Remember Dork Diaries?
If you remember:
wanting an iPhone 4
listening to CD’s by Selena Gomez, Miley Cyrus, etc.
The Scholastic Book Fair coming to school, and being excited over it
Then you automatically qualify for a veterans discount. Sadly, these times are long behind us---as is the never present quality of the Dork Diaries Series by Rachel Renee Russell. The series started out simple enough: a fourteen year old art hoe transfers from her normal school to an elite day school in Westchester, NY. Along with a Starbucks located in the cafeteria, this new school also has a ton of rich, snobby kids; one of them is Mackenzie Hollister (AKA the one-dimensional main antagonist that fits in with plenty of other tween girl mean girls) who bullies Nikki for being “poor” because rich people do that.
Nikki makes new friends, develops a crush on the boy with the most personality and character development out of everyone in the series, and even finds her niche at her new children’s prison when she wins the School’s art competition.
It’s a basic run-of-the-mill plotline, yet it was--and still is--somewhat relatable to anyone in middle school then and now, right? Fast-forward ten years later to 2019; Nikki is still in the eighth grade, but now she has over fifteen books to talk about--and each book is progressively worse than the last.
Nikki starts a band in book three, gets a Reality TV show deal with said band in book seven, and even gets to go on a tour of the country with her band in book fourteen (Which is the most recent publication in the series.) Quick Question: How can any tween girl relate to this?! Isn’t the book supposed to be about dealing with materialism/peer pressure and finding a place among the chaos of middle school? Why is Nikki living the dream life of being a music star when music isn't even her forte? Even Wimpy Kid ( which Dork Diaries supposedly ripped off) didn’t go this crazy in terms of plot! But it gets even WORSE.
Enter: FanFiction/Wattpad
