u/georgemillman

I know there's been a few people who've struggled with Rachel Dean, and are wondering if she was the right choice to take over when Nick Sharratt left.

Sue Heap illustrated bits of Double Act and Buried Alive (because the kids were meant to have done the illustrations themselves, so a second illustrator was needed to distinguish between Ruby and Garnet and Tim and Biscuits). I always thought her illustrations really complimented Nick's.

I wonder if anyone considered getting her to take over from him? I've looked her up and she was born in 1954, so of course she may well be retired now. Just a thought I had... her illustrations might not have been as opinion-dividing.

I've heard a lot of people talk about this scene (when Elle is led to believe she's being interviewed for her art, but the interviewer just asks her about her views on gender stuff). It's a really important and powerful scene, but the bit that really hit me the most was the depiction of Katy, the interviewer.

Katy, to me, was not a horrible person. I think she thought she was giving Elle, and trans folk more generally, some decent representation. She was thinking, 'Okay, last week my guest was someone who didn't agree with trans people in single-sex spaces, so this week I have to balance that out by getting an actual trans person's view on that.' When Elle walked out and she said, 'I'm sorry if I offended you!' she was genuinely confused by that. She was thinking, 'But I don't understand - I was respectful and I gave her the chance to defend being trans, why wouldn't she jump at it?'

I thought this scene was so good for underlining how easy it is for a well-intentioned person to completely screw up and end up perpetuating injustice in the interests of 'giving everyone a voice'. Katy was such a great depiction of the kind of privileged person who thinks just being polite to everyone will solve most societal problems. The kind of person who says, 'I'm not transphobic, I've got a friend who's trans and they're lovely. Of course, not everyone feels the same way, and that's okay, they're allowed an opinion too.' The kind of person who fails to realise that it's not respectful to ask trans people to defend their existence over and over again whilst someone who wishes them harm is given equal amounts of time to talk.

Everyone has met someone like this, who thinks they're a good egg and an ally - and if I'm being completely honest, as a cis person I used to be a little bit like this myself. Before I'd spoken to as many trans people as I now have, I did kind of have an 'everyone has a right to express their opinion' attitude, and I now realise that this does not extend to having an opinion on someone else's right to being allowed to be themselves with basic dignity and comfort. The only appropriate way for an interviewer to ask a trans person how they feel about trans issues is to be 100% clear (both to them and to the audience) that they're unequivocally on that person's side, and that this isn't a debate.

For those who don't know, The Diamond Girls was written in response to a criticism of The Illustrated Mum by the late Ann Widdecombe, whose primary issue with it was that it featured sisters who had different fathers which she didn't think was appropriate for children to read. Subsequently, Wilson wrote this book which features a family of four (later five) siblings, who all have different fathers and have a lovely mum and they all get on well.

But if this was the case, I don't understand why Sue was depicted the way she was.

-She carelessly got pregnant again (the father implied to be a boy on the estate who is only a year older than her eldest child);

-She puts massive gender expectations on her unborn child, in spite of the fact that her four daughters all have different levels of traditional femininity;

-She uproots the whole family and takes them away from their schools and friends without discussing it with any of them first;

-She fails to do any prior checks on the new place they're moving to;

-She parentifies Martine;

-She fails to arrange any childcare for her other children when she goes into labour (to be fair to her, she went into labour early which she couldn't have predicted - but with four children already, she had to know this was a possibility and should have had a back-up plan just in case);

-She refuses to accept the sex of the baby she's just had;

-She's pretty nasty to Bruce, who started out only giving them a lift as a favour and Sue worked him so hard he did his back in;

