The Five Hills I'd Die on for Girl Meets World
Soooo, it’s been a minute since I’ve written anything. I fully intended to get this up on the blog at least a month ago, but you know how it goes. This has been sitting in my drafts for quite some time, so without further ado, I present to you the five hills I will die on when it comes to Girl Meets World. In (mostly) no particular order:
Lucas picked Maya originally
I’ve written about this in the past, so I won’t spend a ton of time rehashing everything. But to this day, I am fully, completely sure that Lucas originally picked Maya in Upstate. Go back and watch that scene with the perspective that he was going to pick Maya, and then watch it again with the perspective of him picking Riley. See which one tracks and which one doesn’t. It was Maya, 100%. If nothing else, that smirky, flirty expression Lucas has on his face when Maya grabs his shirt is a dead giveaway. That is not the face you make when you’re about to reject a girl for her best friend.
Of all the hills on the list, this is THE hill I will die on if I could only pick one, that’s how strongly I believe it.
Riley & Farkle were endgame
The above may be my number one hill, but this entry isn’t too far behind. I know I’m not alone in believing that had the show been renewed, even for one more season, we would have seen a development in the Riley-Farkle relationship. Throughout the show, and especially in the third season, we see Riley and Farkle have a deep connection, a much deeper one than she has with Lucas (and deeper than what Farkle has with Smackle. Yeah, I said it!). They truly, deeply, genuinely love each other, and based on what we saw in the third season, it looked like the writers were setting it up for them to develop romantic feelings as they got older. In Boy Meets World, Topanga’s dad admits he used to be scared that he’d find Topanga in the basement (i.e., making out) with Shawn but realizes it was Cory he should have been afraid of all along. My hunch is that we would have gotten a similar callback had the show gotten renewed.
There are also some fascinating parallels between Topanga and Farkle, and I’m totally sold on the argument that he is the Topanga of GMW, not Lucas. But that’s another topic for another day.
The girls’ friendship was actually kind of toxic
We can all agree that the Rilaya friendship was one of the best parts of the show. They loved each other, supported each other, and would do anything to help the other out or spare their feelings. However, they each did something to the other that was ended up being pretty hurtful.
Riley, of course, is largely at fault for getting Maya to believe that her (Maya) growing up, maturing, and wanting to be a bit more responsible was somehow a bad thing, something that needed to be “fixed.” Maya was finally embracing hope and taking herself more seriously…and Riley put a quick stop to that because it “wasn’t her.” Oof. It ended up reverting Maya to her season 1 self, which is not a place Maya really wanted to be.
Maya, meanwhile, was the co-founding member of the Riley Committee, which sheltered Riley from life’s harsh realities and disappointments to the point that her growth was stunted. Despite Riley being a smart girl living in New York City, she apparently had no idea about war, poverty, homelessness, famine, etc. Maya and the others made sure her feelings were protected – they didn’t tell her about Pluto losing its status as a planet because they knew she’d get upset - but it resulted in Riley being immature and naïve to the point of being ignorant. Not a good look.
Neither girl had malicious intent; in fact, they both thought they were in the right to say and do the things they said and did. They would never do anything to intentionally hurt the other, but it ended up happening anyway. I would have loved to have seen this get addressed on the show, but alas, it wasn’t meant to be.
Girl Meets Belief is a super interesting insight into all dynamics of the core four’s relationships
Full disclosure, the original draft for this post ended up being significantly longer than it is currently, and it’s all because of this hill. It made me realize that I want to write a separate post about it, simply because I find said insights so fascinating. So I won’t go into too much detail right here and now. All you need to know is that I think this is a crucial episode to the series since it explores the relationships between our main four so perfectly. We see every iteration of the characters paired up together, and we see why every dynamic works the way it works. Idk, I’m kind of obsessed with it, and I will have more on that soon.
The story wasn’t finished
My last hill, and it’s a big one: I don’t think the story was finished. And not in the sense that it got cancelled somewhat unexpectedly; I mean that I personally think had the show gotten renewed, we would have seen some of the stories from season 3 come back in a future season. I wholly believe we were going to come back to the “Maya became Riley” story and find out that she, in fact, did not become Riley, that Riley was wrong about all of this, and that it was a simple case of Maya growing up. And that while Riley has undoubtedly been a significant influence on her, Maya did all the work herself to become a better person.
I also believe it was going to get revealed that Riley and Lucas didn’t act like a couple for a reason. They were going to learn the important lesson that perception of a thing doesn’t make it so, particularly when feelings are involved. In other words, they were going to find out that their sweet seventh grade crushes didn’t translate to genuine love between two teenagers – and that’s okay! Their lack of chemistry and lack of seeming like an actual couple, to me, was a pretty big hint that there was something more going on beyond “bad writing” and Disney channel restrictions. A shame we’ll never know for sure, but this is my gut feeling on the matter.
And there you have it! If you have any hills you’d die on, send them my way, I want to hear them. Hope you all had or are having a wonderful holiday season, and cheers to 2023!


















