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Students
Jamie Alexandra Kelly
Jamie in the books
Jamie in the movie
The lead character/narrator/fictitious writer of the series.
- Beautiful All Along: As seen in book 8, once Angeline gives her hair a makeover, she becomes very beautiful.
- Cloudcuckoolander: Frequently has odd ideas and misinterprets several plot-important situations.
- Dancing Is Serious Business: Takes great pride in her dancing skills.
- Deadpan Snarker: When facing her parents or teachers, this is common.
- When she's writing in her diary, this becomes First-Person Smartass.
- Does Not Like Spam: Jamie hates mushrooms, cafeteria meatloaf and almost anything her mom makes.
- Insane Troll Logic: Jamie's thought processes sometimes follow this pattern. Example: She sees Angeline with two younger girls who don't look like her. Obviously, they must be siblings, but they don't look like Angeline, which means Angeline's father did plastic surgery on her, which means Angeline is rich. Tadah!
- Nice Mean And In Between: The in-between to Angeline's nice and Isabella's mean.
- Stalker with a Crush: To Hudson Rivers.
- Two First Names: “Kelly” is more commonly used as a girl’s first name.
- Vitriolic Best Buds: Jamie and Isabella are very much aware of this, while Angeline is less aware of Jamie's vitriol.
- Unreliable Narrator: Very, very heavily implied.Now, by the power vested in me, I do promise that everything in this diary is true, or at least as true as I think it needs to be.
- Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist: She's not the nicest person, but serves as the viewpoint.
Isabella Vinchella
Jamie's Jerk with a Heart of Gold best friend.
- Ax-Crazy: Making Isabella angry is inadvisable, as she will pummel you at the slightest provocation. She beat up a mall Santa at age 5 for not bringing her a panda the previous Christmas, and a boy in second grade for laughing at her last name.
- Berserk Button: Don't make fun of her glasses. Or her name. Or the shape of her head. Actually, don't make fun of Isabella in general.
- Big Brother Bully: Isabella's two older brothers, although she has gotten more than her fair share of revenge.
- Con Man:
- In book 4, she uses the money she and Jamie made to buy contact lenses, claiming to donate them to the Juvenile Optometry Federation.
- In book 10, she has two cons- one is for a "beauty lemonade" product using Jamie as the "before" and Angeline as the "after", and she also she sells an old, expired peach with Jamie's hair on it to a young kid, claiming it to be a shrunken head. It falls apart, however, when the kid shows it to his dad, a cop.
- Early Installment Character-Design Difference: In the first book, her glasses weren't as big and her head wasn't as round. Her lenses were also more frequently depicted as translucent, showing her pupils, while they defaulted to being drawn as opaque later in the books.
- Heroic Comedic Sociopath: In spades.
- I Have Brothers: Parodied; "She has brothers"—specifically "mean older brothers"—is basically Jamie's reasoning behind why Isabella is so Ax-Crazy.
- Insane Troll Logic: Isabella's thought processes sometimes follow this pattern, like when she rationalizes Jamie's will to kick her in the face as a result of a radioactive baby-bite that's turning her mind into a boy's and that's why she also understands the way they think.
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: She's generally unkind to almost everyone, not excepting her closest friends. While she is also aggressive much of the time, she does genuinely care about her friendship with Jamie. In School. Hasn't This Gone On Long Enough?, she plans to help Jamie study for her upcoming math test so that she wouldn't have to go to summer school. She accomplishes this by helping Angeline study alongside Jamie (and giving Angeline a pair of her old glasses to make her appear nerdy), so that when Angeline was able to prove her intelligence, Jamie would be motivated to study, if only to one-up Angeline.
- Manipulative Bastard: She pulls this at least once a book, with behind-the-scenes plans that are only revealed toward the end.
- Nerd Glasses/Opaque Nerd Glasses: To show her intelligence, and also to weaponize their opacity.
- Blind Without 'Em: When she colors over her new contact lenses, she stumbles around blindly and almost ruins their gym project.
