An HSM Doppelganger?!?!
Alright, here goes: I enjoy DCOMs (Disney Channel Original Movies) a lot. Whether it’s High School Musical, Descendants or Z-O-M-B-I-E-S, I love (most of) the story lines, music, character development, choreo, etc… I have to admit though, HSM was my first discovery, courtesy of some very close family friends, who’d had HSM as the ‘Big Thing’ their age.
One more backstory before I begin: I love to read. I am absolutely an avid reader, so when I run out of borrowed books from the school library over the weekend, the only to do is to scrounge around the house for any books that I’d not read before. And one day, I stumbled upon the Dork Diaries series, that actually belonged to my sister. I can’t say that I entirely enjoyed them, but I read them anyway.
Something I picked up, however, was a very similar storyline between Dork Diaries and HSM, and since the Disney Hit had been made only a few years before the series, it was only natural for me to think that Nikki’s Diary Collection could have been slightly too close to it. First of all, we have the main characters Nikki and Brady, aka Troy and Gabriella. The love story lines are pretty much the same: the guys are already being crushed on by the ‘mean girl’ aka Sharpay/MacKenzie. Then another girl joins the school — Nikki/Gabriella, who seems considerably less wealthy than their enemy. The new girl and the guy fall in love, while the mean girl looks on jealously, trying to get the guy to fall in love with her instead. This is basically what happens in terms of the outlines of romance in both franchises.
MacKenzie Hollister and Sharpay Evans, you could say, are spitting images of each other. However, at the beginning of HSM, Sharpay doesn’t seem to necessarily be targeting Gabriella, but only trying to get to Troy. On the other hand, Hollister seems to directly aim for ruining Nikki’s life, as well as getting Brady’s attention. I have to say though, Sharpay is probably one of my favourite characters in the HSM Franchise, just because… I mean the attitude, acting and everything was awesome (creds to Ashley Tisdale for her acting :)), and maybe if Dork Diaries was brought to the screen, MacKenzie would be a great character too, but as of now, not so much. She just isn’t portrayed as a victim in any way, for one thing (apart from if you take Nikki Maxwell as ‘stealing her crush’), but as an assaulter in many ways.
Then the guys who seem to just follow their hearts, and are supposedly unaware to some extent, that they’ve stolen others’ hearts. So there’s Brady Grayson, who is initially just friends with Nikki, and then Gabriella meeting Troy Bolton at the New Year Party, turning into him actively pursuing her — then of course it turns out to be requital love (if only life was like that). With Grayson, we see things from Nikki’s POV in the Series, so it seems as though it’s one-way love from Maxwell, but he seems to subtly drop hints that he likes her back. Maybe it’s because of the POVs, but out of the guys, Troy seems to be the more in-touch-with-emotions guys, whilst Brady is Leisured Back, whilst kind of going for it.
So basically, I think that these are 2 supposedly different storylines, which seem pretty close — at least to me — not to say cliché, with DD maybe having a few minor differences here and there.
