Dawn &etc are so mean to Jill. I totally understand drifting apart from friends, but man. I haven't read CD in a while, but seeing it all laid out there, they're so cruel.
Yeah, it's pretty gross. Dawn is more petty to Jill, whereas Sunny is an outright bitch to her (there's a line in her first diary about how much she loves flashing her navel ring at Jill in the halls because she knows Jill is squicked by it). I get the sense from the original BSC series that Jill and Maggie are pretty close, and Maggie seems to be the one who's most tolerant of her in the CA Diaries.
I dislike two things about the CA Diaries series: 1) how much some of the characters change (like Maggie the rebel suddenly turning into Maggie the control freak anorexic) and 2) the idea that the writers had to kick Jill to the curb to make room for two brand new characters. That it even starts at the end of the BSC series just makes it even worse. I actually like Ducky (and feel vindicated to see that he truly WAS modeled on Duckie from Pretty in Pink), but could care less about Amalia.
And really, what was so bad about just aging the characters up instead of coming up with this ridiculous bit about the 8th graders moving to the high school building at Vista? The people who liked the CA Diaries liked it for it's more mature story arcs. Moving the characters out of the time warp wouldn't have been so awful. Vista is grades K-12 so its hard for me to buy the idea that it was such a ~big experience~ to move from the middle school building to the high school building when they're on the same freaking campus.
