We’ve turned manipulation into an aesthetic — lip gloss, perfect hair, emotional violence served with a side of vulnerability. From Regina George to Maddy Perez, Blair Waldorf to Shiv Roy, we’ve built entire fandoms around women written by people who clearly needed therapy.

But maybe that’s why we love them: they weaponised the tools patriarchy gave them, and made it look good.

Regina George didn’t invent the Mean Girl, but she perfected her. She was the millennium’s most polished villain — blonde ambition in kitten heels. She didn’t need superpowers, just a burn book and a flawless sense of timing.

Then came Blair Waldorf, who took the archetype and gave her a work ethic. Blair wasn’t just cruel; she was strategic. Every insult was couture. Every breakdown was performance art. Gossip Girl turned elitism into therapy cosplay, and Blair became a generation’s toxic comfort character — a girl who could admit she was awful and still look immaculate while doing it.

They both taught us the same thing: power looks better in a headband.

As the genre aged, so did its protagonists. The Mean Girl stopped ruling the school and started running companies, newsrooms, or — in Shiv Roy’s case — multinational conglomerates run by emotionally constipated men.

Shiv isn’t “mean” in the teen movie sense; she’s cold, incisive, and quietly self-destructing under a thousand-dollar blouse. She’s what happens when a woman grows up in a world that told her control was the only kind of safety. She’s not cruel for sport; she’s cruel for survival.

Meanwhile, Maddy Perez (Euphoria) brought the archetype back to the small screen with rhinestones and rage. She’s hyper-aware of the performance — a girl who knows exactly how she’s being looked at and uses it as currency. Maddy isn’t the villain; she’s the thesis: “I know I’m a bad person, but at least I’m interesting.”

Most of these characters were born from male writers who thought they were dissecting femininity but were really just projecting onto it. They didn’t create complex women; they created their own fears of them.

So what did the audience do? We reclaimed them. We found power in the sharp edges. We took the one-dimensional archetype and made her our muse.

The Mean Girl became our shorthand for autonomy — she’s confident, articulate, and emotionally literate in a world that rewards none of those things in women. We love her because she does what we can’t always afford to: say the thing, take the space, demand the attention.

Underneath the snark and sabotage, most Mean Girls were just articulate depressives — women who couldn’t be vulnerable without dressing it up in cruelty. Their meanness wasn’t random; it was a dialect. They were fluent in deflection.

When Blair cries, she does it in couture. When Shiv cracks, she does it in private. When Maddy screams, she makes it sound like a monologue. It’s not manipulation — it’s survival theatre.

The Mean Girl isn’t heartless; she’s performing distance so she can stand the sound of her own.

We used to watch Mean Girls to feel better than them. Now we watch them to feel seen.

They taught us to stop apologising for taking up emotional bandwidth. To dress for battle. To stop pretending that power and kindness always have to coexist.

And, yes, they’re written by people who needed therapy — but maybe we keep watching because we need therapy too. They just got the better lighting.