Okay we've determined [1]
that Aoi Sakuraba from Ai Yori Aoshi is too shy or something to be the GND. If we take her away we should also take away shy and modest Jane Bennet from Pride And Prejudice. Smallville's Chloe Sullivan might be a Clark's childhood friend but she's probably not approchable enough. Agreements, disagreements or suggestions?
I added one of Mary-Jane Watson from "Spiderman", but it was removed.
this troper agrees that MJ should be on there. I mean, she is LITERALLY a girl next door.
Edited by 128.54.249.146
The mainstream comics version of Gwen Stacy actually is not a girl next door at all, but comes from a quite different world and Peter only got to know her because they attended the same college. Peter and Aunt May are (lower) middle classe, Gwen is upper class, her father is a pillar or society who belongs to the same club as millionaires J. Jonah Jameson and Norman Osborn. Gwen's boyfriend before Peter was Harry Osborn, the prospective heir to a major chemical firm. When her father dies, readers learn that her closest relatives live in England. Gwen also was never shown as plain-looking, in fact she is introduced as the beauty queen of her former high school. That MJ at first outshone Gwen was due to the fact that Gwen was first designed by Steve Ditko and MJ by John Romita (who had worked a lot on romance comics). However, that was soon altered, as Romita redesigned Gwen to look almost exactly like MJ, apart from the dimples and the colour of hair and eyes.
Mary Jane Watson in the mainstream comics conforms quite well to the trope. Being the niece of Aunt May's best friend and next-door neighbor Anna Watson, MJ can be seen literally as a girl next door. She always got on well with Aunt May, and the only reason that Peter did not meet her earlier was because he actively avoided doing so (ironically because he thought that a girl recommended by his aunt had to be unattractive). MJ is of course shown to be a stunner, but she also is quite accessible and her "classic" dress ensemble is just denims and a black T-shirt (ASM #42); if I remember correctly she was the first of Peter's love interests to wear pants instead of a dress, which also made her a bit of a tomboy by comparison. Also, like Peter, but unlike their friends Harry and Gwen (born with silver spoons in their mouths) and Flash (jock on a sports scholarship), she had to work to finance her education: During the 1960s she was e.g. shown taking a gig as a go-go dancer, in the origin shown in the 1980s she was seen working in a fast-food joint (as did her Ultimate Spider-Man counterpart, while in the first movie she was a waitress in a diner).
Needs a Laconic