genuinely i think gem is, in many ways, the main character of secret life. the bright-eyed newcomer, experiencing this game for the first time. she is able to quickly establish a tight alliance, that's strongly held together by the power of love and friendship and all positive feelings. they all trust each other with their lives and help her out so she can aim higher. she is even specifically allied with scott, and so far every other winner had been connected to him as well. she's basically the perfect heroine, with everything in her favor for victory
and, on the other end of the main character spectrum, we have scar. a guy whose main goal since the beginning had been to scam a couple of hearts and diamonds here and there out of the players and who, even before his tasks turned against him, had rejected a solid alliance offer. he's cagey and scheming and usually mostly acts for his own self-interest. he makes an enemy out of everyone and most people avoid him, except when they're trying to kill him. even his own tasks turn against him, purposefully making it harder for him to progress. he is basically the perfect villain, and he's earned no sympathy from anyone
their paths, notably, cross during the boogeyman apocalypse. gem, being placed at the center of the narrative. she needs a kill, the man with no friends looks like an easy target, and almost everyone who's joined her wants to kill him anyways. and then he ends up taking a ton of hearts from her in the process, and not even after managing to kill him does he stop causing trouble, bc he even burned her task.
but it's alright, eventually they're on the same page and working together side by side rather well, and then he turns her red on accident. and it is an accident, but at the same it's their first brush of conflict, kind of a sign that they'll have to face off again later. foreshadowing if you will. i think a lot abt that death but have not reached any conclusions yet, i just love the symbolism of it.
secret life, notoriously, is a season where a lot of previously established trends were broken, and many things happened for the first time. nobody died in the first session, there was a notoriously big gap in eliminations (with the first 3 happening in session 6, but no one else going out until session 9) and, of course, jimmy was not first out. so things were already, let's say, not going according to Plan. and gem's perfectly laid out victory, all cohesive and planned with a nice message on the power of friendship, fell through. into the hands of the other side of her coin, scar. the guy with no friends.
of course, there's another read to this, the one where this was on purpose, for the watchers to wrangle more desperation out of her. they're not going to let love win, they're going to break off friendships, extend her resentment towards pearl well into the next season. the heroine can't win. evil and hatred and remorse and hurt will prevail, because that's what they're after. and their new chew toy will last them for much longer because another of the broken trends was that the winner of secret life did not die.