- Four Eyes, Zero Soul: Downplayed, but she's definitely the most heartless character in the cast.
- Scary Shiny Glasses: Isabella knows how to tilt her glasses to achieve EYELESSNESS.
- Smart People Wear Glasses: Zig-Zagged—Isabella's a Manipulative Bastard… sometimes. Other times she can be quite stupid. As the series goes on, she fills this role more, and her mistakes are moral, not intellectual.
- Nice Mean And In Between: The mean to Angeline's nice and Jamie's in-between.
- Token Evil Teammate: Isabella has no trace of empathy and a very utilitarian concept of friendship. In fact, it's safer not to be her friend because—well, it's safest not to be anywhere near her. She is still unquestionably a True Companion.
- Vitriolic Best Buds: Jamie and Isabella are very much aware of this, while Angeline is less aware of Jamie's vitriol.
Angeline
Known by the students at Mackerel Middle School as the prettiest girl at the school and serves as the immediate popular girl. Because of this, Jamie viewed her as an enemy during the earlier book up until Jamie's aunt Carol became engaged to Angeline's uncle, Vice Principal Devon.
- Alpha Bitch: In earlier books, as they were written from Jamie's point of view. As Jamie becomes friends with Angeline, this trait notably disappears.
- Bad Liar: Jamie likens Angeline's attempts at lying to someone wearing stolen underpants from you and knows that you know it.
- Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Jamie notes with frustration that even when grimy from working on a car, Angeline is still attractive.
- Beware the Nice Ones: Generally a very sweet and friendly girl, she actually gives Mike Pinsetti a nickname ("Pin-heady") after he tries to pick on Jamie. There's also her manipulative streak.
- Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Angeline is portrayed this way before it's revealed that she has Hidden Depths.
- Characterization Marches On: As the books progress, in addition to the interactions between her and Jamie, her personality changes from being portrayed as "pure perfection" to more of a realistic human who comes to resent said reputation.
- Early Installment Character-Design Difference: Is occasionally drawn with lipstick in the duration of book 1. This is dropped later on, as her beauty turns to being portrayed as natural and effortless to go with her Nice Girl personality.
- Everyone Loves Blondes: She's the only main character with blonde hair as an outstanding trait, and she's popular for this and her personality.
- Evil Is Burning Hot: At the end of book 1. See Kubrick Stare and Troubling Unchildlike Behaviour below.
- Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold: A genuinely kind person, with gorgeous blonde hair.
- Kubrick Stare: Is drawn with one at the end of book one. See Troubling Unchildlike Behaviour below.
- Manipulative Bitch: Gets Mr. Dover, the gym teacher, to hand the baby doll (It Makes Sense in Context) to Hudson during during a gym lesson, resulting in her and her group to complete their objective in less than twenty seconds.
- Nice Mean And In Between: The nice to Isabella's mean and Jamie's in-between.
- Parody Sue: Angeline, though the sixth book shows that she could also be considered a Deconstructed Sue. The first couple of books may be one of the more complete subversions of the
Canon Sue trope in literature. Jamie starts out obsessing about how Angeline is so obviously too perfect and how every little thing that happens is clearly all about Angeline. In fact, Angeline's only real relevance in the early plots is actually caused by this obsession. She only has the narrative spotlight because the protagonist is constantly throwing it at her. - Sitcom Arch-Nemesis: Angeline thinks of Jamie and Isabella as friends and either isn't aware of their scorn for her or just ignores it. It takes Jamie eight books to realize this, and even then, she's not totally accepting of the fact.
- Status Quo Is God: At the ends of books 1, 3, and 4, Angeline, even after she and Jamie start some pieces of character development, still seems to emphasize that she's trying to get to Hudson just as much as Jamie and will try to do anything to keep Jamie from getting in the way.
- Troubling Unchildlike Behaviour: Implied at the end of book 1, where she tells Jamie that her permanent record has things where, had she been caught as the one that threw the meatloaf at Miss Bruntford, she would've been expelled.