-She lets Rochelle, who is 12, go out with a 16-year-old

As a comparison to Marigold, the mum in the story this is a response to, I actually think Marigold is a far better mother. Marigold certainly has many flaws, but you can totally understand her situation. She grew up in care and was abused there. Marigold knows she isn't really stable enough to look after children, but with her experiences being in the care system, I can understand why she'd think that on balance it's far less bad for her children to be in their home with their loving mum, even in the circumstances. That is a decision that she fundamentally believes to be in the best interests, possibly at the expense of her own mental health - and I respect that. But there's very little about Sue that really stands out as being dedicated to her children. Sue doesn't really seem to question her actions at all. Most of the bad situations the family are in are entirely her fault, and it's hard not to agree with Martine when she loses her temper at her. About the best thing you can say about Sue is 'She's nicer than Mary's mum', but that's not much of a compliment! And it gives the impression that any upbringing is fine as long as the children aren't being physically hurt, which is a terrible impression to give - it's very possible to hurt children in an emotional or neglectful way.

I don't know why Jacqueline didn't make more effort to show Sue being amazing, if this was meant to be the point of the book. I know she can write struggling working-class teenage mums as being amazing parents, like Jo in The Lottie Project and Loretta in Secrets. Sue is admittedly more of a challenge because she's had so many children that she can't afford, but I think it can still be justified - Martine was an accident when she was a teenager, and the fathers of Jude, Rochelle and Dixie all had more money and Sue believed being with them would give her a more stable life, and in each case she was let down (domestic violence, death, him turning out to be married). That still leaves Sundance, but if her dad is the boy on the estate this would give a chance to show Sue as being amazing but also flawed. She could have told the girls who he was and said clearly, 'There's absolutely no excuse for what I did as a 32-year-old woman. I got drunk and did something incredibly stupid, and I really regret it. I seriously considered ending the pregnancy, but in the end I just couldn't do it. I accept the consequences of my actions, and we'll manage somehow. He knows, and I've offered him the chance to be part of the baby's life, but he doesn't want to be.'

When I say 'echo effect', I don't mean making the audio repeat. That's what happens if you click 'echo' in effects.

What I want is something that actually makes your voice sound like an echo, as if you're in an echoey place. Good for mystical characters like gods and genies and things.

I feel like he's meant to be a likeable character (at least, he seems pretty popular on here) but I really didn't get a good first impression of him.

It's largely the way he ran the study sessions. We didn't have anything like that when I was doing my GCSEs, and I would have thought that whole set-up would really make it hard for me to study. Very often, people revise better when they're with friends, and allowed to ask each other questions and prepare flashcards for each other and so on. I remember study sessions being quite chill, where we were allowed to work on pretty much whatever we wanted as long as we weren't distracting each other, and could chat openly with friends as long as it was about the work. (I remember one girl saying that the way she remembered that the cathode is negative is because she knew someone called Cathy who was quite strict - and that's stayed with me forever!)

The way Mr Farouk ran it was so oppressive, it almost felt like the whole year group was in detention. Nick was forced to sit next to someone he really didn't like (okay, to be fair I suppose it was on Nick to ask if he could sit somewhere else, but it wasn't really an atmosphere where you'd feel you could make a request like that). And then, when Nick and Ben had an argument Mr Farouk immediately put them in detention (together) when anyone could see that they weren't comfortable with each other and that the problem would be immediately solved by putting them on opposite sides of the room.

I get that the idea is that he starts off cold and no-nonsense as a result of having been in the closet so long, and then becomes softer when he falls in love with Mr Ajayi... but to me it just didn't quite work. When it became obvious they were going to become a couple, my reaction was, 'But I don't really get what Mr Ajayi sees in him, he's not very nice.' I really struggle to have much sympathy with teachers who make kids' lives miserable, even if it's because they're miserable themselves.

Am I the only one? Maybe he's nicer in the comics.

It would explain a lot - the presence of characters like Mrs Henderson and Russell, who realistically would not turn up all those years later. Also some of the inconsistencies like Gary/Guy - Ellie just thinks, 'Hmm, I think that's a better name for him'. Same for having kept Nellie all these years - she felt bad for throwing Nellie out, so in her slightly fictionalised version she changed it.

The one thing it doesn't explain is how she knew what an Uber or a Deliveroo were. She must just be a genius who predicts the existence of these companies, even if she doesn't predict exactly how you use them.

