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Playing With / The Beautiful Elite

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Basic Trope: The characters are part of an exclusive circle of rich, beautiful, and sophisticated people.
  • Straight: Trevelyan Academy is a private boarding school full of rich and glamorous students. Head Girl Rosamond is an eighteen-year-old diplomat's daughter and amateur model who likes holding lavish parties for her friends on the weekends.
  • Exaggerated: ???
  • Downplayed: Trevelyan Academy is a public school that lets in anyone, but it's in a pretty middle-class area and has a lot of well-off students consequently. Most of the characters are conventionally pretty, but are insecure about their braces, pimples, or glasses.
  • Justified:
    • Rich people have more money to spend on things like makeup, skin care, hairdressing, clothes, and plastic surgery. Therefore, the students at Trevelyan Academy have no problem keeping stylish.
    • As the students already have rich parents, they don't need to worry about planning for their future, studying, or getting a part-time job. Being able to keep stress down and take life easy imbues them with an inner glow.
    • The rich and powerful get to set the standards for what is considered beautiful; however they look is automatically glamourized by society.
    • Trevelyan Academy is specifically a school for aspiring models.
  • Inverted: Trevelyan Academy is an underfunded school in a rough area. Most of the students have poor parents who can't afford to buy them any of the latest fashions.
  • Subverted:
    • Rosamond is revealed to be at Trevelyan Academy on a full scholarship; she goes home at the end of the day to a trailer where her and her mother live in debt.
    • Rosamond takes off her makeup at the end of the day to reveal she has been severely burned by a freak accident.
  • Double Subverted:
    • She might live in a trailer with her mother, but her dad is still loaded.
    • The burns fade over time, restoring her glamorous looks.
  • Parodied: ???
  • Zig-Zagged: ???
  • Averted: ???
  • Enforced: The producers want to portray an idealized version of teen life, so they hire glamorous actors in their 20s and 30s to play awkward sixteen year olds.
  • Lampshaded: ???
  • Invoked: ???
  • Exploited: ???
  • Defied: Fearing the students may become conceited, Principal Greyson implements a very unfashionable school uniform, bans makeup and jewelry, and encourages all the students to volunteer for soup kitchens.
  • Discussed: ???
  • Conversed: ???
  • Implied: A job fair aimed at students of Trevelyan Academy has no blue-collar job representatives, no vocational training representatives and no military recruiters. Indeed, the only job representatives seen there are those for modeling agencies.
  • Deconstructed:
    • Trevelyan Academy becomes infamous for its elitism, and is stereotyped as a nursery for spoilt, vacuous socialites. When alumni put the school on their resume, it's more likely to disenchant an employer than impress them.
    • The pressure of being glamorous all the time causes Rosamond to develop an eating disorder.
  • Reconstructed:
    • The connections the alumni make at Trevelyan Academy help them get cushy jobs
  • Played for Laughs: ???
  • Played for Drama:
    • When her friends find out Rosamond is here on a scholarship, they shun her. She becomes depressed and drops out.
    • When Rosamond gets alopecia and finds her hair falling out in clumps, she loses her popularity and realizes people only valued her for her looks.
  • Played for Horror: Trevelyan Academy is revealed to be run by eugenicists dedicated to preparing a generation of elites to take over the world.

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