Hudson Rivers
Jamie's (and Angeline's) crush and the eighth cutest boy in school.
- Character Development: Starts out as a one-dimensional love interest, before being revealed to have grown up in an uptight manners household, which irritates him.
- Punny Name: Hudson Rivers
. - Satellite Love Interest: Hudson Rivers exists so Jamie and Angeline have a guy to fight over. Deconstructed—he's scarcely aware of Jamie and Angeline's affections, because he has his own Satellite Love Interest: Isabella.
Colette
A transfer student from Wodehouse Middle School after it was temporarily shut down. At Mackerel, she's even more popular than Angeline.
- The Ace: Colette is prettier than Angeline, more vicious and destructive than Isabella, and more spontaneously artistic than Jamie. She eventually turns out to be a legendary outcast who rendered her school uninhabitable in a desperate gamble to go somewhere nobody had heard of her to start over and make friends.
- Everyone Looks Sexier if French: Jamie thinks her French name is a big deal, and it's always written in elegant cursive in her diary entries.
Emmily
The winner of Jamie's "best friend auditions", supposed to keep Angeline away from Isabella. Emmily is... dumb.
- Cloudcuckoolander: As described by Jamie: "I want to visit Emmily's world one day...for I'm sure the cockroaches look like unicorns."
- The Ditz: Poor, sweet, clueless Emmily.You remember Emmily—she was very sweet and we all loved her, but she was not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Emmily wasn't even the sharpest spoon in the drawer. Most of the time, Emmily wasn't even in the drawer at all. She was lost somewhere in the bottom of the dishwasher.
- Dumb Is Good: She's described as "the selfless kind of person people are before they know any better".
- Genius Ditz: In School. Hasn't This Gone On Long Enough?, she tells Jamie through emails that her math grades are so high, her teacher told her she doesn't have to bother with schoolwork as nothing she does from that point onward will bring her grade down to a fail. Apparently, she got a mark even higher than an A.
- Subverted when Isabella reveals that those emails were fabricated by Isabella to motivate Jamie into studying for her math test out of shame that Emmily was smarter than her in math.
- Put on a Bus: She moves away from Jamie's town after the Year 1 series, but is still in contact with the cast.
- Spell My Name With An S: Emmily spells her name with two M's because it reminds her of candy... not because of M&Ms, but because "mm" is the sound she makes when she eats them. She thought the letters on the candies were W's and 3's anyway.
Margaret
A classmate whose most notable trait (to Jamie, at least) is chewing pencils.
- Beautiful All Along: Subverted; while she gets a makeover and her popularity boosts, it's actually because of a perfume concoction sneaked into her backpack by another student.
- Oral Fixation: Margaret a conspicuous Character Tic of chewing on pencils. A lot.Jamie: I don't want to say she's still eating a lot of pencils, but when she farts, I swear you can almost see a little puff of sawdust.
Mike Pinsetti
A boy in school who's known for being one of the "least cute".
- Hidden Depths: While he's set up as a repellent character, he has a poetic soul and seems desperate to escape his current image.
- The Nicknamer: This is eventually revealed to show Hidden Depths: he's one of the most poetically inclined boys in that grade.
TUKWNIF (Tucker)
- His Name Really Is "Barkeep": TUKWNIF, Jamie's acronym for "That Ugly Kid Whose Name I Forget", turns out to be actually named Tucker.
- Straw Loser: Jamie thinks of him as such for a while.
- Terrible Artist: While he's a good piano player, his drawing skills are horrendous.
Fléurrål
- Funny Foreigner: Zigzagged in book 9. She's very Scandinavian, but Jamie admits she lacks the cultural context to know if she's normal or weird by Scandinavian standards.
Teachers
Miss Bruntford
The cafeteria monitor, a hulking Brawn Hilda who insists on students eating their meat loaf on Thursdays.
- Big Beautiful Woman: In the movie during her villain song.
- Berserk Button: Not eating the meat loaf is a big one for her.
