[quote=@Undine]I'm a little confused about why people don't like her beyond the whole popularity/social ladder thing. If she's friendly and approachable, why do people not like her? While a social hierarchy [i]is[/i] important in high school, it's not always the case. As part of the unpopular kids back in high school, it was always really fun to talk to people, even if I didn't know them very well. I suppose it would all depend on where Marie stands in the social hierarchy... But are there other reasons why people don't like her? Or is it literally just because of the popular/not popular kids thing? Because if it's the latter, it feels like a little bit of a stretch to me.
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Basically I was pulling from my own high school experiences, where any potentially popular kids (which Marie would be, since she's friendly and approachable as well as sporty, active, and relatively attractive) who mingled with the nerds or the socially inept folks ended up catching just as much flak as those unpopular kids themselves. Like a "Why aren't you as elitist as we are" penalty. If you feel that's unreasonable, I don't mind changing it up a bit, because I don't really disagree with you either.

My intent was that she's generally popular in the school sense of the word, like she's part of the 'it' crowd, but she gets talked about a lot behind her back because she's not that smart, and she definitely doesn't act like somebody who's going to be a successful businessperson one day. She doesn't worry a lot about the social norms, clique boundaries, etc, and doesn't really even recognize that they exist. I figured that would make her an easy target for potential bullying, etc. She'd definitely be an easy mark, as somebody who wants to help people all the time, or somebody who steps on peoples' toes by accidentally forgetting their name or face.

Let me know if that cleared anything up. If you still feel it's a stretch, I don't mind shifting some things around, I'll just need a bit to think on how I want to approach it. I'ma start working on a relationship sheet now as well, so I should get that up in a couple hours or so.