late, I LOVED the Sweet Valley series. I read every iteration: elementary school, middle school, high school, family histories, super-specials…my word. And yes, the Margo ones were the best. She literally let a kid drown so she didn’t have to babysit him any more, and was subsequently stalked by the kid’s hot older brother.
And I never realized until, like, just now that the burned girl who haunts their dreams in the middle school series is a Freddy Krueger rip-off. My favorite middle school special was the one where they get the Harlequin dolls and end up being transported into some magical land where the dolls are actually twin princes. Ridiculous. RIDICULOUS, I loved them so much.
I’m with ya girlfriend, I think I chugged my way through at least some of every incarnation too, although SVT were my favorite. I loved The Magic Christmas. And I know exactly what you mean, I read lots of them when I was only 7 or 8, and it was only years later that I realized many of the super-specials (and books in general) were complete rip-offs. The Christmas Ghost = A Christmas Carol. The Christmas Without Elizabeth = A Wonderful Life. Big for Christmas = Big. But hey, haha, if the girls are going to be 12yo for about a dozen Christmases, I suppose it makes sense they’d have to dig into pop culture for enough ideas. 😛
Anyone read Sweet Valley Junior High? It was like the O.C….. so soapy but so good.
Those are the ones where the girls have switched middle schools in 8th grade, and the books are written via different POVs (a la Game of Thrones), yes? Don’t get too excited, haha, I have only the ~barest~ trace of memory of them (a boy named Salvador, a girl named Anna, who were friends with Elizabeth). I do remember one though where a girl (Larissa? Bianca?) was trying out for the school production of West Side Story but her parents didn’t approve, and something about a dead brother. The things that stick with us… 😉
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Pleasantly displayed data in this post, I want to peruse this sort of stuff. The nature of substance is fine and the conclusion is great. A debt of gratitude is in order for the post.