In 2005's episode 'Aliens of London', we meet Toshiko Sato, later a regular character in Torchwood, looking after the pig alien from the Slitheen spaceship (which initially seems odd when we meet the character in Torchwood because she's a tech person rather than a medic, but 'Exit Wounds' confirms Tosh was covering for Owen because he had a hangover).

But what I've never got is, why was Torchwood Three there in the first place? It wasn't their patch. Torchwood Three existed to keep track of the Cardiff rift and investigate what came through. This appeared to be a full-scale alien invasion that had nothing to do with the rift. It surely should have been Yvonne Hartman's team at Torchwood One who were working on it?

I think it's commonly acknowledged that Russell is a horrible, misogynistic, predatory pig, and were all screaming at Ellie to come to her senses during Girls in Tears.

But my question is, did the author really intend him to be quite as bad as that? I think perhaps not. The reason Girls in Tears gets a lot of stick (in my view, quite rightly deserved) is that Ellie goes back to Russell at the end and that's supposed to be a happy ending. It's my opinion, and I think the opinion of many others, that Russell is abusive. He belittles her, copies her ideas, pressures her for sex, cheats on her and is just generally a twat who makes Ellie miserable. (Also their age difference. Ellie is in Year 9 and Russell in Year 11, but they're more than two years apart. In Girls in Tears, we find out at the beginning that Ellie is still thirteen, whereas Magda and Nadine are both fourteen by this point. Academic years in the UK go from September to August, so Ellie must be one of the youngest in her year group - there's no mention of her having a birthday in this book, so I'd imagine her birthday is in July or August, way at the end of the school year (EDIT: BEEN INFORMED IN THE COMMENTS THAT HER BIRTHDAY IS CANONICALLY JUNE, WHICH STILL BACKS UP MY POINT). It's harder to work out when Russell's birthday is, but he doesn't seem to have a birthday during the time he and Ellie are with each other, otherwise Ellie would surely mention plans she was making for her boyfriend's birthday. So he could very easily be closer to the start of the school year. If his birthday is in September or October, which it very easily might be, he'd be almost seventeen. If he's nearly seventeen and pressuring someone who's still thirteen for sex, that makes him more than a toxic boyfriend, it makes him a potential child molester.)

But the important thing is that I wouldn't mind any of these things being in the story if the story was about Ellie slowly coming to realise how damaging this relationship is for her. We could also read between the lines about how worried her dad and Anna are about her - but they don't seem to be. (Actually, this is one of the few moments when I really do like Ellie's dad, who's normally pretty concerning himself - he very clearly doesn't like Russell at all, and it actually reaches the point where he shouts at Russell for how he treats Ellie. I think that's a good thing, although it's kind of soured by the fact that his reaction is clearly because deep down he knows he's not that different from Russell in his own treatment of Anna.) But I'm not sure this is what Jacqueline Wilson was going for. I think it feels more like a 'high school sweethearts come to learn their own and each other's flaws, and eventually patch things up, listen to each other and start again' story, rather than a 'girl learns she's experiencing an abusive relationship' story. She emphasised Russell's bad points so much that you can't possibly see anything good that will come from Ellie continuing to see him.

I read someone once observe, in a review of The Diamond Girls, that the subplot with Mary and her mum feels like it's there to make Sue Diamond look better. Sue was written to be a wonderful mum regardless of being quite promiscuous and having five children with different fathers (Jacqueline Wilson actually said in interviews that that was the point of her) - but she failed in that, because Sue actually isn't written as a wonderful mum at all. She's selfish, neglectful, irresponsible, and I think it's quite hard not to think Martine was right in most of the things she said about her (and incidentally, there's no reason a promiscuous woman can't also be a good mum, it's just that Sue isn't). The best thing you can say about Sue is 'she's not as bad as Mary's mum', but that's hardly a compliment, and is problematic because it suggests that all you need to be a good parent is to not be physically violent (and besides, Jude admits that Sue used to smack her sometimes when she was little, so you can't even say that Sue never did that). I think that reviewer had a point, and I think there's an argument that this is what Wilson was doing in Girls in Tears with Nadine and Ellis. When Ellis turns out to be an elderly man preying on a thirteen-year-old, it feels like it's there to make you think, 'God, by comparison, Ellie's situation with Russell really isn't too bad, is it?' And that is such a harmful message. Abuse is not a contest where you establish that your own is not as traumatic as somebody else's (and is therefore acceptable). Abuse comes in all shapes and sizes, and Ellis turning out to be an elderly child molester doesn't make Russell any less of one.

