Headscratchers / 13 Going on 30

• So the magic dust actually works. How is this not common knowledge?
  • Who, aside from Jenna, would have known it works?
  • It's magic dust; only kids would've really tried it. And who would've believed them?
  • Maybe they forget everything once they go back to their original ages.
  • Wait...the magic dust actually worked? I thought Jenna just fell asleep and had a dream.
  • The dust definitely worked. Jenna went through way too much character development for it to be just a dream.
  • It also put her back several minutes before she made her wish.

• This is less of a Headscratcher for the film itself, and more for the page on This Very Wiki for it. Namely, the Ambition Is Evil trope. As far as I could see, nothing is really shown to indicate that Jenna was bad for wanting to be rich and successful. If anything, it seemed to take the view of "you can be rich and successful, but you don't have to be a Jerkass to do so". Seems kinda presumptuous, and nothing in the film really supports it.
  • Agreeing and elaborating, as Jenna's successful in her career as a Jerkass but becomes even more successful when she stops being a Jerkass— her secretary starts actually liking her, her editor is thrilled with the work she does for the magazine, and she gets everyone to actually enjoy themselves at the magazine party. The only thing that screws her over here is that Lucy uses a deal she made as a Jerkass against her, which she never would have done if Jenna hadn't rubbed her the wrong way as a nicer person.
    • Disagreeing here. In the original timeline, before Jenna "aged up," she was screwing over Poise. Remember, she was feeding the rival magazine, Sparkle, with Poise's ideas, until Lucy found out and screwed Jenna, taking the job for herself. Thus taking down Poise and putting them all out of work, for the sake of being Editor in Chief of the other magazine. On top of this, she was a real bitch everyone hated, treated her assistant like crap, didn't speak to her parents, and she was sleeping with a married man (and cheating on her boyfriend). Not a nice person, and a Lady Drunk besides—probably to deal with her own awfulness.
  I hope you choke on your own bile, you pretentious, conniving snake.
• How did Jenna go from wanting to be popular and desperately trying and failing to fit in to the most popular girl in school in such a short time? Was Matt really holding her back there?
  • Thank you! It doesn't make sense at all. They mention she became "Basically (the six chicks) leader" but how she became popular is never even mentioned. Bugged the hell outta me.
  • I was always under the impression that it wasn't Matt himself holding her back, but rather that he reminded her of who she was. He kept her grounded and kind, but when she became convinced that he'd ruined her life, she abandoned him and the sweetness he kept in her. With him gone and no longer keeping her as a person, she was left with nothing but ambition- she had no loyalty to herself at all, meaning she would do whatever was necessary to be popular.
  • Matt mentions that after discovering the Six Chicks gone, Jenna threw the dream house he made for her at him. We see that Tom-Tom comes back into the house in the original timeline - so maybe she saw Jenna do that and got impressed. And that was the start of them becoming friends.
  • Perhaps Virtue Is Weakness in the battleground of middle school popularity and Jenna was more ruthlessly able to attain her goals once she became The Unfettered.
• If Jenna and Matt stopped being friends in the seventh grade (in the original timeline), why is Jenna's mom at Matt's wedding?
  • It's not uncommon for childhood friends' parents to be friends with each other as well. Jenna and Matt may have stopped being friends, but Jenna's mom could very well have still been a friend of Matt's family (both mothers could have been friends as well); it does seem a bit odd, but it's a logical explanation.
  • Jenna and Matt were neighbors in 1987, so it's likely their parents were friends or acquaintances.
• Again, a Headscratcher from This Very Wiki, but why is Jenna considered a Manic Pixie Dream Girl? For starters, she's the protagonist, with an arc... and feelings... and introspection... all that jazz, where the trope typically necessitates a male protagonist. Secondly, Matt is happy before they get back in touch, and even refuses to break off the wedding at the end, so she's not a "dream girl" for anyone in the story. Thirdly, she's not "manic" for the sake of it, she's "manic" because she's, psychologically speaking, still a teenager. Don't know why the trope is listed, to be honest, because I didn't get that at all.
  • Or Matt is Jenna's Manic Pixie Dream Guy.
• Did the wishing dust work and she actually mentally time traveled... or was the whole thing a dream the 13 year old Jenna was having? There seems to be contradictory evidence for both
  • It seems a bit of a stretch that not only did she get everything she thought she wanted, including working for her favorite magazine... but she actually ended working with the alpha bitch from her old school?
  • If the experience was in fact genuine shouldn't there have been a few more moments of her being a fish out of temporal water? Yes we have a quite a few moments of her not understanding adult things because she is mentally 13... but what about the fact she's basically missed out on the last seventeen years? Shouldn't there have been some scenes of her expressing disbelief at or trying to catch herself up on current events?
  • Heavy suspension of disbelief is required to accept the fact that a thirteen year old could survive even a few days an a prestigious fashion magazine, let alone come up with a redesign idea that would actually fly
  • However there are a few things that don't make any sense if the experience wasn't genuine. The fact she didn't recognize Tom Tom at first. That both she and Matty do in fact grow up to look exactly like she 'dreamed' they would. That she's put in adult situations quite a few times that a innocent thirteen year old just wouldn't come up with.
  • Really the film makes the most sense if you consider her experience genuine... but only in an 'Its a Wonderful Life' kind of way.
  • For the 17-year gap between 1987 and 2004 the changes were mostly political stuff that might not matter to the daily life of a 13-year-old girl. Eg social media was still in its infancy and hadn't taken over daily life yet, myspace was only a year old at that point. Had jenna skipped, say, the years between 1999 and 2016 or 2003 and 2020, or even 2007 and 2024, she would have had a lot more practical change to deal with ...
• When did Matt sell the rights of his photos to Lucy to use if he mentions later to Jenna that he knew that Lucy was lying? If he knew that she was full of shit why did he do something that would clearly screw over Jenna later?
• This is more of a thing for societal attitudes of the time the film came out, in 2004 liking Michael Jackson was nowhere near as cool as it was in the 80s due to the second wave of accusations of child molestation he was going through at the time, so it does stretch believability a bit that nobody at the party has an issue with Jenna playing his music.
  • yeah, production on the movie was in 2003, just before the second molestation case came out, when it was too late for them to change the script, presumably. That said, while Jackson was already a controversial figure for the "Blanket" thing, my recollection is that in the pre-metoo era the treatment of that subject was different than it would be today, and most people assumed he was innocent. I don't recall anyone at the time objecting to the reference to jackson in the movie, and if moviegoers had no objection it's plausible the characters wouldn't either.

• Evidently all the development in character she had wasn't about outward appearances, as she evidently got the same nose job she had gotten in the original timeline.