Hot Take(?): sandy is worse than sylvia
Ok first of all i want to say that i hate the way people talk about both of them and i know that they both get unwarranted hate but truthfully i think the way people treat sandy in comparison to sylvia is actually insane.
People often view sandy as a more sympathetic character which she definitely is but let’s be honest here she is not perfect whatsoever. canonically she did cheat on soda and father someone else’s baby but because of the fact pony boy for the majority of the story talks about her in a positive light she is seen as redeemable, which truthfully i think she is. i often see people head-cannoning it that she didn’t actually cheat and she reached out to soda after the book and they all lived happily ever after. which sure is very cute but is also definitely not the case (canonically speaking!!)
sandy is obviously a more complex character than just a ball of sunshine who actually didn’t do anything wrong and is just a girl. i think that it just makes her so one dimensional.
then in comparison sylvia. she is treated HORRIBLY by this fandom like it’s seriously strange to me. i can’t even count the number of times i’ve seen people calling her a bitch, or insulting her. it’s really jarring to see. i don’t read a lot of fanfiction if im being honest but in the ones i have seen they portray sylvia as this awful person with ZERO redeeming qualities who is just trying to fight y/n for dallas’s love even though she broke is heart and cheated on him or whatever…
it’s very frustrating that no one in this fandom can understand that obviously pony would have nicer/more things to say about sandy who is literally his brothers girlfriend meaning he’d see her around far more than sylvia who i doubt he knew very well seeing as she’s the girlfriend of his brothers friend who he doesn’t even like all that much near in the book.
i truly doubt that he would’ve known her outside of what the gang who obviously didn’t fw her so there’s no way pony boy could’ve even known her in anything besides a neutral perspective?..
i have thought for a while about why these characters who were given to us pretty much completely blank have such drastically different headcannoned personalities by this fandom and i have realized it’s due to probably 2 main factors.
1. In book descriptions
I will say in all honesty that i can sort of understand why we treat the two differently because of the breadcrumbs we are given about their personalities. our first impression of sandy is positive and our only impressions of sylvia are negative.
the only way we know sylvia is by dallas and things that pony boy has heard, the fact that she cheated on him AGAIN which dallas tells and that we learn later in her attempts to cheat she had tried to get with johnny. both of these are extremely vague and have no actual examples of what she specifically did (how she cheated and the extent of what it really was)
on the contrary we are told that sandy is a sweet girl by pony boy and it’s only implied that she lead soda on for a bit thinking the baby is his before going to florida. where soda learns that the baby wasn’t his. all of this was going on while pony boy was away and when he learned about it there was so much else going on it sorta was just a footnote in the plot. further more, the language used is very of the time. since it was the 60s they spoke more discreetly of teenage unwed motherhood. anyone who had read the book at the time of its release would have completely understood the implications but in more modern times it can be missed by current readers who are often young. which brings me to my next point…
2. the fandom
most people in the outsiders fandom are very young which makes sense seeing as it’s required reading for most middle schoolers. but i think with its younger audience it is very easy for them to be the loudest with their opinions.
overall i think that we need to be nicer to the greaser girls. they’re probably victims of circumstance because of their upbringings and even if they weren’t they’re teenage girls who are bound to make mistakes just like their male counterparts and dare i say treating them like criminals is just misogynistic especially since some of the male characters have literally killed people… 😬
ok that’s all! i’m curious to hear what others think about this!