What was in Jackie's mind at the time, do we think? Anyone have a more sympathetic outlook than me?

In the first episode, Donte and Chlo cause a car crash that kills one of their best friends. Subsequently to that, Donte is in police custody for the rest of Series 1, and there's a big plot line about Chlo trying to claim full responsibility for the crash to try to get him off.

I feel like this high-stakes situation was a big part of what caused the intensity of their relationship. If that hadn't happened, might their relationship have just been a bog-standard teenage crush that they both grow out of?

Another thing is that I think Donte probably became a nicer person as a result of that. In the first episode he was more like Lewis Seddon - violent, aggressive, confrontational and bullying. You could just put that down to the fact that the writers hadn't fully figured out his character yet, but I think you can explain that in-universe as well. In that first episode he did something that really had terrible consequences for both him and a lot of other people, and he was never quite the same again after that.

Most of JW's main characters seem to have aspirations to get into one of these things, if we hear any ideas about their futures at all. So I'm wondering which ones we can think of who had aspirations for something totally different?

If I remember correctly Gemma from Best Friends wanted to be a footballer (which I think is quite cool, because women's football wasn't what it is now when the book came out so it's good that there was a girl interested in that). Elsa from The Bed and Breakfast Star wanted to be a comedian. In the TV version of Tracy Beaker Tracy was interested in doing bits of journalism, but I don't think that was in the books particularly.

Are there any more?

In Series 10, Abdul learns that his dad bought him from a dodgy orphanage in Pakistan and brought him to the UK illegally. His dad gets into trouble for that, but due to having cared well for Abdul and not having known that Abdul had a family he seems to get off without charge.

But I'm interested in whether Abdul would actually be allowed to stay in these circumstances? Surely this makes him an illegal immigrant, in the same way that Grace in Series 4 was. Or would the Home Office take pity on him as he'd spent his entire life in the UK and had no personal connection to Pakistan?

Two sentiments that I see people on here expressing quite a lot are: 1) That they weren't all that happy with Think Again; and 2) That they find Anna a really interesting character that they'd have liked more of.

So what if rather than writing about Ellie in the future, Jacqueline's idea for a spin-off for adults had been re-writing the same four books but from Anna's perspective, showing how she sees her son and her husband and her step-daughter and all the other supporting characters? I think that could be quite interesting.

I also think this could be an interesting idea for some of the other books. I'd love to see Secrets from Wanda's viewpoint, or The Lottie Project from Jo's, or Vicky Angel from Mrs Cambridge's.

Is this ever explained anywhere? I've only done the TV series (and Solitaire), so forgive me if it's in the comics.

This is something I find interesting. Most teens in Jacqueline Wilson who have discovered their sexuality and are dating are described as 'boy-mad' or 'girl-mad'. They generally have fairly fleeting relationships and are enjoying that. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, because there are lots of teenagers in real life who are like that and there's nothing really wrong with that when you're discovering who you are. But there's also a fair few teenagers who are stable enough to hold down monogamous relationships for a reasonable amount of time, and I'm curious as to when Jacqueline has represented that. (And Ellie and Russell absolutely don't count - HEALTHY monogamous relationships.)