- Everyone Has Standards: Though she can't abide refusal to eat meat loaf, she doesn't think it's such a good idea to eat more than one serving of the stuff.
- Evil Redhead: Although her hair colour is not stated in the book, she is a redhead in the movie, and on the cover of book 5.
- Hidden Depths: Is shown to be friends with Aunt Carol, and goes to great lengths to sabotage Miss Anderson's planned disruption at Carol's party. She also shows a sense of humor about the meat loaf by presenting it as horse meat to calm down a stupid student who wanted a horse promised to him, and is revealed to be a widow later in the series.
- Lady in Red: During her song.
- Manipulative Bastard: She invites Mrs. Kelly to cook for the cafeteria in book 3, knowing that it will be so awful that the regular fare will look much better in comparison.
- Villain Song: In the movie. It's about her disgusting cooking.
Miss Anderson
The art teacher, who is pretty enough to not be an art teacher. Has conflict with Aunt Carol over their shared crush, Assistant Principal Devon.
- Apathetic Teacher: Later in the series, she's depicted this way, with a jar of aspirin on her cabinet and improvised lesson plans like "read the names of crayon colors for an entire class period".
- Clingy Jealous Girl: She tries to make a scene by showing up at Aunt Carol and Assistant Principal Devon's engagement party, but Isabella, Angeline, and Miss Bruntford indepependently decide to mess with her car to delay her and save the party. She seems to be over Assistant Principal Devon by the time she arrives with the handsome tow truck driver.
- Ms. Fanservice: Jamie notes that pretty much everything she does is done in an artfully lovely pose, but later notes that she doesn't play it up without a male audience.
Family members
Jamie's mom
- Lethal Chef: The lemon squares that Jamie's mom made for a bake sale, according to Jamie, made kids lose their hearing for three days (and one person mentioned everything "still tastes lemony"). When Miss Bruntford asks Jamie's mom to make meatloaf for the school, Jamie's dad even calls their insurance to check their coverage, just in case.
- Supreme Chef: When making hors d'oeuvres, however, Mrs. Kelly is an excellent cook.
Jamie's dad
- Men Can't Keep House: Jamie's father comes up with "creative" ways to avoid dirtying any dishes when his wife is away and does not know how to use a washing machine (or even what the machine to clean clothes is called), and jokes that if he hadn't met Jamie's mother he would be living in a very dirty cardboard box.
Aunt Carol
- Cool Aunt/Cool Big Sis: Carol is Jamie's cool aunt, but—seeing as Jamie is an only child, and Carol is younger than Jamie's mom and doesn't have any kids of her own yet—fills the Cool Big Sis role too.
The Dogs
Jamie's dog—Stinker—and Angeline's dog—Stickybuns—who have a litter of puppies; Prince Fuzzybutt (Angline's), Dingledongle (Aunt Carol and Uncle Dan's), the Bubblegum Duchess "Bubs" (Isabella's), and Stinkette (Jamie's).
- Best Friends-in-Law: At best. As the nieces of an aunt and uncle who got married, and the the owners of two dogs who had puppies together, Jamie and Angline aren't related exactly, but… well, they can tell it:Angeline: Of course we're not cousins. We're going to be grandmas together.Jamie: Because my dog Stinker, and her dog, Stickybuns, had puppies together, which makes them married in Dog World. But this doesn't make me and Angeline related, exactly. What this makes us is Dog-in-Laws.
- Disney Death: Stinker almost dies after swallowing an old bracelet. Fortunately, surgery saves the dog.
- Heroes Love Dogs
- Precious Puppies: Stickybuns's puppies.
- Cuteness Proximity kicks in around them.
- Odd Name Out: Prince Fuzzybutt, Dingledongle, the Bubblegum Duchess (called Bubs), and… Stinkette.
- Shout-Out: Stinker and Stickybuns have puppies, three of which resemble their mother, with the fourth being the only one who looks like her father.
- Ugly Guy, Hot Wife: Stinker and Stickybuns… but you know, dogs.
