YMMV / Amigas y rivales

• Adorkable: Irene, Tamara's young and nice chubby friend.
• Alternate Character Interpretation:
  • Did Nayeli really love Roberto for real or was she just in love with a shadow?
  • Was Tamara's friendship with Irene really genuine? At the beginning of the telenovela, Tamara is Irene's only friend, she is the one who introduces Irene to the other characters, she also defends Irene when Luis and other bullies make fun of her appearance, saying that she is a great person, and encourages Irene to lose weight. However, on more than one occasion she ends up losing patience with Irene and ends up being rude to her. So halfway through the telenovela, she stops interacting with Irene for several episodes, and no longer invites her to parties and meetings with the rest of the gang. At the end of the telenovela, when Tamara asks to resume her relationship with Luis and discovers that he is dating Irene, she is so shocked and furious that she insults Irene like she is fat. Later, even knowing that Irene has never dated in her life and that she was in love with Luis, Tamara still wants Luis to leave Irene to get back together with her, and even mocks Irene and Luis as a couple to Nayeli (who also participates in the mockery) . When Luis and Irene visit Tamara to make it clear that their relationship is serious, Tamara is devastated but stoically accepts and tells Irene that she is a wonderful person, hugging her and wishing the couple all the best. But then in the final episode, Tamara is once again mocking the couple to her new boyfriend, stating not being able to understand why Luis would prefer Irene over her, and mocking that Irene is too fat. In the end, it could be argued that Tamara was so hurt by Luis preferring Irene over her that she ends up resorting to these insults in an attempt to get revenge and that their friendship is unfortunately over for good. But you could also argue that Tamara was never a real friend to Irene, that her behavior towards Irene was always condescending, and that she liked to feel like the only friend and protector of poor Irene, the fat girl in high school. Either way, Tamara's behavior in the final episodes makes you review all of her scenes with Irene in a different light.
• Angst? What Angst?: Roberto seems to accept surprisingly well the revelation that he has had sex with his sister.
• Archive Panic: 185 episodes, each about 45 minutes long.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Irene, Tamara's friendly chubby friend, who ends up winning Luis's heart at the end of the plot.
  • Luis, who starts out as a spoiled and arrogant boy and becomes a hardworking, honest and kind person.
• Hollywood Homely:
  • Irene is constantly insulted and humiliated for being fat. Even though she deviates from the aesthetic standards of the time, Christina Pastor is a very beautiful woman.
  • Ulises is an ugly man with pimples. The actor, Gabriel Soto, is handsome.
• Narm: It's a mexican telenovela, after all...
  • In one scene, Jimena, who is a recovering addict, tells her friends that she would like to drink a tequila. Not only does the soundtrack immediately turn dramatic, but all of Jimena's friends stare at her in horror, as if she's just said she's killed someone.
  • In Luis and Irene's dinner scene that culminates in the couple's first kiss, Irene says the term "The truth is that..." half a dozen times, over the course of two minutes.
  • For some reason, actress Michelle Vieth was absent from the latest episodes of the soap opera. The characters vaguely mentioning that Laura is ill. It gets to be laughable when in the last episode, the villain Roxana sets a trap to kill ALL the protagonists, and even she mentions Laura's absence.
  • Roxana accidentally throwing acid in her face in the last episode of the soap opera. It's as ridiculous as it sounds from the description.
  • Roxana is such a diabolical and cartoonish villain that it can be difficult to take her seriously...
• Narm Charm: ... But on the other hand, no one can deny that this telenovela gets boring when Roxana does not appear.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Susana González appearing in a supporting role (and as villain's henchman) exactly a year before starring in Entre el amor y el odio, and becoming a famous actress of Mexican telenovelas, in roles of protagonist and antagonist.
  • Mayrín Villanueva also appearing in a supporting role some years before becoming another famous actress of Mexican telenovelas, as protagonist and antagonist.
• Rooting for the Empire: The four protagonists are incredibly generic and boring when you compare them to villain Roxana.
• Strangled by the Red String: If not even the characters believe in the romance between Laura and Don Roberto (who is 45 years older than her), why should the viewer? Many characters even question how forced is Laura forgetting Don Roberto and falling in love with his son so fast.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Luis, one of Tamara's love interests, has a Character Development, turning from a rich man and spoiled by his mother into a sensitive and hardworking man who cares about his friends. The character deserved more screentime with the rest of the main cast. But in the third act of the telenovela (around the final thirty episodes), Luis is Demoted to Extra, distances himself from the rest of the class and his romantic plot with Irene is quite secondary. In the final ten episodes, his only interactions, in addition to Irene obviously, are with Tamara and Ulisses.
  • Irene, Tamara's young and nice chubby friend, introduced in the second half of the telenovela. In addition to her adorable personality, the plot involving her obesity and her love triangle with Tamara and Luis could have won more screentime, with Irene becoming part of the gang. Unfortunately, Irene is treated as a secondary character by most of the telenovela, coming to remain absent for dozens of consecutive episodes, and her romantic plot with Luis is quite secondary.
  • Lourdes, the beautiful employee of the television station where Nayeli works, and who ends up falling in love with Luis, could have been a good recurring character, but her participation in the telenovela is few and limited to the secondary role.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • The whole plot of Luis falling in love with Irene occurs in the 15 episodes of the soap opera, with the couple getting to one to three scenes per episode. The plot could have been developed much earlier, especially considering that the soap opera had 185 episodes.
  • Around chapter 140, Lourdes meets Luis, who will work with her, and falls in love with him. Considering that there were still 40 more episodes to the end, the writers could have better developed a romantic plot between the two, and created a loving quartet between the two, Tamara and Irene. Instead, Lourdes' appearances are few and she doesn't even interact with Tamara and Irene. Her last appearance in the antepenultimate episode is when she finally invites Luis on a date but finds out that he is already seriously dating Irene.
• Uncertain Audience: So... Who was this telenovela made for? It was promoted to the youth audience, which makes sense considering the protagonists are young students at university ... but the plot has people addicted to drugs, brutal murders and even rape scenes and incest.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
  • Tamara. My God, where to start?
    • She falls in love with Ulisses when he becomes handsome and flirts with him even though he is married to his friend Jimena.
    • After she breaks up with Luis, she continues to let him live at her home, as he has nowhere to go. After a few episodes, when Luis admits that he is still in love with her, Tamara gets angry and throws him out of her house, not even caring if he has the financial means to find a home of his own.
    • When she falls in love with Luis again, she asks him to be her boyfriend again. When she discovers that Luis is now dating Irene, she immediately tries to call Irene fat, and Luis tells her to shut up. And yet, even knowing that Luis and Irene are seriously dating, that Irene is one of her best friends, that Irene is a great person who has suffered many humiliations and rejections in her life, Tamara still asks Luis to break up with Irene and return with Tamara.
  • Nayeli can be a shy and friendly person, but she also knows how to be unpleasant when she wants to.
    • Nayeli falls in love with Roberto, but he loves Laura. Even after Roberto and Laura's relationship became serious and definitive, she remains in love with him, jealous of the couple and hopes that he will one day notice her, even going so far as to reject two single men.
    • When she learns that Luis and Irene are dating, the first thing she does is laugh incredulously and call Irene "chubby."
• The Woobie: Irene is a young woman whose father committed suicide in her childhood and whose mother suffers from mental disorder. She begins to discount her frustrations and fears by eating too much food, getting fat. She is constantly bullied at school. And then she falls in love with a handsome guy ... who finds her ugly and annoying, and who is dating her beautiful and best friend.

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