There's actually only one that I can think of, which is Callum and Ayesha in Best Friends. At 17, Callum seems to have a very mature take on dating, he and Ayesha seem to care about each other and are happy together. There's one other one I was going to say, which was Kev in the Girls series and his boyfriend at the end of Girls in Love - but actually I don't think we have enough information to be able to count that. Although Ellie says 'I know he's got a boyfriend' at the beginning of Girls in Tears, suggesting she might have seen them together more times, there's no particular indication that he's still with that boy, or with anyone, by this point. Nevertheless, I think from Ellie's comment we're meant to assume they're still together, and I think Jacqueline's using that to make him stand out from the other teenagers as a more emotionally stable, more dependable character who'll be there when Ellie needs him (which I think is the purpose of Callum's relationship in Best Friends as well - being able to hold down a relationship indicates that a teenager is quite mature for their age).

Are there any others?

I know one thing everyone finds amusing about her is the way the children in her books often talk using terminology that no 21st-century child would ever say. There's whole threads here about the idiosyncrasies of her language.

But I'm just thinking... her books are so popular, and children have been so inspired by the characters, are there any turns of phrase that another generation have started using because they show up so frequently in Jacqueline Wilson?

This is a recurrent theme in Love Lessons that's never really explained. Although Bernard is pretty abusive to Prue just as he is to everyone else, he is at least slightly more respectful of her than he is of his wife or of Grace. Their mum often nominates Prue to talk to him if she's trying to get him to see reason.

Why did he like Prue a little better than them?

So, the only bits of Alice Oseman's work I've done so far are the Heartstopper Netflix series (haven't done the film yet, but don't mind being spoiled) and the original version of Solitaire. When I started watching Heartstopper I knew it was based on a graphic novel, but I didn't realise she'd been writing about these characters for such a long time. Then someone told me about Solitaire, and how it was about Tori and her group of friends (including Michael, who I didn't realise the significance of when he turned up in Heartstopper Series 3), how it's set during the later part of Heartstopper and how Heartstopper came about because Alice wanted to explore Nick and Charlie's backstory and how they became such a strong unit. So I listened to the audiobook of that one (original version), assuming as I was listening that all this was canon and that Heartstopper would eventually catch up to the events of it.

But although I've really enjoyed both, I will admit it has made me more confused because multiple significant parts of Solitaire that Charlie was there for (like the attack on Ben, the fireworks at the Clay festival and the fire at the end) just don't seem to exist in Heartstopper. I know the official reason Alice didn't include them is that Heartstopper is a very different genre and is meant to be a sweet romance story rather than about mental health... but from the perspective of someone trying to understand this world and get it straight in my head, it does put me in a muddle. Presumably there's meant to be some overlap between the stories because Charlie's eating disorder wasn't retconned in Heartstopper, and Tori is still friends with Michael Holden. Alice's website has information on the timeline and when the stories are meant to take place in relation to each other. And I know she edited the book, partly to make the depictions of Nick and Charlie feel more like the Heartstopper characters, so it seems on some level they're meant to be taken together.

Is there any clear way of working this out so it makes sense and the events of both stories fit together? Is the issue that my experience of Heartstopper is the Netflix series, and it would make more sense if I read the graphic novels (I know there are some things in the graphic novels that are closer to Solitaire than the series, like Oliver being Charlie and Tori's little brother rather than their cousin)? Does it become clearer if you read her other books, like This Winter and Nick and Charlie? Or is it best to think of these stories as existing in parallel universes?

I was reading a discussion today about whether Solitaire would ever be adapted for the screen. Most people seemed to be agreed that it wouldn't, at any rate because the actors in Heartstopper are too old, so they'd have to recast it. And it's got such a different vibe to Heartstopper that people who watched expecting it to be like that might struggle with it.

But I think a stage adaptation would suit the Solitaire format more. Being a completely different form of media, you'd be able to separate it more strongly from the Heartstopper TV series, without it being so controversial to cast new actors. I think the very intense and deep conversations in it would suit the stage format more than the screen format. And certain aspects, like the attack on Ben Hope and the fire at the end, could be done in more of an interpretive, choreographed way that isn't too literal, therefore mimicking Tori's confusion and mental health struggles.

I'd buy a ticket!